In this section, Collins poses the questions of whether the near-ubiquity of the search for the existence of a supernatural being represents "a universal but groundless human longing for something outside ourselves to give meaning to a meaningless life and to take away the sting of death" (p.35). The search for meaning in one's life is an important question, but I don't think the search for the divine stops there. We have a curious approach to the world, and we like to understand why things happen. When we don't understand why things happen, we have throughout history tended (sadly, some still do) to invoke gods. Don't know why the sun goes around in the sky? Oh, that's Apollo's chariot. Not sure why there's thunder and lightning? It's due to Ah Peku, Inazuma, Karai-Shin, Lei Kung, Ninurta, Orko, Pajonn, Tien Mu, Thor, Zeus, or several others. Let's get more modern: Not sure where the universe came from, or why it seems so finely-tuned? Yahweh did it.

Back to Collins' point here: God gives meaning to a meaningless life and takes away the sting of death. I will grant that humanity has no ultimate purpose in the universe; in another five billion years, our sun will die and our planet with it. (I use "humanity" loosely here knowing that, since it took about three billion years to go from single-celled organisms to humans, our descendants five billion years hence will most likely look nothing like us.) Furthermore, some physicists theorize the universe itself will die a sort of heat-death; it's not a rosy picture for ultimate purpose. But just because there is no ultimate purpose does not mean life is without meaning. Many atheists find meaning in life. For me, I find meaning in: raising my son, sharing my life with my wife, enjoying time spent with friends, caring for my neighborhood, a chance to play golf, a good scotch. And that list is certainly not exclusive.

I find Collins' statement about removing the sting of death to be puzzling, especially given that it seems religious people are still rather afraid of dying. There are plenty of web sites addressing the Christian fear of death, so it leads me to think that there really isn't much sting taken out by a belief in God. If anything, there is an added fear of going to Hell, even if one thinks one's done the right things to avoid Hell. I think the frank and honest acknowledgement that there is no god, no heaven, and no hell, and that nothing other than death happens when you die is rather liberating. Furthermore, in addition to taking the sting out of death (or at least reducing that sting), this acknowledgement has the added bonus of provoking me to do the best I can in this life, rather than treating this life as a proving grounds for some afterlife.

If you debate theists very often, there will soon come a point where you'll start hearing the same arguments over and over again. And although I do my best to bear in mind Greta Christina's wise words on patience and remember that most proselytizers have never been exposed to an effective atheist critique, some of these claims annoy me more than others. Usually, this is because the logic behind them is so patently flawed, or the fallacies so obvious, that even an evangelist with no formal education in critical thinking ought to be able to spot them.

In this post, I'll list a few of the apologetics used by Christian proselytizers that I find the most irritating, in the doubtless vain hope that it will help put them to bed sooner.

Jesus defied chance by fulfilling the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.

Christian apologists love to tout the many prophecies of the Jewish scriptures and the allegedly staggering odds against anyone fulfilling them by chance. Here's a typically overblown example:

"Someone did the math and figured out that the probability of just eight prophecies being fulfilled [by chance] is one chance in one hundred million billion. That number is millions of times greater than the total number of people who've ever walked the planet!" (Louis Lapides, in Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, p.246)

Discounting these ludicrous numbers and the fanciful assumptions that doubtless went into them, what these apologists always ignore is that this was not a blind comparison; the Old Testament was not a set of sealed scrolls that was cracked open only after the New Testament was written. No, as even the most hardened apologists acknowledge, the New Testament authors were well-versed in the Old Testament and could well have had the scrolls in front of them while writing.

If they noticed that their story did not fit the guidelines of prophecy, there would have been nothing at all to prevent them from revising, embellishing, or outright inventing, as necessary, to make it conform to the predetermined Old Testament prophecies which any plausible messiah candidate would have to have fulfilled. (This need not imply a deliberate effort to deceive. It may be that they believed Jesus was the messiah so strongly, they assumed that he must have fulfilled the prophecies, even if they didn't have direct knowledge of him doing so.) And once we admit this possibility, those supposedly astronomical odds evaporate.

The gospels must be true stories because they contain references to real people and places.

Apologists such as Lee Strobel make hay out of the fact that some people and places mentioned in the gospels, such as Quirinius or the Jewish bath at Bethesda, did exist in history. They're not reluctant to imply that the gospels' accuracy about these historical facts should convince us to trust them about matters that aren't as easy to verify.

But this doesn't prove that the storyline of the gospels actually happened. At best, it means that the gospels were written by authors who knew of those people and places, but what does that prove? As in the last point, there's nothing to prevent an author from writing a work of fiction that's set against the backdrop of real historical events. If the apologist logic was correct, we'd have to conclude that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is an accurate historical documentary, since it, too, depicts real personages (i.e., Adolf Hitler) and places from history.

The New Testament is trustworthy because Jesus' resurrection was vouched for by four hundred witnesses.

This one is particularly irritating because of its willful disregard for the laws of evidence. We do not have four hundred separate, notarized eyewitness accounts of anything in the New Testament. What we have is one verse in the New Testament, by one writer, who says that four hundred people saw the resurrected Jesus.

Clearly, this is a completely different situation. We don't have four hundred separate testimonies that can be checked against each other for consistency, to see if their authors all had the same experience. We don't know who these alleged four hundred witnesses were - neither their names, nor anything else about them by which we could verify their trustworthiness. We don't even know if there actually were four hundred of them, or if Paul might have been fudging the numbers, exaggerating, or honestly miscounting.

If I said, "A thousand people saw me levitate off the ground", that by itself would not establish that I had a thousand witnesses to vouch for my supernatural powers. This kind of evidence is called hearsay, and it's banned from criminal courts for a reason. A witness who can't or won't speak for themself is no witness at all.

Jesus was neither a liar nor a lunatic and therefore must be who he said he was.

This argument, the so-called "Lord/Liar/Lunatic" trilemma usually credited to C.S. Lewis, may be the most absurd of the bunch. It implicitly assumes that the New Testament is historically reliable and that everything in it can be treated as true. Well, if you accept those presuppositions, it hardly matters what Jesus said - the stories of him calming storms, walking on water, healing the sick and raising the dead would be more than sufficient evidence of his divinity.

But if you don't accept that absurdly broad premise, then the trilemma grows another option: lord, liar, lunatic or legend. It's possible that he was a real person, maybe even a would-be religious reformer, but that his words and his deeds became exaggerated over time, or that episodes which would cast doubt on his character have been censored from the historical record. It's also possible that he began as a purely legendary figure who was gradually historicized into a real human being. In any of these cases, the simplistic choices of the trilemma fall apart.

