Sunday, April 15, 2012

The Myth that Religion is the #1 Cause of War


Atheists and secular humanists consistently make the claim that religion is the #1 cause of violence and war throughout the history of mankind. One of hatetheism's key cheerleaders, Sam Harris, says in his book The End of Faith that faith and religion are “the most prolific source of violence in our history.”[1]

While there’s no denying that campaigns such as the Crusades and the Thirty Years’ War foundationally rested on religious ideology, it is simply incorrect to assert that religion has been the primary cause of war. Moreover, although there’s also no disagreement that radical Islam was the spirit behind 9/11, it is a fallacy to say that all faiths contribute equally where religiously-motivated violence and warfare are concerned.

An interesting source of truth on the matter is Philip and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, which chronicles some 1,763 wars that have been waged over the course of human history. Of those wars, the authors categorize 123 as being religious in nature[2], which is an astonishingly low 6.98% of all wars. However, when one subtracts out those waged in the name of Islam, the percentage is cut by more than half to 3.23%.




That means that all faiths combined – minus Islam – have caused less than 4% of all of humanity’s wars and violent conflicts. Further, they played no motivating role in the major wars that have resulted in the most loss of life.    

Kind of puts a serious dent into Harris’ argument, doesn’t it?

The truth is, non-religious motivations and naturalistic philosophies bear the blame for nearly all of humankind’s wars. Lives lost during religious conflicts pales in comparison to those experienced during the regimes who wanted nothing to do with the idea of God – something showcased in R. J. Rummel’s work Lethal Politics and Death by Government:


Non-Religious Dictator
Lives Lost
Joseph Stalin   
42,672,000
Mao Zedong   
37,828,000
Adolf Hitler     
20,946,000
Chiang Kai-shek
10,214,000
Vladimir Lenin
4,017,000
Hideki Tojo     
3,990,000
Pol Pot            
2,397,000
[3]

Rummel says: “Almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of a myriad of ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs.”[4]

The historical evidence is quite clear: Religion is not the #1 cause of war.

If religion can’t be blamed for most wars and violence, then what is the primary cause? The same thing that triggers all crime, cruelty, loss of life, and other such things. Jesus provides the answer very clearly: “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. “All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man” (Mark 7:21–23).

James (naturally) agrees with Christ when he says: “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:1–2).

In the end, the evidence shows that the atheists are quite wrong about the wars they claim to so desperately despise. Sin is the #1 cause of war and violence, not religion, and certainly not Christianity.


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Saturday, April 14, 2012

Where is the Evidence for Atheism (Part 3)?


This is the third and final installment of this three part series. Please see earlier entries for part 1 and part 2.



What does the atheist do with Jesus of Nazareth?

Some atheists, right from the start, try to inject doubt into this topic by either overtly claiming or subtly hinting that there actually was no historical Jesus of Nazareth. For example, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if he did we know nothing about him.”[1]

Although some may argue for the participation of other, earlier historical figures that began making these claims, most historians peg the start of these allegations with a man named Bruno Bauer (1809 – 1882). Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher and historian who looked at the sources of the New Testament and controversially concluded that early Christianity owed more to Greek philosophy (Stoicism) than to Judaism. Starting in 1840, he began a series of controversial works arguing that Jesus was a myth, a second century fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology.

Bauer’s work was picked up by Albert Kalthoff (1850-1906) who followed Bauer’s extreme skepticism about the historical Jesus. Kalthoff went so far as to claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed and was not the founder of Christianity.

However, Bauer’s and Kalthoff’s assertions were refuted (and have continued to be refuted) by legions of historians, both Christian and secular. One example is Gary Habermas book “The Historical Jesus” that chronicles scores of extra-Biblical historical references to Jesus’ first century life, the count of which outnumbers citations of historical figures that no person doubts (e.g. Tiberius Caesar; 10 mentions vs. 43 for Jesus). 

Summing up the conclusion on whether Jesus of Nazareth actually lived, Princeton New Testament scholar Dr. Bruce Metzger says, “Today no competent scholar denies the historicity of Jesus.”[2]

So where is the atheist’s evidence that Jesus of Nazareth never existed? To date, no compelling proof has been offered.

