I functionally stopped believing in the existence of God sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, since it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed. Long after I became an agnostic, though, I still clung to many of the cultural trappings of Christianity. One of these trappings was the BC/AD dating system, which numbers the years from the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, with “BC” standing for “before Christ” and “AD” standing for “anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord,” referring to Jesus.
For nearly two years after becoming an agnostic, I continued to use this dating system in all my articles. I felt that the alternative BCE/CE dating system (which uses the exact same numbers for the years, but with “BCE” standing for “before the Common Era” and “CE” standing for “Common Era”) was a relatively recent invention of atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda by taking the Christian dating system and making it superficially “secular” by removing the explicit Christian references while retaining the years numbered from the supposed date of Jesus’s birth. I wondered why secularists didn’t just create a dating system that was actually secular and not based on the supposed date of Jesus’s birth.
Well, it turns out that the history of the “Common Era” dating notation is a lot more complicated and fascinating than I realized. In fact, it is not a recent invention of atheist secularists in any way; it is both quite old and originally Christian. Christians first began using the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century and they have been using it continuously ever since. Jewish people widely adopted the notation in the nineteenth century so that they could use the Christian dating system that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religion by not applying the titles “Christ” and “Lord” to Jesus. The notation is now widely used among scholars and academics, primarily out of respect for followers of religions that don’t regard Jesus as Lord or Christ.
Ancient Roman dating systems
As the New Zealand classicist Peter Gainsford discusses in this blog post from February 2016, the ancient Romans did not have one, universal dating system. Instead, they used many different systems to keep track of the years. The most common dating method in Rome itself was by consular years. At any given time, Rome had two officials known as consuls. Each consul held office for one year and they could not hold successive terms in office. The Romans kept lists of all the consuls in the order of the years they held office known as fasti consulares. The most common way Roman people would date events was by saying who the consuls were in the year when the event took place.
After Rome became ruled by emperors, another method came into widespread use of dating events by the year of the reign of the emperor who was in power at the time when the event took place. People would also often date events by the years of provincial governors, local rulers, and various religious officials. An example of all these dating systems in use occurs in the Gospel of Luke 3:1–2, which reads as follows as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”
Tiberius became emperor on 17 September 14 CE. Thus, the year that the author of the gospel is trying to describe here is most likely the one lasting from 17 September 28 CE to 16 September 29 CE.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head in the Musée Saint-Raymond depicting the emperor Tiberius, in whose reign Jesus began his ministry
For a relatively brief period in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE, a handful of Roman historians dated events by numbering the years from the date of the legendary founding of the city of Rome in 753 BCE. This is the system known as ab urbe condita, or “from the founding of the city.” The extent of the use of this dating system, however, has been wildly exaggerated. It didn’t really come into use until the third century CE, it didn’t become common until the fourth century CE, and, even then, it was only used alongside other dating systems, which were far more commonly used and understood.
Two other dating systems were especially widely used in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. The first of these was the Greek system of dating events by Olympiads, or four-year Olympic cycles. The first Olympic Games are traditionally said to have been held in 776 BCE. They were held every four years after that until the games ended in late antiquity. They were of immense cultural importance to Greek people throughout the Mediterranean and people kept lists of all the Olympic victors, the cities from which they came, the events they won, and the years in which they did so. (For interesting anecdotes about the ancient Olympic Games, you can read this article I wrote in July 2021.)
Thus, if you wanted to date an event, you could date it by stating the Olympiad and the year of that Olympiad in which the event took place. For instance, the Greek biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) states in his Life of Numa 1.3 that Numa Pompilius became the king of Rome in the third year of the sixteenth Olympiad (i.e., 714 BCE).
The last recorded Olympic Games took place in 393 CE during the reign of Theodosius I (ruled 379 – 395 CE), but archaeological evidence suggests that at least some version of the games may have continued at Olympia after his reign. The last games at Olympia may have been held sometime during the reign of Theodosius II (ruled 402 – 450 CE). Obviously, once the games ended, they could no longer be used to date historical events.
