Is Evolution Satanic?

One of the basic arguments made by creationists is that evolution is a Satanic viewpoint, created by the Devil to deceive people into abandoning Jesus. Organized science, therefore, is nothing more than an atheistic, anti-Christian cult who -- through evil intent or naïve ignorance -- are dedicated to doing the work of Satan by spreading “evolutionism” and destroying decent Christian values.


The creationists are actually quite open about this belief, and will freely assert that evolutionary theory -- even so-called “theistic evolution” in which God is the planner and driving force behind the evolution of the various species -- is the work of Satan.


To quote the Reverend Doctor Henry Morris, “Behind both groups of evolutionists one can discern the malignant influence of ‘that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world’.”


These same people assert that the reason why the modern scientific community spreads the teaching of evolution is not because it has literal mountains of evidence behind it, or because its the best explanation of how species arrive, but rather because they -- the scientists that is -- are atheistic agents of Satan. John Morris, a “creation scientist” at the Institute for Creation Research -- a religious organization that doesn’t actually do much research to be honest -- flatly states that “most scientists reject God.” Creationist Jerry Bergman writes that, “The atheist belief structure is the norm for science. The fact is that the majority of leading evolutionists are atheists, or at best non-theists for whom God is irrelevant.” Henry Morris asserts, “Modern evolutionary astronomers and cosmologists have ruled out the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient God as creator of the universe” and concludes that evolutionary theory can only be accepted “if one categorically dismisses the existence of an eternal God.” Creationists have referred to science fiction giant -- and great scientific mind -- Isaac Asimov as “the atheist Asimov”, and repeatedly assert that astronomer Carl Sagan was “blind to the abundant evidence of God.”


In the mind of a creationist, every area of modern society is permeated with this Satanic conspiracy. Every area. Take, for example, Henry Morris’s opinion regarding Hollywood:

“That old Dragon called Satan had invaded Paradise and God had cast him out into the earth, where he continues to this day leading men and women to rebel against God and His word. ‘Paradise’ is translated directly from the Greek, which in turn was taken from the Hebrew word ‘pardec’, meaning park. Thus, it is no coincidence that Hollywood’s leading atheist producer, Steven Spielberg, chose to fill his “Jurassic Park” with a bestiary of revived dinosaurs. Once again, the serpent is loose in Paradise.”

Apparently, the existence and success of “Jurassic Park” is proof positive that Steven Spielberg is just another part of the International Satanic Evolutionary Conspiracy. Last I heard, Steven Spielberg is a practicing Jew who actually believed in God in addition to believing in evolution. Funny how that works.


The creationist notion that they are the victims of some vast Satanic conspiracy simply cannot be taken seriously. These people attempt to paint their viewpoint as the only Christian viewpoint, implying both that their theological interpretations are representative of Christianity as a whole, and that their interpretations are the only rational view on the subject, while all other viewpoints are the work of Satan.


Neither of these assertions are true.


The fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis followed by the majority of creationists are, in fact, a tiny minority within Christianity as a whole. Every mainstream Christian denomination flatly dismiss the idea that evolution is the work of the Devil. This was amply demonstrated during the Arkansas “Balanced Treatment” trial. All but two of the plaintiffs were representatives of mainstream religious organizations and churches, including the American Jewish Congress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Bishops of the Unite Methodist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and African Methodist Episcopal churches, the head of the Arkansas Prebyterian Church, and individual clergy from the Southern Baptist church. One of the witnesses who testified against “creation science” was a Catholic priest who held a PhD in genetics as well as theology.


How do creationsts respond to the fact that nearly every mainstream religious organization in the United States rejects their theological viewpoint concerning evolution? By claiming that these religious organizations are themselves just another part of the Satanic conspiracy.


Can you think of anything more ridiculous than the idea that the various scientists -- in league with non-fundamentalist religious denominations and film director Steven Spielberg -- are engaged in a vast conspiracy to silence “the truth” that the Devil is actually behind evolution?


The very idea is the product of paranoid insanity. I’m serious. If this is what you really think, you are utterly insane.

