Jesus desires all to be saved, just not that badly...

So asteroids are on their way to destroy the earth. Aliens show up and declare that their spaceships (which have no weapons capabilities to destroy the killer asteroids) can keep a "few" of the world's 7 billion people alive (though they admit they’ve had really meager success at saving other planets in the past). They are only going to pick the people who they believe are worthy. It is obvious that the sensibilities of these aliens (of what constitutes "worthy") are going to vastly differ from your own despite you being a lifelong sci-fi fan. Do you feel confident about your chances of making it on the spaceship based on the idea that you hope you were the right kind of sci-fi nerd?  If they tell you that they have been using mind-control to help some people become worthy for a while now, are you now confident that you happened to be one of those people?  You’ve seen a lot of crazy people at comic-con...

I believe the above analogy is basically analogous to the Christian salvation scheme in terms of probability of success of any given human.  I’m going to argue that Jesus is just fine with losing practically everyone as the Bible and observations from natural theology (i.e. human history) relentlessly demonstrate.  

In the beginning, Jesus could have made many different couples instead of just Adam and Eve and then prevented any couples who violated the sacred tree from reproducing.  Billions of human beings would not have had to suffer for the sins of so few or be so disadvantaged from the start if only Jesus had used some forethought.  He didn’t.

Popular young earth creationist websites estimate that before Noah’s flood that wiped out the entire planet there would have been 10 million humans alive.  Jesus could have saved more than 8 of them in the ark.  He didn’t.

After leaving his people in slavery in Egypt for 400 years, Jesus led 2 million of them out into the desert with the hope of making it to the Promised Land.  Jesus could have made sure more than 2 of the original population actually made it to the Promised Land rather than sending plague after plague and just letting them wander around until they died.  He didn’t.  

Over the course of most of the Old Testament prophets Jesus is having a tug of war over his people’s loyalties between his invisible self and the inanimate objects known as stone and wood idols.  He could have done better than regularly falling back on just preserving a “remnant” of faithful Jews.  He didn’t.

Even when Israel is having its most expansive, most successful heyday during the reigns of King David and King Solomon, it should be noted that apparently Jesus is only focusing on the one small nation of Israel rather than the rest of the planet.  Jesus could have picked many chosen nations or worked with them all on a case by case basis to ensure no one would ever be born into confusing or detrimental circumstances.  He didn’t.

In the New Testament Jesus is asked if only a few will be saved from the fires of eternal damnation.  To prove that all the hardships and apparent evils in this life were worth it and that there really was some long term strategy at play, he could have said that “most” would be saved rather than only a “few.”  He didn’t.

Despite Christianity being a world class religion, self-identified Christians still only number a third of the population out of 7 billion.  Jesus could have made sure every nation from the beginning of Christianity was informed, that even that later minority of humanity was all on the same denominational/sectarian page, and that most of them took their religion seriously rather than merely being culturally (or even mistakenly) Christian.  He didn’t.

So despite being an all powerful, all knowing, and morally perfect being, and despite expressing the desire that no one should be punished for punishment's sake (Ezekiel 33:11), that he would like all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4), telling us that no one is responsible for the sins of their parents (Ezekiel 18:20), that all things are possible with this god (Matthew 19:26), and that even one lost "sheep" is worth his while (Luke 15:4), our lord and savior Jesus Christ in Matthew 7:14 confesses that there is apparently no mysterious greater good at work here since he loses the vast majority of his flock in the end.  Proverbs 22:6 even says, "Raise a child up in the way he should go and he will not depart from it."  Hmm...good advice!  Why our supposed heavenly father does not heed this obvious advice and instead lets his enemies and chaos reign on earth is beyond me.  He doesn’t seem to be trying to be successful because of egotistical reasons (as stated in Job 1:8-12) and makes negligent excuses for not tending to a fallen creation in the meantime (as in Matthew 13:24-30) as though having a police force or a legal system prior to Judgement Day is a waste of time.

Objectively speaking the odds are against you.  Satan and company, sin, death, confusion, ignorance, neglect, obscurity, bias, and whatever else still prevail the majority of the time.  It just doesn’t seem to matter than an all-powerful Holy Spirit is on your side once everything else in play is taken into account.  

Now, it could be that “few” being saved when it comes to 7 billion people might actually be a lot of people.  It could be 2 billion people!  That would classify as a “few” of them, right?  So do we breath a sigh of relief as we watch 5 billion other people burn in hell?  Are even 2/5 odds that good? Ever play Russian Roulette with 5 chambers out of 7 that are loaded (assuming a gun of that configuration actually exists...)?  

