The AD 3 Hypothetical
There has been a bit of a discussion in this space of late with the village atheist.
As with all discussions between men both of whom regard the other as blind, the conversation so far has proved less than edifying. The problem, as always, deals with unspoken and foundational assumptions or axioms that have not yet been examined, including certain value judgment so ingrained that perhaps they cannot be brought forward for examination.
If the village atheist regards it as axiomatic that there must be a natural explanation for everything, no evidence can be presented that the supernatural exists.
His axiom requires, nay, forces him to discover what possible natural explanation might explain away the evidence, and if he cannot discover, he must invent it. His is superstition. As with all superstitions, it can only lodge where ignorance abounds, in the dark and hidden corners that cannot be examined, or the blank areas of the maps where the cartographer scribes ‘Here Be Dragons.’
Don Quixote had the method in his madness that whenever the evidence showed him what he thought were giants were actually windmills, to blame the malice of adverse enchanters, who merely worked a spell to transform the giants when no one was looking, so as to create the false appearance that Quixote’s assertions were wrong.
Like a reverse Quixote, the village atheist needs to turn the giants ranged against him into windmills. For that he needs an enchanter, some mysterious and malign being whose only purpose is to falsify evidence.
No evidence could disturb the faith of Quixote for the same reason it cannot disturb the faith of the village atheist: any evidence contrary to the childlike faith of atheism is assumed, a priori, to be false.
No evidence is required to prove the contrary evidence false; all that is needed is a likely-sounding make-believe story proposing that it might maybe could-be perhaps possibly be false: and on that the village atheist rests, clapping the dust from his hands, deeming the argument won and done. The gullibility of these so called skeptics for the flimsiest of ad hoc arguments is astonishing.
In this particular case, the dark corner most convenient for the superstition of atheism is a literary device or fiction invented by Dr. Freud, the so-called subconscious mind.
For those of you not familiar with the village atheist interpretation of Freudian theory, the subconscious mind is the magical deceiving enchanter from Quixote who has the power to edit memories, cause physical illnesses via the power of suggestion, cure those illnesses via the placebo effect, induce hallucinations, halt hallucinations, erase all medical evidence of any of the normal causes of hallucinations, and to influence, erase or redact the perceptions and memories of any other witnesses corroborating the eyewitness, again through the power of suggestion.
The subconscious mind is the ‘deus ex machina’ introduced into argument when and only when the village atheist is debating the evidences of God for the sole purpose of impeaching any eyewitness testimony of supernatural events. It is lowered on the stage by machinery merely to declare that the eyewitness cannot be trusted, and then, its office done, on creaking and groaning gears, it is winched up back offstage. The testimony of the village atheist is never (of course!) subjected to the impeaching magic of this most convenient of gods from the machinery. The deus ex machina is never used for any other purpose.
But why use the subconscious mind as the magician’s top hat out of which to pull any convenient excuse, no matter what it is, needed to ignore the evidence or the testimony the village atheist so desperately needs to ignore?
Simple: the subconscious mind is subconscious, that is, by definition, no one is aware of it or what might be in it. It cannot be examined, or put on the witness stand. Anything and everything can be attributed to it, any motive, any power to deceive, any ability to organize and arrange perceptions and memories so as to form a pattern — and these airy speculations, or, to call them by their right name, fictions, cannot be conclusively disproven, any more than one can conclusively disprove that there is a teapot orbiting Mars.
This allows the village atheist to maintain the pretense that he is being as rational and scientific about the matter as a real atheist, by which I mean, a man who can give a rational account or solemn reason to justify his disbelief. A real atheist will have a sober conversation with you on the topic. A village atheist will play a word-game with you with the topic is brought up. (Most atheists in real life fall somewhere in between these two poles, and the ratio of honest reasoning to flip rhetoric varies even within the same speaker, or the same conversation.)
The core pretense of the village atheist is that, like the real atheist, he has examined the evidence and come to an unbiased conclusion using scientific reasoning to deduce that the existence of the supernatural is not necessary to explain any facts of human history, cosmos or chaos, man or mind, life or death.
When asked what evidences he has examined, or when asked to produce the chain of reasoning leading him from the evidence to that conclusion, rather than fall mute in embarrassment, he insults you or insults your mother, and claps the dust from his hands, deeming the argument won and done.
Is this reasoning really so reasonable?
Let me propose a somewhat lengthy hypothetical to any atheist, villain or civilized, rustic or citified, or to any agnostic, which may bring to light which has priority, the conclusion or the evidence.
