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- [00:00]
Bart Ehrman
When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with
- [00:11]
Megan Lewis
my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing.
- [00:23]
Bart Ehrman
Discover what BetterHelp online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp.com today.
- [00:36]
Podcast Announcer
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Lets begin.
- [00:56]
Megan Lewis
Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we are talking about how Christians tell God what he can and cannot do. For a religion that claims to view God as the most powerful supreme being in the universe, some Christians have an interesting habit of placing restrictions on what he can and can't do. God can't make a world without suffering. He can't inspire myth, only historical fact. And he certainly can't be involved in other religions. But where do these limitations come from and what purpose do they serve? Before we get into that, however, but good morning. How are you doing today?
- [01:29]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. We're in the Christmas season, so the problem is of course now the Christmas season starts sometime in mid October, but so we've kind of been in it for a while. But this is the time of year when I start listening to, you know, Christmas music and stuff, which I have a soft spot for. So yeah, yeah, things are okay. And we're winding down our, our semester. That's another good thing, but a rather frightful prospect for many of my students. How are you doing?
- [01:59]
Megan Lewis
Good. This time of year is mildly terrifying to me because it feels like Christmas is looming. And we start listening to Christmas music very early because my husband just loves Christmas music so it kind of is playing all the time if he's home. Because we have it on for so long, I tend to tune it out. It's like, oh, I've got loads of time before Christmas and I don't have to worry about all this stuff. And then it gets to the end of November and I realize I have exactly one month left and there are things that must be done. Yeah, I'm good though. I really love Christmas.
- [02:33]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, good. I do too. I mean, there are a lot of us who are Not Christian believers who love Christmas. We love parts of Christmas. I love the story of Christmas in a lot of ways, and I. In some ways, you know, it's a great season. I think for me, a lot of people don't find it great at all.
- [02:48]
Megan Lewis
Yes. Which is, I think, very reasonable, especially if there's a religious trauma going on there. But for me, and for the way I was raised, it's very much a. You get to spend time with. With family and just kind of enjoy yourself and see friends that you don't see very regularly. So that's. Those are the bits I really treasure.
- [03:06]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Well, you know, the thing is, the family thing is often what leads to the problems because a lot of people had very unhappy Christmases because the family had to pretend that things were okay when they weren't. So it's. It's fraught. So much is these days, unfortunately.
- [03:22]
Megan Lewis
So. Well, however people are preparing, I hope that the holiday season is kind to you, to everyone. Given the stresses that can occur, we should move on to Christians bossing God around, which is, I think, going to be an interesting topic of conversation. So we're going to start, as I like to do, at the beginning with the development of Christianity. Was the Christian God always considered to be like a powerful supreme being, or is this something that developed over time as the religion progressed?
- [03:55]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, the early Christians, of course, were Jews. They certainly believed that there was one God, that He created everything, that is, that he was. He was superior to everything else and nothing existed before Him. He. He was around forever. They did construe him in masculine terms as a He. He was sovereign over all. There is. They didn't have the kinds of philosophical issues that we have today. Like since the Enlightenment, people would ask things like, could God do anything? Could he do everything? And it becomes a logical problem. But also. Well, it becomes a logical problem. I think if you had asked somebody in the ancient world, they probably would have said, yeah, he could do anything like a Christian in ancient world. But they wouldn't have the kind of philosophical problematic things in our heads that we would think of, that they just assumed God was all sovereign and could do what he wanted.
- [04:47]
Megan Lewis
I mentioned in the beginning that there are some restrictions that some Christians place on their idea of God. Do we see these similar restrictions in early Christianity or are they introduced at a later time?
- [04:59]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I think as Christian theology develops, it came to be thought that God did certain things because that was the way, and they thought, therefore, this was the way to do it. I'm not sure, they recognize the logical problem of that, but it does mean that God is constrained by something else, by the best, and he's constrained by necessity. In theory, there should be no necessity with God, but there is a necessity with God because God can't do anything contrary to his nature. Well, that's putting a restriction on God and who has established his nature. And so you can kind of do an eternal regress with this. Well, God established his nature. Well, how did he know to establish his nature? Because he's God. You keep going like that. So again, I don't think that they saw this as a logical problem, but I think as theology develops and it becomes more and more nuanced with, for example, the relationship of God and Jesus, there has to be a certain relationship. But once you say there has to be, then whether you recognize that that's a logical problem or not, it does mean that there's something outside of God that's being imposed upon him. And of course, everybody would deny that. They'd say, no, no, no, no, it's not being imposed upon him. But then why does it have to be? Well, it has to be because of God. Well, okay, so. But couldn't God break his own have to be. So that becomes a problem. But it's not a big problem in early Christianity. They were really early Christians like everybody else was basically trying to figure out how to survive in this world and, you know, how to eat tomorrow. And from the Christian set, you know, for the Christians, you know, how to have eternal life. And these kinds of logical issues may have been, I mean, the, the deep philosophical issues might have been being discussed deeply by 1% or less, but most people weren't worried about this kind of thing.
