In this episode Trent shares three similarities between Protestant critiques of Catholicism and atheistic critiques of Christianity in general.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker Trent Horn. On a previous episode of the podcast, I talked about seven ways Protestants act like atheists. Now in saying that I did not mean to denigrate my Protestant brothers and sisters. I know that there’s a fair number of Protestant Christians who listen to this podcast. I’m really grateful for that. I’ve been blessed to participate and cooperate with Protestant friends over the years. Those pro-life missionary groups I’ve worked for. I really enjoy working with Cameron Bertuzzi at Capturing Christianity. I love my Protestant friends, but we still disagree on important issues and we have to talk about those disagreements and that’s important.
Trent Horn:
What I notice though, in the discourse, in the dialogue that sometimes takes place between Catholics and Protestants. I noted these similarities that when Catholics would argue for the Catholic worldview, which is essentially, as I said in the previous episode, I think for many Protestants, they’ll say, okay you’re Catholic, I’m Protestant. We both agree on the Bible. But you want me to have a church and the pope along with the Bible, where is your evidence for that? Otherwise, I want to stick with the Bible. I noticed that this kind of arrangement, this sort of dispute, mirrored the same arguments that Protestants often have with atheists, where atheists and Protestant Christians will say, okay we both agree that the natural world exists. We both agree in truth and the natural world, but you Mr. Protestant Christian, you want to bring God in and Jesus into my view of the natural world we both agree on, where’s your evidence for that?
Trent Horn:
In the previous episode, I talked about these similarities related to things like burden of proof, for example, or ways of looking at evidence. Now I do want to make a caveat that this certainly should not apply universally. People are all very different. In saying that, I notice some tendencies in atheists that Protestants might also mirror them. It’s not to say that a Protestant is morally deficient as an individual because they exhibit these behaviors. The fact of the matter is we all have psychological bias, myself included. Many of the criticisms that could be leveled at Protestants acting like atheists, can also apply to Catholics as well. We should all be on the lookout for them.
Trent Horn:
One of my previous criticisms was that I’ve seen Protestants attack a caricature of Catholicism, which reminds me of when atheists attack a caricature of Protestantism. Now, of course there are Protestants who are very learned and they have insightful criticisms of Catholicism that are not strong man arguments. Much the same way, there are Catholics who attack caricatures of Protestantism and that’s wrong also.
Trent Horn:
If the similarity bleeds over Catholicism, I’d say, hey we shouldn’t do that either. But I had noticed this. Just recently, actually it was when I was recording for the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics, I was just ruminating my head, waiting for them to reset the hall where I was filming. I have a new course coming out soon, one on Mormonism, one on Jehovah’s witnesses. The ideas just kind of come to me every now and then. I saw other similarities that had not come up in the previous video saying, oh wow. When some Protestants engage Catholicism in this way, they’re doing the same thing that atheists do towards Protestantism or mere Christianity. It’s important to realize that because they don’t want to endorse these kinds of arguments by arguing against Catholicism. If they reject these same kinds of arguments when atheists offer them.
Trent Horn:
So I have three examples today. Maybe if I get enough examples, I can put them all together in a book or something like that because the similarities is really astounding. Here’s the first one. That would be pagan copycat arguments. Now, as I said, this isn’t every Protestant and this kind of argument is much more common among fundamentalist type Protestants. So people who enjoy reading Jack Chick Tracts. In fact, the examples I’m going to give you come from two chick tracts. Jack Chick is a late cartoonist evangelical author promoting a particular fundamentalist, Protestant movement. He made these very macab comics and tract, you can find in parks or in laundromats. They’re just left everywhere. The ideal is to read them, be horrified about going to hell and then giving your life to Jesus Christ, making him your personal Lord and savior.
Trent Horn:
He criticizes everybody who doesn’t agree with him, even fellow Protestants, but he especially dislikes Catholicism and he endorses particular conspiracy theories. One of which is the idea that Catholic sacramental theology actually comes directly from paganism, not just sacramental theology, but Maryology sacraments Catholic distinctive were just copied wholesale from paganism. I’ll give you two examples.
Trent Horn:
One is from a tract on the Eucharist called the Death Cookie and it talks about where did the Eucharist come from? Instead of tracing it to the last supper and its Jewish roots IE, read Brant Petrie’s book Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist. This panel says here’s where the Eucharist really came from. In Egypt the people worshiped the sun and they called it the great God O Cyrus. On the altars of Egypt were round sun shaped wafers made of unleavened bread. Egyptian priests would pray over the little wafers to make them holy. Then they told the people that a miracle had happened. They claim that the wafers had turned into the flesh of the sun God, O Cyrus. Later the tract goes on to say that the letters IHS that are imprinted on the Eucharistic host IHS, that’s actually a reference to the Egyptian gods, Isis, Horus and Seb.