Some atheists who know better than to attack the historicity of Jesus’ actual life put forward arguments that involve Christ being mythologized by His followers into more than He was. They try and assert that various pagan gods such as Horus, Mithras, etc., influenced the disciples who borrowed traits from those deities and attached them to Jesus.

Books such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and more recent works like the Internet Zeitgeist movie have been literally pulverized into submission by scholars who have showcased the many logical fallacies committed by the authors and the extraordinary lack of real commitment to historical research. Metzger says, “It goes without saying that alleged parallels which are discovered by pursuing such methodology evaporate when they are confronted with the original texts. In a word, one must beware of what have been called, ‘parallels made plausible by selective description.’”[3]

The fact is, the atheist cannot deny the historicity of Jesus’ life and be on the side of historical truth. The core historical facts include the following:

Jesus was born to a young and very ordinary couple. There was some controversy surrounding his birth (which primarily centered on who his actual father was), however outside of that, he lived in relative obscurity for about thirty years. He then burst onto the religious scene in the Roman occupied areas of Galilee and Jerusalem as a very learned Jewish Rabbi, despite never being formerly educated. Reports of him performing amazing miracles (e.g. healing the sick, raising the dead, performing exorcisms) spread throughout the regions, along with claims of him being the long awaited Jewish Messiah. He gathered around him a band of fairly unsophisticated disciples, with others also following his itinerant preaching journeys.
           
Soon, though, he ran afoul of the Jewish religious leaders and was brought before the Roman authorities on a number of unsubstantiated charges. He was then condemned to death under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, put to death under the common form of Roman execution, which was crucifixion, and then buried.

Three days later, his body went missing and remains missing to this day. Reports of him appearing to both believers and unbelievers alike quickly began to circulate. His disciples who had fled from him during his arrest then boldly began to declare that they had seen him alive, that he was the Christ of God, with his resurrection becoming the absolute center of their preaching. A number of his disciples were martyred for their refusal to deny their story, with others like John dying of natural causes.

Lastly, a zealous Jewish Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, who had formerly persecuted the new Jesus movement, claimed he too had seen Jesus alive. Saul converted to the Christian faith and eventually was beheaded by the emperor Nero for his faith around 65 A.D.

Now, it’s important to understand one thing about the prior statements: none of them requires any faith whatsoever to believe. Not one. Every claim above can be confirmed via the standard, scholarly methods (including archaeological finds that back the Bible) used to verify ancient history.

The question is, when a philosophical appeal to the best explanation is made to account for these facts, where does the atheist end up?

What bothers the atheists the most, obviously, is Christ’s resurrection. Dead men stay dead, says the atheist. Our experience tells us that this is something you can count on.

Dead people do indeed stay dead in a naturalistic-only reality that is a closed system. But what if…what if there is a supernatural reality and our universe is actually an open system to a Creator that transcends everything that is physical? That is a horse of a different color, and one that goes back to the atheist’s need for philosophical and empirical evidence to rule out God.

Conclusion

Occasionally an atheist will say to me (quoting Carl Sagan): “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” What they often don’t realize is that, while they meant to slice into me with their comment, their sword actually cuts both ways.

The atheist claims that a cause (with a beginning all its own) possessing none of the characteristics of its effects created all that we know. That’s a pretty extraordinary claim.

The atheist claims that “Living objects . . . look designed, they look overwhelmingly as though they’re designed. Biology is the study of complicated things which give the impression of having been designed for a purpose”[4], and that the information (not data) contained with all of us did not come from an intelligent source. That’s a pretty extraordinary claim.

The atheist claims that either Jesus never existed or all the historical accounts written about Him are inaccurate, exaggerated, and cannot be trusted. That’s a pretty extraordinary claim.

If extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, then the atheist has some explaining to do. And that explaining needs to involve supplying the same rock-solid proof (not mere theories) that they themselves routinely require of Christians.


