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TimS comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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The misunderstanding is that Christianity doesn't hinge on the existence of talking snakes, any more than evolution hinges on monkeys giving birth to humans. The error in logic is the same in both arguments.
Why doesn't Christianity hinge on their being talking snakes? The snake is part of their origin story, a core element in their belief system. Without it, what happens to original sin? And you will also have to question if not everything else in the bible is also just stories. If it's not the revealed truth of God, why should any of the other stories be real - such as the ones about how Jesus was god's son?
And, if I am wrong in that Christianity doesn't need that particular story to be true, then there is still a weaker form of the argument. Namely that a large percentage of christians believe in this story, and two hundred years ago I'd guess almost every christian believed in it, but you cannot find any leading evolutionist who claims that monkeys gave birth to humans.
Ultimately, outsiders cannot define the content or centrality of parts of a belief system. If believers say it is a metaphor, then it is a metaphor. In other words, if believers retreat empirically to the point of invisible dragons, you can't stop them. Invisible dragons aren't incoherent, they are just boring.
That large sub-groups of Christians believe something empirically false does not disprove Christianity as a whole, especially since there is widespread disagreement as to who is a "true" Christian.
Citation needed. You sound overconfident here.
I would say CarlJ is right about general Christian belief in the past from Historical Theology by Gregg R. Allison
For how this would apply to the snake in the garden see this: Jamieson
And also correct that the doctrine is important to many Christians today from Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem
So I think a successful attack on this point would be significant.
But I think Eliezer is correct there isn't extra improbability in the snake than in other elements of the creation story. I don't think most people would find absurd the possibility that an engineer could build a snake like robot that you could use a radio link to speak through, so, given the creation of entire planets and all the plant and animal life, someone talking through a snake in not an additional stretch.
But I think Yvain is getting at something additional here. The reason the snake in particular seems absurd is that talking animals pattern match to things like Kipling's Just So Stories and Aesop's Fables. But that connection is in the map, not the territory. Using that as your leading argument against Christianity makes it sound like you've used a lazy and flawed heuristic to dismiss the religion, rather than actually considered it rationally and found it wanting.
Thank you for the source! (I'd upvote but have a negative score.)
If you interpret the story as plausibly as possible, then sure, the talking snake isn't that much different from a technologically superior species that created a big bang, terraformed the earth, implanted it with different animals (and placed misleading signs of an earlier race of animals and plants genetically related to the ones existing), and then created humans in a specially placed area where the trees and animals were micromanaged to suit the humans needs. All within the realm of the possible.
But, the usual story isn't that it was created by technological means, but by supernatural means. God is supposed to have created the world from some magical ability. So, to criticize the christian story is to criticize it as being magical. And if one finds it difficult to believe one part of that story, then all parts should be equally contested.
Regarding Yvain's point - I think it is true that one could just associate "stories about talking animals" with "other stories about animals that everyone knows are patently false" and then not believe in the first story as well. But, it is not just in the mind's map of the world that this connection occurs, because the second story is connected to the world. That is, when one things about Aesop's Fables you know (though not always consciously) that these stories are false.
So, to trigger the mind to establish a connection between Eden and Aesop, the mind makes the connection that "Stories that people believe are false", but the mind has good arguments to not believe in Aesop's fables, because there aren't any talking animals, and if that idea is part of knocking down Eden, then it is a fully rational way to dismiss Christianity. Definitely not thorough, and, again, it's maybe not a reliable way of convincing others.
Biologically speaking humans are animals and we talk. And since evolution resulted in one type of animal that talks couldn't it result in others, maybe even other that have since gone extinct? So there has to be an additional reason to dismiss the story other than talking animals being rationally impossible. You mention that the problem is the "magical" causation, which you see as a synonym for supernatural, whereas in Christian Theology it is closer to an antonym.
So let me tell you a story I made up:
Thahg and Zog are aliens in a faraway solar system study species of other planets. One day Thahg shows a pocket watch to Zog and says "Look, I think a human made this." Zog says, "What's a human?" "A human is a featherless biped from Earth" Zog thinks about what animals come from earth and the only one he can think of is a chicken. He laughs and says, "You think a plucked chicken made that? Boy, are you nuts!"