Trent Horn:
Of course there’s a lot wrong with this. First, there’s no evidence that ancient Egyptians believed in a doctrine of transubstantiation like Catholics do. Also, on the host, IHS obviously does not stand for Isis, Horus and Seb. It also does not stand for in hoc signo, not under this banner, we will conquer, that also goes back to Constantine. Some people think that it means in his service. Doesn’t mean that, it’s just the first three Greek letters of Jesus’s name when they’re capitalized.
Trent Horn:
Jesus, and this the first three Greek letters of that when they’re capitalized. In the Eastern church, instead of IHS, you would have Kairo. You would have a row R but it’s a P in Greek, an X, a P, and an I, and it would be arranged to look like a cross. This would be similar to ancient Christians in the first and second century, on manuscripts would write something called a staurogram, which is the Kai and the ro, the X and the P that Christus or Chrestus, the X from there. It would be arranged to look like a cross called staurogram. There’s one conspiracy theory there that the Eucharist, that’s actually from these pagan deity’s, of course it gets the original Egyptian mythology wrong and the similarities are paper thin or they’re not even similar at all.
Trent Horn:
But what does that remind you of? It reminds me of the documentary Zeitgeist, which by the way, I have a debunking of Zeitgeist here on this channel that you should definitely go and check out. But you have mythicists, who would basically be fundamentalist atheists, who say that Jesus never existed and what is their argument? Their argument is that the story about Jesus was stolen from Egyptian mythology. They’ll say, oh, look at Horus, he did all these things. Jesus is just like Horus you know, Horus was crucified and he rose from the dead and he had 12 disciples and Jesus did the same things. The story of Jesus is stolen from Horus.
Trent Horn:
What is the response that any Christian, especially a Protestant, but any Christian would give. We’d say, number one, your info about Horus is wrong. Horus was not crucified. He did not have 12 disciples. Any other similarities are paper thin. You’d expect worship of deities, but otherwise there’s no good evidence the story of Jesus was taken from Egyptian mythology. Protestants who would believe that, and I’m not saying most Protestants do this, in fact many do not, but these tracts have sold millions of copies. The Death Cookies, it’s everywhere. Some of them will say that the atheist who claims the story of Jesus was taken from mythology is just wrong, will then turn around and say, oh the Eucharist actually comes from pagan mythology, and here’s what happened and they’ll make the same mistakes. They’ll get the original Egyptian mythology wrong. They’ll find paper thin similarities that don’t imply borrowing at all, or they’ll have weird conspiracy theories like the IHS or Isis, Horus and Seb, and just get the modern facts of worship wrong.
Trent Horn:
Here would be another example from Chick. This is a tract on Mary called Why is Mary Crying? He’s really good at these controversial titles, the Death Cookie, Why is Mary Crying, to get you to open them. It says veneration of Mary comes from pagan mythology as well. This is going back to the idea by the way of a book called The Two Babylons written by Alexander Hislop back in the 19th century, claiming all Catholic worship comes from ancient Babylonian religion, except the scholarship is just terrible. It’s absolutely wrong. It was another Protestant, I think his name was Ralph Woodward wrote a reply. It was called Babylon Mystery Religion. He agreed with Hislop, but then he wrote his own reply saying, wait, actually this is all wrong.
Trent Horn:
What they were saying is that ancient Babylonian mother goddess worship. She became a goddess with names such as Belet or the Madonna, great goddess mother, queen of heaven, mediatrics, mother of mankind, [inaudible 00:10:54]. It has these pictures of Mary and Jesus and saying, this worship of Mary as almost like a goddess. Of course, we don’t believe Mary is a goddess, but we have icons, Madonna and child. They’ll say, look here, Dvārakā and Krishna from Hinduism, Isis and Horus. Isis, Horus’ mother embracing him. Egypt, Indrani, and child. Then the people of Babylon, it says they were scattered all ends of the Earth. And so this idea of venerating, Mary actually comes from pagan worship.
Trent Horn:
Now you see the problem here, right? Atheistic fundamentalists will do the same thing. The Mythicist will say, oh the story of Jesus? That was taken from pagan mythology. They had a mother and child. Protestant fundamentalists who make this argument will cut off the very branch they’re sitting on in any argument saying that veneration of Mary is wrong because there’s a pagan similarity. An atheist can make a parallel argument and say, any worship of Jesus is not actually divine in origin. It just comes from pagan mythology as well. It completely undercuts itself. It’s a way I think that some Protestant fundamentalists, in trying to argue Catholicism is false because of pagan parallels, you can do the same thing with Christianity in general, with alleged pagan parallels. Much the same, the same responses to the alleged pagan parallels for Christianity in general, also apply to the same arguments with Catholicism in particular.
