Justin Brierley is an excellent host in Christian broadcasting. I’ve been on his show several times, including in person, when ironically I was an American visiting Brierley’s studio in London discussing the historicity of Jesus on a call with Mark Goodacre, a Brit residing in America! I since went on future shows as a call-in guest to discuss whether Hitler was a pantheist and whether David Marshall has anything honest to say about the historicity of Jesus. I was also indirectly featured in an episode when N.T. Wright was asked to address an argument I made against his work. Brierley is good company, and superb at balancing and moderating a discussion, and even more importantly, he can often correctly explain back to anyone in his own words what they just said. Which is why so many atheists remain perplexed at how he remains a Christian despite ten years of solid discussions about it with top-notch atheist thinkers.

Well aware of this, Brierley recently wrote a book providing his answer: Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian (published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 2017). I will be providing a detailed critical review of this book in a series here. Because it is, quite exceptionally, the only honest defense of Christian belief I have read in decades. It’s fatally flawed, but only because Christianity is false. But if there were any book I’d tell people makes the best case that can be made, it would now be this book. Usually, these days, best selling apologetics are written by liars (see my series on Timothy Keller: Dishonest Reasons for God, with more examples in my article The Case for Christ: The Movie! and of course pretty much anything William Lane Craig ever writes; see also Jeff Lowder’s Rebuttal to Geisler and Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist). Brierley isn’t a liar. He is simply not competent at fact-checking or vetting the logic of an argument. Which I find is the most common cause of The Christian Delusion.

In the first respect, his ignorance of facts, Brierley relies almost exclusively on what the guests he happens to get on his show just happen to say while there (if even that; more on which in a moment). He never actually researches anything; as in, on his own, looks for the steel-man argument or assay of facts on any point, to confirm there wasn’t anything omitted, overlooked, or poorly explained by his guests. In the second respect, his failures at logic, Brierley deploys in this book several quite surprisingly fallacious arguments, often replacing facts with emotions and arriving at a conclusion by non sequitur; and he even represents those as to him the most convincing. Which two facts are all we really need to explain why he still believes this ancient, thoroughly-debunked superstition. Though one might still want to explain why he is so bad at these things. And I think it’s the same reason all delusional people are: he is stricken by a cognitively crippling emotional attachment to his beliefs.

I’ll give examples of all these points as I go. But I want to bracket one aspect of the first point here:

I didn’t have time to check every episode Brierley references in this book against his account of it there, so as to confirm that he has not omitted any crucial things his guests said. I am simply assuming for the sake of this review series that he isn’t “blanking” on actual challenges to his faith, forgetting them, and only “remembering” a straw-man version of what happened in each show. Yet I know that commonly happens; it is a feature of delusional thinking. And I have seen him do this on the shows I was on.

For example, even in this book Brierley completely forgets what I said on his show about Paul declaring all baptized Christians “Brothers of the Lord,” instead insisting, “fact is you can’t be the brother of Jesus without there being a real Jesus to be the sibling of” (p. 110). Brierley has thus “blanked” on our entire exchange over that, and the whole fact that one prominent way you can be a brother of Jesus without being his sibling is literally outright stated in his own Bible. This fact has evidently been erased from his memory; a common symptom of delusional belief management. Brierley likewise “forgot” that on his show I actually said Paul believed in “the physical existence” of “a flesh-and-blood Jesus” (p. 109), that Paul only thought this was a celestial, not an earthly event; yet Brierley writes as if I was saying Paul denied “the physical existence” of “a flesh-and-blood Jesus.” He literally didn’t “hear” a thing I said; at least, by some time after, he didn’t remember it. His brain erased it. This is a symptom of delusion.

So I am suspicious in other cases, too, when it seems unlikely to me that some of his guests (like Stephen Law or Hemant Mehta) actually didn’t answer the things on his show he claims they didn’t. Maybe, as in my case, they did. So it would be useful if someone took this book and compared its account of each episode he references against what was actually said in that episode that could already rebut what’s in the book. In other words, to find what Brierley’s conscious mind is conveniently “forgetting” was actually said—as he needs to do, to continue believing. Here, for want of time, I will just assume this never happened, and his every account of what his guests said (and didn’t say) is pertinently accurate. Even though I don’t trust that’s true, and I think this selective “blanking” and “forgetting” what he’s been told plays a key part in why Justin Brierley is still a Christian.

