Minimal facts vs. Maximal Data

 

Minimal facts vs. Maximal Data

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

Recently I had some correspondence with someone who found my interview from several years ago with atheist Luke Muehlhauser and asked me to look around Muehlhauser's (now-archived) web site and respond to some posts there. In the course of doing so I came upon this part of Muehlhauser's deconversion story:

What I learned, even when reading Christian scholars, shocked me. The gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death, by non-eyewitnesses. They are riddled with contradictions, legends, and known lies.

That the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death is apologetically fairly unimportant. From an historical perspective, there is no reason to distrust a document because it was written "decades" after the events it tells about. This statement is even compatible with a document's being written by a careful and truthful eyewitness of the events recounted! Moreover, "decades" could mean as little as twenty years.

But what about the rest: "Riddled with contradictions, legends, and known lies"? That would be problematic, if it were true. And "written by non-eyewitnesses" definitely implies that we know that John wasn't written by John and Matthew wasn't written by Matthew. Then there are Luke and Mark, which on the traditional view were written by people who had access to and conversations with eyewitnesses, but Luke M. obviously thinks that he "learned" that no such thing is the case.

There is an approach to arguing for the resurrection of Jesus Christ known as the minimal facts approach. Versions of this argument have been made by William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas, for both of whom I have the greatest respect. But there is one problematic aspect of minimal facts arguments: They tend to be presented in such a way as to imply that it doesn't matter to the strength of this case for the resurrection if the gospels are historically unreliable. Proponents of the minimal facts approach do not rely heavily upon the details of the resurrection accounts in the gospels themselves, except for a few general aspects (e.g., that Jesus was believed to have appeared to a variety of people), preferring to put more weight upon Paul's creedal statement about the resurrection in I Corinthians 15. The very strong impression given is that we can get a very strong case for the resurrection of Jesus even if the gospels are historically unreliable and even if the resurrection stories in the gospels are beefed-up, legendary accretions.

I submit that this is highly problematic. A minimal facts argument would be fine as a first statement of some of the issues, as a first approach, but it becomes positively misleading if those who learn this method think that they can lightly toss the gospels to the likes of Bart Ehrman and that we can be fully justified in believing in Jesus' resurrection even if the gospels are, in the words of deconvert Muehlhauser, "riddled with contradictions [and] legends."

First of all, some evidence that I am not misrepresenting this loose approach to the reliability of the gospels. Here, from William Lane Craig:

The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents. You may be wondering how it can be shown that the Gospel accounts of the discovery of Jesus empty tomb can be shown to be, in their core, historically reliable without first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically trustworthy. Read chapter 8 to find out. Reasonable Faith, Preface to the Third Edition, pp. 11-12.

We shouldn't "saddle" ourselves with the task of showing that the gospels are historically reliable. We can get what we need without that.

Even stranger and more surprising is a passage here, where Craig (who is among the most careful, brilliant, and worthy analytic philosophers of religion now living) seems to move confusingly from Biblical inerrancy to historical reliability and back again to inerrancy without noting the shift of emphasis:

[W]e have a very strong case for the resurrection of Jesus. That case in no way depends on the Bible’s being inerrant. This became very clear to me during my doctoral studies in Munich with Wolfhart Pannenberg. Pannenberg had rocked German theology by maintaining that a sound historical case can be made for the resurrection of Jesus. Yet he also believed that the Gospel resurrection appearances stories are so legendary that they have scarcely a historical kernel in them! He did not even trust the Markan account of the discovery of the empty tomb. Rather his argument was founded on the early pre-Pauline tradition about the appearances in I Corinthians 15.3-5 and on the consideration that a movement based on the resurrection of dead man would have been impossible in Jerusalem in the face of a tomb containing his corpse.

Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this. It really is true that a solid, persuasive case for Jesus’ resurrection can be made without any assumption of the Gospels’ inerrancy.

(I will have much more to say about Pannenberg below.) I am particularly disturbed by the implications of this sentence: "Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this." Prima facie, this sentence is expressing a lot of dubiousness about the claim that the gospels are historically reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research. In fact, a natural reading of the sentence would be that Craig is so dubious about this claim that he doubts that even many evangelicals who give "lip service" to it really believe it! Well, I'm not sure whether I count as an evangelical (being that I'm a sacramentalist of sorts), and I'm even less sure that I count as an inerrantist according to the most natural interpretation of the Chicago Statement, but let it be noted here, now, and for the future that I really do believe that the the gospels are historically reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research. More: I think that's pretty important to apologetics, as I will argue here. And if a lot of evangelicals, especially leaders and pastors, are just giving "lip service" to that proposition, then they need to do some digging and learn more. Not so that they can sign off on a statement of faith that includes inerrancy (which wouldn't be guaranteed by historical reliability in any case), but so that they can present the arguments of historical apologetics with confidence that they aren't dealing with a handful of legend-riddled documents.

Here is a fairly typical statement of the minimal facts case for the resurrection of Jesus. The point I intend to focus on is Fact #3, stated here as:

On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.

In this interesting discussion of different versions of the minimal facts approach, Gary Habermas quotes from Mike Licona a slightly different wording of this same general minimal fact:

Very soon afterwards [i.e., after Jesus' death], Jesus’ disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the resurrected Jesus.