[1] Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian, pg. 16.
[2] Bruce Metzger, The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content (New York: Abingdon, 1965), pg. 78.
[3] Bruce Metzger, Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (Grand Rapid, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1968), 9.
[4] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, Pg. 1. 
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Friday, April 13, 2012

Where is the Evidence for Atheism? (Part 2)


This part 2 of a three-part series on the evidence for atheism. See here for part 1. 



The Big Bang Theory is currently a popular comedy show on television, whose opening song contains the follow lyrics:

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!

The death of the steady state theory and the near-universal acceptance of the big bang theory causes quite a problem for atheists. First, it means that our universe had a beginning and whatever has a beginning has a cause (and therefore is not eternal and cannot serve as the atheist’s necessary and self-existent first cause). Second, it demands an answer for what caused the big bang.

Atheists honestly don’t know what caused the ‘bang’. Now, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a lot of various theories tossed about, but when pressed for the type of absolute proof that they demand for validation of the Christian faith, atheists come up short.

The most recent attempt at explaining the origin of our universe has been the multi-verse, which postulates the simultaneous existence of many, possibly infinitely many, parallel universes in which almost anything that is theoretically possible will ultimately be actualized. So, then, the atheist says that with the multi-verse there is nothing surprising in the fact that we have the universe that we do.

However, the multi-verse theory was pretty much laid to rest this January at a rather unusual event: the 70th birthday celebration of Stephen Hawking, which was held at Cambridge. Delivering the eulogy was Dr. Alexander Vilenkin, who had written a recent paper that was presented at the “State of the Universe” meeting of scientists who had gathered to honor Hawking.

After demonstrating the fallacies of the various theories that have attempted to validate a multiverse, Vilenkin summed up his conclusions by saying, “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” And in fact, prior to this address, Vilenkin had developed a scientific proof along with Borde and Guth that demonstrated how even if the multi-verse existed, it too must have a beginning.

This, naturally, puts every philosophical naturalist and atheist into mourning because Hawking himself has admitted, “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”

So with the multi-verse option struggling mightily, where is the atheist’s empirical proof that God is not the cause of the universe?

Further, the atheist must explain the fine tuning of the universe and how that came about. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross has calculated that the odds of all Anthropic constants (122 at last count) to be in place for any planet in the universe by luck alone to be one chance in ten with 138 zeros after it. This number becomes even more incredible when one realizes there are only 1070 atoms in the entire universe.  Finally, mathematicians point out that anything which exceeds 1050 power is the exact same thing as zero chance.

What proof does the atheist have that such a thing can be arrived at through their trinitarian god of time + matter + chance? Most will attempt to point to the universe ensemble / multi-verse hypothesis, which as we have seen, is no proof at all.

Next, atheists must come up with empirical evidence for the origin of life. Many atheists believe this is an easy task and begin to pull out their biology books and extol the explanatory power of evolution. In fact, Richard Dawkins has said: “An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: ‘I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.’ I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[1]

But, not so fast.

The ill-titled “Origin of Species” by Darwin does not explain the origin of life at all. Rather, Darwin begins with 4-5 existing life forms that are already in possession of reproductive capabilities (isn’t that convenient?)  Evolution only attempts to explain the supposed change in existing biological entities and possesses no capacity to explain their original arrival. So Darwin does not come to the aid of the atheist at all in the way Dawkins describes.

The very building blocks of life and specified complexity like DNA also pose quite a problem for the atheist who must provide proof for how they came about through purely natural means. Having worked in database software for over 20 years, one thing that fascinates me about DNA is that it contains information and not just raw data. Dawkins admits: “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, warn breath, nor a ‘spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions. . . . Think of a billion discrete digital characters. . . . If you want to understand life, think about information technology.”[2]

But everything we know says that only intelligence causes information. Moreover, scientists have also demonstrated that DNA is mathematically identical to a language. The atheist must show how, given that no language has ever arisen apart from intelligence, did such a thing happen in DNA without an intelligent cause.

How can the atheist, on the one hand, nod in agreement with an archaeologist who walks into a cave and discerns that an intelligent source is behind the scratchings on the wall, and yet assert that it is more reasonable to conclude that a non-intelligent cause is behind all the information contained in DNA? 