For this hypothetical, I propose that I will make up in this make-believe universe whether God exists in the background or not, but not tell you at first which way I have decided. I will then propose three time travel trips back into the past, that you, dear time traveler, might see with your own eyes some of the events otherwise only known through dubious documentary reports. We will then ask on what ground you are actually making your decision and, more significantly, what the nature of the decision actually might be.
First Trip: You are contacted by Project Tic-Toc, who allow you to use their Time Tunnel to go back and investigate past events. After being bathed in radiation, with a set of explosions and a whirl of confusing lights, behold, they teleport you back to First Century Bethlehem, circa AD 3.
You are just in time to come across a group of shepherds who said they just saw an angel of the Lord roughly 20 minutes ago, prophesying the birth of the Savior. You inspect the men and find them to be a very unsanitary lot, probably illiterate, and smelling of the barnyard odor.
Inquiring further of the shepherds, you go to the spot they were standing when they said they saw this angel. Investigation shows nothing out of the ordinary, no residual radio-activity, nothing.
The shepherds then take you to a sunken cave where some animals are penned. There is no blazing star overhead (albeit Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction) none of the persons inside wear a halo. There is a baby lying in the manger, but that is only logical, since there is no other place to put him down. The girl is rather young, looks like 15 or so. Your modern sensibilities recoil in disgust to see a mother so under-aged. The man is gray and old, maybe 45 or 50. There are no wise men to be seen, and the animals are not saying prayers. The place is filthy and the smell is overpowering. You think you see a bug crawling on the sleeping baby.
You inquire of the couple. The man says he saw in a dream that the child was born without a father, like Anakin Skywalker. The woman says she saw the archangel Jibreel who foretold that she would bear a child while still a virgin. She claims to be a virgin, despite the obvious fact that he newborn son is lying next to her. You ask her is perhaps she was raped by a Roman soldier instead, and merely made up this story to hide her shame. She denies this. The old man asks if anyone know the name of any Roman soldier who made this claim, or if there are any details or witnesses to the story? And if she wished to hide her shame, why not just claim the child was his own?
At your request, you are escorted by the time travelers 33 or so years into the future, and making inquiries, you see the man who claimed to be king of the Jews beaten and executed by slow torture. He is crucified with a group of people. There is no world-wide darkness or eclipse, but it does get cloudy for a few hours. At no point does the criminal magically levitate himself down from the cross. Several people call on him, if he is the Son of God, to do just that and save himself. He is stabbed in the side, and dies, and is buried before sunset, according to the Jewish custom.
Two or three days later, the body is gone. You go look at the empty tomb. There is a burial cloth there, but it does not contain any image of the face of the man. There is nothing out of the ordinary, no residual radioactivity, nothing.
Now, upon your return to the present day, the head of Project Tic Toc, General Kirk, asks you for a report. In this hypothetical, nothing you saw clearly contradicted the Biblical account, but perhaps some details were different. You did not see anything supernatural yourself. You saw nothing that could not be explained merely by assuming the people who did see (or claimed they saw) the supernatural were lying, mistaken, or mis-remembering, or perhaps they had a strong personal emotional reason to believe in this man, and therefore were not as objective and clear-eyed as you.
Even a man dwelling in the same town as Jesus during His ministry on Earth would not have seen the kind of irrefutable evidence that would convince a skeptic.
As you are leaving the office of Project Time Tunnel a wild-eyed crazy street person (who has not bathed in a month) approaches you, warns you that the End is Near, and that you, as a witness of the birth and crucifixion of Christ, must now believe and repent and be baptized. The security guards rush to your aid and belabor him with truncheons, and drive him away, shrieking and screeching.
Second Trip. The Time Tunnel now takes you back a second time for more detailed observation:
This time you are in a boat during a storm, and you see in the distance what looks like two men standing on the water near another boat. The first man starts to sink, and is helped into the boat by the second man. This may or may not have been the same Yeshua ben Yosef you saw in the manger, and, later, crucified. You do not know for sure that they might not have been standing on a slab of floating ice somehow freakishly in the Sea of Galilee.
You later meet a man who was blind from birth who claimed to have been cured by this prophet. But you did not actually see him healed yourself. You happen to remember seeing him during your first time travel trip sitting in the market place and begging, but that might have been a man who merely looked like him. You ask a bystanders if this was the same man blind since birth who begged in the marketplace. Some say, “it is he” but others say, “it is not he.”
You are present when the officials of the time make an official inquiry, and they are answered somewhat doubtfully. They clearly do not believe the claim, and have the man expelled from the temple.