The second dating system that was widely used in the east was the Seleukid Era system, which dated events from the year 312/11 BCE, in which the Greek king Seleukos I Nikator re-conquered the city of Babylon. This event was considered by historians to mark the year of the founding of the Seleukid Empire. The Seleukid Era system actually continued to be used in the eastern Mediterranean well into the Middle Ages.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble head on display in the Louvre Museum depicting Seleukos I Nikator, on whose conquest of Babylon in 312/311 BCE the Seleukid Era system was based
The Alexandrian Christian anno Diocletiani dating system
For the first five hundred years of Christianity, no one ever dated events from the supposed year of the birth of Jesus and, in fact, there was no widespread agreement among Christians about which year Jesus was actually born. When trying to date historical events, Christians mostly used the same kinds of dating systems that the “pagan” Romans had used before them.
Then, starting in the fourth century CE, Christians living in the city of Alexandria in Egypt began using the dating system of anno martyrum (which means “in the year of the martyrs”) or anno Diocletiani (which means “in the year of Diocletian”). This system numbered the years starting from 284 CE, the year when Diocletian became emperor of the Roman Empire.
Early Alexandrian Christians used this dating system because they were deeply—almost pathologically—obsessed with the idea of suffering martyrdom for Christ. Diocletian was a notoriously brutal persecutor of Christians and dating the years from the beginning of his reign was seen as a way to honor all the brave Christian martyrs who died during his persecution.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a laureate marble head of the Roman emperor Diocletian on display in the İstanbul Archaeological Museum
Dionysius Exiguus and the invention of the anno Domini system
Dionysius Exiguus (lived c. 470 – c. 544 CE) was a Christian monk from the Roman region of Scythia Minor, which occupied part of what is now Romania and part of what is now Bulgaria. His epithet Exiguus literally means “the Paltry” or “Insignificant” and is said to reflect his personal humility. In the year 525 CE, he wrote a treatise titled On the Pascal Cycle, in which he constructed an Easter table for the years 532 through 626 CE.
Dionysius seems to have disliked the anno Diocletiani system, presumably because he thought it commemorated an emperor who persecuted Christians. He therefore invented his own system of numbering years from the year in which he believed Jesus had been born: the year we know today as 1 CE. He numbers the years in this manner in Column A of his Easter table, labeling the column anni Domini nostri Iesu Christi, which means “years of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (If you’re interested, you can read an English translation of Dionysius’s On the Paschal Cycle here.)
As I discuss in this article I wrote back in November 2019, we actually have only an extremely vague impression of when Jesus was born. It is impossible to determine even the exact year when he was born with any certainty, but, if the claim in the gospels that he was born during the reign of King Herod the Great is correct, then he must have been born sometime in or before the year 4 BCE. Dionysius Exiguus’s supposition that Jesus was born in the year 1 CE therefore does not match the information in the gospels.
ABOVE: Eastern Orthodox icon depicting how the artist imagined Dionysius Exiguus might have looked. (No one knows what he really looked like.)
Bede and Alcuin’s popularization of the anno Domini system
Dionysius Exiguus’s system of dating events from the supposed date of the birth of Jesus didn’t catch on for over a century and half after his death. Then the Northumbrian Benedictine monk and historian Bede the Venerable (lived c. 673 – 735 CE), who made an Easter table that was an exact extension of Dionysius Exiguus’s, adopted Dionysius’s dating system for his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, or Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Throughout his history, Bede uses the Latin phrases anno ab incarnatione Domini (“in the year from the incarnation of the Lord”) and anno incarnationis dominicae (“in the year of the incarnation of the Lord”). Bede also uses a Latin phrase analogous to the modern English phrase “before Christ” in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum 1.2: ante incarnationis dominicae tempus, which means “before the time of the incarnation of the Lord.” Bede’s use of this system popularized it among the monks of Northumbria and brought it into wider use.
