Surprisingness and evidence for supernatural occurrences

From my paper "Miracles and the Case for Theism."

It is true that in order for miraculous occurrences to play a role
in a case for theism, it must be the case that such events contradict
naturalistic expectations. But it does not follow that, from the point
of view of naturalism, these events have to be maximally improbable.
Other events that contradict naturalistic expectations to a greater degree
can be passed off as mere anomalies because no plausible theistic
explanation is available to tempt the naturalist to alter his beliefs about
the way the world works. Paul Horwich gives an account of what it is
for an event to be surprising that may shed some light on this matter.
He claims that it is necessary to distinguish between unlikely events
and surprising events, since many unlikely events do not surprise us.
If I were to flip a coin 100 times and get heads every time it would
surprise me, even though any other sequence of heads and tails would
be equally unlikely. What distinguishes surprising events from other
unlikely events is the presence of an alternative account of the circumstances
under which the event occurred, an account not previously
accepted, that would diminish the improbability of the event in
question. Thus in the coin-tossing case the possibility that the coin
might not be fair causes me to wonder if the world is in fact the way
I, who am accustomed to coins being fair, previously thought it to be.
This explains why it would not be surprising if Jones were to win a
lottery amongst a billion people, but it would be surprising if Smith
were to win three lotteries amongst a thousand people, even though it
is more probable that Smith should win his three thousand-person
lotteries than that Jones should win a billion-person lottery. This is
because the Smith case gives me reason to change my background
assumption about the fairness of the lotteries in a way that the Jones
case does not. Thus surprisingness, for Horwich, does not vary with
improbability, it varies with the degree to which events force us to
change our hypotheses about how things happen in the world. 21 In
cases where there is evidence that a miracle has occurred, it is the
combination of natural improbability and the availability of supernatural
explanation that makes the evidence surprising from the point
of view of naturalism, not the improbability alone. So perhaps we can
attribute Mackie's insistence that miracles are maximally improbable
for atheists to the fact that good evidence for miracles would be maximally
surprising for atheists; for persons with a naturalistic bent the
acceptance of miracles requires a thorough revision of their view of
the world. (Miracles would also surprise theists, if they were not expecting
God to act in the way he did and would find it necessary to
change their view about what God is like). However, as Horwich has
shown, surprisingness is not strictly a function of improbability; therefore
Mackie is mistaken in assuming that since miracles are maximally
surprising they must also be maximally improbable.  

Let's try again with the McGrew paper

Here.

Tim McGrew on the Dwindling Probabilities Argument

Someone brought up the Dwindling Probabilities Argument. If you are going to defend that one, you have to take on Tim McGrew.

The Barker-Horner Resurrection Debate

BDK and Tim on Historical Evidence

This exchange gets very very good about the time Tim and BDK get into an exchange on what evidence would be sufficient to support belief in a resurrection.

It goes, though, to an important part of my enterprise in discussing historical evidence surrounding the foundation of Christianity. Any particular piece of evidence in the question of theism versus atheism, or of Christianity vs. non-Christianity is just that, one piece of the evidence. This includes, by the way, the problem of evil. I would be surprised, maybe even shocked, if historical evidence alone overturned BDK's overall commitment to a naturalistic philosophy. People change basic philosophies only when lots of things fall apart and typically, it's lots of kinds of things. The interesting claim here for me is that patient study of the whole issue will reveal is that there is something profoundly odd and surprising from a naturalistic standpoint in the whole history surrounding the founding of Christianity. You can admit that and say, "OK, but naturalism seems to me so well grounded otherwise, that I'm got to continue to believe that naturalism is true and that the whole story happened naturalistically, even if it's tough to imagine just how that could have been."

Lewis wrote about an atheist colleague being surprised at the strength of the historical case for Christianity.

“Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole outline of Christian history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought-I didn’t of course say; words that would have revealed the nonsense-that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.” But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”
by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224



VR: That atheist remained an atheist. But he thought the strength of the case for Christianity was stronger than he thought it would be. If you establish that with the argument, who knows where it goes from there.

Historical Intent and the Pervasiveness of the Miraculous

There are two sets of facts that, I think render a naturalistic account of Christian origins difficult. They are what you should expect if there were real miracles but not what you should expect if there were none. One is that it seems clear to me that the Gospels were written with the intent to be represent reality, and that they were written by people who, if not eyewitnesses themselves, were in a position to interview eyewitnesses. In the case of the later parts of Acts, I think it very clear that Luke WAS an eyewitness to at least some of the events he discusses.  I think the archaeological evidence, along with other types of evidence, shows that the New Testament has at the very least a significant historical core. I realize that this doesn't buy you inerrancy, but it does undercut any theory that the whole thing was made up. People didn't write novels at that time, and a comparison between the Gospels and other literature at the time shows that, whatever else the Gospels and Acts were, they were attempts to represent reality. Call this the Attempt to Represent Reality Thesis.

Of course it is open to the skeptic to say, at this point that OK, there was a significant historical core, but all the miracle reports were legendary. However, these documents seem to be pervasively supernaturalist, so that it doesn't seem even possible to isolate that naturalistically explicable historical core from the elements which, in one way or another, imply a supernatural character to the founding of Christianity. The passages used to back up the "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" argument are cases in point. Not just the healings, the claim to forgive sins, but also the claim to supersede the Law with "I say unto you," and Jesus' more explicit assertions like Mark 14: 61-62 make it difficult to isolate a naturalistically acceptable element. This is the thesis of the Pervasiveness of the Miraculous.

But the pervasiveness isn't just in the Gospels. In one debate on Acts, I had been pointing to the archaeological confirmation of later Acts. The event-to-writing gap is less, and, as I indicated, we have good reason to suppose that some of it is eyewitness testimony. So, someone who believes in a naturalistic account would expect a downturn in the element of the miraculous. Skeptic GearHedEd indeed floated just such a hypothesis, which is perfectly reasonable on naturalistic assumptions:

I submit that everything before Acts 9 is stage-setting, and that everything after the infamous "Road to Damascus" incident is probably historical, at least as much as anything is considered "historical" in any other early "historical" writings.

Things that make you go, "Hmmmm..."

Miracles

Before Acts: 9? Many

After Acts 9:? Almost nothing, save vague statements of the "Holy Spirit descending on them" in Acts 11, and Peter's "miraculous" escape from prison in Acts 12 (who was there to record the circumstances of Peter's escape? And didn't he at first think he was "seeing a vision (Acts 12:9)? He should have trusted his first impression).

Only, as Tim McGrew pointed out subsequently, miracles don't drop off at this point. 

It is completely unclear to me why GearHedEd thinks it would be a point in his favor if the latter part of Acts contained no reported miracles. The suggestion that the gospels and the earlier parts of Acts are entirely fabricated does not warrant serious discussion.

But for the record, here is a partial list of miracles recounted in Acts from chapter 10 onward:

* Peter is liberated from prison by an angel (Acts 12:5-11)

* Paul temporarily blinds the sorcerer Elymas (Acts 13:9-12)

* Paul and Barnabas work miracles on their missionary journey (Acts 14:3)

* Paul cures the lame man of Lystra (Acts 14:7-9)

* Paul exorcises girl possessed of a divining spirit (Acts 16:16-18)

* Chains fall from Paul and Silas in prison (Acts 16:25-30)

* Paul raises Eutychus from the dead (Acts 20:9-12)

* Paul shakes off a viper from his arm and suffers no hurt (Acts 28:3-6)

* Paul heals Publius’s father of dysentery (Acts 28:7-8)

* Paul heals all the sick brought to him on Malta (Acts 28:9)

In addition, Tim could have also pointed out that the presence of signs and wonders was used as one of the major reasons which justified the Gentile ministry of Paul and Barnabas to the Council of Jerusalem. 