Perhaps this is why when interviewed for the movie Expelled, Dawkins suggested the possibility of directed panspermia as the cause of DNA. In other words, aliens brought it here. One struggles to understand how pushing the problem to outer space solves the atheist’s predicament.

The atheist also needs to provide proof on how absolute moral values can be produced through purely materialistic means and show this in action via repeatable empirical experiments. Sam Harris tried and failed miserably in his book The Moral Landscape, but perhaps other atheists can do better.  If they try, they need to first remember the admonition of Einstein: “You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.”

Lastly, the atheist must provide empirical proof that they can trust their own cognitive faculties. Philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga have argued that our experience tells us that order, design, purpose, intent, and intelligence produce trustable things. But chaos, chance, randomness, etc., produce the opposite where trustability and repeatability are concerned.

So, if our brains are stuff made of by the latter (all traits of a naturalist-only universe) and not the former, how can we trust anything we think? The atheist wants to have reliability, repeatability, trustability, and believability in their science, yet they want all this from a source that possesses none of these characteristics. In essence, the atheist demands warmth without a fire. 

So where is the atheist’s empirical proof for these and other issues that seem to suggest an intelligent source? Mind you, we are not looking for theories or spit-balling, but real empirical proof that shows how all of these things happened in a supposed anti-supernatural universe. The atheist must supply strong, credible evidence and must do so without committing the logical fallacy of ‘appeal to the future’ (i.e. one day science will provide an answer), which merely inserts a ‘scientism of the gaps’ argument.

In part 3, we'll address the need for historical evidence from the atheist camp. 
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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Where is the Evidence for Atheism? (Part 1)


Christians hear it all the time in one form or another from atheists and skeptics. It’s heard on Internet forums, at the recent “Reason Rally” held in D.C., and in personal one-on-one debates that center on the existence of God.

“Show me the evidence!” says the atheist to the Christian.

The atheist, believing they have triumphed, usually concludes their demand with a folding of the arms, as if no good evidence for the Christian worldview has ever been put forward.  This, of course, is a position that is either unknowingly or willingly ignorant of the weighty philosophical, empirical, and historical evidence that has been provided from the first century all the way up to the present by Christian apologists in defense of the faith.

Such demands by atheists are naturally designed to put the Christian on the defensive, but let me ask: do atheists not bear any burden for the exact same type of proof they demand from Christians for their own worldview and faith? Indeed they do.

The implied idea that just because a person holds a worldview that is devoid of God means that no evidence needs to be brought forth in defense of that held belief is absurd. The atheists have much to prove, and the fact is, when their own set of criteria they apply to Christianity is aimed back at their own belief system, it is shown to be in need of immediate CPR. 

Let’s look at three particular areas where the atheist needs proof to back up their claims.

Part I - Where is the philosophical evidence for atheism?


Some atheists scoff at the idea that philosophical evidence is needed to justify atheism. For example, Stephen Hawking has said that “philosophy is dead”.[1] One can only roll one’s eyes at such a statement, especially since Hawking goes on to philosophically argue much in his book to support his anti-supernatural position.

From the start, the atheist puts him/herself in a difficult philosophical position because they make a negatively existential proposition (i.e. “no god”); a type of proposition that can never be proven. Intellectually honest skeptics will admit this and retreat to an agnostic position instead, which is more defensible.

It’s important to note that with its primary assertion (no god), atheism has much prove and explain. First, it must answer the primary philosophical question put forward by Leibniz, Heidegger, and others: why do we have something rather than nothing at all? Recent attempts by atheists have failed miserably at providing proof for an answer to this query. For example, Dr. Lawrence Krauss’ latest book embarrassingly shows how far some committed atheists will go. Krauss is only able to give an answer by redefining ‘nothing’ to be the quantum vacuum or empty space, neither of which are ‘nothing’. 

Unless they believe in an infinite regress of causes, the atheist must philosophically defend his or her concept of the existence of an eternal/self-existent being that caused everything else. To date, no hard proof has been offered for the atheist’s eternal first cause.

No matter how you section reality, the fact is, you will always end up with something that owes its existence to something other than itself. In other words, everything that is known is a contingent being in one form or another. This being true, the atheist must produce sound proofs for what necessary being exists that provides existence to everything else. 