Does “few” even have to be that many (i.e. 2 billion)?  Revelation says there will be “many” who are saved.   Wouldn’t even the metaphorical 144,000 of the book of Revelation still constitute both a “few” from the standpoint of everyone and “many” from the standpoint of an individual?  144,000 is a LOT of people.  Just have them over for dinner and find out.  But didn’t I just show how abysmally poor Jesus is willing to let the scorecard be in specific cases from the Old Testament?  Eight out of ten million (0.0000008%)?  Two out of two million (.000001%)?    What is .000001% of 7 billion?  7,000?  That’s still a lot of people, right?  It’s also still just a few in reference to 7 billion.  It’s also apparently well within a divine being’s threshold of acceptable success, er, failure.  

So why aren’t Christians terrified?  

Maybe it’s because general Christian complacency is taken to be evidence of the confidence given by the Holy Spirit?  But don’t most Christian preachers rant *against* such complacency and ignorance of the Bible on a regular basis as they are disgusted by it?  Cult-think isn’t supposed to be cult-think, remember?  It’s all supposed to be just a big misunderstanding that the New Testament relentlessly seems to advocate intellectually stunted thought patterns and reality denying magical thinking to justify the belief system.  So if you’re not using cult-think you should be using something more like Bayesian reasoning.  And Bayesian reasoning requires inputting the prior probability of actual success here (i.e. not wishful thinking or obliviousness) based on the evidence we actually have from the Bible about what happens when Jesus actually tries to save people (i.e. what your religion actually teaches and the facts of the world show).  It also requires taking into serious consideration alternative explanations of the same data that we know from our experiences of the world.  I’m doing that here.  The results are grim.

Yes, an almighty god might be available to help you get to heaven, but how do you know when that is? And how do you know when you are self-deceived and/or deceived by Satan and his minions? What Christians may be most inclined to fall back on is not necessarily the work of a holy spirit. It's probably primarily enculturalization plus confirmation bias even if Christianity is true, right?  Enculturalization, complacency, and confirmation bias are real factors even if there is *also* a Holy Spirit in the mix.  Remember you have to take those alternative competing explanations seriously and factoring in their probability realistically.  There is never any obvious direct confirmation of being the “elect” in this life that is discernible through the thick fog of false religious confidence.  You don't think most people of most religions are comfortable with their religion regardless of whatever their religions teach?  That’s hardly evidence of anything!  But it is real information that responsible Christian thinkers would have to take into consideration.  

Remember, the many Bible verses that describe how hard it is to be saved are not addressed to unbelievers (i.e. Matthew 7:21-23, Revelation 3:16, Mark 4:24, Matthew 25:24, 1 Corinthians 9:24, Philippians 2:12, and Matthew 7:14).  They are primarily addressed to believers.  To sum up:  Make every effort to run the race as hard as you can with fear and trembling, because most people aren’t going to make it and Jesus is going to turn away a lot of lukewarm people who thought they would make it, because well, Jesus is an amoral asshole who does whatever the hell he wants.  So yeah, Jesus may well want everyone to be saved, but just not that badly as he is clearly willing to settle for only a handful.

The Sex Advice of Moses

This is how I imagine the conversation between Moses and his scribe went on certain topics:

Scribe: So uh, when you say, "Don't lie with a man like you lie with a woman" do you mean that men should have sex with men *differently* than they have sex with women or not at all?

Moses:  What?

Scribe:  Well it's just in this section where it seems like if mixing fabrics is a bad thing, well then perhaps keeping your sexual positions distinct between sexes might be in order as well?

Moses:  It's just a euphemism for not doing it with men at all.  Why do you ask?

Scribe:  Well when many of the men in the camp heard about this they were afraid they couldn't have sex with their wives like they were having sex with their boyfriends.

Moses:  Come again?

Scribe: In the butt.

Moses:  Wait...they do that?  To women?

Scribe:  Oh yes.  Actually man on woman butt sex happens a lot more than man on man butt sex.  There's just more man/woman couples.  I took a class on statistics in Egypt.  Mind boggling, I know.

Moses:  Well I don't believe it.  They poop from there.  So that doesn't happen.

Scribe:  Right, right.  Okay...and um, what about women?  Are women allowed to lie with other women like they lie with men?  You don't seem to address the topic at all.

Moses:  Well yeah.  Why bother?  How could they possibly even do that?

Scribe:  Well, uh, you know how your wife Miriam and her best friend um...have fun in their own tent late at night?

Moses:  You mean when they give each other vigorous back rubs?  They are rather loud.

Scribe:  No...I think they're rubbing each other's clitorises.

Moses:  What's a clitoris?