In other words, you should expect it to be the case that the more you find support for historicity, the less likely you are to find miracle claims, if naturalism is true. But this is not the case, so that disconfirms the naturalistic hypothesis.

Reply to Loftus on miracles and prior probabilities

I argue that when it comes to miraculous claims yesterday’s evidence no longer can hold water for me, for in order to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for me, I must already believe the Christian framework (i.e., the Bayesian priors) that allows me to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for Christianity.

Are these your prior probabilities, or are these priors everyone else is supposed to have? If the former, that may be true. But if that's all it is, then you are going to have trouble getting irrationality charges off the ground. I am not in the business of making irrationality charges. I don't think that the evidence for the Resurrection is sufficient by itself to rationally compel belief. I just think there is a lot that is hard to explain about the founding of Christianity that makes more sense if the supernatural is admitted than if the supernatural is not admitted. I realize people like McDowell say it's irrational to be skeptical, given the evidence, but it's beyond my powers to make such a case. In other words, I am engaged in what Steve Davis calls soft apologetics, although I also maintain that the Resurrection evidence is a cumulative case role-player in a case for theism. (You haven't read my two papers on miracles, have you?)

The problem is that no amount of philosophical thinking alone will produce the conclusion that any event actually took place in the past, much less a miraculous resurrection. So on the on hand, in order to establish the Christian faith believers must use historical evidence at every juncture. But on the other hand, in order to see that evidence as evidence we need to have good reasons to do so. Where do those reasons come from? Not from any “background knowledge” or “priors” of theirs. They cannot use their so-called “background knowledge” or their “priors” to help determine whether the evidence shows Jesus arose from the dead until they can first show that he did. Christians must independently establish that the resurrection took place in history before such a belief can be placed into their bag of "priors."  


If we can't use our priors, whose priors do we use? My claim is you have lots of people out there, from people who think Christianity very antecedently likely, to people who think the central events of Christianity might or might not have happened and are looking at the evidence to see if it did, to people who think Christianity is absurd and wouldn't believe if Jesus were to sit down across from them at lunch. The subjectivist theory of prior probabilities says that rather than find "correct" priors and argue from those, we simply have to use our own priors and adjust our confidence as we look at the evidence. How do we look at the evidence? We ask if the evidence, such as we have it, is more likely to be the way it is if the Christian story is true than if the Christian story is false. Now suppose I successfully show that the evidence that comes down to us from the first century is more likely to be the way it is if the Christian story were true than if the Christian story were false. Well, then we Christians would have grounds for having more probabilistic confidence in our Christianity, people sitting on the fence would become Christians, but those who have strongly skeptical priors would remain skeptics, but they might scratch their heads a little bit of how this could possibly have happened the way it did. AS C. S. Lewis said.

Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”
by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224

That hard-boiled atheist never converted, but he nonetheless accepted the fact that the founding of Christianity was "rum" from the standpoint of his atheism. And maybe that's all we can expect from the argument.

But we can look at the facts and see if they are more likely given Christianity than given not-Christianity. That is a comparison we can make regardless of our priors. We have no logical method that I know of for determining what our priors ought to be, and certainly no argument proving that the prior for miracles ought to be vanishingly low.

This problem is fatal for anyone who wishes to believe Jesus bodily arose from the dead in history. We can even grant the existence of Yahweh or a creator god and the possibility of miracles and it changes nothing. For what needs to be shown is that Yahweh did such a miracle here in this particular case and the historical tools we have available to assess whether he did are inadequate for the task. 

The reason why our historical tools are in some sense inadequate is that we have to live with a situation where prior probabilities differ widely. So historical evidence will probably not be sufficient to allow us to pin irrationality charges on our opponents. But guess what. YOU are the one making the irrationality charges, which means YOU have to prove them. I believe that we can determine, historically, whether the evidence is more likely to exist given a supernatural theory of the founding of Christianity, or whether it is more likely to exist as it does given a naturalistic theory of the founding of Christianity.

I like Bob Price who says that even if God raised Jesus from the dead there is no way we can know that he did.

Depends on your understanding of knowledge. If what we mean is that the evidence is sufficient to persuade all reasonable persons, then no. If what we mean is that we can have good reason to suppose that the historical evidence confirms the supernaturalist hypothesis, that it is more likely to exist as it does given supernaturalism than given naturalism, then yes, I think we can have a justified, true, belief that Jesus rose from the dead if, indeed, Jesus did in fact rise from the dead.

THAT is the case and only practically brain dead people refuse to acknowledge this.

There you go again, with this irrationality charges, for which you need proof, and for which you have provided none. You are claiming that no reasonable person can believe in the miraculous origin of Christianity. You have to demonstrate either that the historical evidence, such as we have it, is more likely given naturalism than supernaturalism, or show that everyone ought to have very low priors for the Christian miracles. Good luck with that.

Some further exchange between McGrew and Babinski

The title link goes to Babinksi's response to McGrew at his own site, this is Tim's response.  Tim's new comments are in blue, those from Ed are in black.

Ed has taken the time to explain some of his thoughts on the first couple of points of our initial exchange, and I have, today, a bit of time to respond. Since the semester has begun and I have various other commitments, I cannot promise to keep up an exchange in a timely fashion. I say this, not out of a desire to avoid discussion, but to give fair warning that it isn’t something I anticipate being able to carry on indefinitely. I would not want to give anyone a pretext for inferring anything from silence.

EB [FURTHER REPLY]: What does the word "appeared" mean exactly? I read in Carnely's book on the resurrection that the term can apply to something less than physical.

Ophthe comes from optanomai, which means simply “to appear.” Further shades of meaning cannot be squeezed out of lexical entries alone; we must look at the context, both textual (how does such a claim function in a creed?) and socio-cultural (what would a Jewish audience have understood by a resurrection?). The suggestion that an early creed would be taken seriously if its point were that lots of people had experienced purely subjective “appearances” is bizarre; in the Jewish context, Jesus’ rising again could only have been understood as a physical rising again, a point argued in extenso in Licona’s forthcoming book. To read ophthe here as “to have a purely subjective appearance-experience with no objective physical correlate” is, in face of these considerations, insupportable.

As for appearing to Peter first of all, that's not in the Gospels. Neither is a lone appearance to James. (Neither is an appearance to over 500. But more on that below.)

This sounds like an argument from silence in the making. In any event, though an appearance to Peter is not described in the Gospels, it is alluded to in Luke 24:34.

Let's say that Jesus' core group of initial followers returned to Galilee, mourning the loss of their leader, and Peter had a post-mortum appearance-experience (not unheard of), and the rest of the apostles WENT ALONG with it, saying, "Oh yes, the Lord appeared to Peter and the rest of us also." And perhaps by saying such a thing they originally only meant that THEY BELIEVED that the Lord had appeared to Peter and he was their leader? And suppose other followers of Jesus tended to view James as a leader at least equal to Peter, and they saw how the notion of an "appearance" to Peter rallied the Jesus movement round him, and so a story arose that James saw the Lord too--"and then the apostles," just as in the case of Peter, making them equal. In other words I'm suggesting that an early story grew, prompted by questions of leadership. As for the idea of miracle stories growing, an examination of the NT itself provides prima facie evidence of the addition, growth and change of miracle stories over time. If TM wishes to disavow my case and instead conduct his own based on harmonizing tales, that's his prerogative. But I'd say from my perspective that the prima facie evidence and each question raised by such evidence, comes first.

This chain of perhapses and supposes is pure fabrication; I cannot imagine why you think that it is supported by the evidence of the texts. There is no power struggle recorded between Peter and James. Most of the conditions requisite for this sort of post-mortem experience are missing. Any misunderstanding of an initial claim to have believed that Peter hallucinated something would have been easily quashed by those who had made the initial claim. To suppose that the misunderstanding arose and took over in the first years, to the point that the truth had disappeared within five years of the events of Easter and the creed reported only the misunderstanding, is not credible.