One might think, reading these statements, that they mean to take as a "minimal fact" to be explained that the disciples and others (such as the women at the tomb) had experiences of the kind that are described in the gospel resurrection stories--that it seemed to them and that they claimed that they talked with Jesus (experiences both auditory and visual), that Jesus ate food in their presence, that they spent periods of time interacting with Jesus in groups on repeated occasions, that Jesus invited them to touch his scars, and the like.

It's important to emphasize, however, that that is not what is meant by this minimal fact. The reason is that "consensus of New Testament scholars" is very important to the minimal facts approach. Here is how Habermas puts the consensus issue:

From the outset of my studies, I argued that there were at least two major prerequisites for an occurrence to be designated as a Minimal Fact. Each event had to be established by more than adequate scholarly evidence, and usually by several critically-ascertained, independent lines of argumentation. Additionally, the vast majority of contemporary scholars in relevant fields had to acknowledge the historicity of the occurrence.

Further,

When establishing a consensus of views, it is important to show that such a near-unanimity is “composed of scholars from all interested camps” (p. 64). We are not guessing about where researchers stand, and neither are we basing the case on a small, sectarian element within the academic community. Rather, the scholars should hold a variety of religious and philosophical positions (p. 65). Later, Licona reported that:

These scholars span a very wide range of theological and philosophical convictions and include atheists, agnostics, Jews and Christians who make their abode at both ends of the theological spectrum and everywhere in between. We therefore have the heterogeneity we desire in a consensus, and this gives us confidence that our horizons will not lead us completely astray (p. 280).

Licona makes an insightful comment here regarding guarding against our own horizons. We must beware of our own imported biases, as well. When discussing the Minimal Facts, I have always purposely included notes at each juncture that list representative numbers of skeptics of various stripes who still affirm the data in question. This is a significant methodological procedure that serves more than one purpose. Among others, it assures the readers that they are not being asked to accept something that only conservatives believe, or that is only recognized by those who believe in the veracity of the New Testament text, and so on. After all, this sort of widespread recognition and approval is the very thing that our stated method requires.

It is a little surprising that Habermas should appear to agree with Licona about the importance of this scholarly agreement between "conservative" and non-conservative scholars, given that Habermas also says,

Of the two criteria, I have always held that the first is by far the most crucial, especially since this initial requirement [being supported by more than adequate scholarly evidence] is the one that actually establishes the historicity of the event. Besides, the acclamation of scholarly opinion may be mistaken or it could change.

Indeed.

I have always doubted, given what I do know about New Testament scholarship, that the vast majority of New Testament scholars agree that the disciples had experiences of the kind recorded in the gospels that gave them the idea that Jesus was risen from the dead.

In researching this post I found confirmation of this suspicion directly from William Lane Craig here. Craig makes statements that one might at first (incorrectly) take to mean that the consensus of scholarship supports the disciples' experiences as recounted in the gospels:

First, the resurrection appearances. Undoubtedly the major impetus for the reassessment of the appearance tradition was the demonstration by Joachim Jeremias that in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-5 Paul is quoting an old Christian formula which he received and in turn passed on to his converts According to Galatians 1:18 Paul was in Jerusalem three years after his conversion on a fact-finding mission, during which he conferred with Peter and James over a two week period, and he probably received the formula at this time, if not before. Since Paul was converted in AD 33, this means that the list of witnesses goes back to within the first five years after Jesus' death. Thus, it is idle to dismiss these appearances as legendary. We can try to explain them away as hallucinations if we wish, but we cannot deny they occurred. Paul's information makes it certain that on separate occasions various individuals and groups saw Jesus alive from the dead. According to Norman Perrin, the late NT critic of the University of Chicago: "The more we study the tradition with regard to the appearances, the firmer the rock begins to appear upon which they are based." This conclusion is virtually indisputable.

But Craig goes on to make his meaning quite clear:

At the same time that biblical scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the historical credibility of Paul's information, however, it must be admitted that skepticism concerning the appearance traditions in the gospels persists. This lingering skepticism seems to me to be entirely unjustified. It is based on a presuppositional antipathy toward the physicalism of the gospel appearance stories.

In other words, when the architects of the minimal facts approach speak of a vast scholarly consensus on the "appearances" experienced by the disciples, they do not mean a consensus on the physical-type experiences recounted in the gospels. To those aspects of the stories, Craig acknowledges that many scholars still actually have an antipathy, though he (correctly) suspects that this is based on an ideological rather than a scholarly objection.

The weakness of what the minimal facts approach is claiming about the disciples' experiences is further confirmed by Craig's discussion of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Here is more on Pannenberg's view from Craig:

I don’t think that Pannenberg’s objection to the appearances is based on naturalism or a bias against miracles. He is already committed to miracles in affirming the empty tomb. Rather, I think it would be exegetical, frankly. He is convinced by Grass’ exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15 that when Paul talks of a spiritual body, what he is talking about is an immaterial, invisible, unextended body. Therefore, the Gospel appearance stories are late legendary developments that represent a kind of materializing of the original, primitive, spiritual experiences. The original experiences were just these visions of Jesus. It would be similar to Stephen’s vision of Jesus in Acts 73. When Stephen is being stoned, he sees the heavens open and he says, “I see the Son of Man in the heavens.” Nobody else saw anything, but Stephen saw this vision of Jesus. And I think that Pannenberg would say that that is similar to what the original resurrection appearances were. They were these visionary events and then they got corrupted and materialized and turned into the Gospel appearance stories, which are very, very physicalistic.