Let's Take a Look at Noah's Flood

According to the Book of Genesis, the global flood took place when Noah was 600 years old. Now, if you assume, as the Christians do, that the world was created in 4004 BCE, this would place the flood at about 2400 BCE, give or take a decade or two. In other words, right about the same time that the pyramids were being constructed on the plains of Giza. In other places around the world, the dynastic civil war was settling just which one of four brothers would be king of the Akkadians in Mesopotamia, the first Great Kingdom was forming up to rule what would later be known as Korea, and the city of Lothal was being founded in India.

Lots of things happening, in other words. And in -- well, in wherever the Noah story was supposed to be taking place, the entire world got covered with water as it rained for forty days and forty nights.

I’ve always found it hilarious that the Christians claim the entire world was drowned under water, but the Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Chinese, Koreans, Olmecs, Celts and so on were all going about their business without noticing that they were supposed to be drowning under mountains and mountains of rainwater. You’d think they could hardly have missed such a thing, but apparently, they did.

Historical records from all those other civilizations show that at no time were their civilizations suddenly wiped off the face of the map by a global flood, or a slow repopulation afterward. Nowhere in the world is there any evidence of such an event. Not archeological evidence, not geological evidence, not historical evidence. Nothing indicates that a flood wiped out the world and drowned all the people on it except one eight-person family.

But “no evidence it ever happened” is only one of the multitudinous reasons to not think the flood of Noah, as described in the Book of Genesis, is actually true. Take, for instance, the problem of the boat itself. The Bible describes Noah’s Ark as being “300 cubits by 50 cubits by 40 cubits,” which translates to approximately 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet tall. Were this for real, the ark was four times as large as the largest wooden ship built by any civilization in the history of the world, and certainly out-sizes any other ship built by any other ancient civilization that existed during the second millennium BCE.

The stresses navigating the open ocean place on large wooden ships were severe, and the larger the ship, the greater the stresses. There is a reason why the ships built by Bronze Age civilizations were much smaller than those built by post-Dark Age civilizations. To be blunt, the technical advances later civilizations developed to enable a large wooden ship to survive ocean travel just did not exist in the Bronze Age.

In point of fact, no ship the size and weight that we are discussing was known to have been built and successfully sailed until the year 1900 CE. These ships, built as I note in 1900, were nine-masted schooners some 300-feet long (150 feet shorter than the ark). They were so long they visibly undulated with waves and required large diagonal braces made of steel -- a substance unheard of in 2400 BCE, a time when bronze was the new big thing when it came to metal -- to keep it from breaking in half. And even with these reinforcements, the stress regularly caused gaps in the ship’s hull; these schooners would leak like sieves and required constant bailing with automated pumps that ran -- quite literally -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And even with all this, these overs-sized schooners were never taken out of sight of land, because if taken out onto the open sea they’d be battered to pieces by oceanic waves. They were used for coastal traffic only.

The fact that these large transport ships had so many problems was one reason why the world’s navies turned to steel ships during the last years of the 19th Century and the years prior to World War I. And this was only 116 years ago, as I write this on January 17, 2016, folks.

Think about it. We’re supposed to believe that a ship 4000 years ahead of its time was built by Noah -- a man who was not a nautical engineer but a shepherd and farmer -- and survived the open seas during a catastrophic, raging flood. We’re supposed to believe that this 600-year old farmer solved engineering problems, all by himself and without the use of modern metallurgy, construction techniques, or physics knowledge, that every navy in the world could not manage to beat 4000 years later. And then, after the flood, the knowledge of how to build these super-ships was apparently forgotten because no other ship of this type would be built, ever.

So that’s the lack of evidence and the implausibility of the ship itself. Let’s consider the live cargo of the ark for just a moment. If we accept the most generous version of the Noah story, Noah was commanded by God to carry seven of every “clean” animal and two of every “unclean” animal on the ark along with himself and his family. But there was only so much space within the hull of the boat, and if you look at the list of known animal species, even restricting it to just two -- much less seven -- means that the boat would be carrying an awful lot of animals. (And it just gets worse if -- as logic dictates we do -- we include not just the animals that exist today but every species of animal known to have gone extinct between 2400 BCE and present day.) Its obvious that even in a boat with some 1,518,750 cubic feet of space (450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet tall, remember) the ark would simply not have enough space for all the animals.

Some creationists have gotten around this by arguing that Noah didn’t take two (or seven) of every species, but rather seven (or two) of every “kind.” And, they argue, after the flood the “kinds” would then vary and produce all the new species we see today.