Examples of Bad Logic & Poor Fact-Checking

I’ll add subsequent articles on specific chapters in his book. But for now, I’ll make good on my general promise by surveying several examples across his book of his incompetence at logic and fact-checking, so you can see what I mean, and that it is a pervasive and not isolated problem.

One prominent instance exemplifying Brierley’s illogical reasoning: he actually tries to argue (p. 149) that theism has “a multiplicity of arguments” and atheism really has only one (the Argument from Evil), which is both false (he himself goes on to list many other arguments for atheism; there are many, many more) and illogical. Because it does not matter how many invalid arguments you have for a conclusion; that does not make the conclusion even one iota more likely to be true. If anything, it makes it less likely to be true. Because no one has to invent a dozen bad arguments for something that’s true. Only false claims need such deployments—as I already noted when I dealt with this illogical argument from Alvin Plantinga. 

Thus when Brierley says we “may dispute their validity, but the preponderance of arguments tips the scales towards belief in God,” he is exposing how incompetent he is at logic, and that it is this very incompetence that produces and sustains his Christian faith. Bad arguments do not add up to a good argument. They never tip the scales. That’s literally logically impossible. And that’s the case even if all they were are invalid (or in proper logical terminology, unsound) arguments; but in fact, every argument for god he presents is actually an argument for atheism and against god: when you put back in the evidence apologists leave out. Which is a point I’ve already thoroughly covered in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics; but I’ll be illustrating it more as I go through Brierley’s entire illogical and fact-challenged defense of Christianity in coming entries in this series.

But to pick up one example of that here, Brierly attempts to argue, “If God exists, then we would precisely expect belief in God to be an innate and widespread phenomenon” and therefore that it is, is evidence God exists (p. 181). This is illogical in the same way most apologetics is illogical: by leaving all the pertinent data out, an argument is constructed whose conclusion follows from the premise…until you put the evidence back in that you left out. In actual fact, the evidence of world religions (and the entire history of religion) contains a great deal more data than “believing in god(s),” and your theory has to explain all the data, not just one cherry-picked and disingenuously defined datum. 

For example, “God” in Brierley’s sense is actually a rare output of human cultures, arriving extremely late in human history, and all deriving from a single innovation: Islam and Mormonism are just sects of Christianity; and Christianity is just a sect of Judaism; and Judaism had only invented its familiar apocalyptic monotheism (or more properly termed, monolatric henotheism) a few centuries before Christianity—and then only under influence from Persian Zoroastrianism, wherefrom all these ideas actually derive. Yes, all modern monotheism is simply a derivation of Aryan paganism. It’s all just distortions of one pre-biblical religion in Persia. All spread by imperialist conquest and coercion—from the Persian Empire, to the murderous religious courts of ancient Judaism, to the heresy-hunting Holy Roman Empire, and indeed all the murderously oppressive Christian and Islamic empires of the Middle Ages, to the Era of Modern Imperialism. That all established this multiply-perverted Persian religion across the globe by cultural lock-in. Now it hangs on by a thread in the Post-Imperialist Age of Christian Privilege, whereby getting ahead (or elected), or a helping hand, or even social acceptance, still all but requires expressing devotion to Christianity; even in a lot of the First World, but even more so beyond.

In actuality, most cultures believe (and historically only believed, for many tens of thousands of years more than even Zoroastrianism or Judaism has existed, much less Christianity) in a diverse array of superhuman spirits nothing at all like Brierley’s God. We could add yet more data to all this (all the different and highly variant creeds, soteriologies, magicks, moralities), but the result of doing so is always the same: there is a lot more to explain than Brierley lets on. And his theory performs very poorly in explaining it; in fact, it predicts almost none of it, but quite a contrary observation than we actually make. Whereas the theories of sociology, anthropology, and cognitive science explain all of it, and without appealing to any entities or powers not already empirically established, such as well-documented cognitive biases like “agency overdetection” and “magical thinking” (see Dennett and Hutson). 

The evidence of world religions is therefore actually evidence for atheism, not theism. Because all that evidence is fully predicted by atheism (and concomitant sciences); yet entirely contradicts what Brierley’s theism would have us expect instead. His theory has thus been decisively falsified by this data; not supported by it. As I wrote before:

We have evidence of divine communications going back tens of thousands of years (in shamanic cave art, the crafting of religious icons, ritual burials, and eventually shrines, temples, and actual writing, on stone and clay, then parchment, papyrus and paper). Theism without added excuses predicts that all communications from the divine would be consistently the same at all times in history and across all geographical regions, and presciently in line with the true facts of the world and human existence, right from the start. Atheism predicts, instead, that these communications will be pervasively inconsistent across time and space, and full of factual errors about the world and human existence, exactly matching the ignorance of the culture “experiencing the divine” at that time. And guess what? We observe exactly what atheism predicts; not at all what theism predicts. And again, adding excuses for that, only makes theism even more improbable [by adding unevidenced assumptions that are therefore themselves epistemically improbable].