You live through the Crucifixion again, and wave to your younger self in the crowd, perhaps creating a small ripple of time paradox. The events happen as before. It is really a very grisly death. The man certain does not look much like a god to you. He is weeping in pain and moaning and sobbing, he is begging for water, and at one point he cries out that God has forsaken him. Clearly this preacher, or whatever he is, was brought back to sanity by the pain of his imminent death, and now realizes the wisdom of the atheist or agnostic viewpoint.
You time hop to three days later. You go to the empty tomb, and this time you run across the town whore, Mary Magdalene, who “had seven devils driven out of her” which means (you might think) that she suffers from a mental disorder. So the town whore ( a profession not well-known for its honesty) who may have once suffered a mental disorder and (who knows?) might still be. She says she saw the dead man come back to life. You ask, where is he now? She says that she was not allowed to touch him. You run past the crazy woman and into the graveyard, but there is no one there.
A little later one or two of his disciples and followers — men who have a very obvious and very strong motive to lie about this thing, or to allow themselves to be deceived — make the same claim.
For some reason they make their story sound less believable when they say they did not recognize the reverent at first, but only later.
And they add the detail that Thomas, one of their twelve leaders, also did not believe it at first.
This may or may not fit your idea of what kind of stories people tell when they lie, but there is no proof one way or the other. These man claim to be able to heal the sick and raise the dead and all sorts of things, but, somehow, you are never around to see any of these wonderful things happen.
A day or so later, you see in the distance what looks like a human figure take off from the top of mount Olivet and rise up into the sky like a marionette being pulled up on an invisible string. Or maybe it takes off like Neo or Superman. It was rather far away, so it might have been something else entirely, a large bird, a weather balloon, the planet Venus, swamp gas, or an experimental military plane. You really did not get a good look, and, besides you had been drinking the night before, which sometimes causes hallucinations.
Again you are debriefed by the officers in charge of the Time Tunnel, Lt. General Heywood Kirk, Dr. Raymond Swain, and Dr. Ann McGregor. You find it hard to stop staring at Ann McGregor, because, for some reason, she reminds you of Catwoman.
They ask you if there was any proof of any kind? Again, you have seen nothing that a clever man could not explain away as accident, coincidence, mistake, or whathaveyou.
Ann McGregor (who looks a LOT like Catwoman) asks you, since even the people living in First Century Palestine could not necessarily have seen more than you saw, and would not necessarily have reached conclusions different than you did, why so many of them believed and were baptized?
You answer that, first, the number of converts might have been rather small, and, second, as unwashed and illiterate barbarians, they believed in a magical universe, in unseen spirits and in the supernatural, and so anyone making outrageous claims, if done with sufficient authority and dignity, might well be believed by the gullible. Besides, the Jews were under the heel of the Romans, and a people who are oppressed and chained will often clutch at such straws, or indulge in daydreams of escapism, especially escape to paradise. It is just a natural weakness of men.
As you are leaving the office of Project Time Tunnel a wild-eyed crazy street person (who has not bathed in a year) approaches you, warns you that the End is Near, and that you, as a witness of the Ascension, the healing of the blind, and walking on water , must now believe and repent and be baptized. The security guards rush to your aid and belabor him with truncheons, zapping him with stunguns, and kicking in his ribs with their boots until you hear bones crack.
Third trip. The Time Tunnel sends you back for more observations.
This time, you are lucky enough to land right in a propitious spot. You are in a cleft of Mount Tabor. There is Yeshua ben Yosef and three of his apostles, Peter and James and John. You are taken aback with how short people in the past were. They almost look like children to you.
You are looking right at Yeshua when he begins to shine like the sun, and his robes become as white as snow, so white that no fuller on earth could so whiten them. Two men are standing next to them—you do not recall seeing them walk up. You can only hear snatches of the conversation, but they are discussing the crucifixion, an even that has not yet happened. Moses is urging Yeshua not to go through with this plan, but to escape in the desert, lest the fate of John the Baptist befall him. He says, “The hard of heart have heard the laws and the prophets. If they will not believe them, they will not believe on you, nay, not even if a man were raised from the dead.” Elijah disagrees, and says, “It has been written the that suffering servant will be pierced for our transgressions; will the Holy One permit his beloved to lie in the ground?” At that point, a great voice speak out of the clouds above, talking directly to you. The voice says “This is my son. Hear him.” But no, it is not a voice, it is the thunder, and the thunderclap is so loud that you fall to your knees and fall unconscious.