- [06:48]
Megan Lewis
So what are some of these restrictions or limitations that you come across in your work?
- [06:53]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, well, you know, a lot of times there might be some kind of problems that either Christians or non Christians would have with Christian understandings of God. And there are things that might seem like contradictions in the way God relates to the world in the traditional Christian view, and often when these problems are raised, it turns out that God has to do it this way. I'll give you an example. A lot of times when I tell people that the Bible has contradictions, for example, and that there are discrepancies in the Bible and historical mistakes, people will say they don't believe it. And you know, I say, well, just look, this is a contradiction. And they'll say, no, they don't believe it. And you say, why? Well, because God inspired the Bible, if he inspired the Bible, it has to be without error. And you say, well, why did God have to inspire an inerrant Bible? Well, he had to, because he's God. And so he had to do that. If you're going to inspire authors, then what they have to write has to be inerrant. And it doesn't occur to people. Why does it have to be inerrant? It's more like it's a common sense than an argument for them. It's a common sense. And the problem with common sense, of course, is that common sense is common to whom? And so it's not like you can establish truth by taking a vote among the human race. Right? And the majority wins. And so normally a common sense like that comes out of people who have been raised in fundamentalist circles or who have been convinced by fundamentalist views of things that God has to inspire. And Arabic just has to be that way.
- [08:35]
Megan Lewis
So are these restrictions usually grounded in Scripture, or are they more often apologetic arguments in the defense of either the Bible or Christianity or God? So if you look at whether the Bible is inerrant, which you mentioned, like God has to have inspired an inerrant Bible, is that necessity in Scripture, or is that something that is placed upon it by Christians?
- [09:01]
Bart Ehrman
Well, somebody defending the Christian faith, virtually everything that a Christian will say, defending the faith, they will find biblical proof for just anything. Because for people who are defending the faith, especially in the Protestant tradition, but also in the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions, there has to be authority for it. And in all forms of Christianity, the Bible is ultimately an authority. And so the Bible gets appealed to for everything. And so, for example, when I, when I went to Moody Bible Institute, we believed that the Bible was inerrant and that there was no other way for God to communicate with humans apart from an inerrant Bible. How else would he communicate? You know, we had logical reasons because we'd say, well, it's clear that he can't communicate just through humans, normal humans, because humans all make mistakes and humans disagree with each other. And so he couldn't just use, like, prophets, because anybody could come up and say they're a prophet. He had to have a written word. And if he's using a written word, it has to be inspired. And so kind of a logical argument. But then we always would appeal to Scripture itself. So as the Book of Timothy says, all Scripture is inspired by God. And the word for inspired, there is a word that the author invented. It didn't exist before that. It's the word Theopneustos, which means God breathed. So all scripture is God breathed. And so we would point to this passage as evidence that God had breathed out the words of the Bible. If they came from God, they've got to be inerrant. We would pick a, you know, a scripture passage to support it. But ultimately, you know, this scripture passage isn't talking about what we were talking about. For one thing, this is a passage in the New Testament that's referring to the Old Testament. It doesn't say it's inerrant. It says that it's God breathed. And so it's not talking about the New Testament at all. And it's not coming up with views of the Bible that did not develop until the 19th century.
- [11:06]
Megan Lewis
When you were an evangelical, when you were still at Moody, how did you view these. These limitations and these restrictions? How would you have responded if someone had told you that actually you were telling God what he could or couldn't do?
- [11:20]
Bart Ehrman
Well, what we would usually do is say that this person who's disagreeing with us wasn't disagreeing with us, they were disagreeing with God.
- [11:30]
Megan Lewis
Very humble.