In question #86 of his Reasonable Faith column, William Lane Craig addresses a question from a Christian who's troubled by one of the most wicked doctrines of that theology, the dogma of Hell. Craig's correspondent wonders whether the saved will feel compassion for the damned, but also worries that it would be a violation of free will for God to erase their memories of their lost loved ones.

I would never forget that I had a child and wish to be with them in the afterlife unless God specifically altered my mind... I am just having trouble imagining myself so happy that I just don't think about my child who is burning in eternal damnation.

Craig's response begins:

You object... that God would violate the free will of redeemed persons were He to take such action. I don't see that this implication follows. God's respecting human free will has to do with moral decision-making. God will not cause you to take one morally significant choice rather than another. He leaves it up to you. But obviously God limits our freedom in many morally neutral ways... if God removes from the redeemed knowledge of the damned, including knowledge of loved ones that are damned, He does not violate the moral integrity or free will of the persons involved, any more than if He had removed their knowledge of calculus.

This is just obviously wrong. Stealing people's memories of the suffering of others is a morally neutral limitation on their freedom? By what bizarre reasoning could anyone possibly arrive at that conclusion? Taking away that knowledge stops us from acting in ways that we would otherwise want to, which is the essence of making a moral choice.

It would be as if I had a relative who was dying from cancer, and I went to see a therapist who could hypnotize me into forgetting their existence, so I wouldn't have any desire to visit them in the hospital and comfort them. By Craig's reckoning, this is a "morally neutral" choice. By any rational system of morality, however, this would be an act of supreme callousness and depraved indifference to the suffering of others.

But not to worry, Craig has a fallback answer:

This alternative suggests that the experience of being in Christ's immediate presence will be so overwhelming for the redeemed that they will not think of the damned in hell.

Craig compares this to a wounded soldier having a limb amputated without anesthetic, suffering from pain so intense it drives all other thoughts out of his mind - except, he says, we should substitute happiness for pain to get some idea of what it feels like to be in Heaven. (Great analogy!)

What this comes down to is saying that the saved will be like drug addicts on a permanent high, so wrapped up in their own euphoria that they care nothing for the world outside their own head. Heaven will be like the Land of the Lotus-Eaters from Greek mythology, its inhabitants forever smothered in a blissful haze that leaves them unable to think of or contemplate anything else, for all eternity. Am I the only one who finds this image disturbing rather than appealing?

Craig isn't the first one to suggest this; other Christians have said very similar things. But whenever they try to describe in any detail what people in this state would look or act like, they always wind up painting a picture of Kafkaesque automatons that I call bright machines. Far from being the fullest and most perfect realization of human potential, the imaginary inhabitants of Heaven are less than human. They're lacking in all the emotional depth, all the richness and color that makes our lives real and meaningful.

We do have a glimpse of this vision here on Earth. Certain kinds of brain damage can rob a person of all emotional affect, so that all they ever feel is a constant, all-enveloping bliss - very like Craig's vision of Christians overwhelmed by the beatific vision. But the result isn't an appealing picture:

"He looks like our son and has the same voice as our son, but he is not the same person we knew and loved.... He's not the same person he was before he had this stroke. Our son was a warm, caring, and sensitive person. All that is gone. He now sounds like a robot."

This, then, is the Christian conception of the afterlife - blissed-out robots in Heaven, billions of the damned eternally suffering in Hell. If that's what William Lane Craig and others want to believe, that's their right. But I would hardly call this reassuring or comforting to the worried questioner - much less a "reasonable faith".

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting Reasonable Faith

Anyone who's familiar with Christianity knows that, in the last few decades alone, the Christian church has seen an astounding number of its powerful preachers exposed as blatant hypocrites. The most famous example, of course, is Ted Haggard, former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a fervent opponent of gay marriage, who fell spectacularly from grace after revelations of a three-year sexual relationship with a male prostitute.

But he's not the only one. There's Jim Bakker, a once-powerful televangelist who was found guilty of fraud for running a phony investment scheme, and Jimmy Swaggart, who exposed the sexual indiscretions of several powerful preachers and was later caught patronizing a prostitute himself. The list could further be extended to include Peter Popoff, a faith healer whose "miraculous" knowledge of audience members' illnesses came through a covert radio receiver in his ear; Richard Roberts, who resigned as president of the college founded by his father Oral Roberts after a lawsuit alleging misuse of school funds; Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who was censured by his own church for adultery; the secret anti-Semite Billy Graham; the turbulent and violent life of Francis Schaeffer; recent revelations about Todd Bentley; and many, many more.

The charge of hypocrisy in the church has become so pervasive that even Christian apologist sites feel obligated to address it. In this post, I'll address the common apologist replies and show how they unintentionally illuminate the depth of the problem, as well as discussing what it does and does not prove.

To start off, it's quite true what most apologists say: that the existence of hypocrites within the church does not prove that Christianity's claims about the existence of God are false. There is no logical connection between those two propositions. But all these hypocrites, I think, do undermine a different supernatural claim: the alleged ability of Christian belief to transform people's lives in a uniquely effective and beneficial way.

The apologist site ChristianAnswers.net unintentionally points this out when it insists that many Christians have unequivocally condemned hypocrisy:

Addressing 10,000 itinerant preachers and evangelists in Amsterdam in the summer of 2000, Dr. [Ravi] Zacharias then went on to challenge his listeners with these words: "Why is it that a community that talks so much about supernatural transformation shows so little of that transformation?"

Why indeed? Zacharias' point is a good one, although that probably isn't the message he intended to convey. For a religion that so frequently touts its life-changing powers, it seems Christianity has more than its fair share of frauds who gleefully engage in the private acts that they loudly condemn in public. And this hypocrisy occurs not just in lay believers, but among the very leaders of the church: the ones who were believed to be godly and virtuous by millions of followers, the ones who had by far the most to lose if they were caught. If Christianity can't change the hearts of these people, shouldn't we take that as an indication of how well it will work for the rest of us?

And where would you go anyway? With what faith would you ever align yourself? Certainly there are also hypocritical Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. Even atheists.

No doubt of that. Then again, atheists, unlike Christians, don't claim to have privileged access to the sole font of moral virtue. On the contrary, we believe that every sect will have both good and bad people among its membership. Nor do we claim to enjoy supernatural protection from temptation, as Christians do.