Further, this necessary being must match the effects we observe all around us. The atheist has to explain how an impersonal, amoral, meaningless, purposeless universe accidentally created personal, moral beings who are obsessed with meaning and purpose. As a cause cannot produce an effect that possesses something it doesn’t (i.e. you can’t give what you don’t have), the atheist struggles greatly for a satisfying philosophical solution to their dilemma.

This issue is multiplied greatly when the question of unity and diversity is added to the mix. Unity and diversity in effect necessitates unity and diversity in the first cause, and while the Biblical concept of the Trinity comes to the aid of the Christian, the atheist has no such answer to fall back upon.

The atheist must also explain the notion of absolute moral values and how the concepts of good and evil are defined and managed. Some atheists such as Sam Harris have attempted to explain these things in recent works through pure natural means, but have been soundly refuted by both religious and non-religious ethicists.

The logic the atheist must deal with where morality is concerned is the following: If there’s such a thing as evil, you must assume there’s such a thing as good. If you assume there’s such a thing as good, you assume there’s such a thing as an absolute and unchanging moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. If you assume there’s such a thing as an absolute moral law, you must posit an absolute moral lawgiver, but that would be God – the one whom the atheist is trying to disprove. So now rewind: if there’s not a moral lawgiver, there’s no moral law. If there’s no moral law, there’s no good. If there’s no good, there’s no evil. Some atheists, such as Richard Dawkins admit there really is no good or evil, but most atheists aren’t willing to make such a confession.

Again, some atheists will try and dismiss these and other similar philosophical issues that confront their worldview and will attempt to assert that the only evidence worthy enough to be considered is that which is scientific/empirical in nature. However, this presents them with another philosophical problem.

When the atheist says, “We should only believe that which can be scientifically proven”, they aren’t aware that the truth claim that has just left their lips is one that cannot be scientifically proven (it is a philosophical proposition). This means their position is a non-starter right out of the blocks.

For atheists that either already understand this fact or are forced to awaken to this truth, they then are brought to a couple of other unpleasant realities. If science cannot be the end all/be all where truth claims are concerned, then why demand that evidence for God must be found only in the empirical-only dimension? If questions of morality (e.g. “were the Nazi’s evil?”) and concepts like justice cannot be empirically tested and validated, perhaps neither can God.

Further, the legal/historical method of ascertaining truth is widely accepted and can also be used to investigate things that cannot be handled by pure, repeatable empirical methods. If the atheist denies this, then they must explain how courtrooms worldwide arrive at their findings.

In the end, the atheist cannot escape the need to provide philosophical evidence for their position that God does not exist. Their attempt to rely only on empirical methods to support the atheistic worldview cannot be maintained, and, as we’ll see in Part 2, science isn’t much help to their cause either.

[1] Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design, pg. 5. 
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Sunday, April 08, 2012

Response to CNN's "The Jesus debate: Man vs. Myth"

Maybe I should expect things like this from media outlets like CNN, but still... In any event, today's article on CNN that questions whether Jesus really lived was disappointing. Not in having the debate itself (that's fine to have), but for how they chose to end it.

Yes, Jesus is real, and yes, we can know plenty about Him from the works of the New Testament. I've written a number of articles and given some presentations that speak to how the whole "Jesus is just a myth" argument is seriously flawed, but a number of years ago, I wrote a piece that I think hits the vast majority of the high points.  I hope what follows helps you if you read stuff like what CNN has offered up today or any skeptic decides to challenge your Christian faith on the ground that Jesus never existed.

***

There are a number of voices in the contemporary era that are claiming that the accounts of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament are simply myths, and were the end result of the writers borrowing stories from pagan mythology and creating something that was exaggerated and false.  For example, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their book The Jesus Mysteries ask the question: “Why should we consider the stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and the other pagan mystery saviors as fables, yet come across essentially the same story told in a Jewish context and believe it to be the biography of a carpenter from Bethlehem?”[1] And in his best selling book, The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown puts these words in one of his character’s mouths: “Nothing in Christianity is original.”[2]

Is this actually the case? In short, no.  Once the facts are examined, these claims evaporate into thin air, which is what happens every time a beautifully false theory meets a brutal gang of facts – the facts win every time. To discover the truth about these particular claims and others like them, it’s important to first unearth the history behind their assertions, examine the actual historical portrayals of the false gods being compared to Christ, expose the logical fallacies that the authors are making, and finally quickly look at the compelling evidence that demonstrates why the New Testament gospels can be trusted in terms of accurately depicting Jesus Christ.