That is quite clear. The "experiences" that Pannenberg accepts that the disciples had were some kind of "visionary events," others who were present would not have seen anything, and the gospel accounts are physicalistic "corruptions."

The extremely minimal nature of the scholarly consensus on the disciples' experiences is also confirmed by the careful wording used in describing what is agreed upon by New Testament scholars. Habermas has done extensive research in this area. Indeed, much of the information we have about the scholarly consensus comes from his meticulous research. Here are some of the wordings he uses in discussing the results of his research on scholarly opinion:

The nearly unanimous consent of critical scholars is that, in some sense, the early followers of Jesus thought that they had seen the risen Jesus. "Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What Are Critical Scholars Saying?" Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 3.2, p. 151.

The phrase "in some sense" is worth noting.

The vast majority of scholars agree that these persons certainly thought that they had visual experiences of the risen Jesus. "Resurrection Research From 1975 to the Present," p. 152.

The reference is to visual experience, not to tactile or even auditory experiences, much less to the length of the experiences nor to conversational interaction with Jesus. Habermas does imply that there is a high degree of scholarly consensus that these visual experiences (whatever they were like), were reported to have been "witnessed both by individuals and groups" (p. 152).

I think it is necessary to be blunt: If all that we are going to assert and seek to explain is the claim that Jesus' disciples had some kind of visual experiences soon after his death that they took to be appearances of the risen Jesus, and if we are allowing that these experiences could, for all we know, have been fleeting, unclear, intersubjectively inaccessible (that is, invisible to anyone other than the disciples), and involving no senses other than sight, then the case for the resurrection is gravely weakened.

If one hangs onto the idea that these experiences (whatever their precise nature) came "both to individuals and groups," and if one includes James, Jesus' brother, among those who had an individual experience (Habermas discusses the question of whether an appearance experience on the part of James should be included as a "minimal fact"), then this will provide an interesting coincidence, and naturalistic explanations will be somewhat strained. I admit that. Why should these various people, including a former skeptic of Jesus' ministry (his brother) have had these experiences shortly after his death, even if they may (for all we know) have been somewhat vague and visionary in nature?

But let's be clear: The conclusion we thought we could support was that Jesus was risen from the dead. Vague, fleeting, or visionary experiences provide a weak case for that conclusion. In fact, if the minimal fact of the appearance experiences is compatible with minimal experiences, then paranormal explanations become an interesting option, which I gather is what New Testament scholar Dale Allison is exploring. Maybe there's just "something weird" in this world that we don't know much about that isn't a miracle, and isn't a resurrection, but that causes people to have brief experiences "of" a person after his death.

The example of Pannenberg, so far from showing that the gospel narratives are unnecessary to a defense of the resurrection, shows just the opposite. Pannenberg believes that God miraculously made Jesus' dead body disappear from the tomb, raised Jesus in an invisible "spiritual body," and took him to heaven, from which he sent visions to the disciples. This (with variants on it) is generally known as the "objective vision" theory of the resurrection.

To say as Craig does that Pannenberg believes in "the resurrection of Jesus" is to say something that ought to be rather theologically controversial. Pannenberg does not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus, and that is precisely why he ditches the gospel accounts! He realizes that they are the strongest evidence for the physical resurrection he rejects. There is something oddly backwards about implying that we do not need to support the reliability of the gospels in order to support a belief in the resurrection of Jesus and illustrating this claim by reference to a theologian who doesn't even believe that Jesus walked about visibly on the earth after his "resurrection."

In fact, it is worth asking just how strongly any supernatural explanation is supported by an attenuated body of evidence that has been deliberately weakened by a willingness to waive the whole question of whether the "physicalist" gospel resurrection accounts are legendary late additions.

A case in point here is Gerd Ludemann, a New Testament scholar whom Craig expressly cites to support the contention that there is scholarly consensus on the resurrection "appearances." Ludemann says, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."

I hope that by this point in my post, however, readers have learned to question dodgy, New-Testament-scholar-like expressions such as "had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." Such statements are by no means as straightforward as they might appear to the unsuspicious eye. And so it is with Ludemann, who believes that the disciples had hallucinations, starting with Peter, who felt guilty after Jesus' death because he had denied that he knew Jesus. The other disciples then got fired up by Peter and sort of "caught" the tendency to have hallucinations in which Jesus appeared to them.

Now, don't misunderstand me: This is a very foolish hypothesis, and Craig and Habermas are right to critique it. But we are critiquing it with a huge handicap if we insist on doing so without using the gospel resurrection accounts as reliable indicators of what the disciples claimed. One can, perhaps, just barely wrap one's mind around a sort of "hallucination virus" that spreads among grief-stricken followers if the phenomena alleged are a lot different from what the gospels recount--a lot less like actual meetings and conversations with a real, tangible, physical person and a lot more like spooky ghost stories. That is precisely where we need to press in answering Ludemann.