Within the century after Bede, another Northumbrian monk named Alcuin of York (lived c. 735 – 804 CE) became influential at the court of the Frankish king Carolus Magnus (ruled 768 – 814 CE), or “Karl the Big,” who is better known today by the anachronistic French name Charlemagne. Most likely under Alcuin’s influence, the anno Domini nostri Iesu Christi system became accepted as the standard dating system in Charlemagne’s empire.
From there, the anno Domini nostri Iesu Christi system became the most common and most widely understood dating system among Christian authors writing in Latin in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Eventually, anno Domini nostri Iesu Christi was abbreviated to simply anno Domini, which means “in the year of the Lord,” and, from there, it was further abbreviated to simply “AD.”
ABOVE: Illustration from an illustrated manuscript copy of Bede’s homilies from Engelberg Abbey in Switzerland (Stiftsbibliothek Codex 47 f. 1v), dating to the twelfth century CE, depicting Bede writing his homilies surrounded by the four living creatures from the Book of Revelation
Johannes Kepler and the origin of the “Common Era” notation in the early seventeenth century
The “Common Era” dating notation is first attested in the book Eclogae Chronicae, written by the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (lived 1571 – 1630) and published in the year 1615. It occurs in the Latin form anno aerae nostrae vulgaris, which means “in our common era.” No one knows exactly why Kepler chose to use this formulation, but we do know that he was a devout (albeit unorthodox) Lutheran, so he certainly wasn’t doing it out of any kind of secularist or anti-Christian agenda.
Kepler later uses the same Latin phrase in the title of a book of astronomical ephemerides published in 1617, titled Ephemerides Novae Motuum Coelestium, ab Anno Vulgaris Aerae MDCXVII. The Dutch publisher and author Adriaan Vlacq (lived 1600 – 1667) published a book in 1635 based on the work of Kepler titled Ephemerides of the Celestiall Motions, for the Yeers of the Vulgar Era 1633, 1634, 1635, 1636.
As my readers can probably guess, the word vulgar comes from the Latin adjective vulgaris, meaning “common” or “commonly known.” This is the meaning the word originally had in English and it is in this sense that the word is used in Vlacq’s title. This is the earliest known occurrence of a form of the phrase “Common Era” in reference to the dating system in English.
ABOVE: Portrait painted in 1620 depicting the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who is the first person known to have used the “Common Era” dating system in Latin
The oldest known occurrence of the exact phrase “common era” (rather than the synonymous phrase “vulgar era”) in English occurs in the book The History of the Works of the Learned, published in London in the year 1708 for H. Rhodes, in volume 10, on page 513. The sentence in which the phrase is used reads as follows:
“The ſecond Book is divided into eight Chapters, treats of the origin of the Greek Charackters, and the changes that happen’d in them, to the fourth Century of the common Era.”
The earliest known occurrences of the phrase “before the common era” in English occur in the book The Elements of Universal Erudition: Containing an Analytical Abridgment of the Sciences, Polite Arts, and Belles Lettres, volume one, by Jakob Friedrich Freiherr von Bielfeld. This work was originally published German, but a printer named G. Scott printed an English translation in London in 1770 for the booksellers J. Robson and B. Law. The earliest use of the phrase “before the common era” in the book occurs on page 62 in a definition of the word Olympiad:
“The firſt Olympiad began in the year of the world 3228, and conſequently 776 years before the common era.”
The Encyclopædia Britannica uses the terms “vulgar era” and “common era” as early as its 1797 edition, using both terms interchangeably.
ABOVE: Photo with digital highlighting to show the earliest known occurrence of the phrase “before the common era” in English
Popularization of the “Common Era” notation among Jews
The “Vulgar Era” or “Common Era” notation soon became widely used among Jewish people. Evidence for the use of this dating system among Jews in the early nineteenth century can be found in Jewish cemeteries. For instance, headstone A13 in the Old Jewish Cemetery on Plymouth Hoe in Plymouth, England, dating to the year 1825, reads:
“Here is buried his honour Judah ben his honour Joseph, a prince and honoured amongst philanthropists, who executed good deeds, died in his house in the City of Bath, Tuesday, and was buried here on Sunday, 19 Sivan in the year 5585 [= 5 June 1825]. In memory of Lyon Joseph Esq (merchant of Falmouth, Cornwall). who died at Bath June AM 5585/VE 1825. Beloved and respected.”
