Resurrection of the gaps

In "The Resurrection Appearances of Jesus" — Chapter 35 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God — Gary R. Habermas announces he "will list ten considerations that favor Jesus's resurrection appearances." Most of this appears to be "eyewitness testimony", but four of these ten considerations are accounts given by Paul in the New Testament. This is eyewitness testimony recorded by one man — a convert whose conversion was so cataclysmic that its location gave its name to such conversions: Damascene. It's well known that converts are often the most devout, the most zealous — consequently their pronouncements are to be regarded with a degree of caution.

"That Jesus' resurrection was the very center of early Christian faith..." doesn't necessarily count towards its status as fact. If a religious sect is being started it needs something to make it special, and a resurrection will fit the bill. The emphasis on the resurrection could have been something early Christian leaders promulgated in order to gain followers, regardless of its truth value. (I'm not saying here that those leaders were deliberately fraudulent, but they would have been aware of which aspects of their faith would be most persuasive to potential converts.)

Habermas uses (and excuses) multiple appeals to authority:

Throughout this essay, I will not assume the inspiration or even the reliability of the New Testament writings, though I think these doctrines rest on strong grounds.  I will refer almost exclusively to those data that are so well attested that they impress even the vast majority of non-evangelical scholars.  Each point is confirmed by impressive data, even though I can do no more than offer an outline of these reasons.

If he's not assuming the reliability of the New Testament writings, how can he use them to support his case?

We must be clear from the outset that not only do contemporary scholars not mind when points are taken from the New Testament writings, but they do so often.  The reason is that confirmed data can be used anywhere it is found.

But of course he's not going to use any data that supports a contrary case, only implicitly asserting that it inhabits tiny spaces left over when he says "...the vast majority of non-evangelical scholars", or "...comparatively few skeptical scholars...", or "Few conclusions in current study are more widely held by scholars...", or "Most scholars who address the subject think that...", or "...scholars usually agree that...", or "Virtually no one, friend or foe, believer or critic, denies that...", or "It is almost always acknowledged that...", or "...the vast majority of contemporary scholars conclude that..."

Habermas's case appears to be a "resurrection of the gaps" argument. He claims there's no natural explanation for the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and that therefore Jesus rose from the dead. First, this is an argument from ignorance, and second, the burden of proof is on those making the extraordinary claim. The evidence from scripture is shaky at best: note that there are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus actually rising from the dead — it's all post hoc supposition, with Habermas and other apologists filling in the gaps themselves with events they want to believe happened.

It's not up to anyone else to disprove the resurrection, because it hasn't been sufficiently established to begin with. I can't account for what goes on in the mind of a religious zealot, but I am highly suspicious of any extraordinary event reported by eyewitnesses. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, and if those accounts are mostly reported second-hand by one individual with his own agenda we have good reason to be skeptical. I may not personally have a definitive explanation for the scriptural accounts, but I don't need one. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to disprove.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952867

Circular logic is circular in Evidence for God

Michael R. Licona, one of the editors of Evidence for God (the other being William A. Dembski) contributes Chapter 33, "Can We Be Certain That Jesus Died on a Cross? — A Look at the Ancient Practice of Crucifixion". Certainty in this matter is apparently important because if Jesus didn't die on a cross he couldn't have been resurrected, and "without a resurrection, Christianity is falsified." So Licona presents "four reasons that support the credibility of the claim that Jesus died as a result of being crucified."

First, he mentions reports about Jesus's execution, some by non-Christians, and he goes on to say:

The fact that these non-Christians mentioned Jesus in their writings shows that Jesus' death was known outside of Christian circles and was not something the Christians invented.

That's stretching it a bit. Licona himself states that the reports were late first century, early second century, early to mid-second century, and second to third century. Even the earliest would presumably have been decades after the event reported, so it's unlikely they were reliable eye-witness accounts. They could even have been second-hand reports based on the same source — but how reliable was that source itself? Maybe the story of Jesus's death was known outside of Christian circles, but the existence of those reports is hardly proof that they are all true.