I’m not kidding. That’s what they say. Let me quote from The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb: “For all practical purposes, one could say that, at the outside, there was need for no more than 35,000 individual vertebrate animals on the ark. The total number of so-called species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians listed in Mayr is 17,600, but undoubtably the number of original kinds was less than this.” (The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, p.69)

Thus, according to creationists, Noah didn’t have to make room for a pair of lions, a pair of tigers, a pair of leopards -- and so on -- on his boat. All he needed was one pair of a “cat kind” and things would be fine. (For now, we’ll ignore all the problems regarding the subject of “kinds.” I’ve got an entire other essay in the works on that subject.)

There are multiple problems with the creationist view. For example, its often assumed that aquatic animals like otters and seals and dolphins -- being aquatic -- wouldn’t be endangered by the flood since, you know, aquatic! Thus, they wouldn't need space on the ark. Unfortunately, if enough fresh water were to fall on the earth to cover it past the top of the tallest mountains, the salt-content of the oceans would be so diluted that no marine organism, be it fish, plant, mammal, or bird, would be able to live in it. Very few salt water animals can survive fresh water. Such creatures swell up, suffer tissue damage, and die when forced to abide in fresh water for two long.

“No problem,” say creationists. “The fountains of the deep must have sprewed sufficient salt to keep the salinity high enough for marine animals to survive.”

That just reverses the problem, though. Fresh water animals that have to abide in salt water dehydrate and die as the fresh water is leeched from their tissues by the salinity differential. Some creationists have tried to have it both ways by arguing that there were pockets of fresh water and pockets of salt water that were somehow kept from intermixing. How this took place while the churning flood waters were utterly destroying the surface of the earth is something creationists never explain. Whitcomb and Morris speculated that, “All fish must be adaptable to at least a certain range of salinities”, but don’t actually provide any evidence that this is so, or even give examples of what sort of fish qualify.

In any case, anyone with a home aquarium and no qualms about slaughtering your fish can disprove this nonsense. Just add a cupful of salt to your freshwater tank -- or a cupful of fresh water to your saltwater tank, whichever you have -- every morning in order to raise and lower the salinity. Then see what this does to your fish.

Anyway, back to the problem of space on the ark. Not only isn’t there enough room for the animals, there’s also the problem of food for each of these beasts and for Noah’s family. Large herbivores -- elephants, for example -- eat about 350 pounds of vegetable matter a day. Large carnivores -- tigers, for example -- eat about 75 pounds of meat per day. In addition to storage space, the food has to be kept fresh and edible for over a year -- and remember, modern refrigeration technology is the product of the late 19th Century. Naturally creationists have no explanation for these problems.

They also can’t explain what the animals ate after the flood. According to the creationists, there were two “cat kind” animals, two “antelope kinds”, and so on. Presumably, the cats got really, really hungry while on the boat, to the point that its entirely conceivable that the first thing they did when they got off the damned thing was immediately pounce on the antelopes and chow down. Thus, antelope kind would have ended in 2400 BCE, and we wouldn’t have gazelles, sprinkboks, oryxes, and so on today.

Now, its possible that the cats didn’t eat the antelopes, but rather ate the antelopes offspring. Okay, that’s a good thought. That would have taken care of the cats for about a week. Then what? Unless we were to assume that antelopes had a baby a week for a year, we have to assume that the cats -- and for the purposes of this argument, we’ll ignore the wolves, the wolverines, and the other predators -- either ate all the antelopes within the first day or else starved to death. And the same goes for the snake kind, the frog kind, the anteater kind, the owl kind, and so on. Obviously, creationists know little to nothing about the relationship between predators and prey.

Since they cannot admit the entire story of the flood is implausible, they have to try and present some explanation. And they do. They present the same old explanation they use for everything.

“God did it.”

Let's Talk About Christian Apologetics

Okay, let's start out with a quick explanation of just what Christian Apologetics is.  In a nutshell, Christian Apologetics is when someone defends the Christian religion by coming up with explanations for problems with Christian belief and Christian doctrine that rational thought and skeptical analysis bring up when such thought and analysis are leveled at Christianity.  The word "apologetics" has its roots in the Greek word apologia, meaning "a speech made in defense."  In Ancient Greece, it referred to a defense made during a trial.  After the accusation, the defendant was allowed to refute the charges against him with a reply to the accusation.  Up until the 1700s, the word "apologetics" was used to indicate any sort of intellectual defense made against accusations.  Right around the middle of the 18th Century, however, the word started to be applied only to the defense of religious doctrine and belief, and it is that narrower definition that continues to be used to this day.  Christian Apologetics is specifically the defense of Christianity.