The abbreviation “AM” stands for anno mundi, which is Latin for “in the year of the world,” and “VE” stands for “Vulgar Era.”
For early modern Jews, the biggest problem with the “before Christ”/“anno Domini” system was not the fact that it was based on the supposed date of the birth of Jesus, but rather the fact that the phrases “before Christ” and “anno Domini” are both explicit affirmations of Jesus as Messiah and God.
Many people nowadays think that Christ is just another name for Jesus, but it is, in fact, a title derived from the Greek word χριστός (christós), which is a calque of the Hebrew word מָשִׁיחַ (māšîaḥ), meaning “anointed one.” If you call Jesus “Christ,” then you are calling him the one anointed by God. Similarly, Domini is the genitive form of the Latin title Dominus, which means “Lord” or “Master.” If you say the phrase “anno Domini,” then you are calling Jesus your Lord and Master.
Atheists and followers of non-Abrahamic religions generally do not believe in the Abrahamic God. Consequently, Abrahamic titles like “Christ” and “Lord” do not hold much personal religious significance, so using them to refer to Jesus in set phrases like “before Christ” might not seem like a particularly big deal. I personally know of many atheists who still call Jesus “Christ,” even though they do not really believe that he is the Messiah.
For early modern Jews living in Europe surrounded by Christians, though, calling Jesus “Lord” or “Christ” was absolutely anathema, because the fact that they didn’t believe in Jesus being Lord or Messiah was one of the major things that set them apart from the Christians who surrounded them. Calling Jesus by such names was not something they believed God would look favorably upon to say the least.
Thus, the reason Jews adopted the “Common Era” notation is not because they ever viewed it as “secular,” but rather because it allowed them to use the same dates that everyone around them was using while still upholding their religious beliefs by avoiding explicit affirmations of Jesus as “Christ” and “Lord.”
The “Common Era” notation came into increasingly common use among Jewish scholars and intellectuals in the middle of the nineteenth century. For instance, the Jewish rabbi and historian Morris Jacob Raphall (lived 1798 – 1868) published a book in 1856 titled Post-Biblical History of the Jews, in which he consistently uses the abbreviations “BCE” and “CE,” rather than “BC” and “AD.”
ABOVE: Photograph of the Jewish rabbi and historian Morris Jacob Raphall
Why more and more historians are adopting the BCE/CE notation
Over the course of the past century, the BCE/CE dating notation has become increasingly widely used and accepted among professional historians. While it is still based on the supposed date of the birth of Jesus, it avoids using Christian titles to refer to him and therefore is more inclusive and respectful toward followers of religions that do not regard Jesus as “Christ” or “Lord,” especially Jewish people, for whom not regarding Jesus as “Christ” or “Lord” is a matter of particular salience.
The BCE/CE notation was certainly not in any way made up recently by atheists seeking to advance a secularist agenda. Christians first started using it over four hundred years ago and have been using it continuously ever since. The reason why the notation is becoming increasingly widely used in the present day is not because of any kind of secularist attempt to superficially rebrand the BC/AD system to make it “secular,” but rather because, by avoiding explicit affirmations of Jesus as “Christ” and “Lord,” the system is more respectful to followers of religions other than Christianity.
Interesting, I did not know about the history of the term “Common Era”. However it seems like the Ab urbe condita system was in use for some time before the 3rd Century. Pliny the Elder uses it occasionally, for example he dates the introduction of Barbers to Rome to the year 454 “post Romam conditam” (Natural History 7.59).