Second, Licona goes into gory detail about crucifixion and concludes that people who were crucified were highly unlikely to survive it. I'm not sure why this needs to be stated — execution isn't something one is expected to survive.

Then we get this:

Third, professional medical opinions are unanimous in concluding that Jesus certainly died as a result of being crucified.⁷

Licona gives the following reference for the above statement:

⁷A number of these are mentioned in Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 1088ff.

Now, I'm not disputing that Jesus probably died as a result of his crucifixion, but I have to point out Licona's appallingly shoddy logic in the above claim. What, precisely, does he mean by "unanimous"? Has he consulted every professional medical opinion? Apparently not — he says "a number" are mentioned in his cited reference. It seems therefore that he's using "unanimous" in the sense that all of the professional medical opinions that conclude Jesus died from crucifixion are unanimous in that opinion — which is at best tautologous.

Licona may have been perilously close to the edge of logic with that last "reason", but with his fourth he steps right off the cliff. He attempts to use Jesus's post-mortem appearances as evidence for him dying on the cross. This is begging the question. What Licona is trying to establish in this chapter is that Jesus died on the cross, because if Jesus didn't die on the cross he couldn't have been resurrected. Licona can't use the resurrection as proof of the crucifixion and then use the crucifixion to prove the resurrection, because — this is elementary stuff — that's a circular argument.

Argumentation of such low calibre is fatal to Licona's credibility here. Dembski should have spiked it.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952883

Expecting the obvious is not "prediction"

Craig A. Evans, in the title of chapter 32 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, asks "Did Jesus Predict His Violent Death and Resurrection?"

According to the Bible (extensively cited) he probably did. But what does it matter whether or not Jesus did so? Considering what he was up to, he might well have expected to fall foul of the indigenous authorities, the consequences of which were not difficult to foresee.

As for predicting his resurrection, this is what Evans has to say:

Did Jesus anticipate his resurrection? It is probable that he did. Once he began speaking of his death, Jesus very likely began speaking of his vindication through resurrection. Had he not anticipated it would have been very strange, for pious Jews very much believed in the resurrection of the dead.

It would have been strange, apparently, if Jesus had not "anticipated" his resurrection, so it remains unclear what point Evans is trying to make. To echo my response to a previous chapter in this section of the book, "So what?"

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952879

Biblical authority in doubt?

Ben Witherington III follows his previous chapter in Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God with "Jesus as God", in which he quotes so extensively from the Bible that I wonder if the editors put the sections of their book in the wrong order. This, the third section, is titled The Question of Jesus, but I can't help wondering if it should have come after the fourth (which I've yet to read), titled The Question of the Bible.

I query this because the book is supposed to be directed at skeptics as well as believers. To quote from the back cover:

Challenges to belief in God as he is revealed in the Bible have always existed, and today is no exception. In Evidence for God, leading Christian scholars and apologists provide compelling arguments that address the latest and most pressing questions about God, science, Jesus, the Bible, and more, including:

• Did Jesus really exist?
• Is Jesus the only way to God?
• What about those who have never heard the gospel?
• Is today's Bible what was originally written?
• What about recently publicised gospels that aren't in the Bible?
• Is intelligent design really a credible explanation of the origins of our world?
• and much more

All but one of those bulleted points rely on the Bible, so shouldn't the Bible's provenance be addressed first? Perhaps the editors felt that the arguments in support of the Bible would not be as convincing as those from science and philosophy. We shall see.

Meanwhile I can summarise chapter 31 as, "Jesus is God because he said so, though he was sensibly cagey about it in certain circumstances."

Not very convincing.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952873

Does it matter how Jesus prayed?

Chapter 30 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God is "Son of God" by Ben Witherington III. It seems mostly to be an argument for the idea that Jesus was God's son — because he was reported, in the Bible, to have said as much. The whole thing is so confused, however, that it's hard to draw any conclusions from it.

Witherington points out that Jesus prayed to God using the term "Abba", which is a term of endearment. This, he says, shows that Jesus thought of himself as the "son" of God as distinct from the prevalent usage where kings were also considered "sons" of God. But Witherington immediately undermines this proposition by stating that Jesus also taught his disciples to pray to God using the term "Abba". So this term does not, after all, denote a special exclusive relationship of the kind usually claimed for Jesus.