So in a nutshell, that's Christian Apologetics.

The one thing to always keep in mind when discussing Christian Apologetics is that its basically made up nonsense.  The apologist relies on logical fallacy and semantic games to make his point, and counts on the general ignorance of science and the need of most unthinking Christians to have an easy answer to the "blasphemous" accusations made by the skeptical about their religion.  Supposedly, Christian Apologetics is based on "evidence," but the truth is that most of the so-called evidence is nothing more than personal opinion on the part of whatever "scholar" produced it in the first place.  (And producing this supposed "evidence" is a multi-billion dollar a year industry).

Two favorites of the apologist are Lee Strobel and his book The Case For Christ, and Josh McDowell and his book Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  It should be noted that both of these men are ministers.  Neither pretends to any scientific impartiality, objectivism, or unbiased opinions.  Oh sure, both make claims to objectivity, and claim to be looking at Christianity from the viewpoint of scholarly truth, but in practice they are as biased in favor of their own religion as any other believer, and are willing to make the most befuddling leaps of faith (pun intended) to support that religion as they find necessary.  The truth is, both men are snake oil salesmen selling a con game to the gullible.

But then, conning the gullible is the basic essence of religion.

Christian Apologists have nothing to support their personal opinions other than more personal opinion.  They have no access to documents written by Jesus (because no such documents exist), no museums full of Jesus artifacts (because no such artifacts exist), no supporting documents by other writers (because none such documents exist).  In short, they have nothing to support their words but logical fallacy, supposition, guesswork, and -- to put it bluntly -- their own ability to convince people that what they are saying isn't just a big pile of bullshit.  What they do have, though, is faith.  And its faith that not only keeps the pile of bullshit from falling over on itself, its what convinces the gullible to actually buy into it.

The primary source of the so-called "proof" that Apologists use to convince the general public that their arguments are sound that their storybook hero is real is the storybook itself.  The Bible is given the special privilege by these people of being able to confirm the truth of itself.  Unique among all other historical documents, Christians hold that the Bible is "historically reliable" simply because the Bible itself says that it is true.  Yes, that's right.  The Bible is true because the Bible says that it is true.  That's a handy little concession, isn't it?  Now, is there any sort of actual justification for this belief?  Does the Bible give accurate chronologies and verifiable facts about people, places, and things contained within it?  Are there avenues of research that clearly show that the Bible is accurate when it comes to the things it says?

Not at all.  Like any fictional story, the Bible describes a series of unlikely events using a plethora of characters and a mass of completely unverifiable fictional details to tell its story.  Oh sure, the setting for the story, Roman-ruled Judaea, was a real-enough place.  First Century Palestine certainly existed (you can, after all, hop a plane to Israel and visit the ruins).  But that said, fictional stories set in real-world locations do not cease to be fictional.

The central question is this:  Did a Jewish Carpenter walk on water, raise the dead, piss off the authorities, get crucified, and somehow get resurrected and taken up to heaven, just like the Bible describes?  Unfortunately for Christians, the only evidence -- the Biblical "facts", legends, history, and the vast number of "witnesses" -- we have saying that such a person really lived and did all those things are other characters in the same story giving testimony that the Jewish Carpenter in question actually existed.

As Dr. Kenneth Humphreys once put it, "This is rather like proving the existence of Batman by quoting the words of Robin the Boy Wonder."

