You can catch up on the strange world of Christian preterism (a view lately gaining a lot of attention, and causing a lot of panic among Evangelicals), especially “full preterism,” at Wikipedia.
But in the ultra-quick: Don Preston holds that Jesus not only did predict he would return and complete the end times in 70 A.D. but that everything he said that would entail (even “the resurrection of the dead”) was only a metaphor and not literal, and therefore it all in fact did happen (so there is no second coming left for Christians to wait for). Usually Christians solve the problem by insisting Jesus didn’t mean what he said in respect to the time of the second coming; Preston solves the problem by insisting Jesus didn’t (literally) mean what he said in respect to what would happen.
Of course, as a historian, I don’t believe either is the case, and that the historical facts support neither of these views. They are both mere apologetics, not legitimate historical conclusions.
So, as our host Derek Lambert at MythVision labels the question, “Did Jesus Get It Wrong About the End Times?” Follow and flag that YouTube link now to clock when it goes live (we’ll be starting in about five hours from when I posted this, which was just before noon EST) and come watch later today—and maybe even put in some superchat questions during Q&A!
This guy just needs to take one more step! He just needs to realize that Jesus himself was only a metaphor, in a sense! 🤣
Just like pigs metaphorically changed their purity status. What, you didn’t notice?
This is so comical. Jesus came, and took away all the righteous, and nobody noticed. Everybody left is not saved.
It’s more convoluted than that. Preston’s position is that no one was “taken away,” but rather, their spiritual status was invisibly changed. In other words, the prophecy was fulfilled metaphorically, not literally.
This allows him to extend salvation to later persons, since all that changed at the “end” was “how it gets decided” who goes to heaven and who to hell, and not anything like what we mean by a resurrection or transformation into immortals (which, obviously, can only happen once, and therefore “cannot be what Jesus meant”).
Hope you got the 5-book series on preterism to bone up for this debate. https://rodericke.com/pretseries
No more necessary than reading every book written by a flat earther or a creationist or a holocaust denier. At some point it becomes clear that they only really have the same arguments, and they are all bad.
So I watched and commented through the debate. It is a testament to Derek’s skill as a host that he had Christians and atheists in the chat mostly being respectful, but man, do people struggle to follow the point. And I love that you and Don were pleasant and chatty. Don seems like a lovely guy. (And people who were giving him crap for a fake degree: Don didn’t lean on his degree at all. He made arguments. While I do think diploma mills are a gigantic problem, if someone outside of conventional academia wants to be able to find some way of studying and interacting, it’s not a big deal. What’s a big deal is when they do when Kent Hovind does and lie about their credentials).
My thoughts/questions:
1) Don is obviously intellectually motivated. He failed to actually address your assessment of the picture of Christianity and just gainsaid it. He misunderstood syncretism fatally. He burnt clock time irrelevantly. And while some Christians in chat didn’t like how you were asking him very specific questions on evidence, I think even they could tell that Don wasn’t answering it well.
2) Regarding chat briefly, I remain agog at how sectarianism works. There were countless mainline Christians telling Don to testify and supporting him even though he is so vastly unorthodox. As long as you’re against the atheist, it’s all okay. Incredible. Even the IO people who showed up and claimed that you were humiliated by them (with no evidence – shocker I know) could get the point that Don is not IO and “corrected” him on that front.
3) There were some things I thought your presentation could have done better. I’d have liked more direct cites from relevant scripture. I would have liked invoking Revelations to show how much the apocalyptic element was found, the lake of fire, etc. And I would have liked hammering him on the fact that so much of what he even had was Luke and John only in the NT and Ezekiel and Isaiah in the OT: Almost no epistles, very little of Luke and Mark, etc. I felt that you should have been hammering him further on the cherry-picking he is so brazenly doing.
4) If you had the debate again, would you point out that he kept talking about the Jewish apocalyptic expectations but didn’t discuss things like, say, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the wars against the Canaanites, or Lot’s wife, where God gives really specific judgment?
I will love to see you scoring the debate when you’re done! His drops were egregious and I think you successfully grouped his irrelevant arguments so I think you won handily on flow!
It always darkly amuses when people start objecting to checking facts and asking for evidence—by that very complaint they just revealed their position to be false. Only people on the wrong side of the facts object to actually caring about the facts.