Interestingly enough, Gary Habermas goes a bit in that direction in answering Ludemann, but in doing so he has to go beyond what he has supported as being part of the consensus of the vast majority of New Testament scholars. Habermas asks,

What about the natural human tendency to touch? Would no one ever discover, even in a single instance, that their best friend, seemingly standing perhaps just a few feet away, was not really there?

That's very interesting. As far as I know, Habermas's own careful wording elsewhere shows that he does not have scholarly consensus on the idea that the disciples had long enough and detailed enough "appearance experiences" that this question would have arisen. Do the vast majority of scholars concede that Jesus appeared accessible to touch, that he appeared to be standing just a few feet away, that the disciples had the opportunity to recognize him by distinct visual inspection as their dearest friend? As far as I know, no such consensus has been ascertained, and the minimal facts approach does not depend on asserting those types of appearances.

Of course, the gospels say that Jesus invited his disciples to touch him, but the minimal facts approach does not take that data into account even as part of what the disciples claimed.

Similarly, Habermas argues that the disciples were not in a frame of mind like that of pilgrims to a holy site, a mindset of expectation, that might give rise to ecstatic hallucinations. To some degree he argues this on the basis of what they "would have felt like"--the trauma, sadness, and certainty of Jesus' death following upon his crucifixion. But of course such a case would be much strengthened by the gospel accounts of what frame of mind the disciples were in.

Habermas also states, "Men and women, hard-headed and soft-hearted alike, all believing that they saw Jesus, both indoors and outdoors, by itself provides an insurmountable barrier for hallucinations." But is that supported by the vast consensus of scholarship--that Jesus was seen both outdoors and indoors, by hard-headed and soft-hearted alike, and by men and women? Is that clearly asserted as a "minimal fact"? Habermas himself has acknowledged a difficulty in deciding what to include in a list of minimal facts agreed upon by a large array of New Testament scholars:

[S]ince I have surveyed this material for decades, I can report that most contemporary critical scholars actually concede far more facts than those included even in the long list, let alone just the few Minimal Facts alone. But the problem is that, as the numbers of events expand, fewer scholars agree on each one. So there could be more give and take on “whose facts” ought to be utilized. Obviously then, longer lists would not fulfill especially the second strict criterion of the Minimal Facts method.

As far as I can tell, this difficulty would plague any attempt to attribute to the "great consensus of scholarship" a claim about the great variety of circumstances (soft-hearted and hard-headed, men and women, indoors and outdoors) in which Jesus allegedly appeared to his followers after his resurrection. For example, Licona points out that the number of scholars who even address the conversion of James and its cause is small. Furthermore, how easily such a variety of appearances can be explained naturalistically will depend greatly upon the surrounding circumstances and the nature of the alleged appearance experiences.

Let me try to put this in broad probabilistic terms: The data constrain the explanations we bring to bear. Whether an explanation is far-fetched and ad hoc or not, and how far-fetched or ad hoc it is, depends on what data we are explaining. If we are unwilling to get at all nitty gritty about the nature of the "experiences" the disciples claimed to have had of Jesus risen, then it is easier to argue that naturalistic or paranormal explanations will do the trick. In Bayesian terms (if you happen to be interested in those terms), the Bayes factor for an "appearance" is considerably weaker in favor of the conclusion that that appearance is veridical if one leaves vague the question of what the appearance was like. When the assertion that the disciples had appearance experiences is so weak that it is consistent with purely visionary experiences of an intangible Jesus, inaccessible to any but his followers, experiences that, for all that is stated to the contrary, might have been fairly brief, involving sight and no other senses, then it becomes a much, much harder task to argue that there must have been a supernatural explanation for what happened. It becomes harder still to argue that the correct explanation is that Jesus really was physically risen from the dead. I won't go so far as to say that a minimal facts case thus construed provides no evidence for Jesus' literal resurrection, but it is a much weaker case than a case that includes, as data indicating what the disciples claimed, the types of experiences actually recounted in the gospels.

To argue that this was indeed what the disciples claimed it was like for them to see the risen Jesus, one needs to argue that the gospels are not riddled with legends. To some degree, one needs to be willing to buck the trends of overly literary New Testament scholarship and to argue that the gospels are reliable historical memoirs of Jesus, written by those close to the events (some of them eyewitnesses).

But this argument can be made! Both external and internal evidence support this forward position on the memoir nature of the gospels. My husband and I have spent the last several years mustering such evidence from older authors (see some more sample links here), and I am happy to say that various other apologists are doing the same. To name just two: Jay Warner Wallace has discussed undesigned coincidences; Peter J. Williams has independently begun discussing external evidences for the historical veracity and eyewitness sourcing of the gospels.

In no way do I mean to disparage the work of Dr. Craig and Dr. Habermas. Their immense work is a gift of God to the church. But I think the ambiguity of the minimal facts approach on the matter of the appearances is a subject that has not been discussed enough in apologetics circles. This means that the weakness I am concerned about has gone largely unnoticed, because it is easy to assume that the "appearance experiences" referred to are the types of experiences we read about in the gospels.