Think about it.  As evidence of the "divine birth" of Jesus, we have the Book of Luke's testimony of the shepherds and the angels (Luke 2).  Never mind that Luke was written between 90 and 105 years after the supposed birth of Jesus.  The writer of Luke steps forward as a witness to dialogue quoted verbatim.  Jesus turning water into wine?  Well, we've got the writer of the Book of John as our key (and in fact, only) witness, writing his story nearly 140 years after the fact.  And who do we have to vouch for the resurrection?  Evidence for the "risen Christ" actually comes from Paul's testimony of "500 witnesses", none of whom are actually identified, the sightings of 12 apostles, and himself (1 Corinthians 15).  Of course, Paul's testimony contradicts the Book of Matthew, which only has two unidentified women and eleven of the twelve apostles.  The Book of Mark raises Matthews tally to three women and names them (Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome), two random passers-by, and the eleven apostles.  The stories don't even match up, but we are expected to take them as if they were unshakable truths, written in stone.  Sure.  Pull the other one.  The entire core belief of Christianity -- the resurrected savior -- rests on just under five hundred self-contradictory words written over a period of 180 years in an ancient and thoroughly discredited book.  Perhaps the writers of the Bible simply expected people to believe as they were told and never question anything.

In addition to the argument that the Bible is true because it says it is true, Apologetics also cite early Christian scholars as evidence.  No, I don't mean they cite the works of these early Christian fathers, they cite the existence of such people.  The supposed lives of these men are used as evidence supporting Christianity, not just what they put down on paper.  For example, Ignatius of Antioch, who lived some time between 50 AD and 115 AD (we're not sure, precisely) has become the lynchpin of the Roman Catholic claim to world mastery.  According to the story, Ignatius was martyred when Emperor Trajan (a man for whom an astonishingly large amount of historical records exist, and who was, in truth, a relatively benign and harmless man as far as Roman Emperors go) took offense to the man for some unexplained reason, and rather than having him tried and executed in Antioch sentenced him to be killed by wild beasts in the Colliseum of Rome.  (This is doubly odd, given that, if that's what Trajan wanted to happen, Antioch had a Colliseum of its own that they could have used.)

We are asked to believe that the Emperor, who was at the time assembling his armies for the coming war with Parthia, took time out of his war preparations to assign an entire battalion of soldiers to bring bring Ignatius to Rome by way of a long and circuitous land-route that gave Ignatius the opportunity to meet and greet notable Christians nearly every step of his way.  Supposedly along this four month long journey, Ignatius wrote fifteen letters to various individuals, including the Virgin Mary and a Christian bishop who wasn't even born by the time Ignatius supposedly died.  Miraculous!

Of course, the importance of these supposed letters is not to supply historical accuracy to the story, but to bolster Catholic doctrine.  Ignatius's letters are filled to the brim with Fourth Century orthodoxy, telling the faithful how they are supposed to live their lives under the benign rule of the Church, how they are supposed to follow the doctrine supplied by the church, and how they are supposed to live their lives as good Christians.  Note I saidFourth Century orthodoxy.  Coming from the supposed pen of a Second Century martyr.  Amazing how that happens.  In addition, Ignatius is used as the "connecting authority" between the early so-called "Christian Jews" and the first true Christians.  (The first Roman bishop to identify himself as "Pope", Anicetus (who reigned over the church between 156 and 166 CE) -- did so supposedly after being named as such by Ignatius.  Similarly, Clements, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus are all used in a similar manner to Ignatius, as if the fact that they existed at all validates Christian doctrine, as if, somehow, the fact that a person living in the Second or Third Century somehow proves that a person in the First Century actually existed.

The problem with this being that evidence of belief is not evidence of fact.  If the fact that lots of people believe something means that the belief is automatically true, then that would validate the Hindu gods a lot better than the Christian one, given that Hinduism pre-dates Christianity by three thousand years.

Then there's the "sheer quantity of documentation" argument.  It goes something like "There is only one manuscript copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars and that dates to the Tenth Century.  In contrast there are twenty thousand manuscripts of the gospels in various languages, dating from the Sixth through Twelfth Centuries.  Doesn't that PROVE the correctness of the New Testament?"  Uh, no, it doesn't.  A lie repeated a hundred times does not stop being a lie, and a truth told only once does not stop being a truth.  But what this does show is how few Christian manuscripts -- or even scraps of Christian manuscripts -- managed to survive from before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Whole libraries full of ancient wisdom and learning -- Pagan wisdom and learning -- were burned to the ground by Christians.  For centuries, by order of the Christian church, the only approved literature was the Bible.  Everything else was forbidden and destroyed.

And modern Christian Apologists have the brass balls to claim that this self-generated lack of documentation for anything other than Christianity is proof of their own religion.  That's sort of like a Nazi saying that the lack of Jewish art is proof of the supremacy of the Nazi cause.

