Transcription
So, Christians oftentimes go to great lengths to justify their faith. Whether it's spitting on somebody's face, it could be faking a resurrection, or appealing to a banana as signifying God's creation. Others write entire books trying to justify the behavior of one of the most controversial figures of all mythology. In today's video, we are covering Paul Copan's book, "Is God a Moral Monster?"
So, honestly, I'm not a huge hater of Christian apologists. I disagree with a lot of what they say, but occasionally they do have some good things to bring to the table, and that's why I read their books. But honestly, with this book, I feel like it has nothing good to provide to the discussion. In fact, it's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. And since there's not a lot of content about Paul Copan on YouTube, I want to start highlighting where I think he goes wrong in his work.
So, for many Christians, the Old Testament poses the biggest threat to their faith. A lot of people can kind of get past the representation of God in the Old Testament by appealing to Jesus and saying that Jesus has kind of overwritten the past behavior of God of himself. Unsurprisingly, the church also leans in the Jesus direction. Despite the New Testament only being 22% of the biblical narrative, it is the topic of 93% of sermons, which makes sense since he is a central figure of the Christian narrative.
So, Paul Copan is kind of taking it upon himself to ease this common Christian concern. So, let's see how he does.
So, to begin, Paul Copan spends a few chapters defining what it means to be an atheist. He's doing this to kind of highlight where the interpretation of the Old Testament, where the incorrect interpretation comes from. And honestly, in this chapter, the rhetoric that he uses just comes off as hostile and immature.
So, the first tenet of what it means to be an atheist is that new atheists are arrogant and angry. Just a huge blanket term thrown out as an insult. I can't believe they include that in the book. Genuinely, I can't believe it. Second, they are profoundly ignorant of what they criticize, being religion. And then lastly, they are inconsistent with their worldview and not very logical. I'm not kidding. When these were the three tenets that he proposed for what it means to be an atheist, a new atheist, these were things that were, they weren't highlighted, but they were italicized as, you know, emphasized. Like, these are the core things of what it means to be an atheist. Are you serious?
So, number three, we'll see throughout this entire video series, but the other two are actually demonstrably false using some studies. And so, I want to mention those. So, there have been studies done that compare atheistic communities to Christian communities or just religious communities in general. They've actually found that the atheistic communities tend to have higher levels of well-being and happiness, which to me does not signify any anger.
Studies have also been done to see the moral character, the moral behaviors of Christians and atheists, and find that atheists are less likely to be incarcerated or go to jail, less likely to break the law, and more likely to give to charity, which again, aren't, in my opinion, necessarily signs of being angry. And the last thing, according to Pew Research, atheists actually have a better understanding of the Bible than Christians do.
So, right off the bat, these are huge red flags for me when I began reading this book. You know, I will give him a pass on not researching, you know, the direct statistics related to his claims. Although, still, for an academic book, that's irresponsible. However, I will not give him a pass for these emotional, unfounded, and just completely irrelevant attacks on atheists in general. This is just not how an honest person approaches any type of discussion. Just throwing out these claims again is quite childish and also ironic, given that he's a Christian. He's supposed to be like this moral up, you know, upstanding good figure, whatever.
So, before we even get to the book, we have to get some more unfounded claims out of the way that are in these first couple of introductory chapters. And I want to go through this book thoroughly because I think that there are things we can learn from all these chapters. And so, let's start with these unfounded claims.
One, atheism hasn't grown since 1940. He wrote this book in 2010, so a little bit ago. And atheism has picked up in the past decade, but in 1940, atheism was at 4%, was it 3%? And now it's at 9%. So, there's clearly been an increase. And I mean, it's like common knowledge that there's been an increase in an increase in atheism. So, just a blatant lie, I guess, right off the bat.
He also claims that Christianity is the fastest-growing religion. And again, even in 2010, Islam was growing faster than Christianity. Okay, this is not even close. Like, this is common knowledge at this point.
He also claims that the Christian faith has had many great contributions. One of them that he mentions, not even kidding, is preserving literature. So, when Christian conquistadors took over Mayan land, they collected roughly four thousand or three thousand documents and burned all but four of them. And so, that's a preservation rate I calculated of 0.15%. And so, if you're talking about preserving Christian literature, then yes, you have a point. But preserving literature in general? No. The Christian church deliberately destroyed literature.
Okay, last lie, we'll get into this is promoting human rights. So, let's start with the rights for homosexuals to get married, opposed largely by Christians. Women's rights are still to this day opposed by many Christian organizations all across the world. And then take something like slavery, supported and opposed by Christianity. So, again, I don't know where he's getting this information.
So, the first substantive chapter of this book is about Abraham and Isaac. And we all know the story. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son to God, and it's supposed to represent Abraham's just complete obedience and trust in God and his plan for him and his heirs. Now, obviously, this has raised some eyebrows. Commanding somebody to kill their son, to kill anybody, being, you know, an all-perfect, all-powerful creator God that's supposed to be benevolent, seems to me, and seems to a lot of people, like kind of a slippery slope.
So, Copan uses a bunch of different tactics to kind of get around this and make it look good. The first one, I'm not kidding, he says that God didn't tell Abraham to do it. He tenderly begs Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Which is just, it's irrelevant. You know, if you tenderly beg somebody to do something, it doesn't mean what you're telling them to do all of a sudden is now good. But I'm just, I'm being 100% serious when I say that this was one of his primary points in this chapter.
Paul Copan goes on to say, Abraham knew that Isaac was not going to be killed or sacrificed. That God wouldn't allow that to happen. To support this, he appeals to Genesis 22:5, which states that "we will go worship and then we will come back." And so, honestly, I don't know if this makes sense given the interpretation, because there's competing interpretations of this passage in Genesis. But I do know that it doesn't make sense and contradicts the purpose of the story. If the purpose is to show Abraham's obedience, to show Abraham's trust in God, then him knowing that Isaac isn't going to die completely defeats the purpose. This wouldn't be an act of faith by Abraham if he knew the outcome.
Something Copan emphasizes is that it's possible Abraham knew that even if he did sacrifice Isaac, God could resuscitate him, and he was just kind of testing him. Knowing somebody can be resuscitated if killed is not a warrant to kill them and watch them be revived. That's ridiculous. I mean, imagine being in that situation. You're killed at the hands of your own father. I mean, how would that work out for a child in their development? They would have freaking so many things wrong with them by the time they were an adult. It's so morally messed up to put a kid in a situation like that and to try and, you know, jump around the situation, not recognize that it's bad. It's really weird to me, and that's why I really clash with this book.
So, throughout this book, and we'll see as the series continues, Copan, you know, starts with the end. He starts with, "Okay, whatever God does is already morally permissible and okay." He's never, ever in the book going to say, "You know what? What he did was messed up." Not once. Right? So, the game that he's playing is just, "What can I do to justify this? What pieces can I put together? What language can I bend?" And ultimately, I think it's one, dishonest, but two, a very dangerous game to play.
So far, this book doesn't seem like it's all that promising. If the first thing you're going to do to defend your position is attack the other side and make these ridiculous claims about them, I think you should, I don't know, reconsider your worldview.
In this episode, we saw Paul Copan lie about various distinct statistics, make unfounded claims, bend words to kind of conform to his story. And honestly, this is not even close to the worst. I'm telling you, it gets so much worse. But that's for another video. I'll see you on the next one.