- [11:31]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's like, you know, well, and in fact, it was meant to be a statement of humility. How funny is that? But, yeah, it's meant to be a statement. He's like, I didn't come up with this. This is what God says, you know, and so you use that as a justification for your view. And you say, look, it says right here, all Scripture is God breathed. It says that. And so, you know, we had logical arguments as well. We were trained in apologetics, which is the field that defends Christian claims. Christian apologetics defends Christian claims against assault against those who don't agree with these claims. And you come up with logical arguments. They're based on Scripture in some way. But the way you frame it is by saying that this isn't, you know, we're just not trusting the reliability of the Bible for this. We. This is logically necessary. And so you can argue for the resurrection, for example, on logical grounds, or you can argue for why there's evil in the world on logical grounds. You can argue that there's one God on logical grounds. And so we would do that. But ultimately our beliefs were being handed down to us from our own tradition by our fundamentalist tradition in a religion in the form of Christianity. That was against tradition. We thought the problem with the Catholics is they relied on tradition. And we didn't realize that we were basing our views on tradition. We would claim that we are not restricting God, that God chose to do things this way, and all we have to do is sit back and look and see how he chose to do it. And so we're not restricting. And so when we say he has to do it that way, all we're basically saying is he chose to do it that way, but he chose the best way.
- [13:08]
Megan Lewis
What would be, in your mind, the most problematic restriction that comes up when we're discussing this?
- [13:13]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I've got lots of them in my head, you know, because. Okay, good. I encounter this a lot and in different areas of Christian thought, and many of them really quite crucial for Christianity. I mean, a minute ago we talked about, you know, I said something about how God has to inspire an inerrant Bible. Almost everybody who says that God inspired inerrant Bible, even if they don't say, like, he had to, but they say, you know, he did, people say, well, he did inspire an inerrant Bible. When they come to see that we don't have the Bible that the authors wrote, we don't have the books, we don't have the book that Mark wrote. We don't have that saying that when he put his pen to papyrus and we don't have that thing, that papyrus thing he made, or when Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians or when Amos wrote his prophecies, we don't have those things. We have later copies of them that all have been changed. And for me, this was a major reason for me to start doubting some of the beliefs I had about the Bible. This is not what led me away from Christianity, but I started realizing I believed that God had given an inerrant Bible to his people. But I knew I didn't have his Bible because the Bible I had was based on manuscripts that had mistakes in them. And this made me wonder if I know for a fact that God didn't prevent the scribes from making mistakes, what would make me think that he prevented the authors from making mistakes? In other words, if the whole point of inspiring an author is to give his word to his people, why don't we have his word? Because it wasn't preserved. When I tell people this, they get very upset. People who are very strong evangelicals, and they say, look, God couldn't stop the scribes from making changes. Well, why couldn't he? I mean, why? Because. Well, that would restrict their free will. Well, but are you saying they restricted the author's free will? No, no, he didn't restrict the author's free will. Well, so how do you know they didn't make mistakes? Because God didn't let them. Well, then he did restrict their free will, you see. So it ends up being this kind of circle about what God can and cannot do. That would be kind of one instance of where the preservation of the text, somehow God can't do that. And I'll point out, by the way, that itself is a strange phenomenon because in Jewish copying practices, they didn't make mistakes, or if they did, they got rid of the copy. The Hebrew Bible was copied accurately over the ages without any, you know, I don't think without any divine intervention. And the Quran is copied accurately without divine intervention. And Christians have this Bible, there's all these changes in them and say, well, God couldn't preserve it. Well, humans can preserve it. Why couldn't God preserve it? That's one of many.
- [16:03]
Megan Lewis
So I wanted to ask, and we have an episode coming up focusing on this problem. So we won't go into too much detail, but how do you see these restrictions coming into play when we're talking about problems of evil and suffering in the world?
- [16:16]
Bart Ehrman
Well, let me give you two examples of that, because the problem of suffering is what led me away from the faith. And it's what leads a lot of people away from the faith, either because they have very, very bad things happen to them in their lives and they just don't understand how that could happen if God was really loving them and in control. And sometimes because they look around the world and they see just how awful things are for so many people and have been for forever, as long as there have been people, how much massive suffering there's been. And that kind of thing leads people away from the faith. And it led me away from the faith. So I've had a number of conversations and discussions and debates, public debates on these. The issue of why they're suffering, if there's a God who's in control. And the standard argument that everybody has, which was the argument I had when I was a Christian, was that God had to give us free will because otherwise we would just be, you know, we'd be robots or we'd be computers and we wouldn't be people who would be freely loving God. And since he had to give us free will, there has to be suffering. Because if I have free will, I can decide to, you know, take your glasses and stomp them on the ground. I'd probably get a lot of hate mail from that, from our listeners, but I could do it.
- [17:30]
Megan Lewis
It depends which pair you pick.