The Apologetics argument that really gets my goat is the one where the Christian asks, "Why would the apostles of Christ have suffered and died for a fake religion?"  Are you kidding me with this nonsense?  Seriously?  People "suffer and die" because they are told lies every single day.  Tell me, Mr. Christian, if suffering and dying for your faith is evidence of the truth of that faith, does that mean the terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 go immediately to heaven, as the Koran said they would?  Even better, one early Christian king in what would become Germany is known to have tortured and murdered nearly ten thousand pagan Germans in an effort to force them to convert to Christianity.  Does the fact that they suffered and died prove the existence of Wotan and Thunor?

And that's ignoring the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that the "apostles of Christ" actually even existed, much less were tortured and murdered by the Romans.  At least not until the Christians started turning its attention to burning heretics at the stake.  Paul, for example, never refers to the execution of a single apostle.  Not once.  Though of course that does nothing to diminish the often repeated story of how the Emperor Nero "put Christians to the torch" in a pogram for which no historical evidence exists at all.  Religious-inspired murder proves nothing.

Now, normally, we could all just sit back and laugh at the gullible rubes who get conned into believing this nonsense.  Problem is, this is as rational as some Christians ever get.  And these people vote.

The thought of a truly Christian government in the United States scares me like no other nightmare scares me.

It's Simple: Intelligent Design Is Not A Scientific Idea. Period.

Intelligent Design (ID) is not a scientific idea.  Its just not.  And if you think otherwise, then you need to actually learn what "science" is, because right now you're demonstrating that you know less than nothing about it.


Part of the problem is that the terminology used in "design theory" aren't actually defined.  The way that the ID movement uses the word "design", for example, has nothing to do with the definition of "design" as it is normally understood.  "Design" is defined in terms of some intelligent agent actively and purposefully arranging something.  The IDers, on the other hand, define "design" by pointing out what "design" isn't (known regularity and chance), therefore making their definition of "intelligent design" the product of an argument from incredulity.


In engineering, a solution to a problem must address the parameters of the problem, or else the "solution" is no solution at all.  Any theory about design must, therefore, address the agent and the purpose, or else its not really about design.  No proponent of Intelligent Design has ever included the agent or the purpose in any attempt at a "scientific" theory of design, and some absolutely come right out and say that these two factors cannot and  should not be included.  Thus, even if the ID crowd were to somehow prove that the universe was purposefully put together, this proof would be practically meaningless.  And it would certainly say nothing about the design in the usual sense of the word.


The idea of "irreducible complexity" also isn't scientific because it, too, is an example of an Argument from Incredulity fallacy.  "I think this is too complex to come about naturally, therefore it must have been created."  Anyone paying attention should recognize how utterly subjective this is.  Whenever one person can think something "too complex to be natural", but another person can say, "No, its still not complex enough... its still natural", the idea behind it isn't science.  Science is either true, or its not.  There's no "might be true" in science.


Lastly, at its core, intelligent design just makes no damned sense at all.  Take spider webs, for example.  Intelligent design says that, because spider webs are complex acts of engineering, the spiders that make them must be intelligent.


And by "intelligent", they mean the spiders must be as smart as people.


Or, it might be that the spiders aren't the intelligent ones, but rather its the spider's designer who instilled into the spider the ability to create heavily complex webs.  The problem being that it could just as easily be argued that the spider's designer isn't intelligent... its just that the spider designer was himself instilled with the ability to create complexity, and was designed that way.


So the question would then become "who designed the designer?"  Or was the designer's designer merely designed?


Such infinitely regressive nonsense gets us nowhere.


But anyway, last and certainly not least, its been admitted by several of its proponents that the entire "Intelligent Design" thing has nothing to do with science and everything to do with sneaking religion into our science classrooms in a way intended to avoid the First Amendment non-establishment clause.

No Evidence For Jesus. No Evidence At All.

I keep having to post this.


On Facebook, I'm active in several different groups dealing with atheism and Christianity. And being so active, I have found I have to repeatedly refute certain claims regarding extra-Biblical proof of the existence of Jesus.

At one point, I had to post this three times, to three different people, over the space of three days. I am disgusted that Creationists just do not seem to learn, and I'm tired of it. So if there are any creationists out there, I'm about to give you an ass-whipping you deserve.