First, where did these claims of Jesus being a myth or an exaggeration originate?  Although some may argue for the participation of other, earlier historical figures, most theologians peg the start of these claims with a man named Bruno Bauer (1809 – 1882). Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher and historian who looked at the sources of the New Testament and controversially concluded that early Christianity owed more to Greek philosophy (Stoicism) than to Judaism. Starting in 1840, he began a series of controversial works arguing that Jesus was a myth, a second century fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology. His work was picked up Albert Kalthoff (1850-1906) who followed Bauer’s extreme skepticism about the historical Jesus. Kalthoff went so far as to claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed and was not the founder of Christianity.

After Bauer and Katlhoff came others, with the most notable being James Frazer who wrote a work entitled The Golden Bough where he argued the theory of there being widespread worship of dying and rising fertility gods in various places -Tammuz in Mesopotamia, Adonis in Syria, Attis in Asia Minor, and Osiris in Egypt. Frazer’s view has been adopted by many who little realize its fragile foundations, with the explanation of the Christian Resurrection by such a comparative-religions approach even being reflected in official Soviet propaganda. In the 1930s three influential French scholars, M. Goguel, C. Guignebert, and A. Loisy, added to Frazer’s claims by interpreting Christianity as a syncretistic religion formed under the influence of Hellenistic mystery religions.  And today, modern propagators of this thinking include the producers of the internet movie Zeitgeist, Dan Brown, and Freke and Gandy. 

The thing to remember about all the works mentioned before the late twentieth century (Bauer, et al) is they never advanced in the realm of academia and religious thought because theologians and scholars investigated the assertions and determined them to be completely false.  Obviously, if these authors had been credible and correct, the world would have applauded them as it is only too eager to argue against the history and validity of Christianity, but that didn’t happen. It has only been in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that they have been resurrected, primarily due to the rise of the internet and mass distribution of information that has no firm foundation.

This leads us to the next area of investigation – do the mythological gods of antiquity really mirror the person of Jesus Christ? As an example, the Zeitgeist movie makes these claims about the Egyptian god Horus:

  • He was born on December 25th of a virgin - Isis Mary
  • A star in the East proclaimed his arrival
  • Three kings came to adore the new-born “savior”
  • He became a prodigal teacher at age 12
  • At age 30 he was “baptized” and began a “ministry”
  • Horus had twelve “disciples”
  • Horus was betrayed
  • He was crucified
  • He was buried for three days
  • He was resurrected after three days



Is such a thing true?  No, it’s not - when historical accounts of Horus are competently examined, this is what rises to the surface:

  • Horus was born to Isis; there is no mention in history of her being called “Mary”. Moreover, Mary is our anglicized form of her real name ‘Miryam’ or Miriam, so that particular name was not even used in the original texts of Scripture
  • Isis not a virgin; she was the widow of Osiris and conceived Horus with Osiris
  • Horus born during month of Khoiak (Oct/Nov), not Dec 25th. Further, there is no mention in the Bible as to Christ’s actual birth date. The Dec 25th celebration of Christ’s birth did not occur until 4th century and was linked to the Winter solstice celebration.
  • There is no record of three kings visiting Horus at his birth. In addition, kings didn’t visit Christ at His birth – magi (king makers) did. And the Bible never states the actual number of magi that came to see Christ
  • Horus not a “savior” in any shape or form – he did not die for anyone
  • There are no accounts of Horus being a child teacher at age 12
  • Horus was not “baptized”.  The only account of Horus and a water incident is described in one story where Horus is torn to pieces, with Iris requesting the crocodile god to fish him out of the water he was placed into
  • Horus did not have a “ministry”
  • Horus did not have 12 disciples. According to the Horus accounts, Horus had four semi-gods that were followers and some indications of 16 human followers and an unknown number of blacksmiths that went into battle with him
  • There is no account of Horus being betrayed by a friend
  • Horus did not die by crucifixion. The Zeitgeist movie pegs the Horus account at 3,000 B.C., long before crucifixion was practiced. Now, various accounts have Horus being dismembered by Set and his bodyparts being scattered throughout the earth, with others combining Horus and Osiris together and him being torn apart and thrown into a river. There are also stories of his left eye being gouged out, which supposedly explained why the moon (which it represented), was so weak compared to the sun. It was also said that during a new-moon, Horus had become blinded and was titled Mekhenty-er-irty (mḫnty r ỉr.ty 'He who has no eyes'), while when the moon became visible again, he was re-titled Khenty-irty (ḫnty r ỉr.ty 'He who has eyes'). 
  • There is no account of Horus being buried for three days
  • Horus was not resurrected.  There is no account of Horus coming out of the grave with the body he went in with. Some accounts have Horus/Osiris being brought back to life by Isis and going to be the lord of the underworld.



So when compared side by side, Jesus and Horus bear near zero resemblance to one another. Another popular comparison done by those claiming Christ is a myth is Jesus and Mithras. All the claims of Horus are applied to Mithras (e.g. born of a virgin, being crucified, rising in three days, etc.) But what does history say? The actual characteristics of Mithras include:

  • He was born out of a solid rock and not from any woman
  • He emerged from the rock carrying a knife and torch and wearing a Phrygian cap
  • He battled first with the sun and then a primeval bull, thought to be the first act of creation.  Mithras killed the bull, which then became the ground of life for the human race
  • Mithras birth was celebrated on Dec. 25th along with Winter solstice
  • There is no mention of him as being a great teacher
  • There is no mention of Mithras having 12 disciples. The idea that Mithras had 12 disciples may have come from a mural in which Mithras is surrounded by twelve signs and personages of the Zodiac (two of whom are the moon and the sun), and even this imagery is post Christian
  • Mithras had no bodily resurrection. We are told he completes his earthly mission then is taken to paradise in a chariot alive and well. The early Church writer Tertullian did write about Mithras believers re-enacting resurrection scenes, but he wrote about this occurring well after New Testament times, so if any copycatting was being done it was the reverse of those claiming Christianity borrowing from other religions
  • Mithras was very popular with the Roman military; it was a military cult that excluded women whereas Christianity embraced women



More examples can be given of Krishna, Attis, Dionysus and other mythological gods, but the end result is the same.  In the end, the historical Jesus as portrayed in the Bible stands unique and far away from the actual description of mythological gods found in the works of antiquity.  Further, while the figures of Horus, Mithras, and some other mythological gods pre-dated Christianity, the only historical writings that bear any resemblance to historical Christianity come after the explosion of Christianity had already begun.  It must be remembered that the pagan mystery religions of that time were highly syncretistic (as opposed to the strictly separatist/exclusivist stance held by Judaism and Christianity) and were only too happy to incorporate teachings and practices that would help gain more followers that perhaps belonged to a rival faith.

This leads us to the next area to examine: the logical fallacies committed by those claiming that Christianity borrowed from pagan mystery religions.  Two fallacies in particular are committed: the fallacy of the false cause and the terminological fallacy.

What if I told you a story about a British ocean liner that was about 800 feet long, weighed over 60,000 tons, and could carry about 3,000 passengers? The ship had a top cruising speed of 24 knots, had three propellers, and about 20 lifeboats. And what if I told you that this ocean liner hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage in the month of April, tearing an opening in the starboard side forward portion of the ship, and sinking along with about 2,000 passengers?  What does that sound like?  You’d likely say the Titanic, but you’d be wrong.

It is actually a fictional story described in Morgan Robertson’s book called “the Wreck of the Titan” or “Futility” (Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, New York, 1898). This book was written fourteen years BEFORE the Titanic disaster took place, and several years before the construction was even begun on the Titanic. In the 1880’s, the well known English journalist, W. T. Stead also wrote an account of a sinking ocean liner in the mid-Atlantic, and by 1882 had added the detail that an iceberg would be the cause of the disaster. 