Added to which, the chapter doesn't address the issue of reliability that's inevitably triggered by a passage such as this:

There can be no doubt however, that Jesus did not view His relationship to God as simply identical to the relationship King David had with God. For one thing, it tells us a lot about Jesus that He prayed to God as Abba which is the Aramaic term of endearment which means dearest Father (see Mark 14:36, Abba is not slang, it does not mean "Daddy.")

We have no records of anything Jesus wrote. We cannot know how he prayed, only how he was reported to have prayed. Witherington's entire chapter is scuppered by his very first sentence:

One of the big mistakes in Christian apologetics is just focusing on what Jesus publicly claimed to be.

There's been much discussion over two millennia about Jesus' public statements — how accurately they were reported, whether his chroniclers' agenda influenced the slant of their reports, or even whether their memories were reliable given that they wrote nothing about Jesus for decades. What Witherington is talking about, however, are Jesus' private prayers. What chance have we of reliably knowing anything about those? And even if we did know, what difference would it make?

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952901

Irrelevant exegesis

Darrell Bock, the author of Chapter 29 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, entitled "The Son of Man", was recently a guest on Premier Radio's Unbelievable? programme. On that occasion he was opposite Bart Erhman talking about the latter's book Forged, and the conversation was, for me (as far as I recall), a little technical and mostly irrelevant. That should have been fair warning, for in this chapter — scarcely two pages long — Bock searches for Old and New Testament mentions of the phrase "Son of Man" and attempts to interpret their meanings (which incidentally he maintains are different in different contexts).

Here's an example:

One way is to discuss whether the use of the title comes with a clear use of Daniel 7, an indirect use or no use, since this is the only OT passage that is connected to the title specifically in the NT. Most uses of the title do not make an explicit connection to Daniel 7. In fact, the explicit uses that do come appear in two places: (1) the eschatological discourse where Jesus discusses the return of the Son of Man and (2) at Jesus' examination by the Jewish leadership where he speaks of the Son of Man seated at God's right hand coming on the clouds, a remark that combines Daniel 7 and Psalm 110:1. This means that in most uses in the gospels Jesus used the title but did not give a reference to tie it to as an explanation. Both of the explicit uses come late in Jesus' ministry.

To whom is Bock directing this scrutiny of minutiae? In a book purporting to offer arguments and evidence for God, it seems more than a little premature. Shouldn't we establish the provenance of scripture itself before discussing its apparent subtleties?

Bock's final paragraph is this:

So the Son of Man is a title Jesus used to refer to himself and his authority. He revealed its full import toward the end of his ministry. But the title referred to Jesus as the representative of humanity who also engaged in divine activity. It was a way of saying I am the One sent with divine authority to also be the representative of humanity. In this context, all of Jesus' ministry and work, including his suffering on the cross for sin takes place.

To which I reply, "So what?"

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952903

Incredible miracles require credible evidence

In my previous post in this series I answered the question, "Who do YOU say Jesus was?" with the following:

It seems likely that Jesus was an itinerant preacher who developed a considerable local following, to the extent that he annoyed the established religion of the time, which got rid of him in an effort to preserve the status quo.

It's clear that I don't think Jesus was a supernatural being. But could a non-supernatural being perform supernatural actions?

Chapter 28 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God is "The Credibility of Jesus's Miracles" by Craig L. Blomberg, in which he puts forward the idea that the historical record of Jesus performing miracles is a true account. Unfortunately for his thesis he employs too many assumptions in order to come to this conclusion. For example, here's part of his attempt to establish the existence of God (a necessary precursor to the divinity — and therefore miracle-workings — of Jesus):

One of the most exciting and encouraging developments in recent years in this respect is the intelligent design movement. Pointing to numerous examples of fundamental entities in the natural and biological worlds that display irreducible complexity, even some scientists who are not Christians at all have acknowledged that there must be an intelligent being behind this creation. The entire "big-bang" theory for the beginnings of the universe leads to the question of what or who produced that "bang." (p 147.)

