Book Review: Why I Became an Atheist, chapter 7

I am reviewing Why I Became an Atheist, by John W. Loftus. Other posts are here.

Chapter 7: The Strange and Superstitious World of the Bible

Loftus chooses as his target someone who believes many things happened “simply because these things are told in the Bible.” The target is narrowed further, to those “fundamentalist and evangelical Bible-believing Christians” who, although you won’t hear it in Loftus’ text, have inherited and interpreted a Protestant tradition of a canonized way of reading scripture and understanding scripture. Academics such as Alister McGrath and William Abraham have demonstrated that this phenomenon is historically recent and in any case not universal. Abraham especially has given further argumentation for why the literalist, inerrantist, Protestant tradition of Sola Scriptura is misguided, constituting a victory of scripture-as-epistemology over scripture-as-soteriology. Sadly, arguments against scripture-as-(exclusive)-epistemology are what we find in this chapter.

Loftus spends some time trying to argue that because the Bible clearly shows ancient people around Israel to be superstitious, we must conclude that the Israelites probably were too. I don’t know who Loftus is addressing in this part of the chapter. Even the Bible is rife with examples of the Israelites being superstitious; for example, the Prophets often condemn them for various occult practices, including having a superstitious understanding of their native practices (thus Hosea 6:6, quoted by Jesus, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”)

Loftus’ first example of superstition in the Bible is characteristically underwhelming. “The first thing we notice, ” he says, “is that the Hebrew God is pictured with a body, just like the gods of their polytheistic neighbors.” It is difficult to engage Loftus on this point. His examples are sometimes obtuse (“God created man in His own image”), sometimes worse (“[O]nly a physical being needs to rest”), and sometimes sort of okay (God shows his “back” to Moses). Loftus says that in the “early” portions of the Old Testament God has a body. It is unstated what he is including in the early portions, but apparently he includes at least one passage in Genesis and one passage in Exodus. Loftus points out that some Christians will say that such passages are not to be taken literally and are just “anthropomorphic.” Loftus has a question for these Christians: “[W]here is the word anthropomorphic in the Bible such that we’ll know how to interpret a passage properly when it is ‘red flagged’ with that word? I don’t have such a Bible, do you?” If these questions don’t provide strong enough arguments for you, Loftus has another: “The only reason they call these things anthropomorphic (or theophanies of Jesus) is because they are reading the texts in their original settings anachronistically based upon later or hindsight Christian understandings.” Christians who have made these matters an object of academic study will balk at phrases like “the only reason.” Of course there are numerous reasons to interpret passages multiple ways, and complicated exegetical and historical issues. But, Loftus is by definition addressing people without such factoids at their disposal. This renders his text impotent as a piece of scholarship and dishonest as a piece of apologetic, a close cousin of the Christian works of his early inspirations, such as Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Most Christian readers will simply not find themselves in Loftus’ tiny (I suspect partially imagined) audience.

Even though there is sophisticated scholarship on the important issues Loftus fails to raise, are the issues Loftus raises important? Say, for example, that many Biblical authors thought that God has a body, has a body in heaven, or has a body on weekends. I can’t think of anything that would follow from this that wouldn’t be trivial. Personally I suspect Biblical authors had all sorts of beliefs that I don’t share; some of these beliefs can be gleaned from Biblical texts. So what?

Loftus reveals to us that “there are mythical creatures” referred to in the Bible, such as “Leviathan” and “Rahab.”  He quotes others as saying that the defeat of Leviathan, for example, is a symbol “for the death of the wicked, to be succeeded by the redemption of Israel.” That sounds about right. But enter Loftus: “My question is how can God defeat mythical beasts that do not exist?” But Loftus just gave (someone else’s) plausible explanation of the literary function of Leviathan in Isaiah. Why does he respond with a literalist question that ignores this interpretation? A very well-known trope in the Hebrew scriptures, one taught at prestigious secular public universities, is that the monstrous images of the surrounding cultures, and their Gods, are often put down in the Biblical texts, frequently through wordplay (e.g. with gods like Shemesh, a word for the sun), which haughtily proclaim Yahweh as at least supreme over gods and nature, and frequently as the only god, or at least the only efficacious god. There’s a fairly big hint of this literary device in the fact that the more “historical” texts of the Hebrew Scriptures have very few examples of other gods as live agents. For example, Leviathan doesn’t show up in the crossing of the Red Sea, but shows up in Hebrew poetry.