My obnoxiously pedantic pet peeve is when people give dates in the form “2021 AD”. My understanding is that the Latin dictates that “AD 2021” would be correct, i.e. “In the year of Our Lord 2021”.
I notice you didn’t discuss “BC” — why is that in English, when post-Jesus years are in Latin? It seems odd.
(For the record: I always use BCE/CE anyway).
Traditionally, the “AD” does come before the year, but nowadays it is generally acceptable to put the “AD” after the year. Back when I was still using “AD” and “BC” dates, I always put both abbreviations after the year, primarily because I liked the consistency of having them both after.
The reason why “anno Domini” is Latin while “before Christ” is English is because the “anno Domini” system has historically been more commonly used for dates after the supposed date of the birth of Jesus than dates before and “anno Domini” was already a thoroughly established and common phrase by the time educated people started writing more commonly in English, while “ante Christum” or “ante Christum natum,” the phrases equivalent to “before Christ” in Latin, were less commonly used, so they never caught on in English.
“it was a gradual process of realizing that all the theological arguments to which I had clung to support my belief in the existence of God were fundamentally flawed”
I know it’s not a tale of times forgotten, so it wouldn’t fit the blog theme if you did a post on it here, but I would still be interested in hearing about this. Perhaps you could add something to your FAQ.
You may have noticed that I don’t tend to worry too much about trying to fit a “theme” with my blog posts. I generally write about whatever I feel like writing and I’ve written posts before that have very little to do with ancient history. (This is something about which many of my email subscribers have complained.)
I may write a blog post at some point about how I came to stop believing in God, but I’m not especially motivated to write such an article because it’s not a topic that I think I would especially enjoy writing about, nor is it a topic that I think there is an especially pressing need for me to write about.
I have zero pull to convince you otherwise, but as an agnostic who thinks a lot about this issues I sense I’d find it valuable.
Well, maybe I will write an article about it sometime, but I probably won’t have time to write it until next month at the very earliest.
There are of course other dating systems that are more radically different from the BCE/CE system. For example, the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt uploaded a video on December 7, 2016 which presents the Holocene calendar, a dating system proposed by the Italian-American scientist Cesare Emiliani. You can check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs&t=3s
Of course, I doubt the Holocene calendar will replace the BCE/CE dating sytem anytime soon.
I personally have thought for many years now that the Holocene calendar makes much more sense than the standard anno Domini/Common Era dating system. For better or worse, though, I think that the Common Era system is too thoroughly entrenched into daily life to be replaced.
Please let us not have a different era: just think how much it would cost to change all the dates, even just on “Best Before” stickers. Something like the Holocene makes sense in a way, though it’s terribly species-centric, but there’s no clear starting point in finer detail than about a century. An era needs a year, as long as we go on measuring time in years.
The virtue of the present system is that, because of the temporary dominance of one particular social formation, it is now universally understood even in societies that have their own eras and dating systems.
Every era is arbitrary outside a more or less narrowly confined context; the use of BCE/CE indicates the shared status of our present era, though I suppose it could be made more thoroughly international by a notation like -ISO/+ISO.
A possible reason for using Common Era and similar designations by Early Modern Christians like Kepler might have been that it was relatively common knowledge that Skinny Denis got his calculations wrong (in so far as they could have been got right)–but I have no evidence for this, just speculation.
For publications like Encyclopedia Britannica, in the eighteenth century in Britain Jews formed an important part of the audience for high end cultural productions: Handel was, for instance, conscious of the Jewish audience, which is one reason why a number of his oratorios are on themes from the Tanakh.
I hadn’t realised that the use of CE/BCE was subject to mythologising in the USA, like the notion that the X- abbreviations for the element Christ- is part of the War on Christmas. Whenever I see dates in the CE/BCE form, my default assumption is that the author is a liberal/ecumenically minded Christian.