- [17:31]
Bart Ehrman
I think No, I don't think. It depends. You have to have free will. So, okay, logically that makes sense. But then when you think about it for a second, I'll sometimes ask them, I'll say, when you die and go to heaven, will you have free will? Well, yes, I will. Okay. Will there be suffering? Well, no, there won't. So you're saying that there can exist creatures with free will without suffering? Yes, I guess I am. Okay, well, then you've got a problem because you haven't answered my question why there's suffering. Because God could create a world with free will without suffering. Sometimes this kind of logical God has to do it is not thought through very logically.
- [18:14]
Megan Lewis
What is your second instance of this?
- [18:17]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, my second one is one that is not widely said to me, but it was said to me in a debate once. So many. Many people know Dinesh d' Souza for a variety of reasons. He's an important public figure. We've had three public debates on this question of suffering. And in one of these debates, maybe in all of them, he raised this issue that I had never thought of, but is like, the more I thought about it, it's really kind of strange. He said that we now know from science that life could not have occurred on Earth if it hadn't been for tectonic plates, that the shifting of tectonic plates creates the conditions that were necessary for life to emerge. And so for us to have life, there has to be things like tectonic plates shifting. And that's what creates earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis. And so you can't avoid that if you want life. And so God had to do it. And when I pressed Dinesh on this, I haven't reviewed review these debates in some years, but as I recall these debates, somebody might correct me on this. I pressed him, I said, dinesh, are you saying that God had to create a world with tectonic plates? Well, yeah. That's how life comes. Why couldn't God create a world without tectonic plates and bring about life? Because that isn't how it can work. It has to be tectonic plates. You're telling God that he has to create a world with tectonic plates and can't create life without tectonic plates. Why would you tell God that? I mean, surely if he's almighty, he could just, like, make a world without tectonic plates in life. For me, it's a very bizarre way to argue what God has to do. Is he almighty or not? When somebody says he's Almighty. I think most people would even say, look, it's not that he can create a contradiction with a base 10 system, numerical system, 2 plus 2 will equal 4, and he can't make it mean equal something else. Okay. Or, you know, that logical inconsistencies are one thing, but telling God what he can and cannot do seems to me very weird.
- [20:22]
Megan Lewis
So can you give us maybe one other example of this kind of limitation that Christians place on God?
- [20:27]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'll tell you one that goes all the way back in early Christianity, which is one that is part of the book I'm writing now. I'm writing about this book about how Jesus had a different ethical view from his environment and how that affected Christianity. And part of it is how Christians changed Jesus views. Not necessarily back to the Greek and Roman ways, but in various ways. My view is that Jesus taught that God forgives sins to people who repent. That Jesus message, the first words out of his mouth in the Gospel of Mark, chapter one, verse 15, are that God's kingdom is near and that people need to repent and believe in the Gospel and throughout the Gospel, he talked about how if people repent, God will forgive them. The idea of forgiveness is the idea that Jesus is working with and that I'm talking about right now. This particular concept of forgiveness is you realized you messed up, you're sorry for it, you regret it, you acknowledge it, and you ask for forgiveness and God then forgives you. That's what I think Jesus taught. God will forgive you if you repent and change your ways. Christians, right after Jesus death had to make sense of why he died on the cross. They knew God favored him because he raised him from the dead. But that would mean if he raised him from the dead and favored him, it means if Jesus was on God's side, why did he have him killed? And the early Christians, very soon, right after the death of Jesus, concluded that Jesus death was a sacrifice for sins, that he sacrificed himself for the sake of others. And you find that, of course, throughout the Gospels and in Paul, etc. But the idea that God requires a sacrifice is not the same as saying he forgives sins. If you forgive somebody, you don't require a payment. Forgiveness is without payment. If you require a payment, that would be something more like atonement, that you need a sacrifice. When my daughter was little and you know, she did something wrong and she said, I'm sorry, you know, I would just forgive her. I wouldn't say, well, I'm sorry, you've got to pay a Price here. And so, you know, I'm going to kill your cat or something. I mean, I wouldn't, you know, you don't have to like kill somebody or something, or you don't make her pay a fine. You forgive her. Jesus taught forgiveness. His followers taught atonement. And today, you know, when I talk to some Christians and I say, look, why couldn't God just forgive sins? Why does he need his son to die? Well, that's just how it has to be. Why does it have to be that way? Well, because that's what God requires for his justice. Well, why does God require it? Why can't he just forgive? I'm happy to forgive you when you hurt me. I don't require payment because he has to do it. And you find it even in like sophisticated thinkers like in CS Lewis, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, people who recognize that as a, as a Christian, you know, kind of an allegory, it turns out that the reason Aslan has to die is because of the deeper magic. That there's something written into the world that requires a sacrifice by death in order to bring forgiveness. Well, who made this requirement and who made this deeper magic? Are you saying God has to do this? Yes. Why? So that would be another. I mean, I think that's a very big area where people are saying, well, God had to do it that way, and I don't see any reason why he had to do it that way.
