It is a mouth-watering prospect, undoubtedly the news story of this fledgling year: God, in a human court of law, almost in the shadow of the Vatican, under obligation to prove that he exists.
And if he can’t, then no one in Italy will any longer be able to claim to be God’s agent or intermediary, to collect money for his greater glory, or to issue instructions to the human world on his behalf. No longer will the pope be able to hand down infallible bulls, no longer will Catholic priests be able to claim divine authority for their appointments, and only under their breaths will the faithful be able to utter their holiest of vows, ‘in the name of the father, the son and the holy ghostâ€, because the father, the son and the holy ghost will no longer be deemed to exist, and publicly to proclaim otherwise will be to mislead the gullible, a crime in Italy.
The drama doesn’t end there. Representing God as the defendant in court on Friday is Enrico Righi, a 76-year-old Catholic priest. His job will be to convince the learned Judge Gaetano Mautone that God (Jesus) exists. Opposing him, the plaintiff is Luigi Cascioli, an atheist also in his 70s, who once went to the seminary to train as a Catholic priest with his adversary. The case is being heard in the ancient town of Viterbo, one- time seat of the papacy. It is a drama that could not have been scripted.
Critics of Cascioli claim that he is grandstanding. But by bringing an age-old argument into a court of law, he has, after centuries of ontological stand-off, engineered a showdown that finally pits one way of knowing truth — by means of revelation with another — by means of material evidence. Why ‘ontological stand offâ€? Because the argument between Christianity and secular humanism always ends with the sterility of compromise and defeat: reasoned argument cannot engage with pure faith. The rationalist says: ‘Show me the evidenceâ€, the person of faith says: ‘I need offer you no evidence, I know because God makes me know.†And so no outcome is ever possible.
By managing to bring the argument into a court of law, Cascioli avoids this impasse, and places the church under the same obligation to prove its case as criminal or civil defendants are placed whenever they are brought to trial in a court of human law. Empirical evidence guides humanity in the regulation of all of its affairs and relationships. A man may claim to love his wife, but unless there is empirical evidence of his claim, his wife is unlikely to believe him. When it comes to the crunch, Christian claims are generally absolved from the burden of empirical evidence. But Cascioli has changed the rules of the game. Whereas he is under no obligation to prove that Jesus did not exist, Righi must prove to a learned judge, who must decide the merits of the case not in terms of his own religious beliefs, whatever they might be, but on the basis of law, that Jesus did exist, and was God incarnate. Tough call.
Cascioli alleges violation of two interesting statutes, one the ‘abuse of popular credibilityâ€, and the other ‘impersonationâ€. By creating moral codes and obligations, by benefiting from tithes and monetary contributions and by creating a climate of belief in the mythical and the fabulous, he alleges that the Church abuses popular credibility. By insisting that Jesus Christ existed, son of a virgin, miracle worker, and God incarnate, he alleges that the Church creates a mythical person, an act that amounts to impersonation. A corollary would be the invention of fictitious human identities to draw salaries or pensions against such identities. None of us would have any problem in identifying such behaviour as criminal.
The Italian laws are not idiosyncratic. Belgium has similar laws in draft form which will make it a punishable offence to ‘abuse credulity in order to persuade [an individual] of the existence of false enterprises, an imaginary power or the occurrence of non-existing events†and there are moves afoot in the European Union to overrule religious objection as being a sufficient basis to avoid legal obligations. For instance, EU experts insist that the legal right of an individual to an abortion overrules the right of others to refuse to facilitate such an abortion. In other words, the standing and the legitimacy of behaviour based upon sectarian or faith-based belief is under serious threat. Cascioli is simply riding solo right at the front of the secular wave.
He has thought out his grounds with wit and insight. He happily concedes that theological argument is rightfully the preserve of theologians — and that theologians can believe whatever they want to. His case is based on history, not theological reasoning. The theology of the RC Church — indeed all Christian theology — is based on a particular historical understanding. Cascioli examines Christian history minutely, and reaches the conclusion: ‘It never happened like that, your history is false.†He will be helped by precedent set in litigation successfully brought against scholars who deny the existence of the Holocaust. He has built his own case in his book The Fable of Christ and arguments from it are readily available on his website (www.luigicascioli.it/home_eng.php). Readers can reach their own conclusions in regard to those arguments. What grips the imagination is not so much the historical argument itself as the unprecedented courtroom drama that will unfold this week as Righi presents his case.
He, and his long-dead witnesses, will be subject to cross questioning and to character and credibility audit. Under these circumstances he will have to think long and hard about who he calls. The Gospel writers ought to be a major concern. Imagine the kind of cross questioning that would take place in a ‘normal†court proceeding: ‘Is their existence attested by any non-Christian source?†Well, no. ‘Can you prove that they existed?†Well, no. ‘Do their accounts conflict?†Yes. ‘In material considerations?†Yes. ‘Is there evidence that their work was tampered with or edited by later writers?†Yes. ‘Do they provide any corroborating evidence of the miracles they report?†No. ‘Are they eye witnesses to the events they describe?†No.
Clearly, if the issue before the court was a case against a person whose fate might be jail or the hangman, any self-respecting judge would have to disqualify the evidence of such unreliable witnesses.
Righi might imagine that his star witness would be Josephus Flavius, a Jewish historian of the period who appears to have testified to the existence of ‘Jesus, a wise man†who was crucified. If Righi puts Flavius in the witness box (so to speak), he runs the risk of Cascioli’s calling his own expert witness, Professor John Meier, well known Christian scholar, and author of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Cascioli: ‘Tell me Professor, do you have any reason to doubt the historical integrity of Mr Flavius?†Oh absolutely. For instance, he had no compunction whatsoever in concocting an immense web of lies to support his claim to have been a Pharisee. ‘So, from a historiographical point of view, Mr Flavius is not a reliable witness?†Oh, absolutely not. ‘What’s the likelihood of a staunch Jew, one who writes a history precisely to demonstrate the superiority of Judaism over other religions, testifying to the status of Jesus Christ as the long-prophesied messiah?†None whatsoever, he never wrote that passage, it was a forgery interpolated by later Christians. Imagine letting Matlock loose on Righi’s witnesses!
The Christians and the secularists are already rooting for their sides. Blogs are brimming with invective, and, and as the trial gets under way it’s hard to resist a frisson of delightful expectation, such as one might feel before Manchester United plays Liverpool. We can expect a great contest, provided that no one gets to the ref. One might venture an opinion as to the winner in this contest for the truth, but we must resist the temptation, for as we South Africans know full well, it would be irresponsible to predict an outcome. After all, the case is now sub judice.