What’s your opinion on the Problem of Evil?

This is the type of thing that it might seem alternately arrogant or redundant for some random blogger like me to comment on, because it’s already been handled so much more thoroughly (on both sides) by people much more learned then me. So, I want to make it clear that by commenting on this issue, I’m not actually pretentious enough to think that I’m seriously breaking any new ground here. I expect that pretty much all of what I’ll say has probably been said before; at best I might say it in a slightly different way.

Still, I think this is the type of religious topic that is worthy of everyone expressing their own opinion about it. Like other religious or philosophical subjects where there’s a lot of room for individuals to have mild variations or subtle nuances in their opinion of it, I think it’s worth it to just kinda get it “on the books” where a person stands on this issue.

Personally, I don’t consider the Problem of Evil to be airtight, definitive proof that God does not exist, but I do consider it to be evidence which points in that direction. As I’ve said before, what I’m trying to do (in a persistent, ongoing fashion) is assess the likelihood that a god exists, and I believe that the existence of evil and suffering in the world make it less likely for that to be the case.

Now, I try to keep these posts fairly concise, so I’m not gonna bother restating the argument; I think it should be easy enough to find it elsewhere on the web. What I want to talk about instead are the apparent weaknesses of the argument; the Problem of Evil does have a couple key weak points that shouldn’t be glossed over, but I don’t think they ultimately discredit or defeat the argument.

The first weakness is that it only works against a specific category of god, that which is “omnimax” (all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving or all-good). As long as an individual conception of God doesn’t have one of those three characteristics, then the Problem of Evil is not a problem for it. The reason why I don’t think this is a significant weakness is that it just so happens that the god believed in by most adherents of the three major monotheistic religions (and described in their scriptures) is omnimax, so the Problem of Evil still does apply to the most common conception of God.

The second weakness is that there appears to be some degree of presumption inherent in the argument; the person making it is kinda claiming to know (or even dictate) how God should behave. Personally, though, I don’t think it’s really as presumptuous as it might appear to be at first glance. When you look a little closer, it’s really just a matter of conclusions naturally following from definitions.

For instance, if we define “evil” as “the opposite of good,” then there’s no presumption required to say that an all-good god would be fundamentally opposed to evil. If he wasn’t, then he wouldn’t actually be all-good. Similarly, it’s not presumptuous to say that an all-powerful god should be able to prevent evil, because it wouldn’t meet the definition of “all-powerful” if he couldn’t.

Of course, in any philosophical debate, it’s always best to iron out the definitions with the individual who you’re debating, and then engage with the specific conception of God that their definitions indicate. But in general, I don’t think there is much presumption on God’s character required for the Problem of Evil to be a legitimate problem.

A third weakness might be that evil can’t really exist without objective moral values, but I’ve already responded to that objection here. In some ways, I almost think it would make more sense for the theist to argue the opposite of that (and in fact, I think that’s what they already are trying to do, but using different terms). Instead of saying that the existence of evil really proves God (which basically just boils down to equivocation), I think the theist really has to argue that there isn’t actually any evil in the world at all. Granted, when I say that, I’m excluding “necessary evil” from the definition of evil.

It seems to me, that phrase is just idiomatic anyway. If something which seems evil is truly necessary to achieve some greater good, then it isn’t really evil. If it’s “necessary” to the person who’s doing it to achieve some selfish ends, rather than some greater good, then it’s simply evil, not “necessary evil.”

So if we were to exclude “necessary evil” from the definition of “evil” (which I think is a quite reasonable exclusion), then it seems to me like the theist’s only way to defeat the Problem of Evil is to argue that evil does not actually exist in the world. After all, isn’t their usual line of criticism that the Problem of Evil doesn’t disprove God, because the evil and suffering in the world serves some higher purpose (such as allowing people to have free will)? They’re arguing that it is “necessary evil.” So if necessary evil doesn’t count as evil, then what they’re really saying when you get right down to it is that there isn’t any evil in the world at all.

But, you know, I find that really hard to believe. I won’t pretend that I can prove it definitively, or that my incredulity counts as evidence, but I would say that someone claiming that evil didn’t exist in the world at all would bear a pretty heavy burden of proof. And I contend that when theists dispute the problem of evil, that is effectively what they’re saying, whether they put it in precisely those terms or not.

If God did exist, would you want to know, and would you follow him?

If the truth be known

Do you really wanna know?

--“Truth Be Known – Everybody Gets a Shot,” Newsboys

These are really two separate questions, but I put them together because the first one has a very short answer. If God actually did exist in reality, then yes, I would want to know about it. I want my beliefs to be consistent with reality. While it’s unlikely that will ever be the case for all of my beliefs at any given time (as is true for all people, since we’re all drawing our conclusions from limited data sets), I still want it to be true as much as humanly possible. So the answer to the first question is an unequivocal, unhesitating yes.

That was the easy part. The second part of the question is harder, because it’s actually incomplete. To answer the question of whether I would follow (or submit to, obey, worship, etc.) God once I became convinced that such an entity really exists, it would be necessary to have a much better understanding of what his (or her, or its) characteristics were, before being able to make any decision whether they were worthy of my praise, respect, or submission.

Of course, if there were a theist in the room right now actually asking the question, they would probably say, “well, obviously, the God that I believe in would be the one who turns out to be real.” But then, you ask ten theists (even just among the three major monotheistic religions) to describe the characteristics of God, and you’ll get ten at least subtly-different answers.

But those subtle differences can have a significant effect on how I answer this question. If the god who is actually real loves everybody, then of course I’d worship him, why wouldn’t I? But if the god who is actually real “loves” everybody, in the narcissistic sense that they get a free ticket to paradise only if they happen to believe in him (regardless of anything else they’ve done), and everyone else gets tortured for all eternity simply because they belong to the wrong religion, then no, I don’t think I could worship such a monster.

Granted, if I was truly convinced that a god like that was real, then I might still knuckle under and submit to him out of the sheer visceral fear of unending torture for all eternity (how’s that for free will?), but I wouldn’t really love or respect him. And since God is supposed to be all-knowing, he should be able to see through that, so I doubt it would make any difference anyway (unless that God really does only want people to pay him lip service).