But what's interesting about this excerpt is that it's essentially admitting that Christians are no different from everyone else! This defense of "well, everyone else does it too" is a tacit concession that Christians as a whole display no special virtue that sets them apart from everyone else. If that were the case, this apologist site could argue that, despite occasional hypocrisy, Christians as a whole are still morally superior to other faiths. It's notable that they make no attempt to claim this.

No one can escape the charge of "hypocrite" — no one except Jesus Himself.

And here's the crux of the matter: the claim that human beings may be fallible, but God is not. But what evidence do they offer to support this? There is no God manifesting himself in the world and displaying his moral perfection. (And the Bible and other texts supposedly dictated by this being contain many verses of highly dubious morality.) If Christians could point to a morally perfect deity giving them instructions, that would be one thing. But they can't: they ask us to take his existence on faith. And when they concede that, morally speaking, they are as a whole no better than the rest of us, this does suggest that they have no privileged link to such a being.

In "Unmoved Mover", I wrote about the presuppositional argument used by some modern Christian apologists. In this post, I want to say some more about presuppositionalism.

The presuppositionalists have a point in this sense and in this sense only: a worldview is worth being held only if it is possible to reason consistently from that worldview given its own starting principles. If those principles lead inevitably to their own negation, then that worldview is self-contradictory and must be discarded. This is correct as far as it goes. Where presuppositionalists go wrong is in the assertion that Christianity is the only worldview that possesses or could possess this kind of consistency. This assertion is both fantastically arrogant and unequivocally false.

Here's an example of a worldview that genuinely is inconsistent. The laws of thermodynamics say that, over time, entropy increases to a maximum. The higher-entropy configuration - the more "chaotic" state - is always more likely. Yet our universe as we currently observe it is in a low-entropy state, with plenty of organized pools of energy available to do work.

As we proceed toward the future, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that entropy will increase. But the laws of physics are time-symmetric: they make no distinction between past and future. Therefore, if we look back into the past, it is also far more likely that entropy was higher back then than it is now. Granted, it's unlikely that entropy would spontaneously decrease, from a chaotic past to an orderly present. But if we assume that the past had less entropy than the present, we have an even more unlikely configuration to explain - we're making the problem worse, not better. Applying the laws of thermodynamics in a naive way, then, leads to the conclusion that everything we observe might be a rare, but statistically inevitable, random fluctuation that produces a temporary island of order in the midst of pure chaos.

And the smaller the island of order, the more likely it is that it could arise through random fluctuations in chaos. Thus, compared to the odds of producing an astronomically vast, orderly cosmos, it's much more probable that random fluctuations would produce a single, isolated observer - a disembodied brain, say - floating in the void of chaos and falsely imagining a whole world surrounding it. This is called a Boltzmann brain.

But there's a problem. If we are Boltzmann brains, then nothing we believe about the world can be trusted - including the very observations which led us to suspect we might be Boltzmann brains in the first place. The circle of logical contradiction is closed: observations lead us to infer conclusions which in turn lead us to doubt and disbelieve those observations. The Boltzmann-brain worldview falls apart from its own inconsistency. (This is not to say it's necessarily false - maybe we are Boltzmann brains, there is no way to disprove that - but even if it is true, we could never know it, because the hypothesis itself undercuts all possible basis for believing it.)

The way out of this dilemma is to assume that the evidence is reliable, and that our sensory perceptions and memories of the past reflect a real external world with a real history. This starting point leads to a position which does not contradict itself.

The atheist viewpoint runs along similar lines. Its intrinsic starting point is that the universe is a collection of physical things which exist independently of us, the behavior of which is governed by orderly, immutable principles which we call natural laws. Although the cosmos is complex far exceeding our ability to fully conceptualize it, and although our senses are imperfect and can be misled, we still have the ability to perceive reality with a fair degree of accuracy, to discover its governing principles, and to make inferences about how events will unfold in the future. In other words, we are rational creatures who can learn how the world works.

Contrary to what presuppositionalists claim, this view is consistent. Accepting it as true does not lead to any self-contradiction. (The usual response - that evolution would not produce rational believers - I dealt with in 2006, in "Are Evolved Minds Reliable Truth-Finders?")

Of course, this by itself does not prove that atheism is true. This is a trivial conclusion, since there are infinitely many consistent worldviews, but only one world. A worldview might be entirely consistent with itself and still be false because it does not reflect the way the world actually is. But self-consistency is the starting hurdle that any worldview must clear before we begin examining it to see whether it corresponds to empirical reality. Atheism is one of the consistent worldviews worthy of consideration, and the attempts of religious apologists to rule it out of hand from the beginning - or to make the ridiculous claim that theirs is the only possible consistent worldview - cannot be sustained.

The Point of Inquiry podcast recently aired a very interesting interview between D.J. Grothe and Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project and a devout evangelical Christian. In the interview, Collins discusses the intersection of science and religious faith, whether belief in God is a scientific hypothesis, and the attacks on religion by Richard Dawkins and other prominent atheist scientists.

Dr. Collins is a superlative scientist, and his published work is beyond reproach. Sequencing the human genome is undoubtedly among the greatest scientific achievements of all time, rivaling the original discovery of DNA itself for importance. Not only was this a tremendous leap forward in our own self-understanding, it also promises immense practical benefits that may save countless lives, including the keys to fighting hereditary disease and the prospect of medicine custom-tailored to each individual's genetic makeup.

So, Francis Collins is an intelligent, accomplished scientist: about this there can be no doubt. This makes it all the more surprising that his arguments for the existence of God were so outright terrible. Without exception, his case was shallow, poorly thought out, and in many places plainly fallacious or flatly contradicted by evidence. His arguments against atheism indulged in many typical apologist fallacies, including the blatant use of straw men that bear little or no similarity to the actual positions of real atheists.

I recommend listening to the whole podcast, but to get a sense of what I mean, here are some highlights:

8:45: "[Atheism] assumed that the atheist knows so much as to be able to exclude, within their own band of knowledge, the possibility of something outside of nature, namely God. That seemed to be a pretty arrogant position, a position of some hubris, for anybody to take and certainly not one that you could defend on rational grounds."