So by leaving all the evidence out, and not employing any sound procedure of inductive logic, Brierley “fools” himself into a false belief. This is not merely a failure of evidence (ignoring all the data his theory does not explain but that atheism does), since Brierley really does know all this. He references the plethora of world religious beliefs several times elsewhere. And he is well aware most religions have flourished on this Earth far longer than his religion has even existed. Egyptian and Persian religion predate Christianity by thousands of years—even being now dead, Egyptian creeds, morals, and soteriologies indisputably lasted over three thousand years (and really, most likely more than six), a claim Christianity cannot make. Was God asleep at the wheel all that time? Couldn’t be bothered to drop a line to the Chinese either? Or India? Or the Pre-Colombian Americas? Why are Judaism, and its heresy of Christianity, so late an innovation in human history, originating only in one place? That’s what we expect of a human invention, not the designs of a universal God.

Brierley is just conveniently “forgetting” about all this when it comes time to articulate some “reason” to hold on to his false belief about the gods. Instead of employing correct inductive logic, whereby we test two competing theories by deducing what different predictions they make about the world and then going to see what actually happened, which theory’s predictions came true and which didn’t, Brierley makes up this completely illogical argument, which we can fairly paraphrase as, “For eons humans have invented countless superhuman spirits to believe in; therefore mine is real.” That’s entirely illogical. But it typifies Brierley’s reasoning throughout his book.

We can predict Brierley’s reaction to these points, because it’s the same reaction all delusional people resort to to maintain their false belief in the face of every disproof: rather than endeavor to find out what’s really true, he will invent excuses to ignore all the evidence against his belief. For example, he will come up with some elaborate excuse for why God would arrange to make or even allow all the evidence of the world history of religions across the whole ethnographic record for tens of thousands of years to look exactly like it would look if God did not exist, complete with all the evidence of biasing in human cognition toward supernatural explanations rather than scientific ones, and its resulting high frequency of error in getting the facts of the world right (or indeed by Brierley’s account, even the facts of religion right) without a disciplined method correcting for that, and of all that’s evolutionary basis.

That way Brierley could pretend all this evidence didn’t just refute his entire religion. But this error is even more illogical than the original error he would be trying to rescue himself from. Whatever elaborate excuse he comes up with will have no evidence whatever for it. It’ll just be a bunch of stuff he made up on the fly as an excuse to ignore the failure of his theory to explain the evidence. And since there is no evidence that any of the many components of that elaborate excuse is even likely, their compound improbability commutes to the conclusion. In other words, adding those excuses actually, in correct logic, reduces rather than increases the probability he’s right. Yet he will tell himself the reverse has been achieved. Every explaining away of evidence against him “wins” psychologically, as long as it quells his cognitive dissonance. But that it doesn’t win in actuality—in actual logical fact this tactic renders his belief even less probable—he can pretend never to hear or understand, because that will feel safer to him than admitting he’s been the victim of a delusion most of his life. But whatever its psychological cause, Brierley’s failure to appreciate this is a failure to understand how logic works, willful or otherwise. Hence as he demonstrates, it is only by not understanding how logic works that any informed person can ever remain a Christian.

The Rest of Brierley’s Book

In other articles to come I will survey all the rest of Brierley’s principal failures of logic and fact, each on a specific subject. I’ll organize this series around his own division of the subject into nine (9) chapters, but I will address these out of order.