Trent Horn:
Now, by the way, I’m not saying Christianity and Catholicism are two different religions. Catholicism is a subset. You have Christians, people who are validly baptized are Christians and beneath that subset, the traditional groups are Protestant Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Just to be clear there.
Trent Horn:
Related to the pagan copycat arguments would be conspiracy theories and especially arguments from silence. So I’ve read Protestant Apologist who will say that we should not believe in the papacy because we don’t see explicit references to the papacy in early Christian documents. They’ll say, well, why isn’t there a reference to the pope and all of his authority and duties in this early Christian writer or in this gospel, or here in these early Christian documents?
Trent Horn:
This is an argument from silence. You need to be careful of an argument from silence, because sometimes we don’t expect everything to written down in this way. That will go back to atheistic mythicists. I guess they’re the fundamentalist atheists for the parallel. They make similar arguments when it comes to Jesus. They’ll say, Jesus never existed. You’ll say, well why should I believe that? Then they’ll say, well, if Jesus really did exist and do all these miracles and form all of these healings and things like that, why isn’t he described in Paul’s letters? St. Paul references the last supper, but he focuses mostly on Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Paul doesn’t tell us about Jesus’s earthly ministry. So the atheistic mythicists will say, see look, the story about Jesus being a wonder worker, having an earthly ministry. That was a legend that cropped up later, Paul didn’t know about that. He didn’t write about the Virgin birth, he didn’t write about Jesus traveling and teaching or having disciples or healing people.
Trent Horn:
The early church fathers will say, why didn’t they talk about this? Why doesn’t Clement or Ignatius talk about all the different miracles and things that Jesus did? Clearly these are just legends that cropped up later, that’s their argument. Of course the reply is going to say, well not all of these writers felt it was necessary to share these truths in that context. For example, in the Acts of the Apostles, we don’t see a lot of narration about Jesus’ earthly ministry or retellings of it. Acts of the Apostles focuses essentially on the crucifixion and the resurrection. But clearly the author of Acts knew about Jesus’ ministry because he’s Luke, he wrote the prequel to Acts, the gospel of Luke.
Trent Horn:
When we read Clement and Epistle of Barnabas and other early church fathers, they focus more on the passion, not Jesus’ earthly ministry. Even Christians today do this. If you may go down this road saying, well, even if it’s odd in some cases that we don’t hear about Jesus’ teaching. In Romans 13, Paul talks about paying taxes to Caesar, but he doesn’t at least explicitly mention Jesus’ teaching. In the ancient world a lot of times you would quote people without citing them. So that can happen. But you might say why doesn’t Paul explicitly mention Jesus’s teaching on taxation in Roman’s 13 for example? Maybe Paul didn’t feel it was necessary to do that, or he had something else in mind or he indirectly cited it.
Trent Horn:
Well, my point is that if Protestants are willing to answer atheistic arguments from silence through this avenue of approach, that they should be willing to do the same for Catholic doctrine and not expect it and demand it in certain places but just to say, well look, we have evidence and we have absence of evidence. What does all of the evidence together, what does that show us? That’s what we should look at. If we do that with Christianity in general, we should do that for Catholicism. I don’t think there’s any fatal arguments from silence when it comes to the papacy. We have very early evidence about Peter’s primacy and very early evidence about the primacy of the church of Rome. Even into the mid second century, we see the Bishop of Rome exercising prerogatives over the entire church.
Trent Horn:
All right, here’s the last one. I was reading an article from Jerry Walls. He was a Protestant author. I’ve engaged him before in a rebuttal video here on this channel called The Strongest Argument Against Catholicism. He did an interview with Cameron a year ago. I responded to that, check out that rebuttal here on the channel. I read a paper he published, I think it was a few years ago on the bad popes. It was an interesting argument against the Papacy. It was not a traditional argument of this pope was a heretic, popes aren’t supposed to be heretics. The standard cases that Protestant apologists will bring up.
Trent Horn:
Walls’ argument was different. It did not focus on hearsay. It focused on the bad popes. He talks about, a lot of them come from the 10th century. We call this the pornocracy in church history. Got a lot of bad popes that show up in the 10th century. But the examples he gives are John the 10th, John the 12th, John the 29th. Thank goodness we had a John Paul that’s close enough to redeem the Johns. Boniface the 8th, Pope Vigilius. Though ironically enough, he leaves out some of the really scandalous ones like Benedict the 9th. Benedict the 9th served twice non consecutively as pope. He sold the Papacy even.