Kevin Jones said, “There is more solid evidence for Jesus Christ than there is for any other historical figure.

If you really believe this, let me just get this out of the way: you're an idiot, and you're wrong.

And here is why.

First, we have no contemporary sources that mention Jesus Christ. None. Absolutely none. And no, none of the sources Christiants usually name were contemporary. "Contemporary", since you apparently cannot understand the concept, means "occurring at the same time."

Second, quite often, when they make claims about “historical evidence”, what they are actually trying to do is use the Bible as evidence for the Bible. Even if this weren't easily dismissed as a logical fallacy (go look up “circular reasoning”, folks), it still wouldn't work. Let me tell you about the Bible, folks. The Bible has been demonstratably proven beyond any possible doubt to have been changed, edited, and rewritten to suit the religious and political dogma of men who lived *centuries* after the supposed lifetime of Christ.

And when I say "changed, edited, and rewritten copies", I would like to point out that sometimes those changes, edits, and rewrites are substantial.

In addition, careful study of the Pauline epistles in the New Testament have shown that while all of the Epistles are supposedly written by Paul, at least fifteen of them (1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Hebrews, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philipians, Philemon, Colossians, and Ephesians) were absolutely not written by Paul at all. Most of these were, in fact, written between 150 and 250 years after Paul supposedly was martyred in Rome.

The remaining Epistles (Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, and Romans) have been thrown into doubt as to their authenticity to the point that its entirely possible that Paul didn't write any of them.

At the very least, later parties took Paul's original words and heavily edited and rewrote them. We know this through careful examination of the vocabulary and the grammar used, and their relationship to the known timeline of the life of Paul (to put it bluntly, at least two of the epistles turn out to be happening at the same time, meaning that Paul was in two places at once -- and these places are hundreds of miles from each other).

Despite the fact that Biblical literalists like to claim otherwise, we know that the Gospels were not written by the men whose names are on them (indeed, outside of the Bible, there's not a lot of evidence that these four men even existed). Mark did not write Mark, John did not write John, and so on. So who did write the Bible? We don't have the first damned clue.

We don't even have original copies. What we have are copies of copies of copies. So we really have no idea what the sources for these documents, which remember the literalists thing are historically authoritative, really are.

And this goes for the apocryphal gospels and epistles also. We don't have the originals, we don't know when they were written, and most of them aren't old enough to be contemporary.

The New Testament canon wasn't assembled until three hundred years after the alleged death of Jesus. The Bible as we know it right now didn't exist until the Fourth Century CE. The reason why the New Testament looks the way it looks is because a man named Athanasius pretty much unilaterally declared it would look like it does.

But for the sake of argument, let's look at some of the usual suspects, the people Christians often claim can be counted as “extra-Biblical evidence” for the existence of Jesus.

Publius Cornelius Tacitus: Tacitus was a Roman senator and historian. He was born in 64 CE, and he didn't write "Annals" (the history that Christians like to cite as if it proves something) until 109 CE. That's a century after the fact, young man. A century. Trying to claim that Tacitus is contemporary with the supposed life of Christ is like me claiming to be contemporary of Ulysses S. Grant. After all, I was alive in the 1960s and he was alive in the 1860s, right?

In any case, Tacitus doesn't mention Jesus, he mentions "the followers of a certain man named Christus" and gives no source for his information. What he's writing about in Annals is information that he heard from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy, a hundred years after the fact. That's hearsay, and absolutely has no value.

Thallus. The problem with Thallus is that we don't actually have anything from anyone named Thallus that makes any mention of anything that could be considered close to Jesus. What we have is a 9th Century Byzantine priest named George Syncellus writing that a 3rd Century priest named Sextus Julius Africanus wrote about some unknown writer named Thallus who supposedly wrote a contemporary description of a solar eclipse at Jesus's crucifixion.

Even worse, we don't even have the document from Africanus that talks about Thallus. All we have is Syncellus claiming that Africanus says something about Thallus saying something. More hearsay. No evidence.

Now, there is note from that notorious liar, con-man, and forger Eusebius of Caesaria who claims that Josephus also wrote about this Thallus account, but that's still one guy talking about what a second guy who got it from a third guy. Even worse, at this point no historian worth his PhD would accept the word of Eusebius of Caesaria if he said the sky was blue because he's been shown to be, as I mentioned, a fraud.

