Richard Carrier offers an argument against the
reasonableness of the Christian faith based on a form of the problem of evil.
Carrier argues that Jesus failed to inform people about things like germs,
parasites, and proper sanitation and thus it is not reasonable to believe that
Jesus is God as Christianity claims. The basic form of the argument can be
summarized this way: “if Jesus had been God, he would have done X, Y, and Z;
Jesus did not do X, Y, and Z; therefore Jesus was not God.” The fatal flaw in
this argument is in justifying the first premise, but that issue can be set
aside for the moment. Let’s start by looking at Carrier’s specific examples of
what Jesus “should have done.”
Carrier argues that in order to prevent centuries of
unnecessary deaths, Jesus should have taught people about germ theory,
parasites, and proper sanitation. First, there is a considerable amount of
naivety in such a statement. Even modern missionaries who travel to tribal
cultures in today’s world can require years to communicate basic concepts of
modern medicine to people from non-Western cultures, and that's only after said
missionaries have had extensive training in cultural anthropology. While it’s
easy to assume that things like modern medicine and science are culturally
neutral and value-free, anthropologists know that this is not the case. So the
idea that Jesus should have given lectures on germ theory strikes me as
misguided. It would not have been understood. On the other hand it might have
been a great strategy for him if he wanted to be followed and remembered by
nobody.
But even supposing that this knowledge could have been accepted and
understood by those first century Jews (which is simply not realistic), so
what? Would these apostles of good hygiene have then been responsible to take
that message to the Romans, and would the Romans have been expected to adopt it
themselves? Perhaps in Carrier’s mind, if God had wanted to come to earth as a
human being he would have done so as something other than an ancient Jew. Perhaps
God should have made himself into a time-travelling 21st-century
Westerner, because that’s what Richard Carrier would do. This appears to be the
honest force of Carrier’s words.
Thus the premise that if Jesus had been God that he should
have done X, Y, and Z has the dubious foundation that it simply starts from
Carrier’s own assumptions about what God should do – and of course one of those
assumptions is that teaching about things like repentance, sin, faith, reconciliation
to God, and life after death don’t matter because – well, presumably because Carrier
doesn’t think those things are real or rational. If Carrier DID think those
things were real, he would probably have a correspondingly higher view of how
important they are – and perhaps a different evaluation with regard to whether or not
Jesus did what he should have done. If Jesus’ mission was to prevent as many
premature deaths as possible, then perhaps Carrier is right, and Jesus should have
taught about germs (even given the likelihood that such a teaching could never
have been effective in the cultural context). If, however, his mission was
something else (such as inaugurating the kingdom of God), then it’s possible that
Carrier is totally off base. Rather than being a strong argument against the
reasonableness of Christianity, Carrier’s argument turns out to be simple question-begging.
There are other problems with Carrier’s argumentation which
are more nitpicky. Carrier alleges that Jesus said “nothing we put into us can
harm us,” and implies that this is simply wrong because of course germs can
make us sick. My best guess is that Carrier is doing a botch paraphrase of Mark
7:15-23 or the parallel passage in Matthew 15:11-20. However, Jesus does not
say that nothing we put into us can harm us, he says that no food can make
anyone “unclean,” meaning in the Old Testament ceremonial sense.
This is a bit
of a surprising gaffe by Carrier – any lay person who has attentively read the
Old Testament will have noticed that there are a lot of foods which are “clean”
and others which are “unclean” for the Jews. This is known as kosher. Jesus was
certainly not saying that nothing we eat can harm us, he was saying that food
does not defile a person spiritually. This is a significant theological point
but it has nothing to do with what Carrier seems to think it does, namely
physical health.
Carrier also says that according to Jesus not even poison can
hurt us (although the verse actually only applies to believers), but this verse
is found in the long ending of Mark which almost all scholars agree is not
authentic. Carrier should know that full well.
Carrier charges Jesus with incorrectly teaching people
to eat without washing their hands in spite of the unhygienic nature of such
advice. Clearly, argues Carrier, Jesus could not have been God and have made
such a statement. Again Carrier’s argument flops because of his evident lack of
understanding of rabbinic Judaism. The neglect of hand washing which the Jews
who charged Jesus with(actually the charge was against Jesus’ disciples) was
not simple hand washing for hygiene. It was the ritual hand washing that they
believed good Jews were supposed to practice before, during, and after meals.
Without the ritual hand washing, they believed the disciples were ceremonially
unclean.
A bit of background is necessary here. The rabbinic system of ritual
hand washing is not found in the Torah, but was later developed by the Jews.
Thus Jesus responds to the challenge by challenging them: why do they break the
commands of God because of traditions made by men? Jesus’ response to the
question of hand washing was that food doesn’t defile a person spiritually,
rather it is evil desires which motivate evil actions which defile a person.
The entire discussion of hand washing (which is found in only one passage in
Mark and Matthew) has to do with ceremonial cleanness and the theological
discussion about the status of the Torah, a discussion which continued into the
early church. Again, it’s an important theological point, but it has nothing to
do with the use that Carrier wants to make of it. The idea of washing your
hands for simple hygiene is not even in view. Carrier is misreading a
theological discussion as a medical one.
Carrier’s entire argument also fails in principle. The
argument is based on the premise that if a good human being would do X if it
was in his or her power, then God should also do X. However, unlike human
beings, God sees “the end from the beginning.” He is not so limited in his
perspective as to see only the immediate effects of some action or inaction. We
can make an analogy from parenthood. Very often as a parent I have to make a
decision, sometimes painfully, to not do what my children would like me to do
or to make them do what they do not want to do. Because I fail to do what they
would do if they were in my position, from their perspective it would appear
that I have fallen short of their moral standard. Often when this happens they
announce, “No fair!” However, as a (hopefully) wise parent, I am able to make
judgments about what is best which they are not yet able to make.
The analogy
to God is imperfect, because God’s wisdom is not merely significantly different
in degree from ours in the way that mine is from that of my children. My
children will grow up and in a few short years reach the level of understanding
of an adult and perhaps one day become parents themselves. God’s wisdom,
however, will always be above us, so it is not certain that anyone knows what
God should do in any given situation. It’s even conceivable that they might be
way off, possibly coming to a conclusion which is the opposite of the truth as
God sees it.
Thus the basic form of the argument as it stands is not effective
for the simple reason that it begins with the very dubious premise that Richard
Carrier knows exactly what Jesus should have done if he had been divine. It’s a
variation on any number of skeptical arguments from evil – if there is a God,
he should have done X, or he should have prevented Y from happening. The basic
justification for the premise is that any good human being would have done X or
prevented Y if it was in his or her power, so God should do the same, most
often accompanied by an emotional appeal which Carrier also makes heavy use of.
It seems to me that it is rather more likely that if God exists (which I am
convinced that he does), that he would do things which nobody would expect. A
God who only did what humans expected or thought he should do would be no god at
all.