I had also hoped for more digging into his arguments from actual passages like I cited and quoted (in my open I couldn’t do more for time), since he makes a lot of dubious or shaky claims about things like the Greek or how similes work. But for some reason he evaded that the whole debate. Even when I cued him (including my repeated description after my opening of how 1 Thess 4 and 1 Cor 15 refute him).
This might be an issue with his not being a professional debater. As it was, I won every one of those points because he never picked them up—so I never had to get into the details of any of those passages. A sound debater will not drop points like that.
I didn’t realize that was happening until it was over. He was supposed to make an argument against my descriptions of those passages, which I would then rebut (that’s the usual pattern of a debate and I count on it—it’s the only thing that makes debates at all productive). But instead Don kept leaning on his circular argument (the prophets meant X; Christians quoted prophets; therefore Christians meant X), and didn’t even respond to my refutation of it (he would just rephrase the argument; which is not a rebuttal, but a drop).
Don burned so much clock on that dead end, he never got around to any of his fanciful claims about the NT passages, or even addressing my abundantly cited evidence of apocalyptic literature establishing the context he is supposed to be attending to (I do wonder, though, if he was worried about trying to pose those arguments in a debate with an actual expert in Greek literature).
And a footnote for readers: you can catch up on Fred’s IO remark in The Incompetent Crankery of the Israel Only Movement. It’s ironic because their position is way more illogical and factless than Don’s.
Absolutely, Richard, I just think that the pedagogical benefit to the audience would have been immense, but he did indeed drop almost everything. When you got into 2 Peter, I think a lot of folks in the chat got it.
That having been said, I think the audience got a ton out of the syncretism cross-ex. He clearly doesn’t understand syncretism and a few other key points, and he clearly is honest enough to actually care, so he asked good questions (frankly that he should have asked himself ahead of time but whatever). Some people on his side in the chat didn’t see the point and were whining but there’s only so much you can do to remind people of why something is important under cross-examination. There were also other key topics in the cross-ex that mattered quite a bit. Tenor wise, you really did have him on his inconsistent and arbitrary method.
And, yeah, he did just keep repeating that, and just bringing in more crank arguments even in rebuttal period where he shouldn’t be introducing anything new and even as all of them could be lumped together.
The “Did Jesus exist or not” fork he tried to pull was particularly strange. So many people in the audience kept thinking you were defending mythicism, when it was almost wholly irrelevant except insofar as mythicism provides some specific explanations for phenomena he identified. It’s also quite funny to see people continue to not understand the difference between “We know he didn’t exist as a historical person” and “They thought he existed, in real life, just as a supernatural entity”. Also, yeah, Don, Jesus could have been a liar or delusional. He basically needed Lewis’ trilemma and he didn’t even bother establishing it.
I also wish that Derek or someone would have more clearly framed this as you being in the negative, though perhaps you guys had some specific element there? Because, logically, he was the affirmative, and he failed to meet his burden. So many people in chat were saying “How does Richard know any of this?” and I kept having to point out “Let’s say he doesn’t. Don doesn’t either. So preterism is wrong”.
And, yeah, I too found it funny that, as much as IO advocates are far more crank and far less salutary of people than Don (who I cannot stress enough really felt like a kind of dude I’d love to take a hike with – and objectively promoting preterism is a good thing for society because it supports universal salvation arguments and defangs the extreme apocalypticism), they can at least track the basic outline of the argument better. It’s a testament to how much religious dogma makes itself invisible.
I concur with your observations.
Just one footnote: Preston has unequivocally denied being a universalist. But since he never explains exactly what it even means to be saved, it’s unclear what it would even mean that he’s not a universalist.
It has long been my contention that the Rapture already happened and nobody made the cut.
That got an audible “Ha!” from me. Internet point sir.
The amount of mental gymnastics that religious people are willing to do to save these timed apocalyptic predictions that didn’t happen rather than just admit that the people who said or wrote these things were just making things up.
