Luke Barnes (Partially) Decloaks

I have, since March 2013, written seven articles that refer to Luke Barnes, to a greater or lesser extent.  Barnes can blame himself for much of these references because he responded to the first article which was only tangentially about him (so long as Barnes is not actually the person I was responding to, namely, faithwithreason).

I wrote in that article: "So, really, the universe could be 'finely tuned' in the sense that if it were different then life could not have arisen and this would provide no proof of Barnes' god."

In the comments, Barnes' denied being a creationist and denied being against evolution.  He said that he preferred to keep his theological leanings to himself.  This is all well and good, and I can fully go along with people keeping their beliefs (and non-beliefs) to themselves so long as their work and their opinions are not informed by underlying theological concepts instead of - or, perhaps more charitably, as well as - more rational concepts … and this is particularly the case if they are scientists.

And this is the problem.  Barnes is selective in his attacks on people engaging with the issue of "fine-tuning".  He took a physicist, Victor Stenger, to task for his thoughtful and detailed discussion, while giving a big thumbs-up to William Lane Craig for his nonsense ("well worth a read").

So, I've been trying ever since (from time to time) to work out if Barnes is a cloaked theist.

I think we have our answer, in part due to the efforts of Arkenaten.

For some bizarre reason, Barnes took it upon himself to attack science royalty in the form of Neil deGrasse Tyson - twice!  And the precise topic on which Barnes attacked Tyson was on the topic of god, specifically Tyson's thesis that a belief in god can put the brakes on scientific enquiry and that "intelligent" design people should "get out of the science room".  Note that Barnes didn't really attack the thesis, but he devoted two blog articles to attacking the example that Tyson used, namely the fact that Newton didn't develop perturbation theory despite it being right up his alley and it took another 200 years before Laplace arrived on the scene and did.

In the first article, Barnes arrives at the conclusion that "scientists suck at history".  This is probably true and probably even true for the reasons that Barnes gives - that scientists read history like everyone else, reading the bits that appeal to them, interpreting historical events in modern terms and picking heroes based on their similarity to the reader.  Barnes goes so far as to say that Tyson raises Laplace to the role of hero because, like Tyson, Laplace was apparently an agnostic.

Interesting, huh?  When challenged by Arkenaten, "Are you upset by Tyson’s take on this because you are Christian, or simply a deist", Barnes responded with "A Newtonian".

Following Barnes' own logic, Barnes is thus a theist, an heretical christian and occultist, like the scientist Barnes venerates - Newton.  (I don't actually think that Barnes is an occultist and as to being heretical, it seems that all the various subdivisions of christianity disagree with each other on various points, so they are perhaps all heretical to one extent or another, depending on who you ask.)

But even more telling, Barnes later responded to Arkenaten that he (Barnes) is "at least a deist".  Ok, now we are getting somewhere.  I don't have any real problems with deists, so long as they are real deists.  Functionally they are indistinguishable from atheists and non-theists with the exception of their answer to "how did the universe come about?"  We'll say "we don't actually know, but there are some tentative hypotheses that don't yet amount to fully fledged theories" (or in short "we don't know") while the deist will say "a god set it all in motion, then buggered off never to be seen or heard from again, leaving the universe to operate purely on the basis of the physics that it (the god) had established, but as to the nature of that god, we know nothing other than it created the universe" (or in short "we don't know").

However, a classical deist does not believe in a personal creator.  (Not even the modern deists do, despite having co-opted the notion of transpersonal relationships.)  This is of interest because, back in the comments to An Open Letter to Luke Barnes, Barnes responded to something I wrote:

Luke also fails, in his paper, to clearly indicate that the claims of apologists with respect to fine-tuning are overblown, thus allowing those apologists to interpret Luke’s work as supporting "strong fine-tuning".  In fact, he follows the standard apologist approach by presenting two "tidy explanations" (which he graciously admits are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive), one which is basically the anthropic principle and another which relies on a "transcendent, personal creator".  Note, he doesn’t say a "divine being" or "a god", Luke uses a term which could have been lifted directly from William Lane Craig or the Institute for Creation Research or Lee Strobel’s "The Case for a Creator".

writing:

""transcendent, personal creator". Note, he doesn’t say a "divine being" or "a god""   They mean the same thing. You really should learn to read the lines before you try to read between them.

If Barnes truly believes that "a god" = "a transcendent, personal creator" then he's not a deist.  To believe in a personal creator, which he's effectively done here, he must be a theist.  He might not define himself as a theist, he might consider himself a deist of some form, but all the signs are pointing to him falling into the generally understood category of theists.  As I have pointed out before, it certainly explains all the quacking.

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I say "(partially) decloaks" because I still harbour suspicions that Barnes has apologetic leanings and an intention to support people like WLC with his pronouncements on fine-tuning, or more specifically "fine-tuning for intelligent life".

A History of Lying

In The Method of WLC’s Madness, I talked about William Lane Craig’s misuse of “explanatory power” – explaining that he tries to use historical method inappropriately.