The simple explanation for why there are no more details in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is that this is a creed, not a Gospel. Virtually all scholars agree that it was composed and circulated at a time when the majority of the principals were alive, in the 30s. The suggestion that because this creed, which is by its very nature streamlined and structured for easy memorization, does not contain further details, none were known, is extremely puzzling. Does anyone seriously maintain that an inquirer in Jerusalem who had heard the claims in this creed and came to the disciples asking what had happened would have been sent away no wiser than when he first came? Or that he would have been told only stories of “pneumatic ecstasies”?

As for the helter-skelter nature of the resurrection reports we have, I think any candid reader will agree that it is just the sort of evidence we might expect if events happened more or less as they have traditionally been thought to have happened. We have a good number of accounts, narrated by different persons, of different appearances in different places, complete with the loose ends that accompany all sincere eyewitness testimony. By far the simplest explanation for this is that the first Christians had complete conviction that Jesus, after His resurrection, had been seen so often and by so many persons that there was no real dispute about the central fact of the matter. The discrepancies in the accounts are no greater than—indeed, rather less striking than—those in the accounts of the death of Callisthenes, or Caesar, or Caracalla.

Dr. Robert M. Price also notes that a host of questions have been raised by theologians concerning the above passage in 1 Cor.  [A long quotation from Price follows.]

It does seem reasonable to suppose that the creed was composed to give a list of prominent males in the early church who could give testimony to having seen the risen Lord. Price’s question about the absence of an explicit Gospel reference to the 500 is actually awkward for him, since he must then try to argue that it wasn’t present in the original text of 1 Corinthians 15. I am deeply unimpressed by such arguments from silence.

Another paragraph from Price follows; the only portion that could be construed as a gesture toward an argument is this:

“[I]f such an overwhelmingly potent proof of the resurrection had ever occurred it would have been widely repeated from the first.”

There are multiple problems here. If the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 was, as most scholars grant, circulated in the 30s, then it was widely repeated from the first, and we have it, in the very words in which it was repeated. Paul, in quoting the creed to the Corinthians, reminds them that this is what they received at the first—reminds them, that is, of their own catechesis. The suggestion that it wasn’t widely known unless it was mentioned twice is absurd; the assumption that it must post-date the Gospels is just another argument from silence and deserves no further notice.

Regarding that line in 1 Corinthians 15 and the description of Pentecost in Acts 2, Price writes:

In fact, would it not be far more natural to suppose that if any connection existed between the two passages, the relation must be just the opposite? That, rather, an originally subjective pneumatic ecstasy on the part of a smaller number at Pentecost has been concretized into the appearance of the Risen Lord to a larger group on Easter? But then we are simply underscoring more heavily the apocryphal character of the result. Lüdemann unwittingly confirms this: "The number 'more than 500 brethren' is to be understood as 'an enormous number', i.e., not taken literally. (Who could have counted?)" It is just this sort of detail that denotes the fictive character of a narrative. It is like asking how the narrator knew the inner thoughts of a character: he knows them because he made them up! No more successful is the suggestion that the appearance to the 500 be identified with Luke 24:36ff. The same question presents itself: if there were as many as 500 present on that occasion, how can the evangelist have thought this "detail" unworthy of mention? And if we suppose he did include it, what copyist in his right mind would have omitted it?

In a word, no. It is not more natural to suppose that the appearance to over 500 brethren at once is a legend growing out of Pentecost, for many reasons, one of which is that no appearance of Jesus is even hinted at in Acts 2. As for the question about counting I hope that we can get beyond the sort of chronological snobbery that suggests ancient people could not or would not count. Price’s attempt to parlay the numerical reference into a piece of evidence that the story is fictional looks suspiciously like an attempt to affirm the consequent.

The argument from silence regarding Luke 24:36 would be worth puncturing if it were not for the fact that the hypothesis that there were 500 people present at that time is not itself particularly plausible (see verse 33). Matthew 28:16-20 is a better candidate; here we simply have another argument from silence, and Price has not provided any compelling line of argument for the inclusion of that detail. If anyone feels a need for a further explanation for Matthew’s brevity, I have already remarked on the fact that Matthew’s final remarks are quite condensed, a fact that has led competent commentators (e.g. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, p. 698) to suggest that, like Josephus in Contra Apion 1.320, Matthew was running out of scroll. The omission of a detail in writing that could be supplied by a living witness to anyone who asked is not a serious ground for erecting an elaborate theory of legendary embellishment.

I cannot for the life of me see why anyone should take the view that the reference to the 500 is an interpolation seriously. And, in fact, apart from Price, virtually no scholar does. There is no shred of textual evidence against its authenticity, and it makes (pace Price) perfectly good sense in the context. I am deeply suspicious of the kind of historical fantasy that would permit us, if it were not reserved exclusively for the Scriptures, to deconstruct all history.

For literalists, let me add that when Paul states that Jesus "appeared" to "over 500 brethren at once" (1Cor. 15:6), that would have been to a greater number of "brethren" than were mentioned at the time of Jesus' alleged bodily ascension into heaven because Acts 1:9,14-15,22 mentions only "120 brethren" meeting together in Jerusalem just prior to Jesus' bodily ascension. Acts also limits the number of people who saw the body of Jesus ascend into heaven to just the apostles (Luke 24:49-53 & Acts 1:2-9 ). But I don't want to rush to discussing Luke-Acts since we still haven't discussed Mark and Matthew's tales of the post-resurrection Jesus yet, which most scholars would admit were probably composed sometime between 1 Cor. and Luke-Acts.

Here we have another argument from silence. The bulk of Jesus’ ministry was in Galilee, and it is widely acknowledged that he had a larger body of followers there than in Jerusalem. So the reference to 120 brethren gathered together in Jerusalem does not cast any doubt on whether Jesus appeared to over 500 people at once. It is generally and, I think, reasonably conjectured that the reference to the 500+ is an allusion to the same event as the one mentioned in Matthew 28:16-20.

TM: It isn’t the point of a creed to give a lengthy description of all that Jesus did and said after his resurrection. This one circulated in the 30s; one of the purposes, plainly, was to list the people of whom one might inquire.

EB [FURTHER REPLY]: The point is not that it was an "early creed," the point is HOW CAN WE KNOW FOR SURE HOW SUCH A CREED ORIGINATED? We can't know, we don't have any evidence BUT this early creed. And it is sparse evidence indeed. So unless you are assuming a harmonization stance to begin with, you don't know either. My view considers the evidence in chronological order, and the most obvious questions that come to mind -- prima facie evidence of what appears to be legendary additions, growth, changes in the story over time. For further reading along such lines I suggest:

I await any account of its origin apart from the obvious one—that people who were convinced they had seen Jesus alive again after his death set down a compact record of notable witnesses—that is remotely plausible. Regarding priority, I will just note en passant that Joachim Jeremias, who agrees that the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is very early, argues that the report in Luke 24:34 represents a tradition that predates that creed. (“Easter: The Earliest Tradition and the Earliest Interpretation,” in New Testament Theology (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), p. 306) Dodd and Bultmann also note the connection between Luke 24:34 and 1 Corinthians 15:5.

McGrew versus Babinski on the reliability of the New Testament

Tim was having trouble getting his rebuttal to Ed Babinski up onto Blogger, so I am reproducing the dialogue here. 

EB: What exactly did their eyes witness?

TM: More or less what they said they did.

EB: 1 Cor. is the earliest and also the most sparse example. All it tells us is that "Jesus appeared."

