Responding to Samuel Butler — Part 2

This is the continuation of my response to Samuel Butler’s claims about Christianity. In my previous post I showed that the idea of Mithraism being an influence on Christianity was unwarranted. This time I’d like to deal with Samuel’s claims about two Papal quotes:

…Pope Leo X (died 1521) called Christ a “Fable”. Later Pope Paul III expressed similar sentiments.

Immediately I should point out that even if the two men here did indeed claim that Christianity was a fable, this does not lead logically to the falsification of Christianity. There are probably many people who will promote an ideology, whether it be secular or religious, who in the back rooms laugh and scoff at the very ideas that they promulgate, reaping their own benefits from doing so. For instance, let’s pretend that President Obama’s recent support for same-sex marriage was not based on his own convictions, but because he wanted the ‘gay vote’ and that secretly he found the idea morally incorrect.¹ Now let’s pretend that after his election this was somehow leaked out to the public. Would the LGBTQ movement feel as though their position was now incorrect since an authority figure had lied to them? Of course not. It is no difference for Christianity – not to mention that there are multiple bodies within Christendom that do not agree with the jurisdictional claims of the Pope and would eagerly use such quotes to discredit the claims of the Church of Rome.

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Responding to Samuel Butler — Part 1

When I was an atheist and attending undergrad, I use to go to the Freethinkers club on campus. I originally did this as a place to find like-minded people – it was little more than to go and say, ‘hey, let’s make fun of Christianity!’ Freethinkers, nevertheless, became a very important to me for multiple reasons. However, there’s one criticism that I’d like to focus on now. One of the disconcerting things that I found while in Freethinkers was that a lot of my athiest compatriots seemed to be so convinced that there was no God that they generally did not deal with apologetics beyond creationism (obviously this was not the case for everyone, though). I remember one meeting when we were discussing what topics to cover in the coming year I purposefully listed off a bunch of names and arguments one can find on the internet: the Kalam Cosmological Argument by William Lane Craig, the Tautological Argument, Alvin Plantiga’s Modal Ontological Argument, etc. The response I got was a blank face followed by one poignant question: “What is that?”

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