You “are” a guy right? Just curious about the hair hmm
Oh do grow up, edgelord #59232343e9
wow he deletes comments
I see lol
Very informative post Spencer, I actually believed the Common Era system had been invented quite recently. Now the fact that it was Kepler who devised it makes me think that it’s related to his calculations about the real year of Jesus’ birth, contained in his book “De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii etc.”. A poster of another comment here already suggested this, but I don’t think Dionysus’ error was common knowledge back then . I remember that it was first suggested, always on astronomical basis (the Star of Bethlehem etc.), by a Polish astronomer not long before Kepler. I don’t remember the name of this astronomer though (not Copernicus anyway). As you said Kepler was a very devout Christian, just a few lines beneath Newton (for modern standards, a fanatic), so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Anno Vulgaris system was devised by him because he felt that saying Jesus was born in the wrong year was for him just like a blasphemy. If this hypothesis was right, the Anno Vulgaris system would be in fact more religious than the traditional Anno Domini. But I should make some researches before to ascertain this, though.
Anyway, your article has made me more open to the BCE/CE system, even if I think I’ll continue to use the BC/AD system for European history and BCE/CE for non-Western history. (I’m an agnostic but nonetheless recognize the strong Christian, along with Graeco-Roman, roots of moder western culture).
Good luck with your studies Spencer.
Interesting and well researched and written.
As a fellow writer I feel compelled to continue to use the old BC/AD system. You say that BCE/CE are not being used as secularist agenda, however I do not feel the same way. Despite their first usage by Kepler not falling into this category, In a world moving ever closer to hard materialism with Christianity losing much of its influence on culture, I feel today the usage of BCE/CE is absolutely used to further diminish the role of Christianity on modern life. ‘Common Era’ does not mean anything objective. BC/AD is an objective distinction designating the birth of a historical figure. Regardless of how anyone may feel about that historical figure (a figure which has influenced our culture perhaps more than any other), to remove the meaning from the words, but to keep the dates seems to me to be a sly way for academia and other secularists to attempt to continue removing anything spiritual from our daily life.
As a side note, I do not like how western culture seems to have such a heavy guilt complex, a complex which is not shared by any other culture. Imagine countries in the middle east apologizing for the influence of Islam on their culture. To remove any mention of the birth of Jesus completely from the way we discuss dates (even though we are using the same dating system) simply because others may not believe in his divinity strikes me as representative of the self hatred brewing amongst modern western culture generally.
I love different cultures, I want them all to exist so that I can experience new things. Even though it seems minute, the CE/BCE thing to me represents exactly what is wrong with our culture, and foreshadows to me the progression toward the eventual demise of it altogether.
P.S.
Congrats on the successful blog. As a fellow lover of history, it makes me happy to see someone following their passion and finding success.
As I mention in my article above, 1 CE is probably not the real year Jesus was born, since no one actually knows which year Jesus was born. The birth narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke suggest that he was born during the reign of King Herod I of Judaea, who died in the year 4 BCE. If Jesus was really born during King Herod I’s reign, then he must have been born sometime before 4 BCE, which means that the anno Domini dating system is not based on anything “objective” at all, but rather on an incorrect supposition.
In any case, I don’t see how using BCE/CE dates reflects any kind of “guilt complex.” No one is pretending that the BCE/CE system isn’t a historically Christian dating system. The purpose of using BCE/CE abbreviations is simply to allow people to use the Christian dating system without forcing them to declare Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
You, maybe somewhat smart but you certainly are not intelligent or humble. Intelligent people can take abstract ideas and put them together and create a synthesis rather than spout off about what they think, that minute. Not knowing you very well except what little I have read on your website. I would guess that your major problem is that you have a great deal of admiration for yourself. Self love never carries one very far, before they fall flat on their face.
Relegating God to the dust bin really frees you, so you can become completely self absorbed. Which you have.
Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life”. Either He is right or could you be? Only thing, I don’t see any martyrs going to the rack now, or for that matter into the future, to protect your latest utterance.
One final thought, Just in case you are wrong, eternity is a long, long time.