TM: ... to Peter, and to the twelve, and to five hundred people at once, and to James -- all of which means just what it sounds like it means. It isn’t the point of a creed to give a lengthy description of all that Jesus did and said after his resurrection. This one circulated in the 30s; one of the purposes, plainly, was to list the people of whom one might inquire.

EB: As for Jesus "speaking" that story builds as any legend might, from no words related by Paul,

TM;... which we would not particularly have expected, given the sort of work Paul is writing and the nature of the creed he is quoting

EB: ... to no words related by Mark, ...<

TM: Arguments from silence are almost always lousy, but you cannot build one here at all since the ending of Mark’s Gospel is lost.

EB:... to a few sentences in Matthew ...

TM: ... whose account becomes so compressed in the final chapter that it is very likely he was running out of scroll, in which case it is not possible to press any inference very hard here ...

EB: ... to hundreds of words and allusions to entire speeches and 49 days of meeting with Jesus in Luke-Acts and John.

TM: What else would you expect? With Luke, you have someone who set out to collect reminiscences of Jesus; with John, you have someone who was perhaps the only disciple personally to accompany Jesus on his earlier trips to Judea and who set out to fill in the gaps left by the previous Gospels.

EB: The legend grew.

TM: This conclusion is not well supported by the evidence you have presented. It is antecedently improbable, it is contradicted by numerous other facts about the text, it flies in the face of the testimony we have regarding the origin of these documents, and there is an alternative explanation that covers more of the facts better.

EB: Singh and Sevi are NOT beside the point.

TM: They are completely irrelevant to the point under discussion. I personally know a guy who claims that Jesus came and lived with him for a few weeks. This proves nothing. Good grief.

EB: As for the Gospel of John's description in chapter 3 of meeting with Nicodemus, it's in Greek and contains a pun that confuses Nicodemus which is shouldn't have happened since they were mostly likely speaking Aramaic, not Greek to one another, ...

TM: Please read what I wrote above. It is very plausible that they were speaking Greek, a language that Jesus, as a tradesman working in Galilee, would have had to acquire.

EB: The previous Gospels have Jesus teaching many plainly Jewish things about "how to inherit eternal life" during the day in front of other people.

TM: ... and not using the phrase “born again.” Yes, quite. But what of it? The entire premise of your objection here is based on a careless reading of John 3. John doesn’t say that Jesus spoke with Nicodemus by night to hide His true teaching from the Jews; it says that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night for fear of the Jews.

EB: Interestingly, only in the Gospel of John do you find the continual depiction of Jesus as the Lamb of God, right from Jesus' first meeting with John the Baptist and put on the lips of John the Baptist, to the "secret nighttime meeting" with "Nicodemus," ...

TM: Right: John uses a phrase not found in the other Gospels. (Yawn.)

EB: ... to the end of the Gospel of John which (unlike the other Gospels) has Jesus slaughtered on the same day they are slaughtering the "lambs" for the Passover Feast.

TM: Another misreading: John has Jesus crucified on the same day as the Synoptics.

EB: My conclusion is that YES, people were making stuff up about Jesus.

TM: People certainly did make up stories about Jesus; we just disagree as to whether the Gospels are instances of that genre.

EB: And I think any religion that wants me to believe in made up hints of stories that continued to be passed along and flourish as legends via a game of "telephone" ..

TM: It wasn’t a game of telephone. Even Bart Ehrman, when he is speaking with serious scholars instead of selling soap to the masses, doesn’t try to pretend this.

EB: ... (played out from Palestine to the Greek speaking world where the stories took root and became "Gospel") ...

TM: Memo to Ed: Palestine was part of the Greek speaking world.  

EB:  ...is equivalent to asking me to turn in my questioning brain.

TM: I would have a good deal more sympathy for you if you showed any willingness to question some of the lousy arguments you have posted on your own website. Skepticism need not be reserved for the Gospels and the creed, Ed. Try doubting something else.

*****

Tim and Lydia McGrew on archaeological support for the New Testament

I have linked to the McGrews' essay from the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

The role of such naturalism as a motivating factor in the work of the form
critics is often explicit, but as an argument against a more traditional
position it suffers from the obvious drawback of circularity. Consequently,
form critics have typically supported their conclusion of late dating of the
gospels and Acts by pointing to ostensible anachronisms and errors of
detail that show the authors to have been, not eyewitnesses, but creative
and tendentious redactors writing at a substantial remove from the events
they are purportedly recording.

Unquestionably, if we examine the gospels with a literary lens of sufficient
resolving power, we find that they contain material belonging to various
literary types: logia, parables,pronouncement stories, speeches, and so
forth. To recognize this fact is not to make any concession on the point of
interest to us here. And anyone who has read much biblical criticism
knows that the form and redaction critics often command much real
scholarship and sometimes display astonishing imagination. But there are
good reasons for dismissing the sweeping negative conclusions of form
criticism regarding the authenticity and reliability of the narratives. There
are no independent textual traditions preserving the allegedly earliest
forms; one must discern them in the existing text, and in many cases
the layers are visible only when the text is viewed with eyes of
form-critical faith. There is a substantial and growing body of
evidence that thegospels were indeed written by eyewitnesses or by
those with access to eyewitnesses. And the conjectures of the form
critics regarding the dating and accuracy of the New Testament writings
have repeatedly been shown by scholars in other fields to be embarrassing
blunders.


A few examples may help to illustrate the latter point. In the early 20th
century,the French critic Alfred Loisy dismissed the description in the fourth
gospel (John 5:2) of the pool of Bethesda as having five porches. This,
Loisy said, was a literary alteration or addition designed to represent the
five books of the law which Jesus had come to fulfill. On the basis of such
reasoning, and in harmony with the late dating advocated in the previous
century by the Tübingen scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, Loisy set the
date for the composition of the gospel at some time after A.D. 150.
Excavations of the pool of Bethesda in 1956 revealed that it was located
where John said it was, bounded on the sides with four colonnades and
spanned across the middle by a fifth (Leon-Dufour, 1967, p. 67; Jeremias,
1966, pp. 36-38). As E. M. Blaiklock says, “No further comment is
necessary” (Blaiklock, 1983, p. 65).


Archaeology has not been kind to literary criticism of the gospels and Acts.
The discovery in Caesarea Maritima in 1961 of an inscription bearing
Pilate’s name and title, the discovery of a boundary stone of the emperor
Claudius bearing the name of Sergius Paulus (cf. Acts 13:7), the very
recent discovery of the Pool of Siloam (John 9) from the time of Jesus,
and numerous other discoveries indicate a level of accuracy incompatible
with the picture of the development of the gospels as an accretion of legend
over the course of two or more generations. Our point is not that these
discoveries demonstrate the accuracy of all other portions of the gospels;
rather, it is the commonsense principle that authors who have been shown
to be accurate in matters that we can check against existing independent
evidence deserve, within reasonable bounds, the benefit of the doubt when
they speak of matters of putative public fact that we cannot at present verify
independently. Several such discoveries also indicate that the author of the
gospel of John was familiar with Jerusalem prior to its destruction, a point
that directly addresses the attempt to place a very late date on the text.
 (See Shanks, 2005, p. 23.)

William Ramsay's book on Acts

A lot of the archaeological confirmations of Acts come from archaeologist Sir William Ramsay. Here is a link to his book, St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen.

Sometimes I think there should be an outsider test for Bible scholars. Would anyone consider for two seconds a next-generation date for a book that has been this heavily supported by archaeological evidence, if that book didn't have to be in the Bible? It is as if the claim that Luke was a companion of Paul is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

Tim McGrew on Carrier's treatment of Luke and Josephus

Tim's comments are italicized. The Carrier essay is linked.