Trent Horn:
There have been some bad popes. There have been some sinful, egregious popes. So Walls makes the argument. Well, if the pope is chosen by God, would we not expect the pope to at least have minimally decent moral character that if the Holy Spirit chooses the pope and the Holy Spirit is involved in the Papacy, then would we expect there to be morally deficient popes like this? So he makes this argument saying that morally bad or inferior popes shows that there is no divine element involved in the selection of the papacy.
Trent Horn:
So how would I respond to that and how does that relate to a parallel argument that atheists will sometimes give against Christianity? First one way I would respond to it and I give Walls credit for this. As I was reading through his paper I thought, he’s going to misunderstand that there’s different ways of understanding how God’s Providence works in the selection of the pope. So you could have one view that the Holy Spirit takes a very active approach and guides those who are involved in selecting the pope and the process has changed over the years. Let’s go with the more modern process, the conclave guides the college of Cardinals and the Holy Spirit strong arms him says, this is the guy I want to be pope.
Trent Horn:
Now I would say that if the Holy Spirit says, this is the person, God wants this person, Walls’ argument would have some traction. It wouldn’t be a knock down proof because you look in salvation history, God directly chose people who had a lot of morally problematic elements to them. Abraham, Moses had their issues. David became a murderer and an adulterer during his time as king of Israel. You look at the judges, Sampson, Jephthah. Walls tries to get around this in his paper by saying, oh, well, they were, they redeemed themselves this or that. But the point is God still chose people who engaged in some pretty bad behavior. But if it were the case, the Holy Spirit is saying, this is the guy I want and definitely him, and they turn out to be just these awful people, it would give his argument a little bit of traction, but I’m skeptical that that is how the Holy Spirit works in choosing the pope. I’m not alone in this. Pope Benedict the 16th in a 1997 interview with a Bavarian newspaper, here is how he thought the Holy Spirit was involved in choosing the pope.
Trent Horn:
The Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense. Not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined. There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked. So here, the way the Holy Spirit works in selecting the pope will be similar to how the Holy Spirit works in the chrism of infallibility. Infallibility does not mean that the pope will always have the right answer. It just means the pope will not formally bind the church to the wrong answer and declare something, a dogma that is heretical or formally bind the church to some kind of error in faith or morals. In that sense, there might be a lot of individuals the Holy Spirit will just prevent the church from selecting someone who would do that, who would contradict infallibility. But even though the Holy Spirit might guide the church and so people in the conclave might choose someone who will not contradict infallibility, they will pick someone who contradicts impeccability. Impeccability just means not sinning. Every pope is a sinner and some of them could be quite grave.
Trent Horn:
Now I will say also I would ask Walls, what percentage would we expect here? Are you saying that none of the popes could ever be morally egregious? Let’s say he provides 10 examples. There have been 267, 66 popes, depends how you count them. There’s Pope Steven, he was elected but died before he was coroneted, so let’s say 267 popes.
Trent Horn:
Let’s say you got 10 that are just absolute stinkers. That’d be 4%. 96% of them have been fine or at least we don’t know enough about them to know they were absolute stinkers. I asked Walls, are you saying 100%, not a single pope could have engaged in morally nefarious behavior? If that’s the case, then I feel like this is going to undercut Walls when he engages atheists who say that the moral behavior of Christians is evidence against Christianity having a divine origin.
Trent Horn:
Paul Draper has an argument called the meager moral fruits of theism. This is Jeffery Jay Lowder, a naturalist and atheist, summarizing Draper’s argument. He says “the moral fruits of theism are meager at best. Theists do not seem to live more moral lives than atheists. Neither church history nor Draper’s personal experience, support the claim that theists are morally superior to atheists. On the assumption of theism, the fact that theists do not seem to live more moral lives than atheists is surprising. On the assumption that atheism is true however, this is not surprising.”
Trent Horn:
So the idea here is if you’re saying, Hey look, if the Holy Spirit’s directly involved in choosing the pope and we’ve got some really bad popes, maybe the Holy Spirit isn’t involved actually at all, why would he allow that? Much the same way, if the Holy Spirit is directly involved in somebody becoming a true Christian, if the Holy Spirit is involved in that and moves [inaudible 00:23:35] faith, why would you get people who seem to be true Christians who then engage in horrible, awful behavior?