Almost right out of the gate, Collins resorts to the time-worn "you'd have to search the whole universe to know there's no god" apologetic. This comment demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of atheism, as well as a fallacious attempt to shift the burden of proof onto disbelievers. Anyone who makes a positive claim has the obligation to support that claim with evidence. If no evidence is provided, then the rest of us are fully justified in disbelieving it, and this holds especially true where evidence is missing when it should be present. We do not need to search the cosmos for proof positive of God's nonexistence; we can merely observe that no one has yet provided evidence remotely compelling enough to support such an extraordinary possibility.

11:08: "A purely naturalistic worldview is impoverished in certain important ways. It basically says some questions are just out of order, like 'What's the meaning of life?' and 'Why are we here?' and 'Is there a god?' If you're going to insist upon a 'fundamentalist' brand of atheism, which is the brand that I think we hear from people like Dawkins and Harris, then basically you are saying those are not questions that are worth asking."

This is a grossly ignorant mischaracterization of atheism. No atheist I've ever known or heard of has ever said that questions about the meaning of life are "out of order". On the contrary, we discuss them routinely and repeatedly emphasize that humanism can give answers to these questions that are at least as satisfying as any answer offered by religion. (Grothe did rightly chide Collins for this obvious falsehood.) Most especially, we do not believe that the question "Is there a god?" is "not worth asking". It should be too obvious to bear saying that the reason we are atheists is precisely because we have asked this question and consider it answered in the negative.

13:30: "I began to read what some of the great minds of the last many centuries have contemplated... some of those thoughts caught me up short, because they raised issues I'd never really seriously considered. Most prominently amongst those thinkers was the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis... He outlines those [reasons] in a little book called Mere Christianity, which I would challenge any atheist to look at seriously and see whether those arguments in that book can be easily refuted. I don't think they can."

I have read and reviewed Mere Christianity, and yes, it can be easily refuted. It is a shallow and ill-considered bit of apologetic fluff. Lewis' main argument is that all human cultures have had essentially the same moral code, which could only be the case if God had installed it in us. He breezily ignores the fact that all cultures throughout history have not had the same moral code, but differed in many drastic ways about the nature of moral behavior. If Collins takes his cue from Lewis, this would go a long way toward explaining his similarly vacuous theology.

18:20: "Why do the atheists insist that we should get over religion and try to be good to each other? Who cares about being good? If they're right, we should all shrug off the whole idea and be just as darn selfish as we possibly can."

Again, Collins drags out the old fallacies. This time it's, "If there is no god, then there's no morality and we should all go on killing sprees." Again, as opposed to his uninformed criticisms, atheists have given great thought and in-depth discussion to this topic, and many nonbelievers have proposed secular foundations for morality.

24:00: "Science essentially has to remain silent on the real, fundamental question of 'Is there a god?' There may be clues from nature that are more consistent with God's existence than not, but it's not really a scientific question."

We can clearly see here how Collins wants to have it both ways. He wants to claim that science offers evidence supporting the existence of God, but whenever there's evidence presented against the evidence of God, he draws back and declares that this is not a scientific question. Which is it, Dr. Collins? Either this is not a scientific question, in which case science can offer no evidence either way and belief in God is purely a matter of faith; or it is a scientific question, in which case it can be answered in the negative as well as in the positive. (I myself believe that the existence of God as conceived of by most religions is most certainly a testable claim, and one that has been tested and found wanting.)

26:45: "By applying the scientific method to religious claims, you're committing, I think, a logical fallacy." [Collins recounts a parable about a scientist who sweeps the ocean with a three-inch-mesh net and goes on to conclude, based on what he found in the net, that nothing lives in the ocean which is smaller than three inches.]

As an analogy for God, this is utterly inappropriate. With this or any other scientific study, one can always point out the limitations of the original study and propose a new one that rules out those sources of error. What Collins is proposing is something completely different: an entity whose existence can never be detected by any empirical investigation.

A better analogy to Collins' view would be if the ocean survey was done, and the scientist's critics accuse him of incompleteness because, they say, there are fish that live in the ocean that are intangible. No matter how fine a net you use, they can pass immaterially through it, so the scientist failed to catch any of them and incorrectly left them out of his catalogue of ocean life. Such a claim would, of course, beg the question of how the claimant could know that these fish exist in the first place.

Collins makes one more final, telling comment that I can't let pass. He says that when he was young and an atheist, he assumed that faith was "something that people arrived at by childhood indoctrination or maybe some emotional experience". He then says that he finally investigated for himself and found that, to his amazement, there was a "compelling and rational case to be made for God" that overwhelmed his skepticism.

Or so he says in this interview. How did he describe his own conversion on a different occasion?

...I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains on a beautiful fall afternoon. I turned the corner and saw in front of me this frozen waterfall, a couple of hundred feet high. Actually, a waterfall that had three parts to it — also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.

Collins' own conversion came about for the exact reason he himself assumed earlier in life: as the result of an emotional experience owing nothing to reason. (P.Z. Myers sarcastically asks, "If the waterfall had two parts, would he have converted to Zoroastrianism?") He assumed that people become believers for irrational reasons and then went on to prove it.

It's amusing how Collins, in describing his own conversion, tries to employ two stock apologist narratives which contradict each other. First he says that he was an atheist when he was younger, and I see no reason to doubt that, but he also says that he had never really thought about or investigated the topic until prior to his conversion. This second admission greatly weakens the first, for if it's true that he had never considered an intellectual defense of atheism, why should atheists who have studied the topic be impressed by his testimony? (When D.J. Grothe, to his credit, presses Collins on the obvious point that his lack of intellectual background in atheism made him "ripe for being plucked up" by proselytizers, he laughs and admits, "Perhaps so.")

The interview mentions that atheism is far more common in the scientific community than religious belief, and if Francis Collins is any sort of representative example, it's not hard to see why. He isn't a creationist, nor does he fall prey to the other forms of scriptural literalism that make most forms of fundamentalism laughable and demonstrably untrue. He's also a highly qualified scientist who should understand how to argue rationally and know how to recognize a fallacy. If anyone could present a respectable case for theism, I would expect that it would be him. But instead, all we get are the same tired old falsehoods about atheism, emotion substituting for evidence, and easily refuted apologetics. There really is nothing more to it than that.

"In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays."

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

In the above excerpt, C.S. Lewis expresses a very common view of time: that it "flows" from future to present to past like a filmstrip passing through a movie projector, with each frame of the film momentarily becoming the present as it is illuminated by the projector's light. Christian apologists such as William Lane Craig use this view of time to argue that the universe must have had a beginning, and hence a creator, because a universe with an infinite past could never have traversed the infinite number of past moments to reach the present moment (the kalam cosmological argument).