- [24:00]
Megan Lewis
I want to just briefly circle back to the ancient cultures that the Christianity was formed kind of around and within before we finish up for this week, because as we were talking, it occurred to me that this kind of limitation or restriction is something that seems to be exclusive maybe to Christianity. If you look at Greek and Roman pantheons, the gods there do all kinds of things that we would consider immoral. And they have their own, like, inherent limitations maybe, but these don't present a conundrum to their worshippers. What is it about Christianity that's different that makes this kind of circular reasoning necessary?
- [24:44]
Bart Ehrman
Right. Well, you know, on one level, it's the monotheism. In the Greek and Roman worlds, there were people who puzzled about things kind of analogous to this, but they had ways around them that Christians don't have. For example, if you read a lot of ancient literature, you know, not kind of non fiction kind of stuff, but stuff we might qualify as fiction today. Things that are stories that they're telling. Often the gods are themselves controlled by the Fates. And there are things that even Zeus, the Almighty, you know, it's kind of he has to do some things because the fates require it there. You have an out and you have an out for all sorts of things because of the polytheism, because the fates are, you know, divine entities as well. And the gods all have different characteristics and some of them do good things and some of them do bad things for humans. And if something bad happens to you, you can always blame some other divine being, right? Or you can blame fate. And in Christianity, it doesn't work that way because you've got one almighty God and there aren't other gods who might do bad things. Except in Christianity, of course, you have demons and you have the devil and so you can blame them. But ultimately God's the one who makes the decision. And in Greek and Roman worlds, it's not that way. In the Christian tradition, God has allowed forces of evil like the demons and the devil and stuff to take over. But he could stop it. Well, why doesn't he stop it? He can't. Why can't he? Well, he can, but he's decided not to yet. Why? So the monotheism creates particular problems that you simply don't get in polytheistic religions where there are explanations. You can just appeal to supernatural explanations for things which you cannot appeal to in Christianity ultimately, because one God is sovereign.
- [26:35]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much. We're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with Bart's weekly update.
- [26:42]
Podcast Announcer
Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar. Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john? @barterman.com Authors. Thank you.
- [28:05]
Bart Ehrman
This is bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, UrbanBlog.org happenings, and online course launches.
- [28:19]
Megan Lewis
Bart, what is going on for you this week?
- [28:22]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, we're ending classes pretty soon, and so it's crunch time for the students. And crunch time for the students means crunch time for the professors because we have to grade their essays and their exams. But this year, I'll tell you, I'm doing this class, this first year seminar on Jesus in scholarship and film, and it's just for first year students. So this is our first semester in college and I've given them this writing assignment that I'm really looking forward to. I picked five passages from the New Testament. They're passages like the Good Samaritan, the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus, Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, the Parable of Lazarus, and the Rich Man. I picked five passages and I picked five social topics of what's going on in the world today, Black lives matter, the MeToo movement, immigration policies in America, American capitalism. So I picked topics and I picked passage. So students for their term paper have to pick one passage and one topic, and they have to do a detailed interpretation based on scholarship of the passage and then show how it applies to the topic independently of whether they're Christian or not Christian. Like, how would something like the Good Samaritan apply? If you understand it historically, how would that apply to the Black Lives movement? Or how would the parable of Lazarus, the Rich man, apply to American capitalism? So they get to choose. So they got all these options. They choose one each and they do it. I've started doing this assignment a few years ago. Man, this is for me. This is the top. This is the best thing that I've ever done in terms of teaching. So I'll be getting those in pretty soon. And I won't enjoy having to spend the time doing it, but I'm going to enjoy doing it. Spending reading these things.
- [30:03]
Megan Lewis
You must get a really good diverse range of responses from your students.
- [30:08]
Bart Ehrman
I do. And part of the point is to get them to see that when you read literature, it isn't just putting your eyes over the page and saying that you looked at the words. It's understanding what the words are. But it's also, what's this got to do with me? And certainly for the Bible. But I mean, I read all literature like this. If I read a. I'm just finishing up an Anthony Trollope novel, 19th century novelist.