And of course Thahg would then look at Zog like he was nuts, because the absurdity Zog is seeing is coming from Zog's own lack of appropriate reference categories rather than an actual problem with Thahg's conjecture.
For another example suppose the Muslim woman Yvain was talking to had said "I don't believe that evolution could work because alleles that sweep through populations more often then not reduce the kolmogorov complexity of the genes' effect on phenotype." Yvain may still think she is just as wrong, but she has demonstrated intellectual engagement with the subject rather then just demonstrating she had no mental concept for genetic change over time, like the 'monkeys give birth to humans' objection demonstrates.
So the problem is saying that talking snakes are magical and therefore ridiculous sound more like "My mental concepts are too limited to comprehend your explanation" than like "I understood your explanation and it has X, Y and Z logical problems."
I think there are two separate questions here.
First: does saying "hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous" sound like it demonstrates a lack of understanding and engagement? I think the answer to that is clearly yes, at least if you say it to thoughtful people with some understanding of this stuff. (But maybe not if you say it to people who are already convinced or to people who haven't given serious thought to these questions at all; so maybe Maher was preaching to the choir[1] and/or trying to shock unthinking believers into questioning their beliefs for the first time.)
[1] A curious phrase, that. Some Christian churches -- I'm thinking e.g. of Anglican cathedrals and Oxbridge college chapels, where the music is a Big Deal -- have quite a lot of people in their choirs who are there only for the music and might be perfectly reasonable targets for preaching.
Second: does saying "hahaha, these guys believe in talking snakes, how ridiculous" actually demonstrate a lack of understanding and engagement? I think it clearly does in some cases (and suspect Bill Maher is one), but I think (1) there really is an argument against (some versions of) Christianity based on the silliness of believing in talking snakes, and (2) some (rude) people may choose to express it in simple in-yer-face terms even though they're capable of making a more sophisticated version that isn't so liable to look like lack of understanding and engagement.
The sophisticated version I have in mind, which I've sketched elsewhere in this thread, goes something like this.
I personally think that saying "hahaha, talking snake" is counterproductive as well as rude, and I agree with Yvain that if you find a lot of smart people apparently believing in talking snakes then you should very seriously consider the possibility that (1) they don't believe quite what you think they do and/or (2) their beliefs are more defensible than they sound. But I also think -- and my impression from the note at the end of the OP is that Yvain does too -- that someone saying "hahaha, talking snake" may actually have a pretty good understanding of the issues and be making (or at least gesturing towards) a reasonable argument.
[EDITED to acknowledge that the devil-snake interpretation is quite widely believed and comment on that, and to tweak some wording a bit elsewhere.]
I would agree that there are some Christians whose belief set could be vulnerable on the point of talking snakes. I can think of several different arguments depending on what other ideas they were holding in conjunction with their interpretation of Genesis. Using a blanket dismissal would have the advantage that you wouldn’t have to figure out which one would work on your target. But I think we would both agree it could also potentially backfire.
Concerning the issue you presented, that ”natural” snakes just can’t work like that. I think you have considerably underplayed your hand. Consider Gen 1:29-30:
That’s right, in the Garden of Eden every single animal was vegan. And ecosystems just don’t work like that. And I would go further and say that all these animals had the capacity at this time to live forever. Death didn’t enter the world till the fall. Rom. 5:12-14:
So we are dealing with quite a big discrepancy from known biology here, and that would be a problem if I were a (Uniformitarian.)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism] But fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian than main stream society. So the idea that God had a different biological system set up initially, and He changed the rules as part of the curse, seems not only plausible, but a nature part of the story.
Also it sort of seems you might be unconsciously assuming the traditional pictorial representation of a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch. But the text doesn't say the serpent was in the tree or give any other reference to size. I tend to picture something more like a Chinese dragon standing on all fours, shoulder to shoulder with Eve. So I don’t get the “brain box obviously too small for speech” effect from my mental picture.
(Note on the preferences for Satan controlling the snake showing an awareness that the talking snake is silly, I think this is more about emphasizing Gen. 3:15 as a Christological prophesy and generally framing the whole story as part of a Christological arch where the first Adam brings san and death and the second Adam (Jesus) brings salvation and life. Having the Devil tempting Adam and Eve here makes a parallel with Christ’s temptation in the desert and with Judas Iscariot’s temptation to betray Jesus. Finding Christological interpretations is a big motivator of Christian Theology.)
