When Theology Collides with Science and History

Deities and miracles vanish

For thousands of years, humans have been imagining and inventing gods. Once ideas about gods have been locked into human brains, fierce loyalties and certainties develop. People who claim privileged knowledge of the gods emerge—the priestly classes—and they do their best to enforce “correct” beliefs and behaviors. Today we call them clergy, and there are thousands of different brands, all of whom are confident of the “truths” they advocate. 
 
Just how many gods have been imagined?

  
 

Prolific atheist author Guy P. Harrison, posted this on his Facebook page, 20 August 2024:
 
“For some reason many people have it in their heads that the number of claimed gods is 3,000. This quote by Ricky Gervais about atheism is a typical example: ‘Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.’ 
I'm not sure what the source is of this number, but it is wildly wrong. Humans, past and present, have claimed that HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of gods are real…The number of religions is difficult to quantify because it depends on how one splits the holy hairs. For example, is Christianity one religion or 50,000 distinct religions? Is Mormonism the same religion as the Orthodox Catholic Church? Also, keep in mind that we know little or nothing about the gods and religions of prehistoric people who account for 99 percent of human existence. Bottom line: According to people, past and present, there are hundreds of millions of gods and hundreds of thousands of religions.”
 
Modern Christians, carefully tutored in Sunday Schools and Catechism, assume that their religion is the only correct one—which is ironic, since there are so many Christian brands that don’t agree. But all these devout folks remain largely unaware of the realities about religion that Harrison has described. Out of millions of religions, how can they possibly be sure that they know the exclusive truth about god? That’s the result of the careful tutoring. 
 
Christians are confident that they believe in the “one true god” —they know for sure there aren’t many gods. Yet Christianity itself seems to be a compromised version of monotheism. How well I remember the processional hymn for our Sunday worship in a Methodist church in rural Indiana: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty…God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” How can a monotheistic god be in three persons? By which is meant, father, son, and holy spirit. The Catholic

Church is confident there’s a fourth person, i.e., Mary, the Mother of God, Queen of Heaven. Appearing throughout the world through the centuries, she seems to have an independent career!
 
But the collision of theology with science and history is fatal. It is the study of science—especially archaeology—and history that has revealed the complex history of religion, cluttered with millions of gods. Christianity is especially vulnerable, as Richard Carrier has pointed out in his 2018 essay about a lot of other dying-and-rising personal savior gods that predated the Jesus cult that emerged in the first century. 
 
Astronomy dealt a fatal blow to the biblical view of the cosmos, i.e., a flat earth as the center of it all, with the realm of its god in the sky below the moon, where the deity was able to keep a close watch on every human being. As curious thinkers used increasingly advanced telescopes to study the heavens, it became clear that there are other planets in our solar system—totally unknown to the Bible authors—and that there is probably so much beyond, the thousands of stars visible from earth being a major clue.   
 
Next month, 6 October, marks the 101^st anniversary of Edwin Hubble’s momentous discovery, in 1923, that the swirl of stars that was known as Andromeda, is indeed another galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. Until that time it had been a common assumption among astronomers that our Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. With

Hubble’s discovery—captured in what has to rank as one of the most important photographs ever taken—it became obvious as there many other galaxies. In the decades since then, it became clear that there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies. In December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope was aimed at a tiny patch of space (about the size of a tennis ball seen from 100 meters). Almost 3,000 galaxies could be counted on the photographic plate. 
 
Does the biblical concept of a god right overhead, watching, monitoring, every human being make sense given what we now know about the Cosmos? That would be a stretch, indeed, it becomes highly improbable. What are the odds that a cosmic creator would even know about or care about our species on one tiny planet lost in space? We have to wonder what percentage of devout churchgoers are even aware of the information revealed by astronomers. This is a devastating collision of theology with science. 
 
The collision of theology with history is just as crippling. It is now obvious that the authors of the four gospels were theologians, not historians. We don’t even know who they were. The traditional names are not found in the documents themselves, but were added much later. None of the authors identify their sources. Luke makes a stab at it, referring to eyewitnesses at the beginning of his gospel—but then neglects to say who they were, or to identify any of his sources. At the end of John’s gospel—the last to be written, decades after the death of Jesus—the so-called beloved disciple (who is not mentioned at all in the other gospels) is identified as the custodian of the stories about Jesus. Could anything be more unlikely? So much material in this gospel is not found in the other gospels, and so much in the other gospels is not included here. We have a right to be very suspicious. 
 
And our suspicion deepens. Lay people are not taught, much less encouraged, to read the gospels critically and skeptically. They are assured that these documents were inspired directly by their god—and hence should be without errors or mistakes. But there is the vast industry of Bible scholar who know this is not the case at all, and they have devoted so much energy to explaining away the mistakes, or adopting the metaphor strategy: “We don’t have to take all of the gospel stories literally, we can understand them as metaphors.” 
 
It would be far better to just admit that the gospels are theologies, saturated with fantasy, miracles folklore, and magical thinking. Their authors were devoted to advocating for the Jesus cult. A fine introduction to this reality is another Richard Carrier article, published 30 July 2024, All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark. It is vital to realize that, without named sources and the citing of contemporaneous documentation (such as letters and diaries written at the time of Jesus, to which historians would have access), not a single event or quote attributed to Jesus in the gospels can be verified. Quite on purpose, the gospels are theology, not history. 
 
This week I am in Milano, Italy, and have been visiting favorite museums. Hundreds of paintings—room after room—depict Mary and child, and so many “events” described in the gospels, or inferred from them. No wonder Christianity has had such staying power: the gospel accounts were taken seriously for centuries. 
 
Humanity would be much better off if the collision of theology with science and history had occurred much earlier. 
 
  
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.