Matt McCormick’s latest book, Atheism and the Case Against Christ, strikes me as the perfect book for anyone who wants to learn more about atheism and about why atheists reject the claims of Christianity, in particular Christianity’s central claim that Jesus was raised from the dead.
In writing this book, McCormick has beautifully served two masters: he has made this book smart enough for philosophers, but common-sense enough for the average person. It would be an especially good book for young, wanna-be Christian apologists who attempt to argue for their faith. It gives them a good hard look at their beliefs in particular.
There are several highly compelling arguments that McCormick puts forward:
A. There is more and better quality evidence for witchcraft going on in 18th century Salem, Massachusetts than there is for the resurrection of Jesus. This means that accepting Christianity means accepting that witchcraft also occurred in Salem. But adopting that position is obviously absurd and problematic. If one adopted an epistemic standard that was so low that it allowed the acceptance of the Salem witchcraft, as well as the many millions of other miracle claims, then you believe in a world that is filled to the brim with supernatural goings-on. No modern person accept this, in light of their own common-sense experience of the world, in light of the dramatic success of naturalistic explanations, and so on.
B. The Counter-Evidence Problem. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with aliens, the loch ness monster, and big foot. I regularly checked out books on those topics from my local library. As I got older, I started reading some of the more skeptical literature on the topic and changed my mind about their existence. What has stuck with me is this: if, a thousand years in the future, historians find old copies of books on creationism, big foot, and other such pseudoscience, but did not have records that took a more skeptical point of view or any of the original eyewitness reports, what would such historians conclude about these documents? Some of those historians might be inclined to trust these books, arguing that no one could have published the book if its information was bogus, or that any respectable author would have known better if the stories they told were false (does any of this ring a bell?). Of course, the most skeptical historians, those who refused to believe anything within these books that is not corroborated by a better quality source, would be completely correct in their judgement. Such historians might reason that there’s no way to know whether the information in these books is right. After all, if none of the more critical sources or anything else survived, then we will not have very much (if any) evidence against these claims, and won’t be able to prove they are false even if they are. The same points apply directly to the New Testament.
C. The Money Bag Problem. McCormick asks us to consider that you are a police officer who has received a bag of money taken off a drug dealer. Before getting to your desk, it passed through the hands of three police departments, all of which are known to have a sizable fraction of corrupt cops. If you had no way of knowing what was originally in the bag, how could you be sure that the contents of the bag had not been altered? Someone might have taken money or drugs (or anything else) and might have added anything. McCormick reasons that we are in a similar position with the new testament gospels, because the stories present in them were told and retold at least a couple of times before being written down in the gospels. McCormick further argues that it would be circular to appeal to the contents of the money bag as evidence that it had not been tampered with, and the same goes for apologists who argue that something about the way the gospel story is told indicates authenticity. Example: With the money bag, a corrupt cop might have found the bag with one-hundred grand in it, removed ninety grand, and a dropped a note saying “here is the ten thousand dollars” to give a false appearance of authenticity and throw off suspicions. I’m in general agreement here, though I think McCormick could have done a better job addressing the possible refutations. First, there are circumstances in which you could trust the contents of the money bag. Let’s say that the money bag included a note that said “Here’s the ten thousand dollars, signed Louie Griffin.” If the handwriting on the note matched the writing of the suspect that the bag was taken from, we could be fairly confident the bag had not been tampered with. Any Christian apologist will argue for a similar exception to the rule, for example by appealing to “embarrassing stories” within the new testament as evidence of its authenticity. McCormick doesn’t consider such an objection, and it is ashame, because that argument has been very thorougly taken care of elsewhere, for example in Richard Carrier’s Proving History.
McCormick goes on to discuss how and why rejecting Christianity also leads to the rejection of all other gods. The reason Christianity is rejected is because the evidence for it is poor. However, the evidence for every other religion is not much better, and in some cases much worse. This inevitably leads to active disbelief in a large number of gods, from Allah to Krishnah and beyond. Atheism and the Case Against Christ may be added to the growing list of atheist response to the resurrection argument, and his contribution stands as unique among them.