Trent Horn:
Now one of the standard lines to go out from that is, oh, they were never really saved in the first place. Calvinists often say that. I don’t know if Jerry Walls would say that, he’s not a Calvinist. He’s argued against Calvinism. I think Walls would say you could be a Christian moved by the spirit who then falls away or does something really terrible. So the problem is that if he makes this argument for the bad popes, Holy Spirit can’t be involved, because you got these bad popes, a few of them that crop up. How could we say the Holy Spirit is involved in Christian renewal and regeneration in general when you have bad Christians that pop up.
Trent Horn:
Walls then offers some criticisms of Benedict’s view of Providence in the selection of the pope. I’m not going to get into that all here, but I’m just saying that, I think you can see the parallel here that any attempt to try to argue against Catholicism from the moral fruit of the Papacy, you could repackage that to an argument against Christianity in general.
Trent Horn:
There is another alternative view that Walls engages dealing with Molinism and foreknowledge. This is not a view that I endorse, but it’s the idea that through God’s foreknowledge, his middle knowledge I should say, he will arrange the world so that the right pope is selected in every age of church history. This is a view of God’s foreknowledge that he knows not only what will happen, but what would happen in any given circumstance. So God arranges history so that the right person is selected. God’s man is picked every time, but sometimes there is just always going to be a bad person. At every possible candidate for the Papacy at some points in church history, they’re all going to be bad, there is nobody good.
Trent Horn:
Now, if you’re familiar with philosophy of religion, this might sound a little familiar to you. This is similar to Alvin Plantinga’s approach to the problem of evil saying that God could create a world of free creatures in it, but there’s some creatures he might create that any world that they’re in, they’re going to do something bad. The question is, why doesn’t God make a world without any evil in it? The Plantingan view say oh well God has his middle knowledge. There’s lots of different kinds of worlds.
Trent Horn:
If God makes Bob, Bob suffers from a condition called transworld depravity. From this idea, any world Bob is in, Bob will do something wrong so it’s not feasible for God to make a world free from evil and also having a guy like Bob in it. That approach has been adopted to papal infallibility to say, God always selects who’s going to be the pope through his middle knowledge. But in some cases, every possible candidate for the papacy is going to have something really wrong with them. “This is the best that God could do.”
Trent Horn:
Walls says of this approach, “I must say, I find this suggestion wildly implausible. Surely out of all possible candidates there were better choices to be made.” He’s talking about Pope John the 12th who became pope when he was 18. But what’s interesting, I don’t know Walls’ view on middle knowledge and that approach to the problem of evil, but this sounds just like JL Mackie. This sounds like Mackie in his approach to responding to answers to the problem of evil, people like Plantinga, that Mackie is skeptical. Walls even makes fun of this. He calls it transworld papacity or something that. There’s always going to be a bad pope at this point in church, he finds that implausible.
Trent Horn:
I wonder if Walls finds transworld depravity itself implausible. If he does, good for him, he’s consistent. If he doesn’t, I would say that’s a wildly inconsistent thing for him. Mackie, he says, “How is it possible that every creaturely essence suffers from transworld depravity? This possibility would be realized only if God were faced with a limited range of creaturely essences, a limited number of possible people from which he had to make a selection. If he was to create free agents at all, what can be supposed to a presented God with that limited range?” So Mackie is saying he doesn’t buy transworld depravity, God could always make free creatures. I actually agree. I agree God can make a world that only has 10 people in it who only choose to do good, but I believe that God can allow evil to exist if he brings greater good from it, topic for another episode.
Trent Horn:
So Walls in taking on this Molinist approach in defense of the papacy of papal infallibility, his criticisms would also undermine using the Molinist approach to defend God’s goodness against the problem of evil. The argument’s almost the same when you see philosophical atheists like Mackie run this against Christian theism in general.
Trent Horn:
So wow. This might have been longer than my original one and I had less things to cover, but it’s fascinating.
Trent Horn:
But once again, I just want to make it clear. I love my Protestant friends. There are my brothers and sisters in Christ. I don’t mean to be unfair. And I don’t think that these criticisms apply to every single Protestant. I just think the similarities are interesting. So one must be careful to apply the same standards consistently. If you would rebut an atheist for using an argument, you ought not repurpose that argument if you’re engaging a Catholic, find a different argument.
Trent Horn:
So hope this is helpful for you all definitely check us out at trenthornpodcast.com. By the way, if you go there, you get access full study series on the catechism, full study series on the New Testament, video lecture series. You don’t want to miss that, fancy mug with my mug on it. So check that all out. Trenthornpodcast.com. Thank you guys and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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