On November 12, 2023, self-identified skeptic Michael Shermer published a Substack essay of about 3,600 words titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” He wrote it as a rebuttal to an Unherd essay of about 2,000 words titled “Why I Am Now a Christian,” written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on November 11, 2023. Shermer’s essay could be at least 3,000 words shorter because its only in a roughly 500-word section – five paragraphs – in the middle of the essay that he actually gives his reasoning for rejecting Christianity. Everything else is commentary about Ms. Ali, himself, or systems of thought he deems superior to Christianity. I’ll deal with those key paragraphs one by one.
First Key Paragraph
Consider what’s on demand in Christianity—that Jesus was the Messiah, was crucified, and was resurrected from the dead. (As the apostle Paul said in 1 Cor. 15:13-19: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. … And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”) Is that true? My first question is this: Why don’t Jews accept the resurrection as real, either in Jesus’ time or in ours? Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the same holy book as Christians do (the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament). They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think the carpenter from Galilee was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians, and still they reject them. That’s telling.
Can Mr. Shermer be ignorant of the fact that Jesus’ apostles were all Jews…or does he just think his readers are ignorant of this fact? The Christian movement was entirely Jewish for the first decade of its existence. Gentiles were only invited in after thousands of believing Jews in Israel and scattered throughout the Roman Empire provided a strong foundation for Gentiles to be added to the mix. Even in our time, there are Jews who believe in Jesus. They call themselves by different names, including Messianic Jews and Jews for Jesus. Of course, once they talk this way, they cease to be welcome in synagogues…which allows people to maintain the fiction that “Even Jesus’ own people don’t believe in him.” If “no true Jew believes in Jesus, and every time one does he ceases to be a true Jew,” what kind of argument is that?
Second Key Paragraph
What would it take for a rational person to accept the resurrection? Let’s put some numbers on it. Demographers estimate that throughout all of human history approximately 100 billion people have lived before the 8 billion people alive today. Not one has died and returned from the dead, unless you are a Christian, in which case you believe that one person did—Jesus of Nazareth. So the claim that one person out of those 100 billion people who died came back from the dead would be extraordinary indeed—100 billion to 1. Is the evidence extraordinary for the resurrection? No. It’s not even ordinary.
Mr. Shermer’s point in this paragraph seems to be that resurrection is rare. I agree! It’s rarity is intentional. God wanted to add an exclamation point to the life of Jesus so that He might be even more thoroughly distinguished from every other human being who ever lived. Jesus’ words and deeds distinguished Him…and His resurrection just magnified that distinction.
Third Key Paragraph
According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosopher Larry Shapiro in his 2016 book The Miracle Myth, “evidence for the resurrection is nowhere near as complete or convincing as the evidence on which historians rely to justify belief in other historical events such as the destruction of Pompeii.” Because miracles are far less probable than ordinary historical occurrences like volcanic eruptions, “the evidence necessary to justify beliefs about them must be many times better than that which would justify our beliefs in run-of-the-mill historical events.” But, says Shapiro, it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even as good as ordinary historical events.
The “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” claim is a favorite of current-day atheists, including Mr. Shermer who invokes it in three of his five paragraphs (the second, the third, and the fifth). In the first place, I’m not sure this atheist anthem is valid. It seems to function as a thumb on the scale for atheists to make sure no evidence for the resurrection is ever enough. In the second place, the New Testament IS extraordinary evidence.
Fourth Key Paragraph
What about the eyewitnesses? Maybe, Shapiro suggests, they “were superstitious or credulous” and saw what they wanted to see. “Maybe they reported only feeling Jesus ‘in spirit,’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest that they saw Jesus in the flesh. Maybe accounts of the resurrection never appeared in the original gospels and were added in later centuries. Any of these explanations for the gospel descriptions of Jesus’s resurrection are far more likely than the possibility that Jesus actually returned to life after being dead for three days.”
Mr. Shermer, have you read the New Testament? I know you have. And, therefore, you know that Mr. Shapiro’s suggestion that believers in the resurrection were “superstitious or credulous” is not tenable. As for his claim that “the resurrection never appeared in the original gospels and were added in later centuries,” where’s the evidence for this? Lastly, you are again claiming that the resurrection ought to be dismissed because it’s so hard to imagine. But it’s as simple as this: if there’s a God, then there can be a resurrection. To assume there cannot be a resurrection of Jesus is to have already assumed there is no God.
Fifth Key Paragraph
The principle of proportionally [sic]—or extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—also means we should prefer the more probable explanation over the less, which these alternatives surely are. Therefore, I am not a Christian because there is not enough evidence to believe that the core doctrines about Jesus’s resurrection are true. And I don’t want to believe in things that have to be believed in to be true.
You have things exactly backwards, Mr. Shermer. The most probable explanation for existence of the New Testament is that Jesus was raised from the dead. For to suggest that those 27 writings and all that is in them can be explained by something other than the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is to suggest the greatest conspiracy theory in the history of humanity. As for your last sentence, you are simply describing yourself as a normal human being for no person in his right mind wants to believe something that is not true. The problem for you is that you are not living like a person in his right mind for you are choosing to believe something that is not true – that Jesus is still dead.
Conclusion
Mr. Shermer deserves credit for putting his finger on the central issue of Christianity, which is, of course, the resurrection of Christ. If it didn’t happen, Christianity is a hoax and the New Testament is a pack of lies. Where Mr. Shermer falls short is in not bringing any reasonable arguments in his five paragraphs. He’s factually wrong about the Jews and Jesus. He’s correct about resurrection being rare, but that’s not a point in dispute. He then quotes someone who says there’s not as much evidence for Jesus’ resurrection as there is for other historical events – but offers no evidence for this claim. Mr. Shermer says that Jesus’ apostles may have been gullible or maybe the original Gospels contained no resurrection testimony. Of course, he offers no evidence for these speculations; and he gives himself away when he says that he’d accept any explanation other than an actual resurrection. That’s the true explanation for why Mr. Shermer does not believe in the resurrection: because he doesn’t want to. He could have saved the five paragraphs – and his entire essay – and just made that point in one sentence. And ends it with three exclamation points to replace his three references to “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” which signal that he’s going to move the goalposts every time you come near them.
(The “IWO” prefix indicates that this page is connected with one of my “Interactions with Others“)
The Duty of a Man 