You might have the impression (given certain things in that Wikipedia article; not everything there is entirely accurate) that uniformitarianism is a premise which is used to interpret the world. Historically, that's inaccurate. Geologists were young earth creationists in the first place, but changed their minds and adopted uniformitarianism as a conclusion, not as a premise, because the facts on the ground did not fit with creationism, not even if the rules have changed.
That's a fair point. But it seems to me that it amounts to saying that nothing in the stories in your scriptures could count as much evidence against their accuracy. (Suppose it said "And Adam, when he heard the sentence that the LORD God had passed upon him, knelt down upon the red grass and laughed for sorrow and shame" -- well, it's only uniformitarianism that entitles us to expect the grass to have been green or laughter to have been an unlikely response to sorrow and shame. Etc.)
In which case, you're also awfully limited in what conclusions you can draw from anything in those stories. "Genesis 3 indicates that God greatly values obedience to his commands." No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might want something very different from us now. "The story of the Great Flood indicates that God has authority over the weather on earth." No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might have somehow given up that authority since then. Do these stories actually have much value, if everything they describe might have changed utterly?
(You might say that God's character and values are known to be stable, unlike the laws of physics or anything in biology. But the sources that tell you that are 2000 years old! That's, like, 25% of the entire age of the universe! If God's character and values were changing on that sort of timescale, it's perfectly possible that these ancient texts might declare them to be stable even though they aren't.)
I don't think I was consciously or unconsciously assuming that. But I was assuming something that's recognizably the same sort of animal as today's snakes -- God says "upon your belly shall you go", etc., not "I shall replace you with something 1/4 the size which shall go upon its belly". I think I agree, though, that the Chinese-dragon interpretation is at least kinda tenable.
OK, that's a good point. (In terms of what it says about where Christian interpretations of Genesis 3 come from; I don't think the Christian tradition of finding prophecies and parallels everywhere in the OT is actually intellectually healthy, but it's certainly a real thing.)
But ... how good is that parallel, actually? I mean, Judas is not (so far as I can tell) in any way usefully parallel to either Adam or Eve, and the temptation of Jesus seems very different in kind from that of Eve, and most of the actual opposition Jesus is reported to have had comes from very human sources.
I think if you're looking for a parallel to the temptation-and-disobedience of Adam and Eve, through which sin and death enter the world, the place you need to look is for some temptation-and-obedience of Jesus through which sin and death are conquered. And there is indeed an obvious such thing, which takes place in the (aha!) garden of Gethsemane, where he is clearly at least considering the possibility of saying "no" to what he has to do but goes ahead with it ("not my will, but yours, be done"). But this temptation is, so far as the stories say, entirely endogenous; we're shown no tempter, whether human or animal or evil spirit. So I'm not really seeing how any parallel between the Adam&Eve story and the Jesus story is made closer by having the snake in Eden be possessed by, controlled by, or an incarnation of, the devil.
That doesn't mean that the tradition that says the snake "was" the devil doesn't arise from a desire to find such parallels, of course. But it doesn't seem to me so obviously well explained in those terms as to make me abandon my more cynical theory :-).
There's one in Matthew 4 verse 1 to 11, in which Jesus spends forty days in the desert, fasting, and then is visited (and tempted) by the Devil.
I agree that not being a Uniformitarian makes the makes the evidence harder to deal with and is generally a headache for everyone. But it should not be used to let a historical theory get away with anomaly without any hit to its plausibility, it should just reduce the size of the plausibility hit. Also several anomalies that are being explained by the same rule change only make up one plausibility hit rather than being additive.
On Christological interpretations, I agree it can get out of hand, and I'm not sure they are very valid here, But if "and He should crush your head" is going of be a prophesy about Jesus, well there isn't a story of Him dramatically crushing a snake's head, so it's got to a general stamina out His victory of death, sin, and the devil, so I do think people are using that frame to identify Satan and the serpent.
Not sure where to start regarding the oddly-named "Occam's Razor" - though we can immediately dismiss the idea that one could do Newtonian Science without it. Possibly we'll discuss this, and modern attempts to formalize simplicity, some other time.