This is the most widely held view of time, for obvious reasons. It seems intuitively true, in accord with our experience; we do observe time apparently flowing, with one moment following the next in succession. In the present, we can act and make choices that seemingly affect the future, while the past is frozen and beyond our ability to alter.

This view is also, indisputably, false.

This may seem a strange thing to say. How can time not flow? We feel it flowing, don't we? If time does not flow, then what does it do, and why don't we notice? If time does not flow, how can there be such a thing as cause and effect? How can there be such things as choice or free will?

These are all valid and important questions. Nevertheless, the widespread perception that time flows is - must be - an illusion. Consider the following points.

First: If the "moving light" of the present, in fact, moves, how can this be? Ex hypothesi, that "moving light" is outside time, because its motion is what defines what time is. And yet, how can there be motion without time? The very idea of motion implies a time at which an object is in one place and a different time in which it is in another. If there is no time, there can be no motion. For this light to move at all, there must be some "meta-time" within which it moves. But if that is the case, then does this meta-time dimension have its own moving light determining the present? And so on, in an infinite regression. The kalam argument, invented to avoid the supposed impossibility of an infinite, ends up running right back into that same impossibility.

But in addition to committing its user to an infinite number of temporal dimensions, this view of time has another problem: the moving light is utterly superfluous. We do not need it. To see this, imagine a thought experiment: What would happen if the spotlight of the present suddenly started moving in reverse? Would we notice anything?

As a moment's thought should make clear, the answer is no. If there is a moving light, then time must be divided into some number of discrete slices - like the frames in a filmstrip - each one representing a snapshot of the universe at a single moment. But the people - more accurately, the people-slices - inhabiting each moment only have the memories leading up to that moment, regardless of whether it is "replayed".

Consider three frames in the filmstrip of my life. In moment A, I'm graduating high school; in moment B, I'm starting college; and in moment C, I'm putting up the first post on this blog. If the spotlight of time started moving backward, so that these moments happened in "reverse" order, would I notice? Of course not. The spotlight of the present cannot change the content of these moments; even if it moves backward to reilluminate a particular moment, that moment will reoccur exactly as it did the first time. And in each of those three moments, I only have the memories of the events preceding it. Regardless of which way the spotlight of the present is "actually" moving, the sequence of my memories imposes a consistent order on my experiences, making it seem as if time is flowing in the "right" direction. And this works exactly the same way if there is no such light at all. The spotlight of the present is an unnecessary explanation, conferring no additional ability to explain our seeming perception of time's flow. Thus, by Occam's razor, it should be eliminated.

But all this is not just a matter of armchair philosophy. It is also a matter of empirical evidence. And in this regard, the evidence strongly confirms the arguments I have put forward. Physicists have known for over a century that the commonly held view of time is incorrect.

For example, if there was a spotlight of time, highlighting moments in succession so that each one briefly becomes the "now", this implies that there is one true present in which everyone shares. All observers should agree on what is happening "now". But this is not the way the universe actually works.

Consider a classic example. Imagine a moving train car, with a light source in the exact center. At a predetermined moment, the light source switches on and fires two photons, one toward a detector on the front wall of the car, one toward a detector on the back wall. Which detector will be triggered first?

An observer on the train, moving along with its motion, will observe both detectors trigger simultaneously. After all, the emitter was in the exact center of the car, so the two photons have to travel the same distance to their respective detectors. This is undoubtedly a correct answer.

But an observer on the platform, watching the train pass by, will observe something different. To that observer, the back wall of the train was moving toward the photon, while the front wall was moving away from it. The difference in distance is miniscule, but it exists; so the back detector should trigger first. This, too, seems to be a correct answer.

Which observer is right? As Albert Einstein first demonstrated, the answer is that they both are. Strange as it seems, there is no one absolute answer to this question. Rather, simultaneity is relative: it depends on the perspective of the observer. Observers who are in motion relative to each other will disagree on which events are simultaneous - in other words, they will disagree on what is happening "now" - and there is no way to say that one is right and the other is wrong.

And this is not a unique, contrived case, applying only to this one example. On the contrary, this is the basis of Einstein's theory of special relativity. Observers in relative motion will always disagree on which events are taking place in the present. At ordinary time and distance scales, this effect is so small as to be almost undetectable, but at very high velocities or over astronomical distances, it can become very significant. Physicist Brian Greene, in his book The Fabric of the Cosmos, gives a startling example: an observer 10 billion light-years away from you, who moved in a direction away from you at a mere 10 miles per hour, would have a "now" consisting of events 150 years in your past. And if this observer moved toward you at the same speed, his "now" would consist of events 150 years in your future.

This shows that moments cannot be partitioned into "past", which have already happened and cannot be changed, and "future", which have yet to be decided. These terms do not correspond to any fundamental attribute of reality. In fact, one observer's past may be another observer's future, and vice versa. Even more importantly, there is no single, universal present, no one moment somehow highlighted in a way that differentiates it from all other moments. Quite the contrary, there are only the moments themselves - each one existing eternally, each one unchangeable, and each one just as real as all the rest. We do not experience this because, as already explained, the causal order of our memories produces an illusion - a convincing illusion, but an illusion nevertheless - of time's mutability and flow.

This realization demolishes the kalam argument. The supposed impossibility of traversing an infinite number of past moments to reach the present simply evaporates, because nothing is traversing anything - there is no spotlight moving in sequence from one moment to the next. The term "now", rather than some special metaphysical significance, becomes, like "here", a term of purely indexical significance. "Here" is wherever I am when I invoke that word; similarly, "now" is whenever I am when I invoke that word. You do not need to traverse anything to reach "here", and nor do you need to traverse anything to reach "now".

The last important question is what place there is for free will in such a scheme. The apparent fixity of the future would seem to deny the possibility of choice, but this ceases to be a problem when we realize that free will does not require the ability to have done otherwise. We choose in accordance with our natures, and our natures are shaped in turn by those choices, regardless of whether that process takes place in a single, special "now" or in one of an eternal succession of moments.

Though the commonly held view of time is wrong, this does not deprive us of anything important. We should always bear in mind that unaided human perceptions are not necessarily, and in fact not usually, a reliable guide to the true nature of ultimate reality. But using science and reason, we can surpass our limitations and arrive at a more fundamental understanding of the orderly laws by which the cosmos operates.