So ultimately, as with many theistic questions, it does very much depend on “which God?” But, since there are some readers who will probably want more of a straightforward answer, I’ll fall back on my upbringing and culture making Christianity the default setting for me. At present, I don’t feel that the god described in the Bible is one I would feel morally justified in worshipping or giving my allegiance to. A God who commits genocide (over and over again) in the Old Testament, and then condemns non-believers to infinite torture for finite crimes in the New Testament, I simply cannot see that as a just and loving god.

On the other hand, if we were talking more about a C.S. Lewis type of god, a wild and fierce, but ultimately loving and truly good Aslan-type god, who only keeps hell as a place of separation for people who don’t want to be with God in a perfect paradise for all eternity, then yeah, I could see myself being able to love and respect that type of god.

But unfortunately, I don’t see that as being what the Bible describes. 

Weren't the worst dictators in modern history atheists?

This is just a quick reply I made to a reddit post; if I were still actively updating this blog, I would try make a much more thorough reply to this common argument...

It's true that two of the dictators with the highest death counts in modern history (Stalin and Mao) were atheists, but you know what else they had in common? The biggest populations they were ruling over. If a dictator is ruling a country with only half a million people, there's really no way they can kill 20 million like Stalin did. So I'd love to see someone calculate percentages of the population that various dictators killed, instead of just raw numbers. Because, let's be serious here, ISIS (the worst theocracy in Islam) would be more than happy to kill 20 million people if they had that many people to kill and still have anyone left to rule over.

What do you consider the biggest contradiction in the Bible?

Because of just how many apparent Biblical contradictions have been documented on various websites, atheists almost face “an embarrassment of riches” when asked to name a single significant contradiction they’ve found in the Bible. We’re so used to seeing them in large groups all bundled together that it’s hard to pick out just one. So in this post, I wanted to step back from linking to various pages that have long lists of contradictions, and just kinda surgically pick a couple that I consider to be some of the most dramatic.

Don't the predictable laws of nature point to a god creating them?

From where I'm standing, I see no reason why an all-powerful deity, who created the whole universe, would need to be limited by everything working the same way every time. If a being was truly all-powerful, then "micro-managing the universe" (exerting his will directly over the movement of every single atom and particle) wouldn't be any sort of strain at all. So if such a god wanted to make a billiard ball move when it was struck one time, and not move another time, and absorb the other ball into itself a third time, that would be absolutely no problem for a god. But it would be a huge problem for naturalistic physical laws. From where I'm standing, physical laws that don't have a god behind them would have to be consistent and predictable, because there's no magical entity jumping in and changing them. Without a god, atoms are just doing what atoms do, so of course they would do the same thing every time. How could it not be regular and limited to a certain range of effects? 

Now, I'll even grant you that it wouldn't make sense for a loving god to be enacting an unpredictable universe, because it would make us be essentially living in a worldwide carnival funhouse. But if you're just talking about a generic "ordering intelligence," then I see no reason why that intelligence (if it cared more about itself than humans) wouldn't just have fun being disordering instead. In other words, I feel like the percentage of possible worlds without a god, where the laws of nature are unpredictable, would be 0. Whereas, the percentage of gods who might make the laws of nature unpredictable would be much greater than 0. Therefore, I think the existence of unpredictable laws of nature would actually make it more likely that a god exists, and the existence of predictable laws of nature do not.

Are you an anti-theist?

I wouldn’t say I’m precisely an anti-theist, but I do feel some solidarity with them on a lot of issues. I believe that most people would be better off without religion, provided they had the intelligence and intellectual commitment to see that religion really isn’t necessary for things like providing a moral foundation or giving your life meaning. But there are a lot of people who simply wouldn’t get to that point if they weren’t religious. So in some ways, I guess I feel like religion almost functions as a kind of “easy mode” for providing answers to those difficult, haunting questions of existence. And, to that extent, I can’t really begrudge people that.

But in society as a whole, it doesn’t just stop there. I recently read through the 2016 Republican Party platform, and it’s loaded with appeals to the value of faith, advocating “faith-based programs,” and pushing for policies that seem to only have religious reasoning behind them. In other parts of the world, fundamentalist Muslims are committing persistent acts of terror and mass murder, because they believe their religion gives them the right to rule the world.

What would it take to convince you that Jesus rose from the dead?

This was written for the “What Would It Take” challenge (see an explanation of what that is here). Since this challenged was posed by a Christian, my references to “you” in this post should be taken as referring to someone in that demographic.

1) The first, absolutely essential, thing required to convince me that Jesus rose from the dead, is that I would have to be convinced that it is possible for people to rise (or be risen) from the dead.

I think we can both agree that is simply impossible in naturalistic terms, so it would follow that I’d have to accept the existence of the supernatural (and probably the existence of God), for a resurrection to even be possible. I do not think that I could ever be convinced in the other direction (be convinced that God exists only because I was already convinced that Jesus rose from the dead), because even William Lane Craig has admitted that resurrection is only the most plausible theory for the “minimal facts” if you already accept that some type of God does exist. (I've delved further into the problems with using miracles as evidence that God exists here.)

Of course, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition. If I became convinced that some supernatural force existed which could raise people from the dead, it still doesn’t mean that Jesus was such a person.

2) If you have first convinced me that God or the supernatural exists, then I think the additional step required would be to convince me that a historical account which includes the claim that Jesus rose from the dead was a historically accurate document. There are a few different ways I can think of that you could achieve that result:

2a) I think probably the most effective way would be to convince me that the gospels were inspired by God.

2b) Even if I didn’t believe that the gospels were inspired, I would still have to believe that Jesus rose from the dead if I was convinced that the gospels were purely-human documents that were nonetheless accurate. There’s no reason that couldn’t be possible without inspiration; they don’t necessarily have to be God-breathed for them to be conveying true events of history. Convincing me of their inspiration just seems like the most direct approach, since the belief that they are inspired seems like the most common reason that people believe they are historically accurate. But it’s not essential, so if I could be convinced that they were accurate histories without believing that they were inspired (which wouldn’t be out of the question, if I had already come to accept that some type of supernatural does exist), then I would be convinced that Jesus rose from the dead.