Let me quickly note that the Chinese dragon interpretation would make God's curse on the serpent even weirder.
It seems to me that one change at a fundamental level could have less Kolmogorov complexity then several special case exceptions at a surface level. And that is what the bringer change sounds like to me, something at a deep level, connected to death, propagating all through the system.
Since we are already talking about going from a legged animal to a legless one, I don't see that doing it on a more massive animal can make a significant change in the complexity penalty.
I hope you're familiar with Clarke's Third Law?
Believers can say "we've chosen to take it as a metaphor now".
But if the believers make statements referencing the past or other believers, they can't say that any more. And typically they do.
I believe you are making a charge (which I have heard made before) that the claim that some scriptural passages were intended as metaphors is a relatively recent innovation among believers to accommodate religion to modern scientific discoveries, and that it breaks with the traditional, literal interpretation of those passages. In fact, there is a long tradition among theologians to recognize that much of scripture should be interpreted metaphorically and/or allegorically rather than literally. Examples include Origen of Alexandria (late second - early third century CE) who took much of the Garden of Eden story to be allegorical, Augustine of Hippo who stated (in a work entitled The Literal Interpretation of Genesis from the early fifth century) that much of Genesis cannot and should not be interpreted literally, and Irenaeus of Lyons (second century CE) who interpreted the Garden of Eden story allegorically (in Against Heresies).
While it is certainly the case that some believers traditionally interpreted Genesis literally (and some still do), it is also the case that there is an ancient tradition of interpreting Genesis metaphorically/allegorically and so modern believers are by no means breaking with tradition if they interpret the serpent metaphorically.
Pretty much every variation on a religion you can think of has been thought up by someone, at some time in the past. You can't use that as your criteria for "ancient tradition" without making the whole concept of "ancient tradition" meaningless because now everything is one. How mainstream was the belief that Genesis is not literal?
For that matter, since religion is supposed to provide eternal truth, the idea of having a minority tradition in sometinng seems problematic. If a religion has multiple traditions at once, how do you decide which one counts as the "real" one that nonbelievers should be criticizing? And if the ancients had beliefs A or B, but moderns only have A, how do you decide that that counts as the ancients believing A (so you can claim that moderns are following tradition) rather than as the ancients believing B (which means that moderns are breaking with tradition)?
Well, the three authors that I listed are among the most influential early doctors of the church, so their views are definitely mainstream (albeit not universally held).
I don't know about that. I listed three very influential early Christian theologians who took much of Genesis to be non literal.
Your point that there are divergent views on the matter of how literally to take Genesis is certainly true and not in dispute. I alluded to that fact in my post when I said:
However, I don't see how that conflicts with my point that one can interpret the serpent story metaphorically without breaking with early mainstream Christian traditions. Moreover, you wrote:
I don't see how the fact that there are divergent interpretations of some scriptural stories is particularly surprising or problematic, unless you are trying judge ancient religious texts against the stylistic standards of modern historical or scientific writing (which presumably most people would not recommend doing).
It's problematic because it provides a ready-made excuse to deny having changed when you get something wrong and you're forced to change. "Oh, we didn't really change anything, look, we're following this old tradition", even though you could have decided any one of several mutually exclusive things and still been able to claim you're following a tradition.
Beliefs about whether or not the snake is literal are not, and never were, "core beliefs" of Christians. Core beliefs are the things that are contained in the creed, like that Jesus rose from the dead and so on.
If you found conclusive scientific proof that Jesus did not rise from the dead, very few Christians would accept that. The reaction to that, no matter how strong the proof, would be very different from the reaction to evolution.
I suspect that two hundred years ago, most scientists believed that human beings were not descended from monkeys. That does not make evolution denial a "core belief" of science, nor do the beliefs of Christians two hundred years ago automatically constitute the beliefs of Christians today.
The attitude of science to its past and the attitude of Christianity to its past are very (and relevantly) different.
In science, everything is meant to be revisable in the light of new evidence; authority is always supposed to be subordinate to reason and experimental results; there's a reason why the motto of the Royal Society is nullius in verba.