Muslims have their own “The Judgement hour is very near” and yet here we are 1400 years later.
https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:2214
I just watched the Debate and I think Don’s arguments was once again circular based on a linear Christian Apologist Perspective and not understanding Pesher or Historical context, he kept referring back to his Christian opinion of Prophecy fulfilled making his Belief and Scriptures fit rather and completely missing the relevant Scriptures what was explicitly mentioned as 1 Corinthians 15 which says in a very literal way that the Resurrection is Physical and the Believers would be Physically changed
The problem with Preston’s “interpretation” is that the Bible becomes so metaphorical and spiritual that it means nothing. We also have plenty of data that failed prophecies become spiritualised in an effort to save the cult. And so a posteriori, this is what is more likely to have occurred. Why should we special plead for Jesus and not for the Seventh Day Adventists? The 7th Day Adventists spiritualised Miller’s failed prediction. A scholarly thesis was written about a failed UFO cult who similarly reinterpreted, after the fact, their failed predictions.
Of course, Preston really only interprets the Bible not to mean what it says in an attempt to save the Saviour. His non sequitur that Jesus cannot be a false prophet if he didn’t exist was really telling. It seemed to me a desperate red herring. If Jesus was a fictional character, then he was a fictional character, believed real, who made false prophesies in purported Gospels and Epistles about him.
I agree.
And for readers, that UFO cult thesis became the book When Prophecy Fails and it originated the psychological concept and study of cognitive dissonance. Which is exactly what is happening with Don (and all Christians who evade admitting the truth by any device).
I found Preston’s “contribution” to be mere empty preacherly sermonising. He also debated the guy from jcnot4me, on this issue, on Mythvision. In that “debate” he was similarly insufferable. Preston is very difficult to listen to. Apologists piss on your back and tell you that it’s raining. Apologetics really is ‘offensive’ to quote Richard C Miller.
An Apologist who tells you that Jesus really did come back and all was fulfilled… but in an invisible, metaphorical, spiritual way—a way totally unfalsifiable!—how serious are we meant to take such a guy?
It is at least plausible enough to at least vet once. So, that’s about as seriously as we should take it.
It isn’t like flat earthism in that respect. Because all the elements of the theory are true. Prophetic language was a thing; figurative and metaphorical discourse was a thing; weird ways of interpreting scripture and rethinking religious ideas were a thing; and prophecies were deliberately obscure to allow hedging, and in result even post-hoc prophecy was made deliberately obscure so as to look like authentic prophecy, allowing a lot of room for interpretation.
The only thing that doesn’t hold together is Preston’s particular assembly of these elements in this case.
Ciaran: I find your take on his behavior pretty interesting. I got the exact opposite vibe. I know it can be frustrating to have someone delusionally committed to an idea tell you brazenly false things, but Don isn’t a slick Craig-esque liar. His cross-ex with Richard seemed quite sincere and showed quite clearly that he hadn’t understood the points. I think Don looks like a nice guy who has a bad, crank idea. And that makes me have a soft spot for him, as compared to the IO cranks who have been to a person arrogant, rude and deliberately incompetent.
I agree with Fred, insofar as I am sure Don is sincere. He’s a crank, not a grifter.
However, I did notice his flirting with rage, hyperbole, and ad hominem a few times (and not only in this debate, but in others of his I watched). Though he didn’t try to game the audience with emotional tricks nearly as often as someone like William Lane Craig, it did happen a few times.
I don’t think this is because he is a grifter like Craig. I think (from experience with this happening a lot) that delusional people get this way when cornered. Cognitive dissonance requires either you flee, or you get aggressive and hyper-arrogant (even angry and insulting).
The difference can be subtle, but for example, consider how Don used the well poisoning fallacy about historicity: I got the distinct impression he really believes that is relevant and that it really does discredit my position somehow. He has, in effect, conned himself.
By contrast, when Craig did this in our debate, it was unmistakably intentional. And I know this because he and I discussed it before the debate, so I know he knew the issue was irrelevant and that I would grant historicity for the debate; he turned around and poisoned the well anyway, knowing full well it was an irrelevant and purely audience-manipulating move to waste clock time on (Craig is also a professional debater, so he well knows what a timewaste is, and never wastes time).
To me, Preston had the tone of a preacher gish-galloping through proof-texts, whereas Carrier had the tone of someone giving a talk, or even a lecture. Even the loudness of Preston’s voice. It seemed to me as though Preston was in Preacher mode, preaching to a Church Hall down his microphone.
Turek also modulates the loudness of his voice in this wise. The more sense Turek thinks that he is making, the louder he talks. As Prophet of Zod points out, Turek has a number of dishonest tricks that he employs so as to unnerve his interlocutor.