The list of “generic parallels” between Luke and Josephus is so generic that I was surprised he left out “Both Luke and Josephus mention the existence of Rome.” The list of “story parallels” is even worse, since in many cases it involves torturing the notion of a parallel. Just run through the list and note some of the (non)parallels that he either vastly overrates or twists ’round:

* In Josephus, the census under Quirinius is the beginning of something bad. In Luke, it isn’t. Therefore, this is a parallel where Luke “transvalues” the message of the census, changing “bad” into “good.”

(Um, ... standards ...?)

* Josephus says that there were many men who led revolts, and he names three prominent ones. Luke has passing references to three persons with the same names, though it is not clear that Luke’s “Theudas” is the same as Josephus’s. One of the men is called “the Egyptian” by both Josephus and Luke; Luke links him with the sicarii, whereas Josephus does not. Therefore, Luke was copying from Josephus.

(The argument that this must be copying because there were thousands of Egyptians in Palestine at the time is beyond ridiculous. It would work equally well against two independent references to Jimmy the Greek. (“How many millions of Greeks,” etc.))

* Luke and Josephus both recount the death of Agrippa I in some detail, speaking of his brilliant robe, his acceptance of adulation as a God, and his immediate demise. There are also some details that differ in the two stories. Therefore, Luke must have borrowed it from Josephus.

(It couldn’t just be a notorious fact? Why not?)

* Josephus mentions a rumor that there was an incestuous relationship between Agrippa II and Bernice; Luke does not. Therefore, Luke is inspired by Josephus and intends the entire scene in Acts 25 as comic sarcasm.

(Does it seem like sarcasm? Can it by any legitimate stretch of the imagination be read that way?)

* Josephus reports that Drusilla abandoned her husband for Felix. Luke (Acts 24) portrays Paul as speaking to Felix about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come, Felix becomes uncomfortable. Therefore, Luke must be using Josephus.

(It isn’t enough of an explanation that Drusilla’s obvious abandonment of her husband for Felix was notorious?)

* Josephus portrays Felix as sending priests, “excellent men,” to Rome for trial on petty charges. Luke portrays Paul as demanding to be sent to Rome. So perhaps Luke was using Josephus as a model.

(Huh?)

* Luke and Josephus both mention Lysanius, tetrarch of Abilene.

* Luke records a parable about a hated king who is really a good guy; Josephus talks about Herod, an actual hated king who was really a bad guy.

* Luke contains a prophecy involving the slaughter of children in a siege of Jerusalem; Josephus talks about a mother who cannibalizes her own infant during the actual siege of Jerusalem.

* Both Luke and Josephus mention a famine in the reign of Claudius.

* Luke reports an attack by Pilate on some Gailieans; Josephus reports an attack by Pilate on some Samaritans.

Forgive me, but as I read through this I am irresistibly reminded of an exchange from Sleeper:

Luna: “Do you know that ‘god’ spelled backwards is ‘dog’?”

Miles: “So?”

Luna: “Makes you think!”

The obvious point, which I made in a previous thread, is that Josephus's area of concern seems to have been Judeo-Roman relations. So he's not going to explain the kind of rich, detailed knowledge of Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta that Luke demonstrates, information that would have been difficult to come by in the second century. See Tim's discussion here. 


It is completely unclear to me why it should be assumed that some similarity between Luke and Josephus has to be explained in terms of Luke using Josephus.

The most detailed defense in recent times of Luke's accuracy is, to my knowledge, Colin Hemer's The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, reviewed here.  That would be the book to set up against Pervo. Price, not surprisingly, declares Pervo to be the winner.

It is refreshing to see Pervo spill the insides of apologists Ben Witherington III and Colin Hemer, who otherwise manage to receive way too much serious regard. When Pervo is done with them, they sag like empty piñatas, only his blows reveal that neither donkey ever possessed any candy inside. Just one example: Pervo shows the gross inconsistency between believing on the one hand that Acts’ author knew Paul personally and on the other that he was not familiar with Paul’s letters.

I'd like to see that argued. No one that I know, even in my immediate family, is familiar with all my letters, except, of course, for those addressed to them. Why should Paul be any different?

Selling the Farm, or the Price is Right

Walter: I love your Robert Price quote:

For what can it profit a man if he gets all the local titles and offices right, if what he is trying to prove is that people in these locations healed the sick with their snot rags, survived the bites of poisonous serpents, brushed themselves off unhurt following fatal stonings, resurrected teenagers their sermons had bored to death, blinded some and killed others merely by a word of power?



I'm afraid that getting an 'A' on an ancient civics test is of no real help in vindicating these wonder stories.

First of all, what this doesn't give us is an explanation as to how Luke got an A on his ancient civics test.  He didn't have a civics textbook. He didn't have a library with all that information in it. He couldn't have looked it up in the Encyclopedia Romanica. He didn't have the benefit of modern archaeology, which is how I know that he got so many things right. Steven, (and notice that Price is admitting that he does merit an A in ancient civics). He couldn't look up the information on the internet. Everyone who studies the Book of Acts in Sunday School knows that it's the book that's all over the map. Luke has to know civics and geography from Jerusalem to Malta, and it's the civics of the time, not of 50 years later. So, how'd he do it? He either was an actual companion of Paul, or he had a lot of contact with Paul later, or he got it through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which is what you're stuck with if you, like Pervo, Price and Carrier, want to put Acts in the second century.

I have yet to see any of these people explain this evidence. You say Bruce is dated. That's chronological snobbery, a rampant disease in modern biblical studies. Well, evidence is not dated. How do they deal with the evidence? How do they explain how all this accurate information got into Acts? Disparaging comments like this don't explain anything.

And why does Price think "passing a civics test" does not profit? Because he can't believe what Luke reports. Why can't he believe what Luke reports? Because Miracles Do Not Happen. Hume, not the inductive evidence, is wagging the dog. I have already admitted that people have different priors. What is sufficient evidence for some is not sufficient evidence for others. But Price has virtually admitted that he would reject any ancient evidence in favor of the miraculous, even if it bit him in the nose.

Bruce says "accuracy is a habit of mind." You don't "ace the civics test" without being a) being very interested in accuracy, and b) having access to the necessary information. Compare Luke's score on a civics test with that of Philostratus in his account of Appollonius of Tyana, who has Appollonius doing his thing in Nineveh centuries after it was destroyed. You don't find ancient annals riddled with supernatural wonders on the one hand, and accurate geography and civics on the other. If Christianity, at its founding, was attended with miracles, then we should expect the books recording its founding to be of just the character. If it all happened naturalistically, if miracles do not and did not happen, then how do we get work laden with miracle reports with so much accurate information about so many things?

In short, I think the character of Luke's work gives us very strong inductive evidence that Luke was "on board" with Paul. It also provides significant evidence in support of Luke's claims concerning the miraculous. Whether you think this evidence is sufficient depends on the prior probabilities you bring to the discussion.

The Shipwreck and the Amityville Horror

One element of the biblical record that I have paid some attention to is the accuracy of, in particular, the Book of Acts. Let me review the claim I want to defend on behalf of the Gospels, which I would certainly also want to defend on behalf of Acts of the Apostles:

Well, I would argue that in the Gospels we have four books written by people who at worst were in a position to talk to those who had seen and known Jesus, and who claimed to have seen him resurrected. They may have had theological aims, but they did their work with a concern to correctly preserve the facts  concerning the life, death and resurrection of Christ. There are, of course, four such records, and as such if they agree with one another that something happened, that is at least some evidence that it indeed did happen. Evidence, mind you, that we might end up having to reject, but evidence nonetheless. Of course, the idea that the Gospels represented an attempt to get things right, as opposed to being a record of some out-of-control legends, will have to be argued for, but it is a conclusion I think is supported by the evidence.  

In short, I am interested in what I would call general reliability, as opposed to inerrancy. Let's look at the evidence first, and let those who are concerned about inerrancy sort it out later.

