What God Would Have Known

Abstract

This book links facts about human intellectual and moral development to what any God who existed at the time of Jesus would have known, and on the basis of that connection it crafts twenty new arguments for the conclusion that classical Christian doctrine is false. These arguments represent what the author calls ‘the problem of contrary development’. Human origins in deep time, human religion, the formation of the New Testament, human psychology, violence, sex and gender—advances in our understanding on all these fronts are brought into interaction with the doctrines of sin, spiritual helplessness, salvation, the divinity of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and revelation, with the result that the latter are shown to be vulnerable to refutation in new ways. For example, it is argued that given what any God would have known at the time, it must be false that God was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, who acquiesced in a religious narrative that centrally featured an oversimplified understanding of human psychology, an inappropriate response to wrongdoing, and the condoning of violence. The book concludes by developing, in connection with its results, two Christian versions of the problem of divine hiddenness and an argument against the existence of God from the historical success (but salvific failure) of Christianity. By taking account of all these things, it is maintained, philosophers can bring a better balance to work on Christianity in philosophy, negotiating a shift from Christian philosophy to the philosophy of Christianity.