Scribe:  Right.  Um...it's that special place in front of their...

Moses:  I have no idea what you are talking about.

Scribe:  ...

Moses:  Look, if anyone is questioning my rules, tell them I know in my heart that they are perfect laws ultimately given by Yahweh himself.

Scribe:  I'm pretty sure the heart is a blood pump, right?

Moses:  Yeah, where I know things.  It makes beating sounds so I know that's where my thoughts happen.

Scribe:  Right, I haven't figured out how I feel about the whole "makes cool sounds" argument yet.  I'll get back to you on that.

Why Evolution Makes Sense

I was drawn into Christianity primarily by the young earth creationist book, “The World that Perished” by John Whitcomb and remained a defender from age 16 to age 24 when I finally decided I wasn’t really sure of anything.  Most modern young earth creationists believe in genetic conservation, limited speciation, genetic degradation, and extinction, but deny that genetic change through natural selection can add up to greater levels of complexity over long periods of time.  Since the slow accumulation of complexity isn’t something immediately (or at least easily) observable I always realized the debate with evolutionists is really about a tiny percentage of genetic change that may be going on in the world right now in any given species...  And to be fair (in hindsight), how exactly would you prove that wrong?  If creationists aren't going to demonstrate their god's magic in the lab, why do evolutionists have to prove their case even if they are arrogantly overstating it?  Last time I checked an argument from your ideological opponent's arrogance is not sound.  Why shouldn’t intellectually honest people at least be agnostic on the creation/evolution debates (and therefore whatever follows from them)?  I've since moved beyond agnosticism on the issue.

Ultimately most doubters of evolution seem to want to know why a copy of a copy of a copy doesn't just degenerate to extinction over a long enough period of time regardless of the curbing of natural selection and all of the mistake fixing mechanisms currently in place in cells.  It is at least a fair question that deserves a direct response regardless of unrelated misconceptions about the second law of thermodynamics that are often pointed out by defenders of evolution.  Pointing to other good evidence that indicated complex organisms arose from simple ones doesn’t exclude some magical mechanism.  Some sort of magical vitalism might be true underpinning subtle changes in species over long periods of time.  Responses from evolutionists like, "There are examples of limited self organization like snowflakes," while relevant to a degree don't seem to address the sheer magnitude of the accumulated complexity.  It is more like expecting Superman's Fortress of Solitude to emerge from a random crystalline structure rather than extremely advanced Kryptonian engineering.  So why would natural selection work?

Numbers.  Human “middle world” sensibilities wildly diverge from reality here because of the “magic” of extremely large numbers.  If you ask your average person, for example, how much money they would have if you doubled the amount of money you gave them every day for one month, starting with a penny (then giving them 2 pennies, then 4 more, then 8, etc.), none of them will predict anything like the correct answer.  Most say maybe a hundred dollars, maximum, but the real answer is over 10 million dollars.  Math.  We’re intuitively bad at it.  This is a problem when we're evaluating the most likely outcomes of certain complex physical processes that seem to run counter to our estimations (especially if we have some serious emotional investment in the outcome for the legitimacy of our favorite religion).  What happens when the outcome actually hinges on the technicalities off our human radar?

Self-replicating molecules know no such limitations.  For example, in just one species of bacteria alive today on earth, trillions of replications are occurring every single day.  That means that absolutely perfect copies will be made rather often by sheer chance alone and hence will preserve that replication process absolutely indefinitely.  So that’s why stuff doesn’t have to degrade in principle.

Note, according to mainstream science, life wasn’t doing much more than single cellular replication for three whole quarters of the last 3.8 billion years.  It was just getting really, really really, really, really really, really good at making various spins on the most basic units of life.  That’s kind of like being a baby for 2.8 billion years and then deciding you’ve mastered crying and pooping in your diaper well enough before you’re ready to grow up.

Now if you’ve filled up the planet with a variety of replicators which are ultimately immune to degradation thanks to math, odds are that something is going to manage to do even better than “perfect replication” and inadvertently start to climb even higher on the complexity and innovation scales.  The continuance of life depends on replication and you don’t need more than the single cellular world to do that really well.  Single-celled organisms are still with us in the gazillions and don’t need us to pick up the slack to keep up the charade.  Anything above and beyond that is pure numerical privilege and escalation as replicators compete with each other for resources in varying environments.  I think Lieutenant Gordon said it best:

***

Jim Gordon: What about escalation?

Batman: Escalation?

Jim Gordon: We start carrying semi automatics, they buy automatics, we start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds, and *you're* wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops.

