The Life of Jesus as a Fantasy Camp

Imagine there were such a thing a Nazi prison fantasy camp. That is, a recreation of a concentration camp where people could voluntarily go to temporarily experience life as a prisoner for a week or so. (I seem to recall that such a thing has actually been done somewhere but I don’t have the details.) Now imagine, that a wealthy man decided to check into such a camp for a week-long holiday. Let’s put aside for the moment the question of why he would do this and just humour me. For a week he experiences life in a fairly realistic mock prison with rather harsh conditions. Afterwards, he gets to go back home to his comfortable life in which he wants for nothing. He might reasonably say that he has a better appreciation of all the good things that he has after such an experience. But imagine instead that he actually said that his experiences in the mock camp were fully equivalent to those of real prisoners who had been detained against their will in real Nazi concentration camps. That is, the suffering and deprivation he experienced during his week of voluntary incarceration was every bit as bad as that of a real prisoner and that he now he has a complete and authentic insight into what it would be like to endure such conditions for real. How would you react to such a statement?

I would be offended. The wealthy man entered the camp voluntarily, and the whole time he was there he knew that before too long he would be back in his comfortable home as if nothing had ever happened. For this man to claim that his experience was comparable to that of a real prisoner – held against his will and with no hope of release – is obscene.

Now consider the claim by theologian Richard Swinburne[1] in The Resurrection of God Incarnate that the existence of suffering is consistent with the existence of an omnipotent and good God. Swinburne states:

that suffering does not count against the existence of God... [because] God would become incarnate to share our suffering and to make atonement for our sins.

He goes on to make rather bold assertions about the suffering of Jesus:

Suffering has been felt to be inconsistent with an omnipotent, good, and omniscient God. The only way I can see to reconcile these is to observe that the evidence is not all in yet—except in one case. Who could say that anyone suffered more than Jesus—with sweating blood (hemathidrosis) in Gethsemane, even before the physical abuse began.

Two thousand years later, theologians are yet to come up with a satisfactory answer to he problem of evil.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the sheer pointlessness of God justifying the existence of suffering in mortal creatures by inflicting extra suffering upon himself. Or the fact that this does not even begin to make sense as a resolution to the problem of theodicy. Swinburne’s claim that no one in the history of the world ever suffered more than Jesus is monumental in its sweeping arrogance. Untold masses of people throughout history have experienced horrendous suffering, including starvation, cancer, torture, and slavery, not to mention grief and heartbreak. Yet Swinburne expects us to believe without any evidence that none of this can compare to what Jesus experienced. Sweating blood! Oh yes, much worse than anything else a human could experience. This is in spite of the fact that hemathidrosis is a known medical condition that has been attested in ordinary humans, so Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane is hardly unique.   

If I had to choose between sweating blood for a while and being in this man's shoes, it would be an easy decision.

There is a deeper problem with Swinburne’s claims than his lack of imagination about the extent of human suffering. Swinburne is trying to prove that Jesus was God incarnate. Yet if this were true then it is simply not possible that his suffering was in any way comparable to the depths of mental anguish that humans are vulnerable to.

Consider the qualities that God is supposed to possess. He is believed to be immortal, all-powerful and to have foreknowledge of the future. The Incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus were all supposed to be part of God’s eternal plan. Therefore, God voluntarily chose to experience suffering, knew in advance exactly what it would involve, and knew all along that after his death he would rise from the dead to continue his blissful and immortal existence without any lingering trauma. Any suffering God experienced was a temporary inconvenience at worst, hardly a major disruption of his life. 

God sacrifices himself to himself to avert his own anger at the sin of a mythical man and woman with no concept of right and wrong. Yeah, that makes sense. 

Compare this to the human experience of real and terrible suffering. Humans are regularly inflicted with adverse conditions that they do not choose, do not foresee, and over which they have no control. A person who is murdered does not have the option of magically resurrecting afterwards. Those who survive horrific experiences are often left with post-traumatic stress symptoms in which they endure the anguish of mentally reliving the traumatic event over and over again.

If God were real he could not even begin to comprehend what it was like to be human. God could never know what it was like to be powerless, to be uncertain, to be mortal, to be traumatised, or to be heartbroken. Compared to the depths of suffering that humans are heir to, the events that Jesus supposedly went through were a fantasy camp.