I have become concerned over the past few months as I have realized that there are young apologists in training who believe that even major concessions to skeptical New Testament scholars like Bart Ehrman are not all that damaging to the case for the resurrection so long as we can "get some historical information" out of the gospels. I fear that Craig's own writings, perhaps influenced by his interest in Pannenberg and by a desire to induce evangelicals not to lean too heavily upon inerrancy, have encouraged this conclusion. So I have decided that it is important to step up and disagree with any such implication concerning the relative apologetic unimportance of the gospels' reliability.

When it comes to arguing for miracles, both God and the Devil are in the details. That is why it is such a dicey business in the area of miracle claims to set aside pertinent information and to waive contentious questions just because they are contentious. To see a strong probabilistic case aright, we should base our conclusion on all the available evidence. The existence of the gospel accounts and the evidence for their closeness to the facts are highly pertinent data to be taken into account. I therefore propose that, instead of arguing from Minimal Facts, we should argue from Maximal Data.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on February 21, 2015 4:09 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

More on arguments from signs and wonders

 

More on arguments from signs and wonders

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

This is a follow-up to this post. To some extent it will be repetitive of what was in that post, and I beg the reader's indulgence for that repetition. But the argument I am answering has surfaced yet again (never mind where), and it just has so many things wrong with it that I have decided to take another whack at it, in the hopes of unconfusing anybody else who has been confused by it.

The argument goes roughly like this. (No, I'm not precisely quoting anyone. I am paraphrasing.)

Suppose that God revealed himself by a sign or wonder, such as by speaking from the heavens, by raising Jesus from the dead, or even by putting some words into an unlikely place, such as writing "Yahweh alone is God" in the stars or in the cell. Such an event would not be taken by an atheist to be from God. The atheist would decide that both he and everyone reporting the event to him were massively hallucinating rather than conclude that the event was really evidence of the existence of God. Hence, signs and wonders can be evidence of the activity of God only to those who already believe on other grounds that God exists. Therefore, they do not constitute independent evidence that God exists. Therefore, we shouldn't make arguments first to atheists from signs and wonders. Instead, we should convince them first that God exists by arguments such as philosophical arguments from natural theology.

Let me try to break down a few of the many things wrong with this argument.

First, this argument wrongly assumes that something cannot constitute independent reason to believe something I already believe. That isn't true. Suppose that I get ten e-mails that appear to be from my friend Jeff. Regardless of what order the e-mails come in, each one provides some independent reason to believe that Jeff exists. It is not as though, once I already believe it, the new e-mails no longer provide independent reason for believing in his existence. That probability just gets higher and higher as I receive additional e-mails. It's true that I'm more prone to conclude that a new e-mail is from Jeff if I already believe that Jeff really exists and isn't a spam-bot, but it doesn't follow that the additional e-mails are doing no work to support the proposition, "Jeff exists" simply because they happen to come later in the series. In fact, they obviously do provide additional reason to believe that Jeff exists, a reason that has its own force.

Second, this argument, consistently applied, would have made it impossible for the revelation of Yahweh to "get off the ground" with the people of Israel, because it would always have required previous evidence for Yahweh's existence before His self-revelation could get started. What we find in Scripture is that God revealed Himself to His people by signs and wonders from the outset. They didn't require or receive a philosophical prolegomenon. Rather, God was the God who brought them up out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage. God made the bush burn. God told Moses to make it clear to the people that he was truly a messenger by giving Moses the power to do signs and wonders. If it were never possible to take signs and wonders to be from God if one didn't have a philosophical prolegomenon, then the specific revelation of Yahweh could never have happened.

This has a parallel in human relationships. Take the example above concerning e-mails. If I always had to have previous evidence that Jeff exists before accepting any e-mail as being from Jeff, the correspondence couldn't get started. I would be justified in dismissing the first e-mail as possibly being from a spam-bot or being a hallucination because I was previously a "Jeff agnostic" or "Jeff skeptic" and didn't know about Jeff's existence. Jeff's revelation of himself to me could never get off the ground.

Third, this argument confuses the direction a piece of evidence points with the conclusion one draws. I realize that this is a slightly technical point, but let me try to make it clear by examples. Suppose that I have a very negative view, based on previous evidence, of Joe's character. I've decided that Joe is just manipulative and utterly self-serving. Then along comes my shrewd friend Bill who tells me a credible-sounding story of Joe's behaving with apparent altruism within Bill's own knowledge.

Perhaps I do not conclude either that I've been wrong about Joe or that Joe has reformed. Perhaps I remain skeptical. Perhaps I hold open the possibility that Bill has been duped by a clever plan of Joe's to make himself look good. However, if Bill gives me a sufficiently detailed account of an apparently purely altruistic act, that is some evidence that points in the direction of Joe's good character. I may reasonably hold out for more evidence before changing my mind (because I did have evidence before of Joe's bad character), but my probability concerning the proposition, "Joe is right now simply a self-serving jerk" should, rationally, shift because of the evidence that Bill brings.

It's important not to think that a piece of evidence must do all the work on its own, that it must be enough to make a skeptic conclude that God exists or to draw some other conclusion against which he previously believed himself to have some evidence, in order to realize that the evidence points away from the skeptic's previous position and should cause the skeptic's probabilities to change. That is the point of a cumulative case. Different arguments and pieces of evidence do their work, and the reasonable skeptic can change his mind gradually as a result of the accumulated evidence coming in. Therefore, to say that a skeptic will not conclude that God exists from a report of a miracle should not be taken to mean that the report does not point in the direction of God's existence and that it should have no impact upon the skeptic.