Loftus strays from his topic frequently, digressing into quasi-moral critiques, e.g. “It would seem that many people followed their cult hero, Moses, out of fear, not true belief.” Loftus undermines himself a lot in this chapter, like when he notes with disbelief that “It didn’t take the people of Israel very long at all to worship other gods, especially if God provided miraculous manna to eat.” But Loftus already said that Israelite culture was infused with superstition. On that assumption, I don’t think it’s surprising at all that Israelite history would be infused with synchronistic phenomena. In fact, Israel’s learning to avoid idolatry seems to be a theological interest for every generation of Biblical author.

Loftus has discovered by reading things like the Bible and the Harper’s Bible Dictionary (frequently cited) that magic, divination, and dreams occur in the Bible. This is both well-known and a topic of considerable scholarly and popular interest. Loftus doesn’t interact with this vast literature, and so little can be said in response to him. Much of his text is just a sardonic retelling of various Biblical passages, with ample quotation from Harper’s. No argument takes place in these passages, although unprepared readers are made to feel like one does. The closest thing to an argument I can find is something of the form: (1) magic is not real, (2) some people do magic in the bible, and (3) the bible people can’t really have done magic. The conclusion Loftus wants to draw is one or several of the following: (4) the (whole?) bible is superstitious, (5) people who believe magic happened are wrong, or (6) Christians are superstitious.

Loftus for some reason avoids more plausible objections to the typical Biblical targets (e.g., a guy couldn’t survive in a whale) and instead frequently opts for speculative psychological objections. He finds it implausible when Israel falls back into idolatry, or when people don’t fall on their face and worship God, given his magical powers.  I’m not sure what the force of these objections is supposed to be. If Loftus is correct, ancient peoples are both unsurprised by apparent supernatural events and very given to ritualistic and superstitious behaviors. So what Loftus finds surprising should not be surprising on his assumptions.

Some digressions in this chapter will strike even Loftus’ imagined unsuspecting, uneducated, simple-minded targets as off-base. For example, he has a short section called “Is the Heart the Seat of the Mind?” Loftus points out that ancient peoples frequently attributed false function to organs. From this he concludes that language involving “heart” in the New Testament is problematic. Since the New Testament usage of terms like the “heart” is virtually identical to our modern usages, few people will care about arguments like these. To grasp how underwhelming Loftus’ argument is, consider his example passage: “For out of the heart comes forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual sins, thefts, false testimony, and blasphemies” (Matt. 15:19). Loftus says this is bad medical science.

Loftus spends quite some time showing that the Bible says that various peoples are superstitious, such as the people of Athens. Loftus says that because the people of Athens were superstitious, they “do not need evidence for their beliefs. They just need to hear a believable story by sincere people, and have some corresponding religious experiences.” This characterization is curious, since in a general sense, we all should need to hear a believable story by sincere people, and have a relevant experience in order to even pursue it, and certainly to believe it.

Loftus’ general strategy in this chapter morphs into an attempt to undercut the evidential relevance of early non-Jewish conversions to faith in Jesus, based on the superstitious nature of the converts. Obviously Loftus’ interest in this topic comes from reading Christian apologists, some of whom place great evidential weight on early conversions. Unfortunately for me I also have some experience reading Christian apologetics, and much more relevance is given to Jewish conversions. But maybe Loftus’ target isn’t such apologists. In fact, Loftus oscillates between attacking the Biblical authors themselves, the persons represented in the Bible, and certain modern Christians.

Loftus says that “The Christian big picture assumes that ancient people were just as superstitious as people in our day.” I can’t think of any Christian thinker who assumes this in their “big picture.” In any case it doesn’t have a role in my “big picture,” if I have a picture. I suspect that if I ever do have a clearly defined big picture, this assumption won’t be involved.

Loftus ends his chapter by considering four objections that as far as I can tell nobody should raise, or has raised.