But bear in mind, it’s not enough to point out some historical facts that the gospels got right, and then expect me to accept the miracle claims as well. I would have to be convinced that at least one of the gospels was thoroughly accurate for this to convince me.

2c) If there were authentic non-Christian sources which reported that Jesus rose from the dead, then I would think that would be pretty compelling evidence (if I already believed that resurrection was possible). I’m including this for the sake of completeness, even though I appreciate that it’s quite a long-shot. Naturally, it only makes sense that if  someone believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, then they probably would become Christian, so then that wouldn’t be a non-Christian source anymore. 

That may seem like setting too high a standard, but I don’t think I should be expected to accept a miracle claim just based on the testimony of that religion’s adherents. There are plenty of mutually-exclusive religions which have plenty of adherents who devoutly believe in that religion’s miracle claims. I contend the reason why that’s the case (even though they can’t all be true) is that these believers first accept belief in the religion for other reasons, and then they accept belief in the miracle claim because they already believe in the religion.

Of course, I understand that in the case of the resurrection, the claim being made is that the earliest Christians (particularly the apostles) only came to believe because they directly experienced the risen Christ. But that is just a claim. Since there have been so many other religions that have sprung up over the course of human history, I cannot accept the argument that the rise of early Christianity could not be explained without postulating that they really saw Jesus risen from the dead. So, ultimately, it’s just hearsay.

That’s why I specify non-Christian sources here. Of course, I understand this is incredibly unlikely, and I’m only including it for the sake of thoroughness, but if it happened to be the case that somebody back then wrote something like, “sure, Jesus appeared to me after I saw him crucified, but heck, Caesar rose from the dead too, so I’m just gonna keep following the Roman gods, because they’re more cool,” then that would go a long way toward convincing me. Of course, you would have to further convince me that any such document was authentic, since there is an established history of the early church screwing with secular documents.

I want to say that I understand and appreciate how this answer might be frustrating to a believer. Because it make sense that anyone who did believe the resurrection was real would become a Christian, it’s bordering on the toupee fallacy to say that I’ll only consider evidence from non-Christian sources. I want to point out, though, that I did previously state that convincing me the gospels were true would be a valid way to change my mind on this issue, so I’m not completely ruling out Christian sources. I’m just saying that some random guy who happens to be Christian writing about how the resurrection was absolutely a real historical event is not gonna sway me, because of course a Christian is gonna believe that. A Mormon will just as dependably believe that Joseph Smith received the golden plates from the angel Moroni; it doesn’t mean they have actual evidence that such an event really occurred, it’s just an article of faith for that religion.

Who are you to judge God?

This seems like the type of question that any atheist blogger should be prepared to answer, so I figured I’d just get it out of the way now. In my experience, when this question is asked, it usually arises from the mindset that the reality of God’s existence is just obvious, and so atheists are really trying to say that God is evil, not that God isn’t real.

Even thinking about it from that perspective (of God being real, and just criticizing what kind of job he’s doing), the question still doesn’t make sense to me. Imagine it’s time for a presidential election, but unlike the current 2016 race, there’s an incumbent who’s running for reelection. Imagine how nonsensical it would seem if you told someone that you were voting against the incumbent, and that person said, “who are you to judge him [or her, potentially]? He’s the president of the whole freaking United States, the leader of the free world, and you have the unmitigated gall to pass judgment on whether he’s doing his job well or not?”

How can you complain about evil if you don't believe in objective morals?

Moral evil actually proves the existence of God. For we may argue in the following way:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

2. Evil exists.

3. Therefore, objective moral values exist. (Some things are evil!)

4. Therefore, God exists.

--William Lane Craig

I was thinking about writing down some of my thoughts on the Problem of Evil, but I figured it would make sense to head off this potential objection before it comes up. This seems like a common retort, in my perception, that Christians act like you have to believe in objective moral laws (and therefore a moral lawgiver) before you can have permission to be bothered by the existence of evil in the world.

If you don’t like how your life is going, why don’t you just ask God for help?

In my last post, I mentioned that my life really isn’t good enough to be worth trading away the hope of heaven, just so I can live by my own rules for what relatively little time I have left in this life. I anticipate the titular question is the type of thing a well-meaning Christian might ask. I’m also drawing some inspiration from my mom, who never hesitates (whenever I’m complaining about my sad state in life) to say that “following God is the only way to true happiness.” This fails to move me, though, because if that were true, I would’ve never left the church in the first place. If that were true, I should think that after two thousand years of Christianity, there wouldn’t still be all this conflict and disagreement about which religion was the right and true one, because it would slowly-but-surely be plainly evident to everyone (not just the people who already believe it) that one religion gets better “results” than the others.

But anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent. Since I’m so dissatisfied with my life, I can see how a person who believes in the power of prayer might think that asking God for help would be a good start to get myself on the right track. Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed thinking about how pitiful my miserable existence is, I might have a moment of weakness and think, “eh, maybe I should just give it a try. What could it hurt?”

Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

(Click here for a longer, more detailed version of this.)

A man or woman rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the paucity of evidence. One rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit one’s need for God.

--Ravi Zacharias

(How atheists think,
according to Jack Chick)

There are three fundamental problems I see with this argument. The first is the use of generalized language. When Christians make this argument, I almost never hear them saying, “some atheists just reject God because they want an excuse to sin.” If they did say that, I don’t think I would have any major problem with this. After all, every position or stance has its share of people who believe in it for irrational reasons. I’m not familiar with any atheists who only reject God because they want to avoid moral accountability, but I don’t doubt that there are a few out there. So if the claim was just that “some atheists” do this, I wouldn’t be able to disagree.

But that’s not the claim. The accusation is universally applied, without any exceptions being offered. The way I parse the wording of that Ravi Zacharias quote, the tacit implication is that every single atheist in the entire history of the world only rejected God out of moral resistance. Rationally speaking, that’s a fairly untenable position to hold, because it would only take a single example to prove that proposition false. Personally, I know myself to be just such an example.