Now, what relevance is it that aspects of Bible can be shown to be factual. That which can be shown to be reliable in the New Testament is not typically the supernatural element. Luke, for instance, seems to know the titles of various officials in the cities where Paul is supposed to have gone on his missionary journeys. In this book, which was featured in the Library of  Historical Apologetics site, James Smith shows that, indeed, the Maltese Shipwreck story in Acts had to have been factual, based on real a real experience of sailing and being shipwrecked.

But should these facts impress us? Chris Hallquist thinks not.

He writes:

The "amazing accuracy"line of apologetics involves compiliing long lists of details of the gospels confirmed in outside sources: John the Baptist existed, the book of Acts uses terminology correctly, et cetera, finding as many examples as they can (a recent Norman Geisler book boasts 140 allegedly confirmed details). Now, there's an obvious (well, not to the apologists) point that needs to be made here: just because some details of an account are correct does not mean that the entire thing is correct. Case in point: when I read The Amityville Horror I had not trouble identifying some somewhat obscure factual points: there really was a parapsychologist named J. B. Rhine, there really are a pair of ghost hunters named Ed and Lorraine Warren. Further reading revealed that the hoax was built around a real murder case in a real house which a family named the Lutzes really moved into, only to leave a month later. The Warrens really participated in a seance at the house, and the character of Father Mancuso was based on a real priest in the Rockville Center Diocese (the name was not real, though he was one of those people whose name was "changed to protect their privacy)  as per a statement in the original book). The fact that some of the details in The Amityville Horror are true did not keep its fantastic supernatural claims from being false. 


Chris Hallquist, UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God, (Reasonable Press, 2008). p. 34,

But there are some problems with using this parallel. First, this is was a hoax, as Hallquist indicates on p. 28 of his book. His theory of how Christianity arose doesn't involve a hoax, it involves hallucinations and legend. So while the creators of the hoax could have put the fact and the fiction together, it has to happen rather differently through hallucination and legend.

Second, it is easy to understand how the people who wrote The Amityville Horror came by their information. Someone familiar with the world of the paranormal would know the factual information necessary to put the hoax together. And if not, a trip to the library would have given the hoaxters all the information they needed. On the other hand, I see no way that Luke could possibly have known what he knew without actually having been a companion of Paul. When we take a close look at what Luke had to know to write his book, I don't see how he could have gotten that knowledge third hand. It's not as if he could have found all the information he needed to know by going to the local library and reading the Encyclopedia Romanica. It seems evident to me that he had access to people involved in the founding of Christianity, that he was there for the missionary journeys, (and by the way those stories do include miracles). It simply boggles my mind that people like Richard Carrier and Robert Price keep putting the date of Acts into the second century. And, if you can't date Acts late, you can't date the Synoptics late, either.

A bump in the road

Let me get back to my central thesis here. I am trying to argue a couple of things. One I am simply assuming, which is that there is no good argument that everyone ought to have strongly naturalistic priors about miracles. That doesn't mean that there's something wrong if you do have strongly naturalistic priors, only that there is no good argument, a la Hume, to suppose that I ought to have strongly naturalistic priors.

My second central thesis is that there is something very puzzling about the founding of Christianity, which makes all naturalistic accounts of its founding unbelievable. This is centered around the Resurrection as the central miracle, but really it's the whole story that just doesn't fit together very well unless the miraculous character of the whole thing is presupposed. My claim is that if you try, in a serious way, to put the historical jigsaw puzzle together without a resurrection, the pieces don't fit. You end up having to strain the facts to make them fit the theory. Now if you have strongly naturalistic priors, I suppose that is what you must do, or you can even say "I don't know what happened, but whatever it was, it wasn't a resurrection." On the other hand, it seems absurd to say that there is something self-contradictory about the idea of an omnipotent being who can resurrect someone from the dead. But your priors are what they are.

C. S. Lewis, in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy, encountered an atheist who reached just such a conclusion, who, nevertheless, remained an atheist. He wrote:

“Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole outline of Christian history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought-I didn’t of course say; words that would have revealed the nonsense-that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.” But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”


by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224

For this atheist, this hardest boiled of all atheists, the evidence for the miraculous nature of the founding of Christianity was a bump in the road. For Lewis, it helped to push him toward conversion. What I have been trying to show, is that the bump is there.

Wagging the dog once again

JL: And we know this because the Bible says this is real testimony of a real event? Would someone PLEASE help me understand why this is not viciously circular?
VR: All I need is that it is testimony. It looks as if it is claiming to be about a real event. The historical argument does not assume any special authority for events recorded in Scripture, as opposed to events recorded by Tacitus or Josephus. However, the testimony is evidence for the occurrence of the event testified to. Maybe not good enough, people have to decide that. However, if Jesus was resurrected, the likelihood that Peter would testify to it is pretty good. If Jesus was not resurrected, we have to wonder why he would testify to it. So Peter's testimony is more likely given the resurrection than given no resurrection. It is, therefore evidence for the resurrection. Bayes' theorem at work.

Of course, the same argument can be applied to alien abductions. Just because we have evidence doesn't mean we have sufficient evidence. We can have independent reasons for rejecting testimony. You clearly think we do. However, to deny the existence of the evidence with the Yellow Brick Road argument is ridiculous. It also makes it clear what is wagging the dog here, it is not the evidence in the texts themselves, it is the antecedent improbability, on your view, of what they claim.

Two boats and a helicopter

The idea in some people's minds seems to be that even if there is good evidence for the NT, God should have provided more, and that he did not provide more is evidence that the evidence he provided isn't any good. Reminds me of this old joke:

A farmer is in Iowa during a flood. The river is overflowing, with water surrounding the farmer's home up to his front porch. As he is standing there, a boat comes up, The man in the boat says "Jump in, I'll take you to safety."
The farmer crosses his arms and says stubbornly, "Nope, I put my trust in God."
The boat goes away. The water rises to the second floor. Another boat comes up, the man says to the farmer who is now in the second story window, "Jump in, I'll save you."
The farmer again says, "Nope, I put my trust in God."
The boat goes away. Now the water is up to the roof. As The farmer stands on the roof, a helicopter comes over, and drops a ladder. The pilot yells down to the farmer "I'll save you, climb the ladder."
The farmer says "Nope, I put my trust in God."
The helicopter goes away. The water comtinues to rise and sweeps the farmer off the roof. He drowns.
The farmer goes to heaven. God sees him and says "What are you doing here?"
The farmer says "I put my trust in you and you let me down."
God says, "What do you mean, let you down? I sent you two boats and a helicopter!!!"

Reply to Loftus on my historical evidence project

Vic, you've got it wrong here and you don't realize what you're doing.



On the one hand you find the philosophical arguments against the probability of miracles to be weak (note, probability not possibility).

Yes, of course Hume's argument is an argument against the probability, not the possibility of miracles, though he slips at one point in the essay and talks about the absolute impossibility of miracles. My claim is that we cannot normatively establish that all rational persons must begin their investigations of the miraculous presuming the probability of the miraculous to be vanishingly low. There is no objective, non-objectionable method that can establish that it must be vanishingly low. That is the conclusion of my work on Bayes' theorem and miracles, which was done under the direction of atheist philosopher of science Patrick Maher, and it is also the conclusion of University of Pittsburgh philosopher of science John Earman, also an atheist.

What I do not claim to have shown is that no one should have vanishing priors for miracles. In my posts recently, I have been bracketing the question of prior probabilities. I have been trying to show that there is a surprising amount of evidence in support of miracles like the Resurrection. Whether you find it sufficient or insufficient will depend on your priors.

On the other hand you dive right into the arguments for the resurrection without first looking at the Bible as a whole. Once you look at what biblical scholarship as a whole you will learn not to trust the Bible just because something is stated in the Bible.