In A Pop-Up Refutation of the Resurrection, I pointed out that WLC (along with other apologists) refer to New Testament scholars as expert witnesses for the historicity of the biblical character Jesus.  There’s a major issue with this because those who devote their lives to studying the New Testament are biased.

This is not to say that there aren’t some scholars who emerge from all that study no longer believing the accuracy of the bible.  There are some indications that many who study the Bible deeply begin to doubt it, not just New Testament scholars, but also Seminary College students.

There is a psychological predisposition to avoid the sense that one’s life has been wasted on a complete fabrication.  This can be seen in the fact that even Bart Ehrman, who debated the historicity of Jesus with WLC, claims that Jesus existed, was crucified on the orders of Pontius Pilate and his body was not found in the tomb by whoever it was who went to check (the four gospels have four different accounts on this last item).  Ehrman does not, however, accept the resurrection as historically factual nor does he accept that Jesus was divine.  One is left to wonder why, once the key elements of the gospel accounts are removed, should any of the stories necessarily be true.

In this article, I want to address another problem, one which brings WLC’s intellectual honesty into question.   First, let us have a little closer look at some of words that WLC uses, repeatedly, in his resurrection argument.  Check out the following excerpts from debates (and two websites) spanning a period of eighteen years:

WLC-Krauss (2011): The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. Historians have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms.

WLC-Law (2011): The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was by all accounts a remarkable individual. Although Dr. Law has recently defended the claim that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, historians have reached something of a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle working and exorcisms.

WLC-Ehrman (2006): … most New Testament scholars, as Bart Ehrman knows, do believe that Jesus of Nazareth carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms. Whether you believe they’re supernatural is an additional step. But there’s no doubt today that Jesus of Nazareth was what he thought was a miracle worker.

WLC @ BeThinking (2003): Today the majority of New Testament scholars agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God Himself, that he claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come, and that he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as signs of that fact. According to the German theologian Horst George Pöhlmann,

Today there is virtually a consensus ... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]

WLC @ ReasonableFaith (2001): The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God's place. That's why the Jewish leadership instigated his crucifixion for the charge of blasphemy. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms.

WLC-Crossman (1995): The majority of New Testament critics today agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God himself. The German theologian Horst Georg Pöhlmann reports, “Today there is virtually a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority – namely, the authority of God…”

WLC-Zaas (1993, quoted in “Who Was Jesus”, Copan and Evans, 2001):

I want to close with a quotation from the German theologian, Horst Georg Pöhlmann. He writes,

“In summary, one can say that today there is virtually a consensus concerning that wherein the historical in Jesus is to be seen. It consists in the fact that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority - namely, the authority of God - with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation.”

Pöhlmann concludes,

“This unheard of claim to authority, as it comes to expression in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, … presupposes a unity of Jesus with God that is deeper than that of all men, namely a unity of essence.

This . . . claim to authority is explicable only from the side of his deity. This authority only God himself can claim. With regard to Jesus, there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. There is no third way.”

So, actually, they are not Craig’s words, they are Horst Pöhlmann’s words.  And who, exactly, is this Horst Pöhlmann?  He’s an obscure German theologian whose book, from which Craig quotes <<Abriβ der Dogmatik>>, does not have an English translation – this is despite being quoted by Craig repeatedly since as early as 1993 and despite having been in print (in six German editions) since 1973.  Nobody other than Craig seems to quote Pöhlmann, other than indirectly when quoting Craig.

When using the quotation (which he often fails to credit, possibly because Pöhlmann is so obscure), Craig doesn’t use the same words every time as one would expect with a quotation but rather employs “creative tailoring” to the extent that he thinks he can get away with it.  I’m left wondering whether a less obscure author, or one who regularly wrote in English, might have been less forgiving of such flagrant and repeated abuse of his work.

On his websites, bethinking.org and reasonablefaith.org, Craig is relatively honest – assuming that, prior to his summarisation, Pöhlmann had made clear that he was talking about slightly more authoritative “New Testament scholars”, rather than just “Christian Apologists” or “Christians”.  He seemed to have been more honest in his early years, in the debates with Zaas and Crossman, although there are a couple of early debates in which he did not present this argument at all.

The crib notes that WLC now appears to work from, if he hasn’t simply memorised the entire speech – which seems quite likely – now have him saying that historians have reached a consensus on the nature of the “historical Jesus of Nazareth”.

This simply isn’t true, except perhaps if the consensus in question were to be “this whole resurrection thing never actually happened”.

I don’t think you could call this misuse or a mistake on Craig’s part.  This is – plain and simple – an oft repeated lie.

You can go to Hell for that sort of thing …

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If a visitor from Germany ever pops in, one with access to <<Abriβ der Dogmatik>>, and they could be so kind as to inform us as to what Pöhlmann actually had to say on the “consensus” and whether it was a consensus of theologians, New Testament scholars, Biblical scholars, Christian Apologists or historians, I’d be very grateful.