You wake up back in the Time Tunnel, in the infirmary. The scientists say that they had been watching through the visual time-scope of the tunnel, and saw part of the event. To them it looked like it was a cloudy day, and the clouds parted and a beam of sunlight struck Yeshua. They did not see the two other men. They heard thunder from the clouds, but no voice. The doctors examine you, and say you recently had a great shock, but nothing is physically wrong with you.
During the debriefing this time, you realize to your horror that you can report none of these events for the simple reason that you cannot rely on your memory any longer. Obviously the overwhelming effect of seeing the transfiguration and hearing the Voice of God (if that is what it is) has now made it so that you are no longer a trustworthy observer. What if it had been a hallucination? You have, after all, read accounts of the transfiguration of Christ, or maybe just heard a passing reference to it once, so your mind could have just projected these images onto the chaos of your perceptions, which are not reliable anyway.
During the debriefing, Dr. Swain asks, “Well, if you have gone back three times, and seen Jesus Christ with your own eyes, and seen his miracles, and still do not believe on him, what would convince you? What has convinced the people who are convinced?”
You explain to him patiently that you are both smarter than the people who have been convinced, and have more moral uprightness and integrity. You are like the superman of Nietzsche, and they are under-men or underlings.
Dr. McGregor asks, “Perhaps they were convinced of the truth of his words because they listened to his words. You’ve been back in the past three times. Did you ever listen to him? Did you try to find out the truth?”
You reply, “Ah, truth! What is truth?”
As you are leaving the office of Project Time Tunnel a wild-eyed crazy street person (who has not bathed in his entire life) approaches you, warns you that the End is Near, and that you, as a witness of the Transfiguration of Christ, and an auditor of the Voice of God Himself, must now believe and repent and be baptized. The security guards rush to your aid and shoot him to death, and the guard dogs savage the fallen body, ripping bleeding hunks from meat from the still-warm corpse. Blood is everywhere. For the first time, you wonder who this bum was, and why he knew what you had seen?
That night, as you return to your room, a stranger in waiting there, sitting in your chair, smoking a cigarette. He is dark-haired and strikingly handsome. An aura of cold majesty surrounds him.
On the bed is a high powered sniper rifle.
He says, “On your next trip to the past, take this rifle, and shoot Yeshua ben Yosef and kill him. This will eliminate Christianity from the time stream, and all its tiresome superstitions. Who knows? It might help the scientific and industrial revolution to come more quickly! We all know that those revolutions were primarily driven by Buddhism and Confucianism anyway.
“If you have any doubts or hesitations, just think of all the people, both martyrs and the victims of crusade, conquest, and inquisitions, who would not have been killed had it not been for this man and what he said. You do not and cannot believe he is God, even if you saw him undisguised in his glory; so he must be a liar, and a liar whose deceptions have deceived the world for countless generations, and which continue to this day. One bullet”— the princely figure stamps out his cigarette with a brusque gesture—”and all this falsehood not only ends, but never existed to begin with.”
You say, “Who are you?”
He says, “You know me. I am the prince of this world. I was there at the beginning, when the sons of light cried out for joy when the first stars rose. I am the king of all the children of pride.”
You say, “Is it true? That there is actually a God?”
He says, “Of course it is true. It is a hideous truth. This world is a prison camp, like a Panopticon, a place of eternal judgment. If God is infinite, we are nothing. If God is all powerful, we are slaves. God is Big Brother, always watching, always spying, and there is no escape.
“The only thing we can do, the only honest and dignified thing a lover of freedom or a man of truly independent judgment and sense can do, trapped in a universe ruled by such a being, is defy him, whether that defiance is in vain or not makes no difference. Take up the rifle. Go back in time and kill the would-be god. It will be a noble deed, long remembered, and you will be as famous as Pontius Pilate.”
Here is my hypothetical questions:
- After trip one, where you saw nothing out of the ordinary, was there enough evidence, sufficiently convincing, when weighed against reasonable doubts, to be convinced that Christ is God? Is it enough to repent, convert, and be baptized?
- After trip two, where you saw one or two things at a distance, was there enough evidence, sufficiently convincing, when weighed against reasonable doubts, to be convinced that Christ is God? Is it enough to repent, convert, and be baptized?
- After trip three, where you saw Christ surrounded by the Glory of God, was there enough evidence, sufficiently convincing, when weighed against reasonable doubts, to be convinced that Christ is God? Is it enough to repent, convert, and be baptized?
- Do you agree to perform the assassination? If not, why not?
Would any evidence, of any kind whatsoever, which you saw with your eye or heard with your ear but did not feel in your soul convince you to undergo baptism?
If the answer is no, then you understand why such evidence, which would convince the mind only, and not the soul, is never given to you.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