Christianity, on the other hand, has authorities up the wazoo. (Different authorities for different sects.) The Bible (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church (held by many to be perfectly free from error, subject to certain conditions). The ancient creeds (held by many to be perfectly free from error). The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Fathers. Luther. Calvin. Aquinas. Augustine. Accepted as authorities (in so far as each one is, by any given Christian) not in the way that someone might appeal to, say, Murray Gell-Mann ("he's incredibly smart and has been very reliably right before -- but of course whatever he says can be checked by other people and anyone can make mistakes") but simply because they're Known Authorities.
In science, a discovery from 200 years ago may be admired as an impressive piece of work, but the assumption is usually that since then we've improved our techniques, done more careful analysis, and superseded it.
In Christianity, all the central ideas are centuries old, they are explicitly passed down the generations, and they are believed largely because there is a tradition (etymology: a thing handed down) saying that one should believe them -- and, in many cases, because it is thought that they originally -- centuries ago -- entered the world at the command of God.
The best reason for accepting any given scientific theory is generally that there is good experimental evidence that it describes the world accurately. In principle, anyone -- at least anyone with the right skills and equipment -- can repeat the experiments and redo the mathematical analysis and arrive at the same conclusions. (Or, in some cases, arrive at different conclusions and show that everyone's been wrong.)
The best reason for accepting the central doctrines of Christianity is that there is a ~2000-year history of other Christians accepting those doctrines and believing that they derive from the all-knowing all-good creator of the universe.
(Of course the above is a bit too black-and-white. In practice most scientists believe a lot of what they do because they heard it from other scientists whose judgement they trust. Some Christians believe some of what they believe because it just feels right to them, or because they consider that God told them directly. But the difference I describe is there and it's a big deal.)
So, if it turns out that until 200 years ago all the scientists were wrong about something important, we should re-check any bits of their work that we're still depending on, but science is a largely self-correcting enterprise and it's probably no big deal. And our scientific opinions now are not supposed to -- and generally genuinely don't -- depend on the judgement, or the character, or the rightness-about-any-particular-issue, of those scientists 200 years ago and more.
But if it turns out that until 200 years ago all the Christians were wrong about something important, it's a really big deal. Because so much of what defines Christianity is what Christians of past ages have handed down, and because so often the case for believing X is something like "all the earliest Christians believed X".
I agree with this, although I do not think it is a sufficient argument to prove that Christianity is false if taken alone, and I think it is inappropriate to criticize Christians both for refusing to update on evidence and for changing their minds when they are mistaken (not that you did this here, but I frequently see it.) People certainly should change their minds when they are mistaken, and yes this makes it more likely that they are also wrong about the other things that they haven't changed their minds about yet.
I agree that it is nowhere near enough on its own to refute Christianity.
If someone (or some institution) has been wrong then they will be criticized for refusing to update if they stick to their old wrong position, and for inconsistency if they change; the fact that they are faced with these two opposite complaints doesn't mean that their critics are unreasonable, it means that once you've done something wrong it's too late for any course of action to render you immune to criticism.
Inconsistency isn't really the right thing to complain about if they change; but, actually, I think the usual complaint made by skeptics about the less-traditional sort of Christian isn't "boo, you changed and that's not allowed"; it's more like "you call yourself a Christian and offer your reasonableness as evidence that the Christian tradition is reasonable; but your position is very far from representative of the Christian tradition and your reasonableness doesn't negate its flaws". (With, perhaps, a side order of "you're adopting a position that's basically indistinguishable from ours, while wrapping yourselves in the apparel of the more popular other guys; that makes arguments with you frustrating and rather unfair".)
I meant that the origin story is a core element in their belief system, which is evident from every major christian religion has some teachings on this story.
If believers actually retreated to the position of invisible dragons, they would actually have to think about the arguments against the normal "proofs" that there is a god: "The bible, an infallible book without contradiction, says so". And, if most christians came to say that their story is absolutely non-empirically testable, they would have to disown other parts: the miracles of jesus and god, the flood, the parting of the red sea, and anything else that is testable.
I didn't say it would disprove christianity - I said it was a weaker form of the argument: there is an asymmetry between the beliefs of christians and evolutionists. But, most christians seem to believe that there is magic in this world (thanks to god). Sure, if they didn't believe it, they could still call themselves christians, but that type of christianity would probably not get many followers.