The Bible Skeptic: Close Encounters of the Trinity Kind

of the Trinity Kind

Christian internet apologist Glenn Miller, of the Christian Think-Tank, has been providing me with interesting reading as I peruse his website as of late. In a previously published article, I examined his reason why dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. Glenn believed it was because these monstrous beasts did not excite the biblical authors sufficiently enough for the various writers to include them in their script. Of course, as I noted, the writers had no problem weaving in wolves, worms, wasps and other wiggly creatures into their tales, but according to Glenn there just didn’t seem to be a plot line available in which could figure a Wannanosaurus!

In this current article, I would like examine his reason why Jesus could not have been the product of an extraterrestrial experiment. Yes, you read that correctly: I want to discuss Glenn Miller's reasons why Jesus could not have been the off-spring of aliens. It's a question that was posed to Glenn by one of his readers, a 17-year-old who asked, “Recently, there have been a lot of accusations flying around suggesting that Jesus wasn't actually a divine messenger of God, but an artificially inseminated alien…” I’m sure the teen didn’t mean to imply that Jesus himself was an artificially inseminated alien, as his sentence indicates, but that perhaps Mary was artificially inseminated by aliens and Jesus was the result. The teen admits that the argument makes “a certain amount of sense” to him and is a “scary” idea. Glenn responded by agreeing that the idea is scary and that these same thoughts once haunted him as a newly converted Christian. I’ll admit, when I was a Christian, thoughts of Jesus as the product of extraterrestrial intervention never really crossed my mind. I guess, perhaps, this is a new thing with the kids! At any rate, Glenn states that anyone promoting such an alien idea would need to answer the following questions before their assertion could even begin to receive respectable notice (all emphasis in the original):

One. Hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) of the existence of ANY EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE (we have none today, in spite of our best scientific programs and SETI-like programs)

Two. Hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's were sentient, more advanced than we, and could do Jesus-class miracles

Three. Hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's could breed cross-species with humans (no other species of life as we know it can do this)

Four. Hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's were HISTORICALLY ACTIVE in Judea at the time of the conception of Jesus

Five. Hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's were ACTUALLY INVOLVED in the case of Jesus

Glenn goes on to note,

Probabilities are NOT 'hard evidence'. Just to say something like: “With so many possible worlds, and so much time, SURELY the probabilities are good that such Alien life DOES EXIST somewhere in the universe” means nothing, evidentially. That is not 'data' or 'evidence' in favor of the speculation. Data/evidence is an 'audit trail' of an “already-happened reality”--not the possibility of that reality occurring! (emphasis original)

Now, my examination of Glenn's article isn’t really going to be about whether or not Jesus had E.T.s for parents. I instead want to point out that Glenn doesn’t see how his argument against Jesus’s alien lineage is also an argument against his own preferred story. If we were to take Glenn’s requirements for an alien parentage for Jesus and apply it to a supernatural parentage, we’d quickly find that Glenn has himself backed into a rather tight corner. Glenn believes that “it is easier to give evidence for the TRADITIONAL STORY (i.e., existence of God, biblical story, etc)” than it is to give evidence of an extraterrestrial-based story. But is it? Let’s apply Glenn’s five criteria above to the “traditional story” of Jesus’ birth. Now, I do not intend a full-scale, detailed investigation of the biblical claims since that is beyond the scope of this current article. I do, however, want to draw attention to the difficulties apologists have advancing the “traditional” story of Jesus’s birth as a historical event.

First, Glenn requires that advocates of a Jesus-Alien Connection provide “hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) of the existence of ANY EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE (we have none today, in spite of our best scientific programs and SETI-like programs).” Fair enough. Skeptics of the traditional story require from apologists for the biblical tale hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) of the existence of a omniscient, omnipotent, self-aware, personal god who intervenes in human activity (we have none today, in spite of the apologists’s best efforts and the question-begging shenanigans of theologians and church councils). No apologist, including Glenn, can produce their version of god empirically any more than a UFOlogist can produce a Gray. And remember, it’s not about probability. We already know the probability for the biblical god is actually far less than that for extraterrestrial life and Glenn has stated, “probability won’t cut it.” In Richard Dawkins’s bestselling book, The God Delusion, he discusses the probability of such a god and it is an argument much advanced by other atheists. The assertion that a god exists is a scientific assertion; one that can be investigated for truth or falsity. What one concludes after dissecting the available evidence is that the probability for any supreme supernatural force is exceedingly small. As this force begins to take on characteristics of humanity –intelligence, personality, loves, hopes and desires, etc.—the probability for such a being’s existence drops to magnitudes less than a hair-breadth of zero. Add to this a god who interferes with human activity, manipulates matter and impregnates young girls and you have the beginnings of a plotline for one of Grimm’s fairy tales or Aesop’s fables. [1]

But what is the probability for life elsewhere in the universe? Is such a question even viable? It is. And it is a much more viable question than one which ponders the existence of that which cannot be tested for against nature, tested against what we already know of the physical universe. The Drake Equation is the most famous of attempts to estimate the number of planets just in our galaxy that might support intelligent life (Drake’s original formula set the number at 10,000! I played around with the formula using numbers I subjectively felt were more reasonable and came up with 716…). But the universe is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies so the estimates for life in the universe will be higher than those tabulated for life just in the Milky Way. In May of 2002, New Scientist magazine published an article which stated,

According to a new statistical analysis based on how quickly life got going on Earth, life will start on at least a third of Earth-like planets within a billion years of them developing suitable conditions. And with recent discoveries that planets are common around Sun-like stars, there's probably no shortage of prospective homes.