Fourth and perhaps most importantly, this argument conflates what a skeptic will or might do with what a skeptic may rationally do. The former is psychology and sociology. The latter is epistemology. We mustn't conflate the two. It may well be true that a particular skeptic "would not be persuaded though one should rise from the dead." It may well be true that such a skeptic will adopt any wild, ad hoc theory rather than believe that a miracle has taken place. But this is a statement about that skeptic's psychology, not about what is rational. Is he rational to be willing to believe anything, including a lot of independent people's mass hallucination, rather than believe that a miracle has taken place? No. That would be a desperate theory rescue for his own naturalism, and we shouldn't imply that it is anything better.

In fact, there are plenty of objections--good, bad, and ugly--that have been raised against various metaphysical arguments for God's existence. If we are just talking about what a skeptic will do or might do, it could just as easily be predicted that he will bring up this or that objection and reject those arguments as well! Why not? If we're willing to postulate a skeptic so stubborn and determined that he'd rather believe that he and everyone else is hallucinating rather than believe that a miracle has happened, he can easily, in fact probably more easily, come up with some "reason" to reject all of Aquinas's Five Ways!

But if we are talking about what is rational, if we are doing epistemology rather than psychology and sociology, then we should recognize that detailed, credible evidence of miracles does support the existence of God and that a skeptic who will do anything rather than take such evidence seriously is being irrational.

It would be difficult to over-stress the importance of this last point. It is simply facile to say or even to imply that, if an atheist will or could reject an argument for Christianity that one doesn't favor (or that one thinks needs to be kept in its place, meaning subordinate to or subsequent to one's own favored arguments), this means the argument is no good. Everyone can play at that game. I can pick any argument for God's existence or for Christianity and drum up an extremely plausible scenario in which an atheist dismisses it stubbornly. But if he's being unreasonable to do so, that's the important point for the epistemology of religion. Arguments can never overcome the human will to disbelieve if that will is strong enough. Man can use his free will to warp and confuse his own mind, to dismiss things that shouldn't be dismissed. That is a sign of the will to evil, the fall of mankind, sin nature. It isn't a defect in the arguments.

It should be obvious that a person who would rather believe that he is hallucinating all the reports than believe that there is some evidence that Jesus rose from the dead is being unreasonable. It is no help to the cause of Christ to bring up such wild scenarios, point out that a skeptic could adopt them, and then use that as a club against the argument from miracles.

Finally, one more small epistemological point: If the argument from miracles has no independent force, it doesn't magically acquire it for a person who already believes that God exists. This is extremely confused. It isn't possible to deny all independent force to the argument from miracles and then to try to revive its force for the person who is already a theist. This would be like saying that an e-mail that appears to be from my friend Jeff has no force in favor of his existence if I don't already believe that he exists on some non-e-mail basis and then to turn around and say that, voila, it really has some kind of unspecified epistemic value for me once I already believe in his existence. Epistemology doesn't work that way. Be careful: If you work hard to argue that an argument is forceless when you don't want it, you can't expect to whistle the argument up later like an obedient dog when you do want it.

Consider: The Jews believed that they had independent evidence that Jesus could not be who He said He was. Why weren't they justified, despite (and in a sense because of) their Judaic theism, in believing that they were hallucinating the reports of Jesus' resurrection rather than conclude that they had been wrong and that Jesus really was the Son of God? Why not? What is sauce for the atheist goose is sauce for the 1st century Jewish gander. If we're going to place all the weight on one's independent, prior probabilities and "diss" the argument from miracles, then it is arbitrary to say that the evidence for a miracle should rationally overcome one's prejudice in favor of a contrary religious presupposition but cannot possibly rationally tell against a person's contrary irreligious presupposition.

As I have said many times before, evidence is evidence. Take it or leave it. Don't try to make it dance to your own tune.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on July 31, 2014 9:34 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (miracles) (natural theology) (philosophy of religion)

If everything is holy, nothing is holy

 

If everything is holy, nothing is holy

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

One of my Facebook friends recently shared, with approval, Minnesota folk singer Peter Mayer's song "Holy Now." The lyrics are here.

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
'Cause everything's a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything's a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn't one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I'm swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child's face
And say it's not a testament
That'd be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it's not a sacrament
I tell you that it can't be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
'Cause everything is holy now

Compare them with his even more pointedly titled "Church of the Earth" lyrics linked from here.

Here's a little info.:

PETER MAYER is a well-known American singer-songwriter. His song "Holy Now" has become a beloved standard in liberal church contexts and was the title entry of the 2006 Songbook of the Association of Unity Churches. Peter's "Blue Boat Home" gained a place in the supplementary hymnal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

In 2006 Peter began collaborating with photographer/videographer Connie Barlow to render the particular songs that highlight evolutionary and ecological themes into captioned video formats ideal for contemplative viewing or sing-along in churches and spiritual centers.