Blomberg's implication here is not just that there must have been a cause for these things, but that the cause was necessarily divine.

For others, philosophical arguments like those of the famous seventeenth-century Scotsman, David Hume, turn out to be more persuasive. While not alleging that miracles are impossible, the claim now is that the probability of a natural explanation will always be greater than that of a supernatural one. Phenomena could mislead, witnesses could be mistaken and, besides, explanations of events must have analogies to what has happened in the past. But it is not at all clear that any of these arguments mean that the evidence could never be unambiguous and the witnesses unassailable. And if every event must have a known analogy, then people in the tropics before modern technology could never have accepted that ice exists! (p 147-8.)

I think he's misappropriating Hume here. Hume stated that reports of miracles could only be accepted as true if the alternative explanation — that the reports are false — would have to be more miraculous than the miracles themselves. That rules out most of Jesus's miracles right at the start. And arguments by analogy carry little weight. Analogies are useful in explaining the general nature of things, but eventually all analogies break down because they are only "like" the things they are analogous to, not identical to them.

Blomberg goes on to challenge the idea that there were lots of reports of miracles in myth and legend that are similar to those allegedly performed by Jesus:

It is curious how often laypeople and even some scholars repeat the charge that the Gospel miracles sound just like the legends of other ancient religions without having carefully studied the competing accounts. For example, it is often alleged that there were virgin births and resurrection stories all over the ancient religious landscape. But, in fact, most of the alleged parallels to special births involve ordinary human sexual relations coupled simply with the belief that one of the persons was actually a god or goddess incognito. Or, as with the conception of Alexander the Great, in one legend almost a millennium later than his lifetime, a giant Python intertwined around Alexander's mother on her honeymoon night, keeping his father at a discrete distance and impregnating the young woman. (p 148.)

He seems to be claiming that the Gospel miracles were of a quite different order from the examples he gives, but I don't see it. Whether a person was actually a god or not has little effect on the credibility of the story when that story is already incredible. Consciously or not, Blomberg is using special pleading to impart undeserved credibility to his preferred account. He does the same with the resurrection story, but here we begin to see a pattern emerging.

If the miracles of Jesus are similar to other miraculous events reported in ancient texts, then that similarity lends the reports credence, because those reporting them knew what they witnessed and wrote about. If the miracles of Jesus were wholly different from those other miracles, they are thereby rescued from the skepticism duly applied to those other, more mundane miracles. Blomberg wants it both ways.

But if that doesn't work, he tells us that most of those other miraculous accounts were based on the miracles of Jesus anyway, in a frenzy of "me too!" copycat miracle-working. I can't help seeing some desperation here. He wants it to be true, but the "evidence" is really thin, and frankly unconvincing.

One might fairly question my own disposition regarding these accounts. I don't think they're true, and I have a bias in my interpretation of them. But we're talking about miracles — extraordinary events that require extraordinary evidence. That evidence is not forthcoming, and until it is, I'll go with the account that fits with my experience of the natural world around me — the world for which there is evidence.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952909

Book Review: Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Philip Pullman states clearly that his latest book is not intended to be an accurate portrayal of historical events. The back cover of his novel proclaims "This is a STORY."

But it's a story that could, given the historical events on which it is based, be one account of the possible truth. It's the story of Jesus, and of Christ, and in Pullman's narrative these are two distinct people — twin brothers, in fact. Jesus is the preacher, Christ is his unacknowledged public relations man. It's told from the viewpoint of Christ, who is constantly in awe of his brother and his wise preacherly ways.

Only once, near the end of the book, do we get to hear the thoughts of Jesus himself, when he goes into the garden at Gethsemane to commune with his God. And we learn that the wise preacher has doubts — doubts so deep that he can be safely described as an atheist.

The character of Christ is by far the more interesting of the two. It is to Christ that the business of recording the historical events falls, and like any good PR man he knows that the facts will need to be spun. We see the process of myth-making, sometimes deliberate, sometimes fortuitous. It remains a mystery, however, who the stranger is who occasionally comes to instruct Christ in his endeavours. Christ never learns the stranger's name, and believes he is an angel, but the stranger could just as easily be Satan, or more prosaically, a subversive fixer from an organisation that sees the cult of Jesus as beneficial.