What would it take to convince you that God exists?

I don’t think most people intend it this way when they ask it, but this question seems to have a lot of potential to be kind of a trap question. There are basically two ways you can answer; general or specific. If you just answer in general terms, like saying “anything that meets the normal standards of evidence,” then you can be accused of not answering the question (example here; sorry for the language, I was rather salty at the time). On the other hand, if you say something specific, like, “if all the stars rearranged themselves to say “God exists!” and people got it on video, and each area saw the message in their own language,” then the person who asked the question might get on your case for making a scenario that you know is never gonna happen. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying that every religious person would act this way, but I think there is a real potential for it.)

So, answering the question can be tricky, but I don’t even think answering it should be necessary. I think the very fact that the question needs to be asked is a mild type of evidence against the existence of God. Imagine if somebody asked you, “what would it take to convince you that the sun exists?” Well, not much, really. All I have to do is look at it (but only briefly, because if I look at it for too long, I’ll go blind, and that doesn’t seem likely to happen if the sun doesn’t even exist). If God really were real, would it seriously be so hard to figure out which purely-abstract arguments or easily-reinterpreted evidence would convince us? To me, all the theories about “divine hiddenness,” and debates between continuationists and cessationists, are just attempts to rationalize the very clear fact that God’s presence just isn’t readily apparent in our world, the way it purports to be in the stories of scripture.

So I think the question shouldn’t even need to be asked, but it also shouldn’t need to be answered (and if you think that’s just me dodging the question, then you’re not listening to what I’m saying). Because, here’s the real kicker. I don’t need to know what would convince me that God exists, because if a god who really is all-knowing does exist, then he (or it) will know exactly what it would take to convince me that he exists. If he’s all-powerful, then he will be able to make it happen, and if he loves me, then he will want it to happen. In a way, then, it’s almost a parallel to the Problem of Evil. If God exists and knows everything, then he not only knows what it would take to convince me, he also knows that I want to be convinced (because I prefer to believe true things, and spending eternity in paradise wouldn’t be a bad deal either). So if he knows what it would take to convince me, he knows I want to be convinced, and he wants me to be convinced (which I grant wouldn’t be the case if the Calvinists are right, and I’m just not one of the Elect), then why haven’t I been convinced?

At present, I believe the best explanation is that such a god simply doesn’t exist.

Do you reject the possibility of miracles?

In a previous post, I said that I’m a naturalist not because I assume the natural is all there is, but simply because I haven’t seen sufficient evidence for the supernatural. That makes the question of how I respond to miracle claims very relevant. Now, I should note before going any further that there are two different types of usages for the word “miracle.” The more casual usage is simply of a very unusual or unlikely event, but not one that anyone thinks is inexplicable from a natural standpoint. But the other, the one we’re talking about here, is the usage where the event could not possibly have happened without a deity interfering with or suspending the natural laws. In short, something that would be impossible without the intervention of God.

Given that conception of miracles, it naturally follows then that a recognition of miracles happening is an admission that some type of God must exist. Since I don’t believe in God or the supernatural, you can easily infer that I don’t believe in any miracle claims either. From there, you might make the further inference that I’m rejecting all miracle claims just as a general rule. This wouldn’t be an entirely unwarranted assumption, since there have been prominent atheists who held this position. Probably the most well-known is David Hume; I’m an avid watcher of religious debates, and his name comes up a lot in those debates that involve discussing the validity of miracle claims (usually the issue of whether Jesus’ resurrection was a historical event). Hume’s position was that, given the very nature of miracles, a miracle will always be the least probable explanation for any given event.

Think about it like this; if a friend told you that they saw someone walking and talking who you both thought was dead, what possible explanations could there be for that?

1. Your friend is mistaken.
2. Your friend is lying.
3. That other person was never really dead in the first place.
4. A miracle has occurred, and this person has risen from the dead by the supernatural power of God.

Now, think about the general likelihood of these options. #1 is always a possibility. Unless the claimed miracle has been recorded on video (and isn’t it just amazing that this never seems to happen with the more visually-dramatic types of miracles?), then I can’t imagine any possible scenario where the person claiming the miracle couldn’t simply be mistaken. #2 is a little more variable in terms of how trustworthy you consider the person who’s claiming the miracle, but at the end of the day, it’s still more likely that a trustworthy person might be lying (perhaps they’re simply playing a joke on you, with no real malicious intent), than that a person has been raised from the dead. Someone telling a lie is a common occurrence that we all know and agree does happen on a regular basis. Resurrections are nothing of the kind. So even if you trust the person as honest, them being dishonest in this one specific case is still more likely than a dead person coming back to life.

#3 is pretty unlikely, but it’s still something that has been known to happen in the real world. Though it’s much more common in the realm of fiction, it’s not unheard of for someone to fake their own death, or for someone to be pronounced dead and then still end up reviving later (this was much more common in the past, when the medical procedures for determining that someone was dead were more primitive). Or, going back to the first two options, the news you and your friend received that this person was dead could have been inaccurate in the first place. None of these things are commonplace and ordinary, but they’re still more likely (in the sense of there already being known and verified cases of this happening) than a dead person coming back to life.

Now, consider #4 again. Any of those first three options would still be viable whether God exists or not. This option, however, would be entirely impossible if God (or some other supernatural power) doesn’t exist. But then, even if God does exist, this option would still be wildly unlikely, because even most people who fully believe in God don’t believe that resurrections are a regular occurrence. Even the Bible, where the existence of God is a given, and miracles (in general) are quite commonplace, people being brought back from the dead only happens a small number of times. So even if you are completely convinced that God exists, this explanation is still less likely than the first three.

So, as I understand it, that’s basically how Hume’s line of thought goes. He rejects miracles because they’re always going to be the least likely explanation for any given miracle claim or phenomenon. To an extent, I agree with his reasoning, but I don’t keep pace with his train of thought all the way to its destination of rejecting the possibility of miracles completely. I think this is a compelling argument for why miracles should be seen as wildly improbable, and thus be subject to a very high standard of evidence. But I won’t go so far as saying that makes them impossible, because wildly improbable things can and do happen in reality.