I trust that is clear enough, if you didn't get it from the song lyrics themselves. (Interesting terminological note: Evidently some liberals use "liberal" as a term of approval among themselves.) If you are curious, earth worship features prominently in the above-mentioned universalist "hymn," "Blue Boat Home." Lyrics linked from here.

Why do otherwise sensible and orthodox Christian people occasionally fall for this kind of "everything is a miracle, everything is holy, nothing is any more special than anything else" universalist shtick? What is it about a kind of spiritual egalitarianism of things and events that is so attractive that blatant, in-your-face pantheism and anti-Christianity goes unnoticed in the same lyric? (Gotta love the reference to orthodox Christianity as "heaven's second-rate hand-me-down.")

It's only fair to admit that Mayer is a talented lyricist, so there's that. I think, too, that many Christians are looking for profundity and mysticism, and saying that "everything is holy" seems to answer that need. And saying that a little red-winged bird shines like a burning bush could be taken in isolation to mean that the creation manifests God's glory.

The problem is just that the sweeping, profound-sounding statement is false. Everything is not holy. A Black Mass is not holy. A demon is not holy. Methamphetamine is not holy. An instrument of torture is not holy. A murder is not holy. There is good and bad and right and wrong. Some acts are holy and some are evil. Some symbols stand for good and beautiful things while others stand for evil things. Some objects or substances have no function or point but the bad function for which they were deliberately made.

We can even take it up a notch by moving away from acts and symbols of evil to things that are neutral in themselves. If you insist on saying that every bit of dirt is holy, you should at least have the theological capacity to say that a bit of dirt is not holy in the same sense that the Blessed Sacrament is holy. The dirt is also not holy in the same sense that a saintly human being is holy. And the saintly ordinary human being, not being God Incarnate, is not holy in precisely the same sense, or at least not to the same degree, that Jesus Christ is holy. Even Christian mysticism must be held together and made coherent by hierarchical structure.

Furthermore, if there is not God, who is absolutely holy, and who is strongly Other than and separate from His Creation, then nothing can be holy at all. A radical anti-egalitarianism, a radical separation between Creator and creature, is a necessary condition for the possibility of meaningful holiness. The "holiness" of pantheism is merely everything-ness. It's a faux holiness that actually turns all theological categories into a giant egalitarian mush. Mayer, being an artist, can dress it up pretty nicely, but he can't make it other than what it is. God's presence can infuse glory into the smallest grain of sand only if God is God, if God is a real, personal Being (not "the All" or the Force), and only if the sand is part of God's creation. The omnipresence of the Judeo-Christian God is sharply different from the pantheist universalism of Peter Mayer's lyrics. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the two concepts are opposed to each other.

Now, about miracles: However sweet it may sound to say that everything that happens is a miracle, that is also false. And again, as with holiness, so here: If everything is a miracle, nothing is a miracle. The concept of a miracle is meaningful only if there is a contrast class of events that form the natural order, i.e., not miracles. (See also the discussion in this comment.) Every drop of rain that falls is not a miracle. Every flower that grows is not a miracle. Though it is true that we wouldn't have drops of rain if God had not made the heavens and the earth and all that is in the beginning by the Word of His power, and though we wouldn't have flowers if God hadn't made the first flowers, the growth of the flower now and the fall of the raindrop now are not miracles now. When Jesus rose from the dead, that was a miracle. When Peter was released by an angel from prison (today's Scripture reading for the Feast of St. Peter), that was a miracle. When Christians were martyred and their bodies decomposed and formed soil for the crops to grow, that was not a miracle.

Sometimes the only way to guard true mysticism and profundity is to seem to run in the opposite direction. I make no claim to be a mystic; far from it. But it seems to me evident that somewhere along the road to a true understanding of God, even by that way of darkness, lies clarity, not vagueness and muddle.

There are crossroads that come up in our thinking about God, and woe betide us if we take the wrong turn. If we are to honor God with our minds, we should see always at those crucial places where the ways part between truth and error an angel with a burning sword held aloft. And from his lips there comes a cry:

"Distinguo!"

Posted by Lydia McGrew on June 29, 2014 12:32 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (miracles) (mysticism) (philosophy of religion)

There are no slippery prior probabilities

 

There are no slippery prior probabilities

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

For the present let it suffice to bear in mind that there is no limit to the strength of working, as distinguished from abstract, certainty, to which probable evidence may not lead us along its gently ascending paths.

W.E. Gladstone, Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Joseph Butler, 1896, p. 349.

In our article on the resurrection in this volume from Blackwell, my husband and I discuss a confusion that has dogged historical apologetics for hundreds of years: The idea that a person who has "too low" of a prior probability for the miraculous is justified in dismissing evidence for a specific miracle out of hand and accepting any other explanation instead.

David Hume made famous capital out of this confusion in his claim to have delivered an "everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion." Atheists run back to the prior probabilities as a rabbit runs to its hole. Never mind the concrete evidence! If I don't already believe that God exists, why should I even listen to your concrete evidence? There must be some other explanation for it, and that's all!

One of the reasons that an understanding of probability is valuable is that it can dispel persistent errors--the intellectual equivalent of urban legends that crop up again and again.