On Brierley’s brief but helpful introduction (1), I have nothing more to add other than to note here, to prospective readers, that he admits he will sidestep doctrinal confessions, thus avoiding getting into the weeds on “questions around sexuality, the nature of the atonement, or which denomination you should belong to” (p. xx). This remains a logical problem, though. If you can’t make any coherent sense of “the atonement,” that is actually a serious argument against the truth of the entire Christian religion (see Ken Pulliam’s magisterial treatment of this problem in “The Absurdity of the Atonement” in The End of Christianity). Likewise the failure of Christians to resolve crucial “denominational” disputes—because no actual evidence exists to appeal to; no one can just phone God in a committee meeting. Likewise debates about “sexuality,” which severely test the ability of Christianity to make any logical sense of the actual facts of human existence, and indeed are a potent test of its ability to offer any moral worldview at all. These debates should not exist if Christianity is true; that they exist (and indeed that Brierley even feels the need to dodge them) is yet more evidence Christianity is false. If God made it possible to conclusively and empirically resolve debates about cosmically trivial matters of fact (from germ theory to plate tectonics), he cannot plausibly have left it impossible to do so about far more serious matters of moral and salvific concern. Whereas this is just what we expect if gods don’t exist, and Christianity is all just as made up as every other religion in history.

Brierley then deploys chapters on cosmological and fine tuning arguments (2), the moral argument (3), and the argument from meaning and purpose (4); and then briefly surveys how he thinks he can get to what Jesus really said and did despite the mainstream view that we mostly can’t (5), and defends the historicity of the resurrection (6). And then he confronts the problem of evil (7). He closes with dedicated chapters on his “ten minute” conversation with Richard Dawkins (8) and his (rather vague) take on what it should really mean to be a Christian (9). I will analyze these chapters out of order, starting next with (4), as it contains the starkest examples of what I just illustrated regarding Brierley’s epistemic failures at fact-checking and logic, and may actually contain the key to why he actually believes this stuff—everything else merely being a rationalization to justify the safety net he is clinging to (see “Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life”). I will follow that with an article on his presentation of the Moral Argument, and his attempt to escape the Argument from Evil, in (3 and 7), because they are closely related to his arguments in (4), and yet conspicuously contradict each other (“Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge and the Problem of Evil”). Then I’ll add an article on his presentation in (2) of the existential arguments (“Justin Brierley on the Science of Existence”); then on all the Jesus stuff (5 and 6; “Justin Brierley on Jesus”); and finally regarding his take on Christianity vs. alternatives (8 and 9; “Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity”).

What this survey will reveal supports the general argument I have presented already: Brierley’s failure to grasp the logical and physical impossibility of his proposed “solution” to popular anxieties about human meaning and purpose, his contradictory stumble into the weeds of morality and evil, and his getting cosmology and physics wrong, as well as early Christian history, all confirm the general observations I just made. I will close with what’s gone wrong in his failed attempt to hold Christianity up as better than naturalist and humanist alternatives. In all these entries I will demonstrate all the same recurring themes: basic failures of logic; an epistemically fatal ignorance (actual or convenient); and a repeated appeal to emotional desire rather than evidence for what is actually the case.

A Summary Observation

There is also a lot of strange self-contradiction in his book, and I’ll point that out when it comes up. But as an example with which I’ll close today’s summary, Brierley tries to explain that the reason he believes “so-called ‘studies’ into the effects of prayer are fundamentally flawed” (p. 73) is not, as is more likely, that they’ve collectively proved prayer has no material effect on the world (beyond psychologically; to which non-prayer correlates, like acupuncture and crystal magic, would work just as well), but rather because he believes science can never study God. Yet barely a hundred pages later he is promoting his own (quite unsystematic) prayer study as evidence for God (pp. 190-94), as if he forgot what he believed in the first half of the book and suddenly started believing exactly the opposite in the latter half of the book. I can’t explain this. But I am not at all surprised that, right on cue, his use of his own “study” betrays all the same ignorance of fact and failures of logic that riddle the rest of his book.

In a sense this is one way we can tell Brierley is not a liar. He’s just incompetent. A liar would just make stuff up, like so many a preacher who has fabricated a false life story, embellished beyond recognition a miracle that didn’t happen, or fibbed about the actual facts (which has been going on for a while: see The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies and How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity). Brierley could have falsely claimed all kinds of incredible results from his exercise in having seventy volunteers pray every day (for forty days) asking God to “reveal” himself to them. But what he describes is entirely what one would expect of such an experiment, even if he had asked the volunteers to pray to the spirit of Victor Hugo to reveal himself to them. As statistical accident alone would predict (see Everything You Need to Know about Coincidences), no god spoke to anyone. Only a “few” people reported random ambiguous coincidences as signs from God, and almost all of them were already believers in God! One person (meaning a result of barely more than 1%), who self-identified as mentally ill, did report hearing a voice in her head tell her to “Be thankful!” but she correctly interpreted that as her own brain talking to her—a very well documented phenomenon; unlike real comms from gods. Yet Brierley still tries to read these non-results as supporting his belief in God. His wishful thinking, poor logic, and ignorance of relevant facts (such as regarding human psychology and the frequency of statistical anomaly) are all here on display, causing his continued Christian belief.