Basically, then, my stance is that I’m going to approach any miracle claim with a high level of skepticism and demand a high quality of evidence, but I’m not going to simply rule them out completely. I try not to rule anything out completely.

There’s one other thing that’s worth keeping in mind, though. The way that the very definition of miracles makes the existence of God (or something supernatural) necessary for them to be real, causes it to be very problematic to use miracles as an argument for the existence of God. It seems like a sound deductive argument to say, “a miracle happened, and miracles can only happen if God exists, therefore God exists.” But the problem is, in most cases that first statement (“a miracle happened”) won’t have actually been properly established. The only reason you don’t have any trouble believing a miracle really did happen is because you already believed in God anyway. So using this as a purported proof of God’s existence can very easily be just Begging the Question, and I don’t think it would be especially compelling if this were your primary argument for the existence of God.

Return Salvo: You Don’t Gotta Believe

This is a review of an article called, “You Gotta Believe: Atheist or Not, You Already Have More Faith Than You Realize,” by James S. Spiegel, which appeared in Salvo (a very conservative Christian magazine). I previously reviewed the article in a much more detailed and thorough (but stream-of-consciousness) fashion, responding to each point as I read the article for the first time. My intention is for this to be a more streamlined and concise review.

Spiegel begins by saying that we all take the reliability of our senses on faith, a point which I commented on separately here. The point he’s trying to make is that we all have things that we need to put our faith in just to get through the day, so also putting your faith in God really isn’t that bad. Spiegel acknowledges, “some faith commitments are more reasonable than others,” and agrees that there is a difference between “justified faith” and “blind faith.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t make any effort to define his terms or draw any meaningful, clear distinction between those two qualitative levels of faith. The problem I have with this type of argument is that it’s too easy for an apologist to essentially say, “you have ‘faith’ in some concept (because there’s actually really good evidence that it’s true), so you might as well have faith in God too,” but without providing the same level of really good evidence for God. At the end of the day, I think that is basically what Spiegel does here.

The arguments he gives for why faith in God is just as reasonable as faith in those other concepts are, in my opinion, very thin. In the paragraph immediately before the section on “Reasonable Religious Faith,” he states, “in order to have a justified faith in a person or thing, your trust must be grounded in some objectively good reasons.” Despite that, his first argument for faith in God being reasonable is the fact that “millions of people all over the world have reported experiences of God.” Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything less objective than personal experiences. Maybe if all those millions of people had the same personal experience, then there might be something to it, but people in every religion have personal experiences of the divine (or near-death experiences) which just happen to align with what was already in their minds. That’s not an “objectively good reason” to have faith in God.

His second reason is that there are things like gravity and love that we can’t directly see, but we know they exist because we can see the effects of them. The problem is, he never even bothers to make any sort of connective argument to justify the claim that God is on an equal basis with things like that. He just baldly asserts it, saying simply, “these are no less matters of faith than belief in God.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument; he never makes any effort to show how God is like gravity and love in that sense, or what effects of his existence we can see (other than the personal experiences, which are still subjective). Speaking formally, that seems like a clear non sequitur. Speaking informally, it just doesn’t seem like a very good argument. And those two arguments are the only ones he ever makes in the whole article for why belief in God is justified.

After that, he delves into a bunch of other “faith commitments” that theists and atheists share (but again, makes no effort to show that faith in God is on equal footing with those). Then he claims that naturalists must have a faith in something he calls the “naturalist explainability thesis,” which is basically the claim that atheists must believe by faith that everything has a natural explanation (another issue I dealt with separately, here). Working off of that claim, he begins to wrap up the article by claiming that atheists actually make a bigger leap of faith than theists. But observe the way he tries to justify that:

Now it is true that the theist also believes by faith that divine intelligence created life, consciousness, and the laws of nature. But considering the attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite capacity for creativity, this actually seems much less of a leap of faith than the atheist makes in holding to the naturalist explainability thesis. It is for this reason that some have claimed that it is not the theist but the atheist who exhibits more faith.

Of course, that’s all well and good if you already believe in God as he does, if you’ve already made that leap of faith that he claims isn’t happening. But what is the basis for the claim that the theist isn’t making much of a leap? “The attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite capacity for creativity.” But how does he know God even has these attributes in the first place? Early on in the article, he acknowledged that the authority of Scripture can’t be proved, so it can’t just be from the Bible. He’s certainly made no arguments in this article for how it would be justified faith that God has any of those attributes, much less all. In short, he’s defending the assertion that theists aren’t making a leap of faith by making a different leap of faith. And yet, he has the hubris to say that atheists are the ones who have a more untenable level of faith. As I’ve discussed in my previous posts, I don’t think any faith is required to be an atheist. But there is a lot of faith required to be a theist, as James Spiegel clearly demonstrates, even in the very argument which intends to show that theists don’t require a leap of faith. 

Don’t you just assume that everything has a natural explanation?

This is another common argument in the “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” line of criticism. The accusation is that since atheists don’t believe in a God to perform all the creative acts that shaped the universe, we must then just believe dogmatically in materialism as an article of faith. That even if the current progress of the scientific community has absolutely no earthly idea how something may have occurred naturally, we just have to believe by assumption or presupposition that there is a natural explanation.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that I disagree with this accusation. While I’m sure there are some naturalists who believe in naturalism through pure dogma (there are, after all, some irrational people in every group), that is not the position I hold. The position I hold is that I will not believe in the supernatural until I have reasonable evidence that it is real. If we define “natural” as “anything that is not supernatural,” then you don’t have to make a pledge to believe that the natural is all there is to be a naturalist. All you need is to not believe in the supernatural. Just like not believing in God is all it takes to be an atheist (without needing to make any claims to know there is no God), naturalism can be a “negative” belief (a lack of belief in something) rather than a claim to definite certainty that the natural is all that exists.