This is such an error. And it is a case where, unfortunately, some Christian writers agree with David Hume. In the relevant section of our article we instance a quotation from the Protestant writers R.C. Sproul, Arthur Lindsley, and John Gerstner, in which they say that "only on the prior evidence that God exists is a miracle even possible" and that therefore "miracles cannot prove God."

This idea of a prior probability that is "too low" gives impetus to an extremely rigid form of classical apologetics that asserts not merely that it is a strategically good idea but that it is an absolute epistemic necessity to convince a person first that God exists, using the arguments of natural theology, before he can be reasonably expected to receive the specific evidence for a miracle such as the resurrection.

The contemporary probability theorist John Earman has done much, building on the work of 19th century thinker Charles Babbage, to demonstrate the falsity of this view. (Earman, to be clear, is not a Christian nor even, as far as I know, a theist.) Briefly, the problem with the Humean view is this: It fails to recognize that any non-zero probability, however low, can be overcome by sufficiently strong probabilistic evidence. This is simply a fact of probability theory. There is no such thing as a prior probability that is "slippery," such that one could never rationally overcome it. Therefore, it is simply false to say that, if one doesn't already believe that God exists, one should "understandably" dismiss the evidence for any miracle. For, if that evidence were sufficiently strong, it would show that, contrary to what one had previously thought, God does indeed exist!

It's important to distinguish strategy from epistemology. For sociological and psychological reasons, it may be quite reasonable in talking with a particular person to present one's arguments in stages--arguing first that God exists on the basis of natural theology and then moving on from there. The arch-probabilist among philosophers of religion, Richard Swinburne, proceeds in exactly this way. It is also probabilistically tidy to do so, because Jesus didn't walk on earth in Palestine unless life exists, and life doesn't exist unless the universe is life-permitting, so it is perfectly reasonable to present these other items as evidence for the existence of God first if one has such arguments.

But those considerations are a far cry from insisting that the evidence for a miracle such as the resurrection literally does not count as evidence or literally cannot be assimilated as evidence unless one already believes in the existence of God. That strong position is simply and flatly false and can be shown to be false by even a rudimentary understanding of how probabilistic arguments work.

In layman's terms, we can isolate the impact of an item of evidence upon an hypothesis from the prior probability of that hypothesis. We can then look at that evidential impact and at least estimate how low of a prior probability could be overcome by that evidential force. That is the strategy that Tim and I employ in our article about the resurrection.

Here is an important point: The strength of the evidence can often be seen by looking at the lengths to which the skeptic must go to explain away that evidence rather than taking seriously the hypothesis that springs to mind. Hence, rather than take seriously the possibility of the resurrection, the skeptic must hypothesize that the women went to the wrong tomb and the persecutor Paul had some inexplicable fit on the road to Damascus that just happened to make him think Jesus was talking to him and that the Christians were right and the eleven disciples all just happened to have a coordinated mass hallucination of Jesus eating, being tangible, and talking to all of them at once, repeatedly, over a forty day period and James just happened to have a similar hallucination and...You get the picture.

A major problem with saying that it is reasonable or understandable for the skeptic (who doesn't already accept the arguments of natural theology) to dismiss the evidence for a miracle is that one is in that case endorsing massively ad hoc hypothesizing on the part of the skeptic. And that is not reasonable.

One could perhaps respond that the skeptic might might simply not know about the details of the evidence for the resurrection. Perhaps he is simply ignorant. In that case he wouldn't be making such ad hoc arguments because he would just vaguely think that "scholars have shown" that the gospels are a bunch of legends made up long after the fact. But in that case, why should the only trigger, the one absolutely necessary trigger, for his finding out more be his coming to believe that God exists by being taken through a prolegomenon of natural theology? Surely we can think of other things that might make him think again--meeting a smart, respected friend or colleague who is a Christian, for example, and wondering why in the world so-and-so believes such a cockamamie tale.

It is important for Christians wanting to think clearly not to become tied to a particular, rigid order for apologetic arguments. This is important first of all because such a rigid order requirement is not defensible. We should want to know the truth, including the truth at the metalevel about how apologetics "has to" go.

Relatedly, it is important not to become tied to such a rigid order because we shouldn't be encouraging people to throw out or ignore strong evidence. We shouldn't even be encouraging them to ignore evidence until and unless they believe some umbrella hypothesis, such as theism, on independent grounds. That is poor philosophical practice. It is one thing to say that it may be helpful to show them first, on other grounds, that God exists. It is quite another to tell them that they needn't bother about the evidence for the resurrection right now, unless they already believe that God exists, because, if they do not have the proper theistic beliefs already in place, it's perfectly understandable that that evidence looks weak to them. No, it shouldn't look weak to them, and no, that isn't understandable.

There are also concerns about eternity involved here; these are matters of ultimate moment. If an unbeliever is simply ignorant of the strength of the available evidence for a miracle, the important thing is to inform him about the evidence, which speaks for itself. To say instead that it is understandable for him to dismiss any miracle claim if he doesn't already believe in the existence of God is to give him an excuse for not looking through the telescope.

We shouldn't be handing out such "get out of jail free" cards readily, because I can tell you one thing: They won't get anybody out of hell.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on May 22, 2014 11:30 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (apologetics) (evidentialism) (miracles) (philosophy of religion)