Thoughts and Plans Concerning Politely Rejecting the Bible

I published my first book, Politely Rejecting the Bible, back in December of 2021. I had thrown myself into the project as hard as I could starting in 2020. First, I spent almost a year building a small personal library for biblical studies (it was during the COVID-19 quarantine so libraries were not accessible for most of that time) and outlining my material in a way that made sense to me at the time. I experimented with different tones—should I try to make it funny? should I go crazy with footnotes? and so forth—and agonized over word counts and other self-imposed parameters.

Then, when the book was finally done, I made a few bold choices with trying to market it, including through sponsored ads on Facebook. The end result felt surreal: I ended up with a very positive review from Publishers Weekly, a number of scathing personal attacks from random Christians on social media, and critical reviews from two Christian authors whose work I quoted in the book. Personally, I was having a great time, though some of the comments I received were so harsh that a few of my friends periodically checked in with me to see if I was doing okay (I was).

Theism and Deism

Ever since leaving the Christian world (which was thirteen years ago!), I've struggled with finding the best way to characterize my current beliefs. Almost overnight, I went from having a full, prepackaged framework for my belief system to now just having a bunch of beliefs about a bunch of different (often related) topics, without any sort of overarching framework for them. Christians disagree with each other about lots of different issues, like free will and divine simplicity, but those who hold to a traditional theology typically have a shared set of core beliefs about ultimate reality (e.g., that God is perfectly just and good, that Jesus is God, that humans need redemption, and so on). That's not to say that there aren't strikingly different systems within that framework of core beliefs, just that the framework itself helps to make everything feel more cohesive.

Goodness and Rationality in Light of the Moral Argument

I recently wrote a post where I talked about how I'd much rather align myself with irrational people who care about empathy and compassion than with rational people who don't. I wrote another post after that about why I am drawn to perfect being theology even though I don't accept the claims of revealed religions. Since then, I have been taking a lot of notes and doing a lot of work at trying to write out the versions of each argument from natural theology that I find convincing. I haven't posted them yet because I'm going through them a bit slowly.

This past week I've been doing a ton of thinking about moral arguments for the existence of God, and that has recently triggered some further thoughts on the relationship between goodness and rationality. What I've discovered, I think, is that people who care about empathy and compassion and who strive to treat other people with dignity, even at great personal cost, are acting very rationally, even if they don't realize it, and even if they hold beliefs about the world that don't make much sense. In other words, there is a sense in which good people are far more rational than people who embrace violence and hatred.

Perfect Being Theism without Special Revelation?

Perfect being theology holds that God is, well, a perfect being. However, the meaning of "perfect" in this context is ambiguous. Usually it is associated with classical theism, which holds that God is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and so forth. But these concepts are also heavily debated.

While it would be nice if we could avail ourselves of the testimony of some special revelation, like an inspired written text, I personally do not think there are any plausible candidates for an authentic special revelation. I used to treat the Bible as a divine revelation, but I came to reject that view (and still reject it) for reasons that I've discussed elsewhere. I've never been drawn to the Quran or any other religious text, and I have some reasons for doubting that God would communicate to us through written texts anyway (although I freely admit that I could be wrong). As a result, I am limited to what I can learn from philosophy and natural theology as well as from personal experience.

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument

(Also known as the argument from contingency)

It's called the Leibnizian argument because it's a modified version of an argument developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

The Argument

1. Everything that exists has an explanation for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. Therefore, the universe has an explanation for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
4. The explanation of the universe is not the necessity of its own nature.
5. Therefore, the universe is explained by an external cause.

Assessment

Goodness and Rationality

I grew up a conservative Baptist setting, where fundamentalist thinking was the norm. Certain beliefs were deeply ingrained in me that took a very long time to critically deconstruct. Some of these beliefs were:

• Every person is intrinsically evil
• Every person is evil from birth
• Every person is either saved or damned
• Damnation is the default
• Damnation means going to hell after you die
• Going to hell means eternal, conscious pain and torment
• Most people are damned
• I am one of the lucky ones who is saved
• But I still deserve to be damned