Recently, Greta Christina of Greta Christina's Blog invited me to comment on a post of hers in which a theist mentioned my article "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists". This person claimed that the fulfillment of prophecies in the Bible should be sufficient reason for atheists to believe in Christianity. That comment can be viewed here.

Below is the text of my reply:

Hi all,

Greta Christina invited me here, since Mr. Cawley was commenting on an article of mine. I'd like to address some of his claims about the alleged accuracy of biblical prophecy.

Let me be clear about one thing at the outset: some of the nations and cities whom the biblical authors claimed would be destroyed, were indeed destroyed. This, however, is hardly stunning proof of the foresight of the Bible's authors. Most cities and nations of antiquity have fallen, and most of the ones that are around today will probably fall eventually, also, if only you're willing to wait long enough.

This is especially true given that Mr. Cawley seems to allot infinite time for any of the Bible's prophecies to come true. Notice, for example, how he claims that the destruction of Ashkelon - in 1270 AD, for truth's sake - was a fulfillment of Zephaniah's prophecy of doom nearly two thousand years earlier. This is the stunning foresight that should so impress us all? If I predict that a great flood will strike Egypt, and then a thousand years later such a thing does happen, does that make me a miraculously gifted prophet? Hardly: it just means that if you predict a fairly likely event and are willing to wait forever, sooner or later your prediction will be fulfilled.

To prove that your prophetic powers are up to snuff, it's not enough to predict a likely event and then wait for eternity. Rather, as I said in my article, such prophecies should come with specific, falsifiable details about time, place and circumstance. In this case, Mr. Cawley has definitely fallen off the horse. Most of his alleged "fulfillments" are derived only by removing relevant context - stripping out specific details which show that the Bible's prophecies actually did not come true as written. I'm not going to address his every example, but as a sample of the kind of misrepresentation he repeatedly engages in, let's consider this point about Egypt:

Of Egypt as a whole, Ezekiel said in Ezekiel 29:15, "It shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations: for I will diminish them, that they shall no more rule over the nations." Egypt continued as a great and powerful nation for many centuries after the prophecy was written, but finally Egypt became a backward, impoverished, weak nation and has remained so ever since.

Mr. Cawley, you are blatantly guilty of out-of-context quotation. But that's not surprising, considering the full details of the prophecy show that, rather than a success, this was a conspicuous failure. Here's the full text of what Ezekiel said would happen to Egypt:

"Behold, therefore I am against thee, and against thy rivers, and I will make the land of Egypt utterly waste and desolate, from the tower of Syene even unto the border of Ethiopia. No foot of man shall pass through it, nor foot of beast shall pass through it, neither shall it be inhabited forty years. And I will make the land of Egypt desolate in the midst of the countries that are desolate, and her cities among the cities that are laid waste shall be desolate forty years: and I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, and will disperse them through the countries. Yet thus saith the Lord God; At the end of forty years will I gather the Egyptians from the people whither they were scattered. And I will bring again the captivity of Egypt, and will cause them to return into the land of Pathros, into the land of their habitation; and they shall be there a base kingdom. It shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself any more above the nations: for I will diminish them, that they shall no more rule over the nations."

—Ezekiel 29:9-15

I think even Mr. Cawley can agree that this never happened. Egypt has never been desolate, much less for forty years at a time, and the Egyptian people were neither scattered nor later regathered. That entire string of predictions failed to come true. It's only the coda at the end, about Egypt losing its superpower status, that Mr. Cawley seizes on and elevates to prophetic status - and, again, history shows that most empires and superpowers decline in status given sufficient time, so this is hardly proof of divine foreknowledge.

For one more example, let's consider Mr. Cawley's claims about Tyre. Again, he's guilty of removing relevant context to disguise prophetic failures. Ezekiel didn't just predict that Tyre would be destroyed; he predicted it would be destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon:

"For thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north, with horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen, and companies, and much people. He shall slay with the sword thy daughters in the field: and he shall make a fort against thee, and cast a mount against thee, and lift up the buckler against thee. And he shall set engines of war against thy walls, and with his axes he shall break down thy towers. By reason of the abundance of his horses their dust shall cover thee: thy walls shall shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots, when he shall enter into thy gates, as men enter into a city wherein is made a breach."

—Ezekiel 26:7-10

Again, this is a false prophecy. Nebuchadnezzar did indeed besiege Tyre for many years - but, as any history book will tell you, he failed to conquer it. (Tyre is a city on an island just offshore, with suburbs on the mainlands. Nebuchadnezzar conquered those, but failed to break into the island city.) Alexander the Great did conquer it later, but he was not the object of Ezekiel's prophecy.

But now comes the real howler:

God also said in Ezekiel 26:14, "And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the Lord have spoken it, saith the Lord God." The site of ancient Tyre is quite suitable for habitation, but the prophecy has stood fulfilled now for over 2, 000 years, and Tyre has never been rebuilt.

This is completely wrong. Tyre exists to this day, and plenty of people still live there. Here's some modern satellite imagery of this supposedly non-existent, never-rebuilt city:

http://www.earthspots.com/ExploreEarthSpot.php?NID=1211&MT=1

When Biblical apologists resort to denying the existence of entire cities in an attempt to mangle history sufficiently to make their prophecies appear to come true, you know there's nothing more that needs to be said.

What is Christianity good for?

I ask this question in all seriousness, not as an insult. I genuinely want to know. Eternal life in Heaven is usually held out as the greatest benefit of becoming a Christian, but that reward is said to be in the next life and is impossible for us to verify. Does Christianity have any benefits in this life, any evidence that can be offered now as partial substantiation of its grander promises later on?

I'm not looking for personal testimonies about how conversion to Christianity has changed the testifier's life. Such stories may be deeply felt and sincerely believed, but they are also anecdotal, and like all anecdotal evidence, they have a substantial problem of confirmation bias. People who convert to Christianity and experience positive change will naturally credit this change to their conversion and want to tell everyone in sight. However, people who convert to Christianity and experience no change, or change for the worse, will be far less likely to speak up. There's no guarantee that the people who do speak out are a representative sample. What I'm looking for is sound statistical evidence that Christian belief leads to positive results at a rate greater than chance and ideally at a rate greater than that of other religions.