Even so, modern science has provided us with many examples of things that now have accepted natural explanation, which previously could only be explained supernaturally. The diversity of living organisms on Earth is probably the biggest example, but there are others, like disease, weather, and planetary rotation. In times past, people have just accepted that there wasn’t any natural explanation for any of these things, but now we know that there is. So that gives a good inductive basis to expect that there might be further natural explanation for other mysteries that are yet unsolved.

Though we have that good inductive reason to expect more natural explanations, we still don’t need to assume them. In the areas where we don’t have answers yet, many naturalists have no problem saying, “we don’t know, and that’s okay.” As Michael Shermer put it, in response to a claim that something could be not be explained through existing scientific knowledge:

So what? The fact that we cannot fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation. It just means that we don’t know everything. Such uncertainty is at the very heart of science and is what makes it such a challenging enterprise.*

Let me clarify what I think he’s saying here, because I suspect someone who is less sympathetic towards naturalism may well read this quote and see it as some kind of admission that naturalists are completely closed to any supernatural explanation no matter what. But notice, the issue at play is simply that there’s no existing natural explanation for something. There’s not even a claim being made that there’s actual evidence for a supernatural explanation, just the lack of evidence for a natural one. This is not a case where Shermer has been presented with clear evidence for the supernatural and he still says “we don’t know” despite that. Rather, this is yet another case where religious people act like a simple lack of natural explanation means the supernatural explanation should be accepted by default.

With that in mind, what I think Shermer’s saying here is that if there’s no evidence for a natural explanation, and no evidence for a supernatural explanation, then it’s better to just accept that we don’t know, instead of assuming a supernatural explanation so we can feel like we’ve closed the gap in our knowledge.

This is quite contrary to the assertion that the naturalist has to assume a natural explanation without any evidentiary foundation. Shermer’s position here (which I believe is shared by many rationally-minded atheists) is that it’s better to accept ignorance than believe a conclusion which is completely without foundation. Religious people will toss out examples like the origin of life or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, and act like the absence of a definite natural explanation means that atheists just believe dogmatically by faith. On the contrary, I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable, and demands no faith at all, to say “we don’t know what caused life to emerge, but until you give me any actual evidence that it was God, I’m not gonna believe that.” Because, if I did just assume it was God without any positive evidence (as opposed to the “evidence” of simply not having any other explanation), then I would be living dogmatically as a theist, not an atheist.

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* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surviving-death-on-larry-king-live-2010-03/

Don’t you need faith to believe in the reliability of your senses?

Doesn’t it take faith to believe in the reliability of our senses?

Sometimes, religious people seem to act like giving any examples of something that requires “faith” for anyone to get through their day makes it perfectly justified to have faith in a specific God. One of the common examples of this is the fact that we generally trust that our senses are reliable. Personally, I don’t just assume or blindly trust that my senses are reliable; I think it’s much more rational to operate with the awareness that they might not be at any given time. And yet, it’s true that I still need to trust their reliability to some degree, at least as a provisional conclusion. Religious people will argue that this is purely a matter of faith or presupposition, because the any attempt to validate or justify the reliability of your senses would still require the use of your senses.  I don’t accept this, because you can use one of your senses to confirm another. If you see a wall in front of you (sense of sight), you can put out your hand and feel to confirm that the wall is really there (sense of touch).

Someone might object, “but that’s still using your senses to confirm your senses!” Maybe I’m just missing some basic philosophical implication that’s obvious to everyone else, but I don’t see why the senses should all be bundled together in the consideration of their reliability. The sense of touch is not the same as the sense of sight; why must our judgment of their reliability be all-or-nothing? If I took off my eyeglasses, I will have good reason to distrust the reliability of my sense of sight; but that doesn’t give me any reason at all to think that my other four senses have become deficient as well. On the contrary, studies have shown that a brain which lacks the reliability of one sense (i.e. being blind or deaf) will rewire itself so that the other senses are more heightened.* Thus, I see no basis for the mindset that we must judge the reliability of “our senses” as an all-or-nothing packaged deal. I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable to validate the reliability of one of our senses using another one of our senses.

And lest you argue that this just moves the issue back a step (because I would then need to justify what validates the second sense that validated the first), I see no reason why the senses can’t mutually validate each other. Let’s say I’m not sure whether I should trust the reliability of my sense of sight, so I use my sense of touch to validate it. In doing so, I’m not assuming (or taking on faith) the reliability of my sense of touch; if the sensory data of my sight and touch didn’t match, I wouldn’t just assume one was correct and the other was wrong, so I’m not placing any faith in either sense’s reliability there. Rather, it is the fact that they agree which validates both of them.

Think of it like scientific experiments. When one scientist conducts an experiment, the accepted scientific method is for someone else to go along and reproduce the experiment to double-check the first scientist’s findings. If the findings of the two experiments don’t agree, the accepted scientific method is not to just arbitrarily decide, “well, the first one was done right, so the second one must have some mistake,” or vice versa. They don’t just assume that either one was correct. Even so, if both experiments turn out the same way, then it is taken as good evidence that there is something to the results of that experiment (while always leaving the door open for additional data to be added). So I don’t think there’s anything circular or irrational about using two sources of data to validate each other.

I would go even further and say that this is a perfectly common practice. If there are two witnesses to a crime (or perhaps two suspects who are pleading innocence), then investigators will question them for details separately, and then see how well the two stories align. If they don’t match up, the detectives may not treat either testimony as reliable, but if they do (especially if the police are sure they didn’t have an opportunity to discuss and plan out their cover story together), then that will give them both some validation as being reliable, even though neither of them had been validated individually beforehand.

Now, I will grant that it’s even better if the investigators have some external way of verifying their stories. I’m not saying that this type of mutual validation is the best warrant for a belief we could ever possibly have. But in the case of judging the reliability of our senses, I think it’s more than adequate. Then again, I think we actually do have an external source of verification; our continued survival. Think about the illustration of seeing and feeling a wall. If our senses were completely unreliable, how many times would we run into walls, or fall into holes, or otherwise interact with our environment in dangerous ways, before it killed us? Unless we all have unreliable senses in an unperceived world that is completely safe and docile, then I can see no way that our senses being unreliable wouldn’t prove fatal very quickly. I don’t need to have implicit faith in the reliability of my senses to see that the fact I’m alive at all demonstrates that they’re doing the job well enough.