I challenge any apologist or theologian to scientifically evidence the probability of their god and then of their god artificially inseminating a young Jewish virgin 2,000 years ago in a backwater town in northern Palestine with the same scientific confidence. To what statistical analysis can they point? What study of virgins conceiving without human male sexual penetration can they reference? Where can they turn, except to the Bible itself, to evidence divine involvement in Jesus’ birth? While Glenn may caution that “probability won’t cut it,” he fails to realize his own preferred tale of Jesus’s parentage doesn’t even have probability behind it at all. No wonder he wants to remove probability from the discussion.

Second on Glenn’s list, he requires advocates of alien involvement in Jesus’s birth to produce “hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's were sentient, more advanced than we, and could do Jesus-class miracles.” There’s a few things wrong here. If we, for argument’s sake, assume that extraterrestrials could have visited earth 2,000 years ago and involved themselves in Jesus’s birth, why wouldn’t these beings be at least as advanced as we are (with the single exception of interstellar space travel!) and have the technology, as we do, to artificially inseminate a girl and do things like give water artificial flavoring, cure certain ailments, revive “dead” bodies, and so on? Indeed, if these beings had the technology to travel between stars, they’d have already demonstrated technological advancement far beyond our own! So, for those “miracles” that appear to be beyond even our own technology, such “miracles” may not have been at all difficult for an advanced civilization. We need only look at the technology invented for such science-fiction fantasies as Star Trek for possible explanations of Jesus’s miracles. The multiplying of the loaves and fish may have been done with an alien food replicator! The sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration may have been accomplished by a transporter! Are these explanations any more extreme than attributing such miracles to a supernatural being with the ability to manipulate matter? Certainly to an ancient our ability to communicate long distances using satellites, cell phones and Bluetooth headsets would seem like a miracle. The fact that we can see inside bodies, mend broken bones and cure diseases would seem god-like to them. If an alien race did run an experiment in the backwaters of Judea 2000 years ago, their technologies may very well have seemed god-like to the people of the region and have been interpreted in the context of the Judaism of the day.

If someone is going to advance extraterrestrial parents for Jesus, Glenn thirdly requires that they show “hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's could breed cross-species with humans (no other species of life as we know it can do this).” By the same token, without resorting to special pleading, circular argumentation [2] and speculation, those advancing Jesus’s divine parentage need to show hard scientific evidence how something beyond the physical universe can nonetheless interact with biological entities of the natural world and cause them to reproduce another of their own species. Forget how cross-species fertilization can happen; worry about how cross-dimensional fertilization can occur! Scientifically, how does a virgin female gain the extra set of chromosomes to produce a new human being without those chromosomes coming from male insemination? And, might I caution, “poof” is not a sufficient explanation.

Glenn next requires that promoters of the Jesus-Alien Connection provide “hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's were HISTORICALLY ACTIVE in Judea at the time of the conception of Jesus.” Of course, a cloaked ship using invisible tractor beams, food replicators and transporters would not leave behind historical evidence, except from the extraterrestrial side of the story. However, how can apologists claim that their god was historically active in Judea at the time of the conception of Jesus without resorting to special pleading or circular arguments?

Finally, Glenn would like to see “hard scientific/historical evidence (not speculation) that any such ET's were ACTUALLY INVOLVED in the case of Jesus” before he accepts the assertion that aliens were involved in Jesus’s birth. Without beating a dead horse, isn’t this the same question skeptics have been asking about Jesus’s divine paternal lineage for centuries? And haven’t the skeptics been left as unsatisfied with the apologetic responses as are advocates of the biblical tale with the responses by ufologists for their advancement of the extraterrestrial connection to Jesus?