For the sake of debate concerning Christian origins, I don't need modern scholarship to keep me from doing that. The simple logic of not begging the question will do that. If I could argue "It says in the Bible that Christ was resurrected, therefore he was resurrected," then there wouldn't even be a debate, would there? No, what the Bible provides is preserved testimony to certain events. We have to talk about how close to the events the testimony is, whether it comes from eyewitnesses or people who spoke to eyewitnesses, etc.

I mean, what is "biblical scholarship as a whole?" It includes, I should think the Bible faculties of evangelical seminaries like Talbot and Trinity. But suppose your marginalize them. Are you going to marginalize Roman Catholics like Fitzmeyer and Brown and Luke Timothy Johnson? There's a considerable group of moderates like Joachim Jeremias and Oscar Cullman, Richard Bauckham and Anthony Thistleton. Are they marginal? And N. T. Wright, where does he fit in? Is he too "evangelical" to be a real biblical scholar? Was F. F. Bruce a real biblical scholar? Are they all people who haven't looked at biblical scholarship as a whole, while you, John Loftus, have looked at it as a whole? I smell the "no true Scotsman" fallacy once again.




Apart from my own WIBA I highly recommend you read Thom Stark's book when it comes out (I don't know when). In my opinion when it comes to understanding biblical scholarship the phrase "educated evangelical" is an oxymoron.

Yeah, if those danged evangelicals would just read the right books they'd come out with their hands up waving a white flag. Sounds like the young evangelicals who think that if their skeptical friends will just read Josh McDowell, Francis Schaeffer, and C. S. Lewis, they'll all get down on their knees forthwith and pray the sinner's prayer.

If Tim McGrew is right, skeptics need to read some books of 18th and 19th Century apologists, who in some ways defend the reliability of the NT with greater sophistication even than those from the 20th and 21st Centuries. So maybe the McGrew Challenge can be a response to the Debunking Christianity challenge. I mean, we can go on with dueling challenges all day long until somebody gets tired.


Until then what Bob Price said applies to what you're attempting to do lately.

Well, here's what Bob Price said.

"What evangelical apologists are still trying to show...is that their version of the resurrection was the most compatible with accepting all the details of the gospel Easter narratives as true and non-negotiable...[D]efenders of the resurrection assume that their opponents agree with them that all the details are true, that only the punch line is in question. What they somehow do not see is that to argue thus is like arguing that the Emerald City of Oz must actually exist since, otherwise, where would the Yellow Brick Road lead?....We simply have no reason to assume that anything an ancient narrative tells us is true." The Case Against the Case for Christ, (pp. 209-210).

Nonsense on stilts. Of course these people agree that you have to start from the presupposition that what we have is ancient human testimony to miraculous (and non-miraculous) events. Apologists sometimes slip and presume something like inerrancy, but the proper method is to look at these texts as ancient evidence. How good? Well, I would argue that in the Gospels we have four books written by people who at worst were in a position to talk to those who had seen and known Jesus, and who claimed to have seen him resurrected. They may have had theological aims, but they did their work with a concern to correctly preserve the facts  concerning the life, death and resurrection of Christ. There are, of course, four such records, and as such if they agree with one another that something happened, that is at least some evidence that it indeed did happen. Evidence, mind you, that we might end up having to reject, but evidence nonetheless. Of course, the idea that the Gospels represented an attempt to get things right, as opposed to being a record of some out-of-control legends, will have to be argued for, but it is a conclusion I think is supported by the evidence.

The idea a piece of testimony becomes worthless once it becomes part of Scripture strikes me as just bizarre. Unless this is the Kooks and Quacks argument all over again, where you dismiss everything because of the time period it comes from. (As if there are no kooks and quacks today). Testimony to an event, all things being equal, is more likely to occur if the event occurred than if the event didn't occur. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, it is evidence for the event. It may not be good enough evidence, but it is evidence. The claim that there is no evidence for the Resurrection strikes me as nonsense, and based on a misunderstanding of the very idea of evidence. And yes, I do think there is evidence for alien abductions. That doesn't mean I believe that anyone was abducted by aliens, I would not use the "no evidence" mantra for alien abductions either.

These founding events of Christianity brought about a massive change in the religious landscape of the Roman Empire, a change that resulted in Christianity becoming the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. For this to happen, a lot of people have to do a lot of surprising things. How do we explain it. My claim is that the founding of Christianity involves a set of events that are strange and difficult to explain unless Christ rose from the dead. What you do with that conclusion once I get you to draw it is up to you.

What would evidence look like if we had it?

Before entering, however, on this examination of the incidental allusions or secondary facts in the New Testament narrative, it is important to notice two things with regard to the main facts; in the first place, that some of them (as the miracles, the resurrection, and the ascension) are of such a nature that no testimony to them from profane sources was to be expected, since those who believed them naturally and almost necessarily became Christians; and secondly, that with regard to such as are not of this character, there does exist profane testimony of the first order.

George Rawlinson, The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records (Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1860), p. 180.

HT: Tim McGrew

Blue Devil Knight on the historical argument debate

A lot of the discussion of historical apologetics has gotten off-track. I prefer not to ban people, but this means that you have to learn what to ignore. I am familiar with Steven Carr's methods of argumentation, and I don't happen to take his comments very seriously. The presence of people in the Gospels who are not mentioned elsewhere in history doesn't strike me as particularly a problem, since Jesus's life didn't primarily revolve around the big history-makers of the time. The disanalogy between these un-accounted for people, and the Angel Moroni or the final battle at the Hill of Cumorah, should be obvious. So I am happy to ignore him in favor of other commenters who make more serious points. But if in failing to give serious consideration to his argument I have somehow overlooked a strong case against Christianity, so be it.

Blue Devil Knight, on the other hand, has given some arguments that I think do deserve some serious attention. His comments are in blue, mine in black.

Back to the martyr arguments.

Giordano Bruno's weird philosophy isn't confirmed by his martyrdom, but as Victor points out the fact that he believed in something strongly is probably established (I say 'probably' because he could have been suicidal or had a mental disorder). 

Yes. Of course, Bruno is not claiming to be a witness to anything. That's Jenkin's point.

I agree that this consideration might block a small subset of skeptical views of the origins of Christianity that say they didn't truly believe the consequences of believing what they were saying were important. I say 'consequences of believing', rather than 'believing' because it is possible to martyr oneself for a cause even while saying things you are not sure are factually true, but the consequences are worth dying for (e.g., I would gladly lie, and (frankly not gladly) die if it meant preventing another 9/11).

I think we have to remember the context of my discussion here. Hallquist's book brings in UFOs and paranormal claims in order to help his case against the resurrection. However, the cases he talks about in his chapter on the history of debunking have to do with exposing deliberate fraud. My point was that the martyrdom risk behavior on the part of apostles like Peter undercuts deliberate fraud hypotheses. Peter goes from denying Christ before the crucifixion to declaring to the very people who crucified Jesus that God had raised him (thus vindicating Jesus and un-vindicating Caiaphas and company in the strongest possible terms). Now, either this transformation never happened, or it certainly needs explaining, and the explanation has to be different from the explanation that can be given in most of the UFO/paranormal cases, since those involve deliberate fraud. 

At any rate, clearly martyrdom implies strong belief in something. Jim Jones' followers believed something strongly. Not sure what, but many were willing to die for it. They also witnessed miracles that he putatively performed and I'm sure they really believed it. The followers of Benny Hinn have witnessed his miracles, healing the blind, the crippled, etc.. I bet if he wanted, he could convince many of his followers to die.