***              

Suddenly, Batman!  You get where this is going.  The substitution for the human intentionality in this analogy (since evolution is not an entity in and of itself, has no awareness or foresight, and no particular goal in mind) is the idea that random chance variation of replicators ends up trying out all sorts of replicator possibilities and the replicators that happen to have an advantage in relation to their competitors in a given environment will be the ones inevitably surviving to produce more offspring.  It’s all pure physical logistics.  So juxtaposed with bare replication, the human brain that can actually contemplate all this incredulously is pretty gratuitous, but only incidentally gratuitous and certainly not representative of what evolution has generally produced in the vast tree of life.

So where are all the transitional forms?  Well, even if we didn’t have the fossil record, they’re still here.  There are still single celled organisms, multicellular organisms, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, monkeys, and your parents.  [Unless you are Batman, sorry!]  One would think that if creationists wanted to ask why there are still monkeys, they would actually be asking why is there anything at all besides humans (as though everything is supposed to evolve in lockstep)?

A creationist asking for transitional forms between humans and mammals who happened to have never been exposed to the entire primate order would likely be blown away by the evidence of many different species of primate who are almost upright, really smart, and share many basic social characteristics with humans.  Remember, a god wouldn’t have to create people and animals with anything in common at all and yet the process of evolution would require this to be the case.  Why do humans commonly have knee and back problems, occasionally have vestigial tails (some of which can actually move with muscle control), why do humans get goosebumps which in other species the same mechanism is meant to puff out a full coat of hair to be intimidating, and why do we have jaws too small to hold our wisdom teeth in?  Is it because Adam and Eve looked a lot more like monkeys than modern creationists would be comfortable with?  Doubtful.  More than likely it's because we have a common ancestor with our fellow primates.

On top of that, why is it that snakes, dolphins, and whales have been found with vestigial legs?  Is it because a whimsical, sex positive god wanted to allow some lucky whales to curl their toes during sex?  Or is it because snakes have legged lizard ancestors and aquatic mammals have land mammal ancestors as we would expect from the tree of life if evolution brought the current species into being?

We have E-Coli bacteria that were able in the lab over many generations to mutate and start processing nylon, a synthetic fabric invented recently.  The bacteria does this extremely inefficiently, but it does do it.  And we have every generation of those bacteria preserved on file and we can identify which mutations enabled this to happen.  What do you suppose would happen if these bacteria were left to their own devices for millions of years?  They’d probably leave behind ancestors much more adept at processing nylon.

I have lots of incredulity about young earth creationist explanations if it's a debate about your incredulity  about naturalistic explanations.  Whose incredulity wins the day if we're being fair?  Dendrochronology seems to very straightforwardly leave no room for Noah’s flood.  Google it.  Modern Creationist organizations still have no explanation for the massively excessive radioactive decay in fossil layers which would have boiled away the oceans if released in the same year.  Even if the radioactive decay can magically be there and then the heat be magically taken away...why in the world did those geological processes go through that charade at all?  It also seems like there is ample opportunity to find the absolutely wrong animal in the wrong layer of geology to disprove the general evolutionary scheme of things and yet somehow there's still a massive worldwide consensus the evidence generally lines up according to evolutionary expectations. Conspiracy?  Shouldn't both extant and extinct similar types of creatures have been found in the same strata if it was just about the hydrodynamics of one worldwide flood?  There’s the issue of how creationists have to expect more evolution than evolutionists in the last 4,000 years since Noah’s flood to account for the supposed 16,000 representatives of the "created kinds" being crammed into one boat and then diverging into the many millions of species we see today.  Etc.  Obviously there's lots of issues here few of us are qualified to fully resolve.  For the basics of the evolution side of things, I would recommend to my creationist friends to read carefully through Douglas Theobald's handy "29 Evidences for Macroevolution" online (and even read the creationist Ashby Camp's responses) and Jerry Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True." Or just read the wiki page on evolution.  There's tons of stuff around the internet.

I recall the feeling even at the very beginning of my creationist career of John Whitcomb magic-bulleting the Noah’s flood explanation against the general trend of geological evidence which Whitcomb himself was presenting.  It made me uncomfortable even when I wanted it to be true.  To the extent I have been able in recent years to scrutinize the back and forth between creationists and evolutionists, I’ve always found evolution to be very friendly with the mutually converging lines of evidence while creationists could only stretch hard to accommodate it.  That is, after I retrained myself from creationist-think to not think in black and white categories and was willing to weigh evidence for the sake of dueling cumulative cases.  With unfair standards of evidence the theory of evolution couldn’t beat a gnomes-made-everything-yesterday belief system either.  That’s nothing to brag about if you’re a gnomist or if you happen to believe in merely an older young earth creationism.