Bob, In your comment assessing someone else’s smarts, I do believe you meant ” you may be somewhat smart” rather than ” you, maybe somewhat smart.” It’s arrogant to denigrate someone’s intellect let alone with a post containing obvious mistakes. Also, your intolerant, sanctimonious, and prideful denigration of someone who you do not know is a perfect example of the attitude that turns many people away from Christianity in fear that all the adherents are as noxious as you.
I can neither confirm nor refute your allegation that I am “completely self-absorbed.” I don’t think that I am, but, for all I know, I might be. In my experience, self-absorbed people rarely possess the self-awareness to realize that they are self-absorbed. In any case, even if we assume that I am self-absorbed, that alone would not prove that I am wrong.
You reference the Gospel of John 14:6, which portrays Jesus as saying: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Quoting this verse, however, proves nothing. Just because a text written around 1,900 years ago claims that Jesus said something does not mean (1) that he really said it, or (2) that it is factually true.
At the end of your comment, you reference Pascal’s wager. His wager, however, has numerous problems, especially if it is used as an argument for why someone should believe in God. The first problem with the argument is that there are many different religions and even many different sects within the same religion that hold fundamentally incompatible beliefs about what brings a person closer to salvation, that all maintain that a person must follow their specific religion or their specific sect of the religion’s teachings in order to attain salvation, and that all maintain that anyone who does not follow their specific religion or sect’s teachings will burn in the unquenchable fires of Hell for all of eternity.
For instance, Sunni Islam generally maintains that Christians and Shia Muslims cannot attain salvation unless they convert to Sunni Islam. Shia Islam generally maintains that Christians and Sunni Muslims cannot attain salvation unless they convert to Shia Islam. The Roman Catholic Church has at least historically maintained that Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Protestant Christians cannot attain salvation unless they convert to Catholicism (although it has somewhat softened its position on Eastern Orthodox Christians and Protestants in recent years). Eastern Orthodox Christianity has at least historically maintained that Muslims, Roman Catholic Christians, and Protestant Christians cannot attain salvation unless they convert to Eastern Orthodoxy (although, again, it has somewhat softened its position on Catholics and Protestants in recent years).
Most Protestant denominations have at least historically maintained that Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot attain salvation. Many Protestant denominations have softened their positions on Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in recent years, but many fundamentalist Protestant denominations still maintain that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians are destined for eternal damnation unless they convert to Protestantism. In fact, even today, some Protestant denominations still maintain that even Protestant Christians who belong to other denominations cannot attain salvation unless they convert to their specific denomination of Protestant Christianity.
These religions that I have just listed are only the very tip of the iceberg. There are literally thousands of mutually incompatible religions and sects of religions promising salvation to their followers and eternal damnation to everyone else. In order for Pascal’s wager to work, someone would have to prove that one specific religion or sect in particular is, at the very least, more likely to be true than any other. Pascal and his many followers have repeatedly failed to do this satisfactorily.
Pascal lazily dismisses all non-Abrahamic religions with a wave of the hand, essentially claiming that the fact that classical Greek and Roman religions are no longer widely practiced disproves them and that all Native American, Asian, and African religions are clearly nothing but ignorant superstitions that are not even worth examining (even though someone could easily use the same lazy argument against Christianity). He then points out problems with Islam that he claims prove that it is not a divinely authorized religion, while failing to satisfactorily explain similar problems that exist in Christianity. He also fails to satisfactorily address the countless different incompatible denominations within Christianity.
Second of all, if one tries to use Pascal’s wager as an argument to convince people to believe in God, then one is assuming that a person can control whether they believe in God (i.e., that a person can voluntarily choose to believe in God or not believe). The problem is that a person can’t choose to believe or not believe; a person can only be convinced by the evidence or not convinced. If a person does not find the evidence or the arguments persuasive, then no amount of following Christian teachings, pretending God to be real, and wanting God to be real is going to make them believe.