The Benny Hinn case is a little bit different, because while I suppose conceivably you could get people to die for the claim that they saw people come up to the stage with health problems they appeared to lack when they went back, it's not the facts, but the explanation of these events that is at issue between supporters and critics of Hinn. In the case of a resurrection, if you thought you saw someone on Sunday whom you had seen die on Friday, it doesn't seem open to the skeptic to say, "Yes, Jesus was dead on Friday, but you saw him walking around on Sunday. But there's a good naturalistic explanation for this." Opponents of the Resurrection either say he didn't die on Friday or say he was still dead on Sunday.

The Robert Jenkin quote Tim offers is fun historically, but doesn't actually offer anything new to the discussion. He points out that the existence of false zealots doesn't imply all those with zeal are wrong. Fine. But that puts the burden back on resources independent of the existence of zealots. The existence of strong believers establishes nothing, as it is orthogonal to truth. It is not evidence for anything except strong belief.

However, a sharp belief and behavior change, such as Peter appears to have experienced, still needs to be explained  unless, of course, you want to deny that it happened.

In sum I take it that the existence of martyrs blocks a very small subset of stories of the origins of Christianity: those in which people actively tried to deceive others, didn't believe any of it, and also importantly didn't believe strongly in the consequences of having people believe. 

You'd have to believe in the consequences strongly enough to want to die for it. Paul, at least seems to be betting everything on Christ's resurrection, and this attitude seems to be reflected in the actions of people like Peter as well. 

¹²But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. ¹⁴And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. ¹⁵More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. ¹⁶For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. ¹⁷And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. ¹⁸Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. ¹⁹If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.  

It's hard for me to read passages like this, written by someone whose martyrdom risk behavior is off the charts, and take seriously the possibility that he didn't really believe that Christ was raised from the dead.  

Does that describe any real skeptic? Does it describe Hallq or Carrier? Has anyone argued that the early founders were making a casual lie with little to nothing to gain from people accepting the lie? 

Hallquist, interestingly enough, accepts the hallucination theory, and Carrier thinks Jesus never existed. My point in relation to Hallquist, which was the main point of the original post, was that Hallquist brought in UFO cases and paranormal cases which have been debunked by people like James Randi today and by Houdini in a previous era. However, those cases were deliberate fraud cases, which means that they are largely irrelevant to the Resurrection, unless it is supposed that belief in the Resurrection arose as a result of deliberate fraud. However, martyrdom arguments, which are not direct proofs of the resurrection, are nevertheless undercutting defeaters for deliberate fraud theories. Interestingly enough, I think UFO-type cases are irrelevant to Hallquist's own theory, which is a form of the hallucination/legend theory.

Finally, priors play such a huge role here, it is clear that these arguments from the apologists are for those with nonnegligible priors about miracles and gods. For instance, Tim calls the 'twin brother' theory of Jesus 'bizarre' (p 32 of the cited bit). Which is more bizarre, someone coming back from the dead or someone having a twin?

I know that Tim would say that the twin theory is bizarre because of the complete lack of evidence, but it does betray a lack of appreciation of just how incredible and unbelievable it is for people with the naturalist's priors that someone was resurrected. They need really good evidence. 

I don't think Tim is arguing that anybody with strongly naturalistic priors ought to be convinced by the case for the Resurrection. I know Tim does believe in objective priors, but all either of us have claimed is that there is no normative argument proving, a la Hume, that every reasonable person must begin from strong naturalistic priors. My claims are as follows: 

1) There is no normative argument based on probability theory showing that we must begin from strong naturalistic priors. Instead, people will consult their own credence functions and ask themselves how much evidence is sufficient. I think this is the overall upshot of Earman's critique of Hume in Hume's Abject Failurem and it is certainly the upshot of my papers on the subject, the one in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (Feb. 1989), and the one that appears online. The evidence will at best confirm theism and Christianity, but all we will get out of it is a cumulative case role-player. I am arguing that some reasonable persons can believe in the Resurrection, not that all reasonable persons must believe in it.

2) The evidence for the Resurrection is going to prove surprisingly strong when we start exploring, in detail, the alternative naturalistic hypotheses. What sounds good at first ends up looking severely problematic when we get done. Different pieces of the historical jigsaw puzzle will undercut different counter-hypotheses.

3) The case supporting the resurrection is cumulative, with several important elements. Martyrdoms are one piece of the puzzle. Archaeological confirmations are another. The claims of Christ and the moral character of Christ are still other pieces. The miracle stories in Acts are other pieces of the puzzle.

Basically, I'll need to see it with my own eyes. More than once. The person will need to live for a week or so, we'll do the DNA test, I'll get others to confirm that I am not hallucinating. I'd need a whole lot of evidence to believe it now, much less as recorded from sources almost 2000 years old with much weaker standards for belief.

Maybe that is what you would require. If I just show that there is something naturalistically mysterious about the history surrounding the founding of Christianity, that's all I could hope for in an argument on the subject.

There is an insurmountable wall here that logic will not cross. That is a weakness of the Christian view, as if logic could cross it, I would cross. I would be a Christian. If the evidence compelled it, I would be a Christian.

I don't believe that there's a slam dunk. 

Clearly there is more to becoming a Christian than logic and evidence. I'm not sure what that implies about trying to use the available evidence and logic to convert people. I think it implies that such things are only part of the equation. My hunch is, they are a rather trivial part of most people's conversion experience, that conversion is much more a matter of inspiration, an opening of the heart to the light and glory of God, an undeniable experience of His presence and Goodness, than to picayune historical and logical points.

Of course there's more to it than argumentation. But faith can't prosper if a person thinks he or she is believing against their best intellectual judgment. And Christian converts do testify to the fact that reason and evidence DID play a significant role in their conversions, even if the conversion was not exclusively intellectual.One makes a judgment call doing the best one can with the evidence. But a Christian who really thinks that the evidence looks like what Dawkins or Loftus says it is is going to have a hard time being a Christian. The historical and logical points are not trivial, even if they are a very incomplete cause for conversion.

Finally, it is strange that people act as if a 'hallucination' theory is the only plausible explanation of people incorrectly believing they observed something. We know there are many ways to acquire a false belief that you observed something in the past. Eyewitnesses are often earnestly wrong, but rarely is the explanation that they hallucinated. Much more likely is retroactive memory distortion.

This is an extremely important point for my strategy, which is to push the naturalist (about the resurrection) into relying on hallucination theory, and then showing the problems with that. I really do think the hallucination argument, allowing for a significant amount of legendary accretions in the story, is the best shot the skeptics have in explaining the founding of Christianity. While I can see memory distortion being the cause of thinking a cab was blue when it was really green, I have trouble with the idea of retroactive memory distortion accounting for someone thinking they saw someone whom they had seen executed two days earlier, if they didn't hallucinate and there was no resurrection. 

Let me take a personal example. Bob Prokop, a frequent commentator here, was a friend of mine my days as an undergraduate at ASU in 1973-1974. We both had a close friend by the name of Joe Sheffer, who, tragically, passed away in 1989 at the age of 36. Now, I can imagine, in a crowd, seeing someone at a distance whom I thought looked just like Joe. But no amount of memory distortion could possible convince me that I had lunch with Joe in 2006, getting his take on the argument from reason, the state of contemporary Thomist philosophy, Thomist models of artificial intelligence, modern physics, the flaws of the Bush administration, and the latest debates on Dangerous Idea. No, if I really thought I had lunch with Joe in 2006, I would have to have been "appeared to Joe-ly," I would have to have had some Joe-experience, which, on the assumption that Joe didn't come back to life in 2006, would have to be a hallucination.  

Note this assumes that putative eyewitnesses did actually martyr themselves, that this is a historical fact. I'm not a historian of Christianity, so am willing to play along with such assumptions.

What is required isn't strictly speaking martyrdom, but martyrdom risk behavior. Peter wasn't killed as a result of what he said outside the gate in Jerusalem, but what he said was inflammatory enough to the people who were responsible for the death of Jesus to expose him to the likelihood that he would be killed, and Peter knew it.