However, in my view Turek is completely cynical, whereas I agree that Preston is probably not.
On another note, would Preston adhere to the doctrine of Scriptural Perspicuity? Not to employ the etymological fallacy, but ‘perspicuitas’, in Latin, means: ‘possessing the ability to be seen clearly through’. If the Biblical text be perspicuous, then non-specialists ought to be able to ascertain its meaning… at least as regards major doctrines like the End of the World. To me, the Bible is not perspicuous if it teaches, in a highly convoluted and interpretive manner—and defying the plain sense of what the Scripture actually says—that there will be a “spiritual” end of the world that most of the world’s inhabitants, both then and since, took no notice of.
Whereas the debate with Mark Smith was similarly mostly good-tempered, there were times when Smith took off the gloves, and told Preston to get real. Smith and Carrier did a team debate, once.
Good point about Scriptural Perspicuity. Obviously there are vastly clearer ways for the Bible to say what Preston wants. So he cannot believe in SP. That might pose a problem elsewhere in his theology (Why would God not speak plainly about things so important? And since we mere humans can, does this mean we are wiser and more capable than God?).
Of course, we were not debating theology or the existence of God. But, yeah, as a side-note.
Richard: Absolutely. And I’m going to be soft on someone protecting their ego with rage as compared to the dishonest but superficially more civil behavior of WLC.
Also, by my watch, while he definitely could be a bit strident and occasionally got testy, he really did work hard to stay charming and to make jokes. It felt like a chat and not a really contentious debate. Not at all like Tour and Professor Dave, as an example.
That is certainly true.
‘So he cannot believe in SP. That might pose a problem elsewhere in his theology …’
Mr. Deity has a term that hasn’t caught on as much as ‘excusagist’ and ‘Low-Bar Bill’, and that term is: ‘Godzheimers’, where an apologist seemingly conveniently forgets about those elsewheres in his/her Theology.
I agree with Carrier that William Lane Craig is a grifter. But why might Carrier have that opinion of him? Is it because Classical Theism and Supernaturalist Christianity, in our day and age, is completely untenable? Is it because Craig, at some level, is intelligent enough to arrive at this inescapable conclusion?
The problem is, as I see it, that any version of either Supernaturalist Christianity or Classical Theism takes such a profound stupidity to believe in sincerely. A point that I constantly make is that as the Internet and AI get better and better, the intelligence threshold for figuring out the falsehood of Christianity gets lower and lower. As Captain Cassidy points out: we have in our pockets ‘magical rectangles’, i.e. Smartphones, that can fact-check any one of Christianity’s almost numberless false claims. Thus, the intelligence of a sincerely true believer is constantly diminishing.
Hitchens makes this point in ‘God is Not Great’. There will never again be another Saint Thomas Aquinas in Christendom, as a man of his intellect, if living in our day, would quickly discover the falsehood of Christianity. Hitchens says that the intellectual caliber of the religious has declined so much such that there will never again be a lesser genius in Christianity such as John Henry Newman. As Information Technology increases, the intellectual capacity of true belivers decreases.
I then ask myself: is this apologist profoundly stupid, or is he psychotically deluded, or is he a con artist? I usually end up thinking to myself that the apologist in question is either psychotically deluded or a con-artist, as instances of such profound stupidity are rare indeed.
And when we catch the likes of Turek and Craig in dishonest rhetorical tricks, then this is merely further evidence that they are cynical con artists. In a video from two years ago, Steven Woodford of Rationality Rules caught Craig and Bertuzzi in dishonest tactics.
https://youtu.be/X8QeVEd5tcM?si=VL8oAWSotCy62IbN
I concur.
Readers might benefit from the following footnotes:
For links on Craig being a grifter and not a sincere delusionist see the opening section of William Lane Craig’s Duplicitous Denial That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.
That Christianity is, nevertheless, generally a delusion, no different than flat earthism for example, see Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory.
That it can easily be swapped out for a more credible yet still completely false delusion (since the fact that that specific delusional worldview features the supernatural is actually trivial; it is thus easily fixed by retooling it into a naturalist delusion) I discuss in the closing section of That Jordan Peterson Is a Crank: A Handy Guide.