Clement of Rome: Born sometime between 90 and 100 CE. Not contemporary.

Ignatius: Born sometime between 55 and 65 CE. Not contemporary.

Polycarp: Born in 69 CE. Not contemporary.

Barnabas: There's no actual evidence this person was real. Traditionally, this is the Barnabas mentioned in the Bible, and several works have been ascribed to him, but most of these works actually date to long after the man's supposed martyrdom (for which he don't have any evidence, either) some time around 80 CE. The best account we have of Barnabas is the journal of Anthemios, Archbishop of Constantia, who claimed to have been visited by Barnabas in a dream.

So yeah, the evidence we have for Barnabas even existing is a dream.

Papias: He wrote his "fragments" between 95 and 120 CE. Not contemporary.

Justin Martyr: He was born until 100 CE. A century after the supposed life of Christ. Not contemporary.

Aristides the Athenian: He suffers the same problem as Thallus. All we have of his work is Eusebius the Liar describing how Aristides said thus and so. We don't actually have copies of his work, so its all hearsay, and thus no evidence at all.

Athenagoras the Athenian: He wasn't born until 133 CE. Not contemporary.

Theophilus: Wasn't born until 165 CE. Not contemporary.

Quadratus of Athens: Also known as Quadratus the Martyr: Yet another religious figure we have no evidence actually existed other than the well-known lying word of Eusebius of Caesaria. Again, we have no copies of his works, just Eusebius telling us what the man supposedly said.

Aristo of Pella: We can put Eristo in the "Eusebius probably made him up" club, as the only mention we have of him or his work is Mr. "Lying for the Holy Mother Church is a Virtue" himself.

Melito of Sardis: We don't actually know when Melito of Sardis was born. But we do know when he died: 195 CE. Now, seeing as its highly doubtful that the man was over 200 years old when he died, its entirely reasonable to say that he, too, was not a contemporary of Jesus.

The Didache: The Didache was first mentioned by our favorite Christian con-man, Eusebius. There is absolutely no evidence for it being older than the 2nd Century, and all the evidence we do have for its origins show that it was actually written by Eusebius himself. Like most of his writings, the Didache claims to be a contemporary account (specifically, of the actions and teachings of the twelve apostles), but no credible scholar actually believes this.

The Epistle of Dignetus: This document was written by an unknown someone sometime between 130 CE and 200 CE, based on the language and other textual evidence. Thus, it is not a contemporary document.

Josephus Flavius: Josephus, the Jewish historian, was born in 37 CE. His "Antiquities" wasn't even written until 93 CE, after the first gospels got written. Therefore, even if his accounts about Jesus came from his hand, his information could only serve as hearsay. In addition, despite the best wishes of believers and the lies of Christian apologists, the account found in "Antiquities" has been definitively proven to be a forgery written by, you guessed it, Eusebius of Caesaria. So thoroughly has this passage been debunked that no credible Biblical scholar ever mentions Josephus except to use it as an example of a Christian forgery and hoax.

Pliny the Younger: Pliny was born in 62 C.E. Not contemporary. Also, his letter about the Christians only shows that he got his information from Christian believers themselves.  Lastly, the earliest versions of the manuscript do not have that account. That likely means that the account in Pliny the Younger's work was added later by Christians.

Phlegon of Tralles: Wrote his histories in 137 CE. Not contemporary.

Lucian: Born in 125 CE. Not contemporary.

Celsus: According to Origen, Celsus wrote "The True Word", his attack on Christianity, in 177 CE. We don't have any surviving copies, but the fact that Origin places it nearly 200 years after the supposed life of Christ means he's not contemporary either.

Mara bar Serapion: Dates to 73 CE. Not contemporary.

Suetonius: Seutonius has two problems. First, he was born in 69 CE and thus isn't contemporary. Second, he doesn't mention Jesus at all. He mentions a criminal named "Chrestus," which was a common name at the time ("Christ" is a title, not a name). His account is only about Jesus if you squint, tilt your head, and pretend.


So to say there is no authentic historical evidence that Jesus Christ walked the earth is simply to be utterly factual and in accordance with modern Biblical scholarship.

Thus endeth the lesson.