Notice that Glenn consistently pairs “scientific” evidence with “historical” evidence. He does this because, like most apologists, he believes there is historical validity to the Jesus story. Remember, Glenn believes that “data/evidence is an 'audit trail' of an ‘already-happened reality’”. For Glenn and other believers in the biblical story, the events described in the gospels are a historical reality. These events are accepted as historical ipso facto. They serve as an “audit trail” of what occurred in first century Palestine. Reading the gospels, therefore, is reading the “data/evidence” of Jesus’s divine origins. However, regardless of whether or not Jesus was a historical figure, the divine and supernatural attributes and stories about him are far from being historical in and of themselves, regardless of what apologists assume. Indeed, accepting Jesus as a historical figure the most one can say about him from the evidence both from within the biblical text and extrabiblical sources, would be that he was an itinerant preacher who wound up being executed by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem and that some friends and followers ended up believing he’d been raised from the dead by God as vindication for his life’s ministry. But Jesus’s life was interpreted through the Jewish and Hellenistic filters of his day. Every supernatural/religious explanation of some particular about Jesus could also be interpreted through an “extraterrestrial” filter were that to have been a popular notion at the time. Indeed, what would be considered far-fetched ideas about Jesus in our own day were actually quite popular in the first century. Some Gnostic Christians were quite a burden to orthodoxy with their claim of Jesus as merely an illusion who did not suffer on the cross. Strange stories of visions of crosses walking out of empty tombs and speaking, of Jesus as a boy killing and resurrecting playmates, toured the eastern Roman provinces as popular alternatives to comparatively mundane tales found in our traditional four gospels. Who is to say that if the idea of extraterrestrials were as popular in the Roman world of Jesus’s day as they are in ours, that a cult would not have developed to interpret the same stories of Jesus’s birth, life and death under these alternative motifs as easily as the Gnostic ideas took root? No apologist, and certainly not Glenn Miller, can prove --either scientifically or historically—that Jesus was not of extraterrestrial origin and that his life and death were merely misinterpreted by those of his day, imprisoned as they were by the limiting worldview of Judaism. Poor Jesus of Alpha Centari (they misunderstood him to say “Alpha and Omega”) was misunderstood in his own day. He was an alien experiment gone horribly awry.

Now, I am not in the slightest promoting the idea that Jesus was an extraterrestrial, or was in some way a part of an alien experiment with human culture. What I am suggesting is that an alien backdrop to the Jesus story isn’t any more fanciful than a supernatural one. When all is said and done, if someone is going to accept Jesus as a historical figure who indeed was born, lived and died in the Palestinian region 2,000 years ago, anything outside a natural explanation for his birth should be met with extreme skepticism of the sort advanced by Glenn Miller above. Glenn provided some excellent guidelines to follow when presented with extraordinary claims. As has often been said from skeptic circles, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Glenn just doesn’t apply that same skepticism to his own preferred tale. However, how can he then fault ufologists who see support for their awkward tale of Jesus’s conception in the biblical text? You can find someone to buy any crackpot theory. Just ask the creationists. What is it that they often say regarding the evidence for evolution? “Same evidence, different interpretation.” [3] And so it is with Alien Jesus. If you have extraterrestrial gods, extraterrestrial space travelers are not that much more far-fetched.

Glenn concludes his analysis of the Jesus-From-Aliens question by noting that advocates of the idea “have NO REAL EVIDENCE (only speculations)” about alien involvement in Jesus’s birth. But, then again, the apologists have “NO REAL EVIDENCE (only speculations)” that a divine entity inseminated a Jewish virgin. Glenn complains that “MUCH of the EVIDENCE that DOES exist generally contradicts their theory.” I suppose we need to know what sort of “evidence” Glenn is talking about that supports the notion of divine impregnation in opposition to alien intervention. He also states that the Jesus-Alien promoters’s “theory is not the simplest/best explanation (law of parsimony--the simplest theory is most like the true one) of the DATA that MIGHT could be explained by their speculation (e.g. miracles).” But, somehow, Glenn is under the impression that a supernatural explanation of Jesus’s birth IS parsimonious! But, then again, he also believes dinosaurs were not mentioned in the Bible because they didn’t fit into any of the writers’s plotlines! You have to feel sort of sorry for apologists. Theirs is an unenviable job!

NOTES

1. A summary of Dawkins’s argument can be found here: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God Return to text

2. “The fallacy of special pleading or half-truth may be considered a distinctive kind of illegitimate accent. For if one emphasizes only those circumstances favourable to his own case, and conveniently forgets the unfavorable circumstances, he is wrongfully accenting or stressing only part of the truth.” (Hamblin, p.25)

Circular reasoing (aka question begging) is a “fallacy [which] consists in either explicitly or implicitly asserting, in one of the premises of an argument, what is asserted in the conclusion of that argument.” (Damer, p.25) So, for example, one would be engaging in circular reasoning if one asserted:

The Bible accurately describes Jesus's birth.

Divine intervention was involved with Jesus's birth.

Jesus is God's Son, not an alien, because of the divine intervention accurately described in the Bible.

Apologists are much better at masking their circular arguments, but in the end, this is pretty much all they have. Return to text

3. "Creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians all have the same evidence—the same facts. Think about it: we all have the same earth, the same fossil layers, the same animals and plants, the same stars—the facts are all the same. The difference is in the way we all interpret the facts." See the creationist article, “Creation: 'Where's the Proof?’” Return to text

SOURCES

Damer, T. Edward (1980) Attacking Faulty Reasoning.Wadsworth Publishing

Hamblin, C.L. (1970) Fallacies Methuen & Co.