Pascal himself did not originally propose his wager to convince atheists to believe in God, but rather to convince atheists to follow Christian teachings. He insists that a person has a rational incentive to believe (which, again, is only true if someone can prove that whatever sect of Christianity they want people to follow is more likely to be correct than all other religions that have ever promised eternal salvation), so, if a person cannot believe, it must be on the basis of them simply not wanting God to exist, rather than reason. He argues that, if a person follows Christian teachings, then this will alleviate their emotional resistance to believing in God and make them want to believe. This, however, simply assumes that there is no rational reason why someone might not be able to believe in God and that not being able to believe in God can only be the result of emotion.
Even if we ignore the logical problems with Pascal’s wager, I have an intense disliking for the argument because I don’t like the slimy, cynical way it is often used to argue that people should believe in God based on personal self-interest, rather than on truth.
I can only stomach Pascal’s Wager as a kind of flip joke. Given who was interested in probability in the Early Modern period he presumably spent a lot of time with precursors of Sportin’ Life, and proposed it as a counter-argument to show who was really playing the odds. But, alas, it seems likely he meant it. I think medieval theologians would have said that at best it was appealing to timor servalis, the lowest of all motivations for the service of God.
As for your Culture Wars antagonist, I think James 1: 20 is relevant to him.
I find your posts interesting, and your hair reminds me of the days of my youth, now long gone, alas, along with the snows of yesteryear.
Thank you for all your complements! I am glad that you enjoy my articles. I also appreciate your complements about my hair. I took the photo that I’m currently using for my profile back in July and my hair has actually gotten longer since then.
I’ve always wanted to grow my hair long, ever since I was very little, but my mother always wanted me to have a buzz cut and she always insisted on cutting it short. We settled on something of a compromise with a medium-length cut that was just longer than my ears while I was in high school. I started to grow it out more when I went to university, but I still felt like I needed to cut it in order to look respectable. When the pandemic struck in 2020, it afforded something of an excuse for me to grow my hair out, since we were all in lockdown and I couldn’t get it cut anyway.
Unfortunately, I was used to having shorter hair and I didn’t know how to take care of longer hair. I kept using the same shampoo I had been using, which I now know is really bad for curly hair, and I didn’t use conditioner, so my hair ended up looking absolutely disgusting for all of summer 2020. I look back at my photos from that summer and all I can think is how absolutely disgusting I look in all of them. I ended up getting my hair cut in August 2020 before I went back to school, but not quite as short as it was before the pandemic struck.
Since then, I’ve been growing it out and, over the course of last school year, I learned how to take care of it. Now I think it is actually looking very nice. I stopped using shampoo last winter, I’ve been using lots of conditioner, and I’ve been using curler cream to really bring out the curls.
This comment is not about the specific article. I just came across your blog and am so thrilled and impressed with your work. I’ve just read a few articles and have subscribed. The articles are so interesting, so well documented and written. Your scholarship and analysis are top notch. I’m not a history scholar, so I’m not sure how much my opinion counts but as someone with a Bachelor’s degree in history and a Juris Doctor, I appreciate that your theses are supported by evidence. That’s my gushing for now. I’m just so excited to have found something so interesting and fun to read! Thanks for all the work and for sharing it. Have you considered writing a book? All the best to you.
Thank you so much! I’m glad you are enjoying my articles. I always put an enormous amount of time and work into writing them. Anytime someone says they are enjoying my work, it always brings joy to my heart.
I have considered writing a book. In fact, I hope to publish a book of some kind eventually. Unfortunately, I doubt that I will be able to publish a book of any kind anytime soon. After all, I am still an undergraduate right now, although I am currently in the midst of applying to PhD programs in ancient history.
Hi Spencer,
As I’ve mentioned on Quora before, I often save your posts up until I’ve time to do them justice. Usually on the weekends, and often on Saturday nights. As it is this evening. Yet another pleasant evening spent with a glass of wine enjoying your work.
Thanks once again. Your writing engrosses this old bloke. Absolutely one of the gems of Quora.