Showing posts with label arguments for God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arguments for God. Show all posts

Monday, 8 June 2015

Losing the will to review: Evidence Unseen or Arguments Unconsidered?


When I announced this book review project in September last year I made a proviso about reviewing James M. Rochford's Evidence Unseen:
...I've decided to read it and (if in my opinion it merits a review) to review it here on the blog.
I reviewed the introduction in March, and continued reading last weekend. Does it merit a review? It's going downhill fast. I had hoped for something substantial, but if the first chapter is typical I'm tempted to give it up as a waste of time. Rochford's arguments are ill-considered and sloppy, relying too much on emotion rather than logic. He refers often to atheists, "atheistic thinkers" and even an "atheistic ethical philosopher" as if they are a breed apart. I can only assume that atheists are not his target readership:
Yet, a certain tension of which they are unaware plagues them: While they are content in their atheistic worldview, they are not consistent with it... [Loc 325]
Basically telling atheists that they are psychologically defective. They are plagued with a tension — but they're unaware of it? This looks like classic projection.
If God doesn’t exist, is it possible to have a life that is ultimately significant? Unfortunately, it isn’t. [Loc 331]
Nothing unfortunate about that, as far as I know. Like many Christian apologists Rochford seems obsessed with ultimate absolute objectivity. It doesn't exist.
If the Christian God is real, then we have the hope of eternity. [Loc 368]
What is emerging here is a massive argument from consequences.
Of course, if the Christian God exists and all humans are made in his image, as the Bible teaches (Gen. 1:26-27; Jas. 3:9), then this would be both objectively true and truly important. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then human beings would hold nothing in common that could make them truly equal. [Loc 391]
This comes after a section trying to debunk "equality" — saying that people aren't really equal (when what he's actually saying is that people aren't all the same — which is true). But just because people aren't the same, that's no excuse for not treating them then with equal fairness, especially before the law.
But if everything in nature is only natural, then how can a naturalist call murder, rape, or genocide unnatural? [Loc 433]
I'm not aware that naturalists do call murder, rape and genocide "unnatural" — seems like he's setting up a straw man here.
...when we claim that morality comes from chimpanzees... [Loc 454]
Um ... we don't. More straw-manning.
Atheist Richard Dawkins argues... [Loc 455]
A Dawkins quote! (Just goes to show that Dawkins continues to rattle theists' cages.)
If morality is truly objective, then it is binding over people whether or not they agree to it. [Loc 501]
Now we're getting to the nitty gritty. Let's define "morality" and "objective", shall we? Apparently not — we're straight on to an argument with Sam Harris:
Why should we think that the flourishing of the human species is ultimately the greatest good? [Loc 508]
This is pretty easy if we're actually members of the human species ourselves (barring any quibbles over the use of "ultimately"). Then we get the seven dying patients in need of organ transplants versus one healthy person:
...wouldn’t it make sense to capture a healthy young man in the lobby to harvest his organs—the seven organs the dying people needed—to “maximize happiness”? [Loc 512]
Actually no, it wouldn't make sense — unless you're content to live in a world where you might be randomly killed so that your organs could be harvested.
While we might not know the right moral action, we still know that one must exist. [Loc 526]
By using the term "right" this is begging the question. There may be a preferable action, based on circumstances and consequences — an action that would be preferred by those affected by the consequences.
Many atheistic thinkers will openly admit that morality is not objective in a universe without God. [Loc 533]
It depends what you mean by "objective". If you mean independent of any single individual, then I'd disagree, because in a universe without God, morality can indeed be independent of any single individual. That's not to say morality is relative, or absolute. It has to be more nuanced than that (certainly more nuanced that a list of rules in a book).
“If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?” [Loc 564]
This a C. S. Lewis quote. But as usual with Lewis, his facility with words outruns his analytic capacity. What he's saying is circular, because trust and reason are part of thought. And even if thought is undesigned, it certainly isn't irrelevant to the one who's thinking. Naturally this comes back to the theistic aversion to determinism and lack of free will. There's quite a lot in this chapter about determinism and free will, and what the consequences are if they are true. Rochford uses them to illustrate the horror of naturalism, but I couldn't help reading that section as a likely true account of reality.