But this is the difference between liars and the merely deluded. Brierley’s reasoning is illogical; his own facts in this case support the opposite conclusion: the frequency and type of results he got are precisely what is predicted by the non-existence of God, and are actually rather hard to explain if Brierley’s God exists. So much for compassion or free will, if God won’t even speak to someone freely choosing, indeed outright begging, to hear him. Ask God to throw you a life vest of salvation, and he refuses? Either God is a dick or isn’t really a thing. Decent people with infinite resources always answer calls for help. There was recently a woman in Canada who faced an intruder in her home and accidentally phoned the Durham police four thousand miles away. Even they answered; and helped her. If God can’t even do that, he’s not even a nice person, much less worthy of worship or trust. But really, a far simpler explanation for the dead line is there is no God to answer. There’s just us. You can call Durham, because it exists. You can’t call God, because he doesn’t.

When we see the folly of his tack there, we can go back to Brierley’s 180-degree-reversal a hundred pages earlier, when he insisted you can’t test for the existence of God at all. “God isn’t an object you can examine in a test tube or analyse with statistical data,” Brierley says (this being the reason he doesn’t trust prayer science, p. 73). Pressing the point, he further insists “faith and hope can’t be found by looking down the barrel of a telescope, nor will breaking everything down to the chemical level get you any closer to explaining love” (p. 74). But this is not how science works. Not even at all. Not a single sentiment Brierley is expressing here reflects reality. His worldview is thus based on a Christian apologetical mythology about science, a fundamental falsehood, and not on the reality of what science actually is and does, and why that matters here.

First, as I shall explain in tomorrow’s entry in this series, love has been thoroughly studied by sciences other than chemistry; and it is science from which all justified faith and hope now arises. Faith just means belief; and hope just means a belief in a future positive outcome. The only justified faith and hope there is, is based on evidence. And the most secure evidence-based conclusions there can be, are the best-established conclusions of the sciences. Faith and hope in our future rests indelibly on the knowledge science has given us, and promises yet still to give. Prayer does not cure or prevent disease. But antibiotics and vaccines do. Faith cannot rescue anyone from any physical peril. But science-based technologies and infrastructures do. All our modern hopes rest even on the well-established facts of political science and economics. It does not matter what the subject of study. If you aren’t figuring things out empirically, with evidence, you aren’t figuring anything out at all; you’re just fantasizing. And employing the most reliable empirical methods we have to answer questions of fact is, by definition, what “science” consists of; which includes history as a science, a science Brierley contradictorily insists can study God. But if history can study God, so can even more reliable sciences. And the bottom line is, if you aren’t employing the most reliable evidence-based methods, you are accessing reality at best poorly, if at all. We should rather want to do it well—and heed the results.

Second, anything that produces any observable effect on the world can be studied empirically, and hence scientifically. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, history generally do not use (nor do they much need) “test tubes” or “telescopes,” mostly have little to do with chemistry, and often can’t use statistical studies either (remember, enormous advances in empirical science predated even the invention of statistical frequency analysis), although any effect frequent and accessible enough can be statistically studied with adequate funding, as all that means is telling the difference between random patterns and actual causal effects on the world. So we are back to, “Does it have causal effects on the world?” We can then study what it is and what its properties are, by observing its differential effects (or lack thereof). If God produces no observable effects on the world, he may as well not exist; if God does produce such effects, science can study him.

There is no in between. Brierley has to choose which it is. He can’t make up false stories about scientists needing test tubes and telescopes just to handwave away the fact that science should have found ample evidence of God by now. It hasn’t. It’s consistently found the opposite, for going on centuries now (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed and my books Why I Am Not a Christian and Sense and Goodness without God). And that means only two things are possible: there is no God; or God does nothing (and has never done anything) of any note in the world, by which we can study and model him, so as to even know anything about him, which further entails Christianity is false. So Brierley’s belief dies on either horn of this dilemma. But Ockham’s Razor leaves us with only the first option anyway: there just is no God. Which my next entries in this series will illustrate.

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You can find the rest of this series as follows (this list will expand as I publish):

• “Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life”
• “Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge and the Problem of Evil”
• “Justin Brierley on the Science of Existence”
• “Justin Brierley on Jesus”
• “Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity”

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