The point is this: even if one thing precedes another, it does not mean that the first caused the second – this is the fallacy of the false cause.  Even if accounts of mythological gods more closely resembled Christ (and they don’t), it doesn’t mean that they caused the gospel writers to invent a false Jesus – claiming such a thing would be like saying the TV series Star Trek caused the NASA Space Shuttle program. 

Another fallacy committed by the Jesus-is-a-myth proponents is the terminological fallacy. The terminological fallacy occurs when terms are redefined to prove a point, when in fact such terms do not mean the same thing when compared to their source. So for example, the Zeitgeist movie quickly says that Horus “began his ministry”, but Horus had no actual ministry – nothing like that of Christ. As another example, those claiming that Mithras and Jesus are one in the same talk about the “baptism” that initiated prospects into the Mithras cult, but what was it actually?  The Mithras priests (using a ritual also performed by followers of Attis) would suspend a bull over a pit, place those wanting to join the cult into the pit, slit the bull’s stomach, which then covered the initiates in blood.  Such a thing has no resemblance whatsoever to Christian baptism – a person going under water (symbolizing the death of Christ) and then coming back out of the water (symbolizing Christ’s resurrection).  But advocates of the mythological Jesus position use the same term to describe both in hopes of linking the two together. 

The last issue to examine on this subject is the truthfulness of the New Testament itself. While much has been written on this topic, here are just a few things to consider. No work from antiquity has more evidence standing in its corner with respect to historical veracity than the New Testament.  With the New Testament, we have more writers (nine), better writers, and earlier writers than any other document from that era. Further, history testifies to the fact that these writers went to their deaths for the simple claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. While some may die for a lie they think is true, no person dies for a lie they know to be false.  Think about it – if someone was about to crucify you upside down as what happened to Peter, and all you had to do to save your life was renounce a lie you’d knowingly been living, what would you do? 

In addition, history has shown that it takes at least two generations to pass before myth can enter into a historical account. Why? Because eyewitnesses can refute error put in print. For example, imagine that 10-20 years after the death of John F. Kennedy, an author wrote a book that asserted Kennedy did not die in Dallas, and instead lived to become a two-term president.  Do you think that book would have ever been taken seriously and would still exist today?  Of course not, because those living at the time could refute the errors of the author and expose the work as being false.  All the gospels of the New Testament were written during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, with some of Paul’s epistles likely occurring earlier than them. That early dating acts as a key protective mechanism against any falsehoods being accepted and circulated.

A final thing to consider is the New Testament showcases the fact that no one mistook the portrayal of Jesus for any other god. When faced with Paul’s teaching, the elite thinkers of Athens – who would be well educated in the various beliefs alive at that time – said this: “He seems to be a proclaimer of strange deities,”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is which you are proclaiming? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears; so we want to know what these things mean." (Acts 17:18-20)

The point: If dying and rising gods were aplenty in the first century, why, when the apostle Paul preached Jesus rising from the dead in Acts 17, did the Epicureans and Stoics not remark, “Ah, just like Horus and Mithras…”? The same would be true of Paul’s discourse in Acts 26; Festus, a Roman (who would have known about the Roman military Mithras cult), said Paul was out of his mind for preaching the resurrection.

So in the end, the accounts of mythological gods – who really were fables used to depict the various seasons and harvests – originated from authors whose works have been discounted by academia, bear no resemblance to the true Jesus, commit logical fallacies that undermine their veracity, and do not hold a candle to the New Testament gospels which have withstood 2,000 years of intense scrutiny.  Princeton New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger says, “It goes without saying that alleged parallels which are discovered by pursuing such methodology evaporate when they are confronted with the original texts. In a word, one must beware of what have been called, ‘parallels made plausible by selective description.’”[3]

Jesus Christ stands unique in history, with His voice rising above all false gods and continuing to ask the question that ultimately determines a person’s eternal destiny: “Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15) 

[1]Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 9.
[2]Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 232.
[3]Bruce Metzger, Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (Grand Rapid, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1968), 9.
 
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