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* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/

How can you trust the scientific method when it can't be verified by the scientific method?

In the Q&A portion of this debate, an audience member asks Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza, “on what basis can you dismiss the principle of parsimony?” D’Souza replies by glibly showing that you can't use the principle of parsimony to show that the principle of parsimony is valid. This is very similar to the oft-used argument (especially by William Lane Craig) that you can't use the scientific method to show that the scientific method is valid. The problem with this type of argument is that things like parsimony, science and the rules of rationality are methods for validating propositions. You can't use the scientific method to prove the scientific method, because the scientific method is not a proposition. It's not either true or false; it's an approach, a style, a means, of finding out which propositions are true or false.

You can't prove that a recipe is true or false (in the sense of being the one right and true way to bake a cake, for instance), but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use the recipe. What matters with a recipe is not whether it can be shown to be propositionally true, but what it results in. If you use a recipe for a cake, and the result is a really good cake, then keep using the recipe. It doesn't matter that you can't show it to be propositionally true, because it gets results. So it is with things like the scientific method and the rules of rationality. They're not validated because we can show them to be true (remember, a method can't be either true or false), they're validated by the fact that they get results.

Have you ever actually read any of William Lane Craig's books?

The short answer is no, not any of his whole books. The long answer is, after seeing a lot of arguments from him in other forms (he even answered a question from me in his Q&A column), I don't believe it would be anything but a complete waste of time to read a whole book. Observe the following quote…

First of all, I think that I would tell them that they need to understand the proper relationship between faith and reason. And my view here is, that the way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit, in my heart. And that this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that Christianity is true, wholly apart from the evidence. And, therefore, if in some historically-contingent circumstances, the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don’t think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation, I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I’m in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover that in fact the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me. (Source)

…And by the way, that’s not just something he said in an interview in the spur of a moment. I did research his actual scholarly work enough to know that his flagship book (Reasonable Faith) has a whole section on this, where he repeatedly reinforces the idea that the way Christians know Christianity is true is ultimately because of the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit, so reason and rationality must only ever be subordinate to that.

See here (Google Books link is dead, but you can follow along if you happen to have a physical copy), the section starting on page 47 with the header “Role of Argument and Evidence.” Here are a few of the most damning quotes, if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing…

“I’ve already said that it is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role.” 

“Reason is a tool to help us better understand and defend our faith;” [...That is, not to find out whether our faith is actually true or not.]

[Down on page 51] “Therefore, the role of rational argumentation in knowing Christianity to be true is the role of a servant. A person knows Christianity is true because the Holy Spirit tells him it is true, and while argument and evidence can be used to support this conclusion, they cannot legitimately overrule it.”

…In short, Craig admits over and over again that his entire worldview is based on a feeling, not facts, data, arguments, or evidence. He further admits that no amount of arguments or evidence would ever changes his mind, and even seems proud of that! He then compounds the sophistry of ignoring arguments himself while using arguments to convince other people, by reframing the feeling which serves as the basis for his belief in an intellectual-sounding buzz-phrase, “the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit.” At the end of the day, he’s no different from all the Young-Earth Creationists who openly admit that they will simply dismiss any evidence which goes against their presuppositions. He’s not a bit different. But I’m supposed to respect his intellectual or philosophical acumen?

But wait there’s more; there’s also this other little nugget which he wrote right above that section on page 47…

“Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.”

…I don’t know about anybody else, but I know (just as fully and confidently as I know anything about myself) that the reason I’m not a Christian has nothing to do with loving darkness rather than light. But hey, William Lane Craig is the foremost Christian philosopher of our time, so he must know my own heart, my own motivations, better than I do, right? Pardon me if I’m skeptical.

So, just that quickly, in one short section of one of his thirty or so books, he’s completely torpedoed his intellectual credibility for me in not one, but two different ways. And that’s without even factoring in all the many things he’s said and done to torpedo his credibility for me in all of his many debates.

Couldn't hell just be separation from God?

A lot of atheists (myself included) believe that the doctrine of infinite torture in hell for finite sins in this life is drastically, ludicrously unjust. Some Christians will rebut this by offering the theory that hell isn't really a Dante-esque place of endless sadism and torture; rather, the torture comes simply from being separated from God, and that's all.

Contrary to this comparatively pleasant idea, however, there are quite a few verses in the New Testament (as ol' Hitch was so fond of saying, it wasn't until "gentle Jesus, meek and mild," that the concept of eternal torture was introduced) which explicitly reference a fiery-torture version of hell. I'll be honest, I was surprised myself by how many there were. Off the top of my head, I could only think of one in the gospels, and a few in Revelation. So I did some googling, and it turns out I was indeed missing quite a few. I'm gonna start with the “primary source” quotations, i.e. the words of Jesus, but I'm also gonna start with the weakest one from that group...

(All bold emphasis is my own.)

Luke 16:24 [in the story of the rich man and Lazarus] - So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'

…Now, of course, this one is from a parable, so it’s easy to dismiss descriptions here as just being poetic imagery. Are we really expected to believe that people who are punished with eternal separation from God are literally within shouting distance of heaven? Not likely. So, taken individually, the description of fiery agony here could be dismissed as just poetic imagery, but it just so happens that this description meshes quite well with plenty of references to hellfire that are much more straightforward…

Mark 9:43 - If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire,

Matthew 5:22 - But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, 'You good-for-nothing,' shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.

Matthew 13:40-42 [Jesus describing the real meaning behind the parable of the wheat and the tares] - ⁴⁰"So just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the age. ⁴¹"The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, ⁴²and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Matthew 18:9 - If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell.

Matthew 25:41 - Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;

…So, that seems pretty conclusive to me already, but if you go outside of the gospels, there are even more straightforward references to a fiery hell…

James 3:6 - And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell.