So far, the evidence has come up negative in several categories:

• Faith healing: Double-blind, peer-reviewed studies have routinely found that intercessory prayer has no beneficial effect on hospital patients' length of recovery, mortality rate, frequency of complications, or other clinical variables. People who are being prayed for do no better than people who are not being prayed for, and in some cases (when they know prayers are being offered on their behalf), actually do worse.
• Sex education: Abstinence-only public school sex education programs supported and taught by evangelical Christians have turned out to be a dismal failure. Surveys have repeatedly found that these programs have no effect whatsoever on the likelihood of teenagers to engage in premarital sex, to get STDs, or to become pregnant (see also). (This should be little surprise, since not teaching teenagers sex ed doesn't mean they won't hear about sex; it just means they won't hear accurate information about sex.) Christian-backed "virginity pledges" fail more often than contraception; more than half of the teenagers who take them have sex within a year (more information).
• Prisoner reform: Evangelist Charles Colson's "InnerChange Freedom Initiative", a fundamentalist Christian program aimed at reforming prisoners through religious education, claimed that its graduates had substantially lower recidivism rates than a matched control group. In fact, as statisticians like Mark Kleiman have found, InnerChange's actual numbers show that their participants as a whole had slightly higher rates of rearrest and reimprisonment than inmates in the control group. Their claim to the contrary was derived by only counting those inmates who successfully completed the program and went on to get jobs after being released, while ignoring those who did less well - in other words, the basic statistical fallacy of counting the hits and forgetting the misses.

If Christianity is not good for these things, what is it good for? I'm open to evidence if any person has any to present. But in the meantime, I have a hypothesis of my own.

In 2005, the sociologist Gregory S. Paul published a much-cited study showing that quantifiable measures of societal health tend to correlate inversely with religiosity. In other words, the worse off a society's people are, the more likely they are to be religious. The most striking example is the United States, long an aberration among industrialized countries for its unusually high levels of religious fundamentalism, and also a standout for its comparatively high levels of social ills such as homicide, juvenile mortality, teen pregnancy and STD infection.

Together with Phil Zuckerman, Paul has now published a new essay in Edge magazine, "Why the Gods Are Not Winning", which documents the dwindling of Christianity throughout much of the First World (again, America being the exception), as compared to an explosive and historically unprecedented growth of atheism and agnosticism. I highly recommend the entire article - some of the quotes from it are real beauties:

Far from providing unambiguous evidence of the rise of faith, the devout compliers of the [World Christian Encyclopedia] document what they characterize as the spectacular ballooning of secularism by a few hundred-fold! It has no historical match. It dwarfs the widely heralded Mormon climb to 12 million during the same time, even the growth within Protestantism of Pentecostals from nearly nothing to half a billion does not equal it.

...What has changed is how people view the Bible. In the 1970s nearly four in ten took the testaments literally, just a little over one in ten thought it was a mixture of history, fables, and legends, a three to one ratio in favor of the Biblical view. Since then a persistent trend has seen literalism decline to between a quarter and a third of the population, and skeptics have doubled to nearly one in five. If the trend continues the fableists will equal and then surpass the literalists in a couple of decades.

(Note: Decades, not centuries!)

Even the megachurch phenomenon is illusory. A spiritual cross of sports stadiums with theme parks, hi-tech churches are a desperate effort to pull in and satisfy a mass-media jaded audience for whom the old sit in the pews and listen to the standard sermon and sing some old time hymns does not cut it anymore. Rather than boosting church membership, megachurches are merely consolidating it.

(Paul and Zuckerman's comments here echo my post of last fall, "Receding Waters". As intimidating as the megachurches seem, they cannot mask the clear trend that American religiosity, and especially American Christianity, is declining rather than gaining.)

...America's disbelievers atheists now number 30 million, most well educated and higher income, and they far outnumber American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. There are many more disbelievers than Southern Baptists, and the god skeptics are getting more recruits than the evangelicals.

The thesis of Paul and Zuckerman's article, which strikes me as entirely reasonable, is that people cling to faith for reassurance in environments of poverty, stress and uncertainty. (This does not exclude the possibility that faith can also perpetuate some of the ills its adherents seek to escape from.) Conversely, as nations become more prosperous and life becomes more comfortable and secure, the need for religion as a supernatural security blanket decreases. This, above all else, seems to be what religion and Christianity specifically are good for - as a source of reassurance in troubled times. But this does not mean they are the only or the best source, and happily, this suggests that two atheist goals are entirely aligned: as we work to improve people's lives in real and measurable ways, the grasping after religion as a method of coping will inevitably decline.

"Now the names of the twelve apostles are these; The first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip, and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the publican; James the son of Alphaeus, and Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus; Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him."

—Matthew 10:2-4 (see also Mark 3:14-19)

Lately I've been thinking about the twelve apostles of Christianity. According to Mark and Matthew, their names are as given above, although puzzlingly, the parallel list in Luke 6 omits Lebbaeus Thaddaeus and replaces him with James' brother Judas, or Jude (apologetic tradition claims that the two are the same person). After Judas Iscariot's death, Acts 1 informs us that Matthias was chosen to replace him.

An oft-heard Christian apologetic asks, "why would the apostles die for a lie?" Save for John, tradition holds, all of the original apostles eventually died martyr's deaths - yet if the resurrection of Jesus was an invented story, they must have known that, and why would anyone go willingly to their death for a claim they knew to be untrue?

I'll get into this claim in a moment, but first, an observation. One of the things I think any Christian should find strange is how little space the Bible gives to the twelve apostles. A few prominent ones such as Peter and John get more attention, but most of them vanish completely out of history after being named, with readers never being told anything else about them or anything they did. It is remarkable how unimportant most of the apostles seem to be in the Bible.

Of all the apostles, the Bible records the death of only two: Judas Iscariot, who either hanged himself or fell and burst open (depending on which contradictory gospel account one believes), and James, son of Zebedee and brother of John, whom Herod killed "with the sword" (Acts 12:2). The Bible has Jesus imply, in John 21:18-19, that Simon Peter will die by crucifixion, but such an event is not recorded in the text.

The question is, how did the other apostles die? More importantly, how does anyone know? Where textual evidence is lacking, tradition has obliged, and a wide variety of local legends sprang up in medieval times about the apostles' journeys and eventual deaths. But most of these traditions are late, invented hundreds of years after the fact, and lack any basis in earlier evidence. They are simply stories, tall tales. Such popular myths provide no support whatsoever for modern Christian claims that the apostles were willingly martyred.

Below is a brief survey of what history has to say about the apostles, and what sources our traditions draw from:

Judas Iscariot: According to the Bible, either committed suicide by hanging (Matthew 27:5) or fell down and exploded (Acts 1:18). Not considered a martyr.