- [30:31]
Megan Lewis
And.
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Bart Ehrman
And I always am thinking about how this is applicable for something in my life or not applicable. And, you know, if I read Faulkner, I do the same thing. It's just like. It's like, you know, and so I'm trying to teach these students that actually reading isn't just kind of acquiring knowledge. It's actually thinking about relevance and. And how things matter.
- [30:48]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much for sharing. We are going to have a soapbox bonus round coming right up.
- [30:58]
Bart Ehrman
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [31:13]
Megan Lewis
So, Bart, what are you on your soapbox about today?
- [31:17]
Bart Ehrman
Well, yeah, I'm not sure how soapy this box is, but I been kind of dismayed lately by two developments, and I just. I don't think people realize how interrelated they are. One development in our current situation is that people more and more, as we all recognize, seem to be unable to differentiate truth from falsehood, and that it's very hard for people to evaluate whether something's true or not. And many people don't care if something is true or not. And many people simply assume that what they hear on the news is true. They base it on whatever news channel they're listening to. And people seem less and less to have any analytical abilities, any ability to evaluate an argument to see if the argument is good, or to evaluate historical claims to see if they're right or not. People seem to have fewer and fewer abilities that way, at least in my judgment. The second thing is the decline of the humanities in colleges and universities in the country. Most people do not see these things as related, but I think that they really are. Humanities are suffering in our country. There are fewer majors in English and philosophy and classics, religious studies. I mean, these are areas where enrollments are declining. And in part, they're declining because universities are withdrawing funding from these areas and they are changing their curricula so that students aren't required to take much by way of humanities. And so at my university, for example, we have a new curriculum, and instead of students having to take a course in history before 1750, every student has to take a course on the human past. Well, you know, our podcast last week was the Human Past. And so, and this is typical of universities throughout the country, the emphasis on history and on philosophy and on classics and on logic is in decline. And it's just occurred to me recently, these two things are not Unrelated, that we have a population that is unable and untrained in being able to analyze argumentation and to recognize what's true and what's false and to establish what's historical and non historical. That people just take other people's word for it. People that they for some reason like and aren't able to do the evaluation themselves and simply are susceptible to conspiracy theory more than ever. Part of this is social media, of course, and are just simply inclined to think one thing or another without even thinking about it. And man, that is not good for the world. As we are seeing increasingly in international affairs, but also national affairs and just on the personal level. Humanities are disciplines that teach people how to think. It isn't so much about learning content, although that's a large part of it, but it's also knowing how to make an argument and evaluate an argument and to see reason and recognize what is not a good argument. So the decline of the humanities is happening precisely the time when we need to increase the humanities and increase the understanding of how to make argumentation and how to understand our world. So anyway, it's more of a frustration than anything because there's nothing I'm going to be able to do to change it. But it does seem to me that this is a very, very bad move in the history of our civilization.
- [34:47]
Megan Lewis
Yes, I would entirely agree with that one. And something that we're trying to do as parents is cover critical thinking at home if it's not coming up at school. Although I have to say that the local high school is excellent. And we do have. Our daughter does come home with some really good talking points that she's been introduced to during classes.
- [35:07]
Bart Ehrman
Encourage it. Yeah, let's get people to think.
- [35:11]
Megan Lewis
So before we finish then, for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spok about today?
- [35:15]
Bart Ehrman
Today we were talking about how sometimes Christians tell God what he has to do. He has to inspire a Bible. You can't have a true religion without a Bible. And if he inspires a Bible, it has to be inerrant. For example, you knew you can't inspire a story about Adam and Eve unless there really was an Adam and Eve. You have to create a world where there is free will so that there will be suffering. You have to create a world in which there are tectonic plates or you can't have life. You have to create. You have to require a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. I mean, you know, God has to do these things. Why? Well, because that's just what he has to do. Once you say that, you're saying there's something larger than God that's controlling God. And I think within the Christian tradition, that doesn't make sense. And so I think that people probably, when deciding on what the religious views are, probably ought to use a little bit more of this logic we were just talking about and a little bit less of just trusting what somebody else has told them and saying, well, it has to be that way.
- [36:12]
Megan Lewis
Bart thank you very much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we going to be talking about?
- [36:32]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, next week we're talking about something that is really close to me in my head, which is, is it possible to have a life of meaning and purpose without believing in God? Or does one need have religious faith? We're going to talk about that one.
- [36:48]
Megan Lewis
We will see you all then. Thank you and goodbye.
- [36:54]
Podcast Announcer
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.