Jude 1:7 - just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

Revelation 14:9-10 - ⁹Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, "If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, ¹⁰he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.

Revelation 20:15 - And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Revelation 21:8 - "But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."

…So there you have it. Eleven different verses (not counting whatever parallel verses there may be to some of the Gospel quotes) which very specifically and directly describe fire as a fundamental characteristic of hell. Unless there’s some other verse I don’t know about which specifically says that all of these verses are just speaking symbolically, then I don’t see how you could possibly hold the position that the doctrine of “mild hell” is Biblical, in light of all these verses.

What pop culture influence primed you for atheism?

I feel like this is kind of a tricky question, because I think the tendency is for the hardcore religious people to look at that kind of thing and say, "see, that just brainwashed you into losing your faith; that's why I don't let my kids watch or listen to anything secular!" Dan Barker once made the comment, "If I had limited myself to Christian authors, I would still be a Christian to this day."

Of course, we atheists see that is a recognition that it's important to expose yourself to different viewpoints to increase your chances of reaching conclusions which are actually consistent with reality. But for dyed-in-the-wool believers, that can just be read as a cautionary tale which should teach diligent Christians to quit reading and watching the infidel material you've been absorbing, because it could cause you to lose your faith (not because your faith is wrong, of course, but because those heathens are so darn good at deceiving people).

I actually had a whole debate with my brother one time, after he said that he thought my enjoyment of comics and such worldly media was partly responsible for my break from the church. I don't remember him ever being able to give any good reasons why he thought that was the case, but the point is that when believers become non-believers, other believers who want to hold onto the feeling that their belief is rational look for things like this to justify how the apostate only left for irrational reasons.

That being the case, I have to state up front the caveat that I don't think this did anything like that (brainwashing me into apostasy or making me leave for irrational reasons), and in fact I don't think this really did much to make me leave the church in the first place (the question is about what primed you for atheism, and I wasn't a full-scale atheist until long after I left the church). With those caveats, I think the answer for me is a podcast called You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes. The show features Pete interviewing various famous people (the vast majority of whom are fellow comedians), but as the title suggests, they get into some topics that are far off the beaten path of the usual interview, and one of those topics is God and religion. So while listening to that podcast, I heard people with a lot of different viewpoints talk about why they held those viewpoints.

What's kind of ironic, though, is that there's been this weird sort of mirror parallelism between Pete's story and my own. His upbringing was similar to mine in that he was raised in the church and sincerely believed it himself, but then he lost faith as an adult. When I first started listening to the podcast, I was still a dogmatic believer, but chill enough that it didn't offend my sensibilities to listen to someone who had left the church. I guess I just figured my faith was stronger than his, and I inwardly cheered whenever one of the guests professed faith as well.

Anyway, this mirror parallelism I mention is basically, in the episodes I listened to as a believer, Pete was very much like, "fuck religion, I'm just done with it," and it seemed like most of his guests were atheist or nonreligious. But then, in the episodes I listened to after I became more of a full-scale atheist, Pete seemed to drift back to a more spiritually-minded, "I don't go to church but I do pray," "I don't know if the stories in the gospels are true, but I really like the ideas they convey" kind of guy, and it seemed like more of his guests were either somewhat religious, or the kind of person who calls themselves an agnostic and says it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as a theist (to his credit, Pete usually did a really good job of straightening those people out about how "agnostic" and "atheist" are not mutually exclusive, and how ascribing the label of atheist to yourself does not necessarily indicate a claim to knowledge).

I recognize that this is most likely an effect of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, at least in part, but it still kinda humorously seems as if Pete Holmes (and the show) are going along this path that seems to mirror and reverse my own. I suppose it would be really funny if, after a few years, I slid back into a softer "spiritual, but not religious" stance, and then the episodes I was listening to at that time showed Pete developing into a rabid anti-theist.

So yeah, that's probably a much longer answer than anyone would ever expect to such a simple question.

Is ignoring the Old Testament law cherry-picking?

When people like Sam Harris say that forgetting about the "vile" parts of the Old Testament law is cherry-picking, isn't that a deliberate distortion of Christian theology?

This is a fairly common defense, that the bad parts of the Old Testament law can be "legitimately" thrown out because the New Testament establishes a new covenant. This is undeniably a crucial aspect of Pauline theology, so if you start with the presupposition that the Bible does not ever contradict itself (even if it appears to), then yes, you can say that the New Testament (taken as a whole) does establish that.

But even so, there are parts of the gospels where Jesus emphasizes the importance of keeping the old law. Take the story of the rich young ruler in Luke 18, for example. Anyone who's been to Sunday School will know all about how this guy asked Jesus "what must I do to be saved," and Jesus answered, "sell everything you have and give it to the poor." But what most people seem to overlook is that before Jesus says this, his first response to the question about how to inherit eternal life is simply to keep the commandments. He didn't say (or even hint), "just wait until I rise from the dead and believe in me, and you'll be set." He said to keep the Old Testament laws. Remember, that was in response to a question, not just about how to be a good person, but how to inherit eternal life.

Another example is in Matthew 5, when Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Sure, that sounds more or less like the New Covenant doctrine. But then, immediately after that he says that not one stroke of the old law will disappear until heaven and earth pass away. I've had discussions about this before (quite recently, in fact), and the question for me with this passage always comes down to this; why does the phrase "until heaven and earth pass away" even appear in this verse at all, if his resurrection is the point when he will fulfill the old law and usher in the new covenant?

Matthew 23:2-3 could certainly be seen as an instruction to continue keeping the old laws, but that's a bit more subtle.

I would agree that Paul teaches that the old laws don't need to be kept. But who is the higher authority for you, Paul or Jesus? Heck, Paul even said himself in Romans 7:12, that the Law is holy. See, that's another big problem with this defense against those ugly parts of the Old Testament. New Covenant theology says those laws are not necessary for salvation, but it never says that those laws are evil or wrong. It never disavows them. So to act like this doctrine makes it okay to just completely forget them now is exactly the cherry-picking that Sam Harris said it was.