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[1] I have previously written about Swinburne on this blog here and here. 


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© Scott McGreal. 

The unknown purpose of the universe

Some philosophers, such as Richard Swinburne have argued that there is evidence from fine tuning that the specific laws of physics that allow intelligent life forms to exist are so improbable that it is plausible that these laws were fine tuned by god in order that intelligent life forms could exist (Leslie, 1990). Swinburne argued that a good god would have particular reason to will that beings such as humans could come to exist, e.g. so that we could develop the capacity to learn true beliefs, such as the laws of physics.

This would seem to imply that the purpose, or at least one purpose, of the universe was to allow the existence of life forms such as human beings. This would therefore imply that our prehuman ancestors existed mainly for the purpose of allowing human beings to evolve. Therefore, hominoid life forms of the Miocene epoch for example might not have had any purpose of their own, they might simply have existed as a precondition of the emergence of human life.

What if human beings then are not themselves the reason for the existence of the universe? Could it be that we exist as a precondition for the emergence of some even more advanced form of life that we can hardly even imagine? That is, humans might eventually evolve into super-intelligent life forms that transcend the current limitations of human life. Therefore, even if a god was responsible for fine tuning the laws of physics, human beings in themselves might not have any relevance to the fulfillment of god’s ultimate purpose. Therefore, current human concerns might hold no more interest for god than the daily lives of prehuman apes.

This is very similar to Nietzsche’s idea that man is a transitional form between the ape and the superman.

The point is that even if god were somehow involved in setting the laws of the universe to allow the existence of living beings, it is quite possible that god’s purpose in doing so has nothing to do with current human evolution. That is, human affairs might be of no concern to god, who might have some unknown purpose we can barely conceive of.

Human beings like to think that their own lives are of great significance and therefore of concern to a higher power. Yet chimpanzees might consider their own day-to-day needs and desires to be of great importance yet it seems ludicrous to think that god is watching over the lives of chimpanzees and taking a great interest in the outcomes of their interpersonal dramas, of which they have plenty. Dinosaurs roamed the earth for an impressive 120 million years. There is no evidence that intelligent life forms would have evolved from dinosaurs if they had survived even longer. Again it seems ludicrous to think that god was taking great interest in their development and quotidian concerns. If dinosaurs were part of some great design it seems hard to see how they could possibly fit in to some purposeful scheme. On the other hand, if they evolved through natural processes questions about their ‘purpose’ become irrelevant. Therefore, I think that the great apes evolved through natural processes involving no design and see no reason to suppose that human evolution involved design or purpose. Hence, I find it preferable to suppose that the laws of physics as they apply in our universe also developed through natural processes without a designer.

Click to enlarge image

Reference:

Leslie, J. (1990). Physical cosmology and philosophy: Macmillan.

Explaining the universe with the unexplainable

Religious philosopher Richard Swinburne contends that the fact that the universe is actually explicable ‘points to the existence of a deity’.

As a thought experiment, imagine a universe that was not explicable to its inhabitants, where the reasons why things happened were completely opaque and not open to human understanding. People there might say that ‘god works in mysterious ways’, that ‘mere mortals’ are not meant to understand god’s great master plan, hence we must have faith that the deity has his/her own reasons for everything, even if we can never comprehend them due to our limited perspective…

Andromeda Galaxy. If God created the universe for the benefit of humans, why create myriads of galaxies we will never visit?

But wait! In our universe, that is exactly what traditional religionists say anyway! Therefore, theologians seem to be trying to have it both ways! The argument from explicability seems to lack refutability, because if the universe were not explicable they could argue that this too pointed to the existence of a deity.  

Atheist have also pointed out that trying to explain the universe by invoking a deity is vacuous because it requires believing in something that cannot be explained, and hence is no explanation at all. I think this makes Swinburne's claim particularly ironic. He seems to say: "We humans have an amazing ability to explain virtually the whole universe through science but we don't know why this is possible - it must be because something we can never hope to explain (God) exists after all." So if there is a God, our ability to explain what's real ultimately fails. Such contradictory logic never ceases to amaze me.