The book is written in a simplistic, almost childlike style. No echoes of the King James authorised version of the Bible penetrate the flat narrative. Because it's so transparent, the framing and blatant spin of the facts at hand are seen for what they are: we are left with a simple story retold many times, incorporating the necessary features for making the myth.

Philip Pullman

Pullman clearly demonstrates that The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is not holy writ. It is, as he says, a story. But it fits the known facts, and raises a question: if a story like this can be made up to fit the facts as we know them from history, how do we know that the other stories that fit the same facts aren't also made up? The answer is, we don't, and while that's an interesting literary question, it's not something on which the moral imperatives of a huge percentage of the world's population can be legitimately based.

[Pullman, P. (2010) The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Edinburgh: Canongate; ISBN 978 1 84767 825 6 hardcover £14.99]

Philip Pullman was a guest (by 'phone) on Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable? programme in May. The mp3 audio is available for download here:
http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/558de763-5bbb-4759-a6d7-f4e5b4261601.mp3
Streaming audio available here:
http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={1439D3F4-FB20-4658-892E-3992F94C5FFD}

Is God real? Is Jesus God? — My response

This is something I posted a while ago (in response to an invitation) in a Premier Community Unbelievable? discussion thread started by Todd Pitner entitled "ATHEISTS, might I have a Word with you?"

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Todd,

Richard Morgan invited me to post in this thread and I'm happy to do so. I've been an atheist for some 40 years or so. Brought up by Anglican parents who weren't overly religious (though they did send me to Sunday School) I was belatedly invited to be confirmed into the Church of England at about age 14 or 15. I say belatedly because by that time I knew I no longer harboured the faith of my childhood and had prevaricated when the suggestion was put to me. Nevertheless, my mother wanted me to be confirmed and I agreed to be tutored one-on-one by our local vicar. We had some interesting but fairly fruitless discussions, and after about four of these sessions he said he was prepared to confirm me despite my professed doubts. By that time I was certain I could not in all honesty be confirmed, and found his willingness to go ahead anyway somewhat disingenuous. I admit that this incident did cement my unbelief at that time.

After that background, on to your questions about what I might find compelling about "God being real" and "Jesus being God". The latter depends on the former, and as I have major problems with the idea of God being real the question of whether or not Jesus is God doesn't arise for me. First I must consider what we are to understand by "God" and "real". If by "God" we mean an intelligent creator of the universe (and by "universe" I mean everything and not just a subset universe of something else), I can conceive of a kind of power or essence in which the universe came to exist, but I find the notion that this power could be in any way personal or intentional to be untenable. By "real" I mean in actual existence — probably some kind of physical existence, because though I can imagine the existence of a god, and I believe my thoughts are "real" in the sense that I do actually think them (and so my thoughts do actually "exist"), they don't have a physical existence in the physical world, beyond being information in my brain. Let me say that though I can conceive of such a God-essence, I've yet to see any compelling evidence for it, and have no reason to suppose it actually exists.

This is a long-winded way of coming round to the statement that I find the Abrahamic God of the major monotheistic faiths completely illogical, ridiculous and unconvincing. I can't conceive of anything that could convince me that the God of the Bible is "real". (I have, however addressed this elsewhere.)

I'm aware that many Christians claim to have had personal experiences that convinced them God is real, but as I've had no such experience I can't offer any opinion on whether such an experience would convince me.

There are lots of arguments for the existence of God, but I don't find any of them convincing — at least, not the arguments I've come across; I'm happy to consider others. I don't think many Christians find these arguments convincing either, using them merely to bolster the faith they derive from personal experience. So we reach a kind of impasse: the theist is convinced by personal experience, but knows that this is unlikely to convince someone who lacks such an experience, so he or she resorts to the well-known arguments for the existence of God, despite not finding them particularly compelling. It's hardly surprising that the atheist finds them even less compelling.