John: Not said to have been martyred. Reportedly died of old age.

James, son of Zebedee: Killed by Herod (Acts 12:2). The Bible gives no further information about his death, including whether it was willing. The fourth-century church historian Eusebius quoted an earlier, lost work by Clement of Alexandria which allegedly claims that James' calm demeanor at trial sufficiently impressed one of his accusers to convert him (source).

Simon Peter: Crucifixion, as implied by Jesus in John 21:18-19. Tradition usually holds that this occurred in Rome, as mentioned by second-century sources such as Tertullian and the apocryphal Acts of Peter. The Acts of Peter also claims that Peter accepted crucifixion willingly, making him one of the few apostles for which the claim of willing martyrdom is at all plausible. Eusebius dismissed this book as spurious and heretical (source).

Andrew: Reportedly martyred by crucifixion on an X-shaped cross ("St. Andrew's cross"). According to legend, he taught a gathered crowd while on the cross and refused their offer to take him down. This information comes from the apocryphal, probably second-century Acts of Andrew. Eusebius dismissed this book as spurious and heretical (source).

Philip: According to the apocryphal and probably fourth-century Acts of Philip, died after being hung upside-down with iron hooks through his ankles by the proconsul of Hierapolis. According to this book, before dying Philip cursed his enemies, causing seven thousand people to be suddenly swallowed up by an abyss. In return, Jesus appeared and rebuked Philip for "returning evil for evil", and told him that he would be admitted to Heaven, but only after being tortured outside its gates for forty days as punishment. Like Andrew, Philip allegedly refused a crowd's offer of rescue. The New Advent Catholic encyclopedia calls this work "purely legendary and a tissue of fables" (source).

Bartholomew: According to the third-century schismatic bishop Hippolytus, he was crucified in Armenia (source). A different tradition claims he was beheaded in India on the orders of King Astreges, who belonged to a demon-worshipping cult (source). Some traditions add that he was flayed alive before, or instead of, suffering either of these two fates. The New Advent encyclopedia says the manner of his death is "uncertain" (source), and adds that other than his name, "Nothing further is known of him".

Thomas: Tradition holds that he was sent to India to preach, where he was killed by being stabbed with a spear. This claim is made by local Indian Christians and an apocryphal gospel called the Acts of Thomas, which Eusebius dismissed as spurious and heretical (source). The New Advent encyclopedia says that "Little is recorded" of Thomas' life, and that "it is difficult to discover any adequate support" for the tradition of his death in India. It also notes that the Acts of Thomas presents Thomas as the twin brother of Jesus, which is not accepted by Christians today or in the past and seems to be a Christian/Gnostic-themed variation of a pagan salvation cult that followed twin gods called the Dioscuri.

Matthew: Conflicting traditions. Catholic.org says, "Nothing definite is known about his later life", and it is even "uncertain whether he died a natural death or received the crown of martyrdom". The Christian History Institute says, "We have nothing but legend about Matthew's death." Even among those who do believe he was martyred, there is no evidence as to where. Another source says there is conflicting information about whether he was martyred in Egypt or in Persia. The manner of his death is unknown, and some churches even say he died a natural death (source).

James, son of Alphaeus: Conflicting traditions. There are several people named "James" in the New Testament and early Christian history, and it is uncertain which, if any, should be identified with this apostle. He is often identified with the "James the Less" mentioned in Mark 15:40 as the son of Mary and Clopas, which is fairly uncontroversial. However, the Catholic church also identifies him with James, the brother of Jesus, which is not widely accepted by Eastern Orthodox and Protestant churches. If this identification is correct, the Jewish historian Josephus says that James was stoned by the Pharisees. This is seconded by Hippolytus. However, other sources (example) say that James son of Alphaeus was martyred by crucifixion in Egypt.

Jude/Lebbaeus Thaddaeus: Conflicting traditions. It is often said that he went with Simon to preach in Armenia, though New Advent says this legend is a late development not mentioned by contemporary historians of that region. The Catholic Patron Saints Index says he was clubbed to death; however, the apocryphal Acts of Thaddeus says he died naturally. Still another account says he was crucified (source). No reliable written sources seem to exist to corroborate any of this.

Simon the Zealot: Conflicting traditions. According to Catholic.org, Western traditions hold that he was martyred in Persia with Jude, usually by crucifixion, while Eastern tradition says he died naturally in Edessa. Other sources, according to New Advent, variously give his place of death as Samaria (Israel), or Iberia (Spain), or Colchis (Georgia), or even Britain. Some sources dispute the crucifixion account and claim he was instead sawn in half.

Matthias: According to the 14th-century historian Nicephorus, died by crucifixion in Colchis, in the modern nation of Georgia. Alternatively, the 17th-century historian Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont says that he was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem. According to the New Advent Catholic encyclopedia, "all... information concerning the life and death of Matthias is vague and contradictory" (source). Many apocryphal sources confuse Matthias and Matthew.

As we can see, information regarding the life and death of the apostles is extremely dubious and fragmentary. This fatally undermines the Christian claim that the apostles were martyred for their faith; there is simply no good evidence that would support such a claim. The gaping void in the historical record when it comes to these twelve men is certainly strange and unexpected under the assumptions of orthodoxy - how could the original twelve Christians, handpicked by Jesus himself, vanish so completely out of history so quickly? However, it does support the mythicist theory that early Christianity arose from a tissue of legends, not from the exploits of actual historical figures. Jesus, the central figure of this myth, became better fleshed out over time, but this process never proceeded so far as to be applied to the apostles.

There is another important point here: for the modern apologists' claims to be proven, we must have evidence not only that the apostles died as martyrs, but that they died in a situation where recanting would have saved them. This requires specific and strong evidence, but then again, it is a very specific claim.

There is no biblical evidence that, for example, James could have saved himself by recanting Christianity. Herod might have been determined to kill him no matter what he said. The same goes for Peter's eventual presumed crucifixion. And these are the best attested of all the apostles' deaths (though that is a relative term). For the majority of the apostles, we have no good evidence even of how they died, much less that they could have saved themselves by recanting. Most of the sources we do have are late, contradictory, and dismissed as unfounded even by early Christian historians. The next time a Christian challenges you to explain why the apostles would have died for a lie, I suggest this response: "How do you know how the apostles died?" Judging by the cases I have seen, they will be unable to come up with an answer.