That concludes my "review" of Chapter 1. It's not deep, but then the chapter reviewed is ridiculously superficial. And I should probably come clean and say that this concludes my review of the entire book. From the introduction and first chapter I infer that the rest of Evidence Unseen will be more of the same — not worth the bother.

Monday, 7 October 2013

God's not dead, he just doesn't believe in confirmation bias

Last night I got caught up with the latest Unbelievable? podcast. It was billed as "Evidence, atheism and the case for God" featuring Rice Broocks, who has written a book titled God's Not Dead. From his description this tome sounds like a standard apologetics portmanteau covering various arguments and evidences for the existence of the Christian God.

Opposite him was atheist David Beebee, a listener to the show who had read the book and who politely stated that he found it unpersuasive. In fact it was politeness all round, including Broocks' physicist-in-tow Brian Miller. Justin Brierley acted as neutral host and it was all very civil (which — along with last week's show featuring Keith Ward and Michael Ruse — made for less stressful listening than the previous two Unbelievables).

Rice Broocks is an American preacher, so he has the apologetic delivery honed to a fine art, and Brian Miller had clearly mastered the exposition of his subject. In contrast David Beebee wasn't the most articulate of atheists, but he made an excellent point about Broocks' double standards with regard to evidence and the acceptance of consensus. The point must have struck home, because neither Broocks nor Miller answered it. So Beebee repeated it later in the show, and still they didn't answer it. It was probably the only point he needed to make; he stuck to it, and it appeared to expose a crucial flaw in the book's reasoning.

Beebee's point was this: In God's Not Dead Broock accepts evidence and consensus when they support what he believes, but denies it when they don't. I think it's unlikely Broocks and Miller haven't heard this criticism before, and equally unlikely they didn't understand Beebee's point — he made it more than once, at different times in the programme. But they dodged it every time.

Sunday, 6 October 2013

Krauss and Craig in Australia

When I heard that Lawrence Krauss was going to debate William Lane Craig again, I was confused. Why would Krauss agree to this, given what happened last time?

Anyway, the videos of the three sessions are now available, so I decided to watch them. Unbelievable? also featured Krauss and Craig, subsequent to the debates, but I decided to postpone listening to the programme until I had seen all three debates. I had misgivings about Unbelievable? having Craig on, as host Justin Brierley has in the past given Craig an unopposed platform to badmouth his debating opponent. At least this time Krauss was, I assumed, giving his side of the encounters.

http://youtu.be/-b8t70_c8eE


As for the debates, I began with the first one, in Brisbane. Krauss spoke first — the format was to be an opening statement from each participant, then a moderated discussion, followed by Q&A. Not long after Krauss began, I thought I got a sense of why he had agreed to participate. It seemed it was payback time, with Krauss calling out Craig for his dishonest tactics (even though — this being the first debate of three, and this the opening statement from the first participant — we hadn't yet heard anything from Craig).

The topic was "Has Science Buried God?" — Krauss said yes, science has buried gods, plural, and gave reasons, but he also attacked Craig for misrepresentation of science, and for lying about the Dawkins and Krauss film, The Unbelievers.

In Craig's opening statement he made the odd claim that theology provides the foundation for science. He put up a slide listing "Assumptions Undergirding Science". Among these were laws of logic, the orderly structure of the physical world, the reliability of our cognitive faculties in knowing the world, and the validity of inductive reasoning. This is thinly disguised presuppositionalism. Anyone who has had dealings with presuppositional apologetics will recognise it immediately. But the fact that Craig was using a presuppositional argument to support his claim that science has not buried God lends credence to Krauss's contention that Craig is being dishonest. In Five Views on Apologetics, edited by Steven Cowan, Craig wrote:
Where presuppositionalism muddies the waters is in its apologetic methodology. As commonly understood, presuppositionalism is guilty of a logical howler: it commits the informal fallacy of “petitio principii,” or begging the question, for its advocates presuppose the truth of Christian theism in order to prove Christian theism.
So Craig is on record as decrying presuppositionalism as not a useful apologetic — and here we have him using it when it suits him. In a debate, it appears, Craig will use whatever will fit his current purpose, no matter if he believes it's true, or if it's already been refuted a thousand times. If it will help him "win" a debate, then it's all dubious theological grist to his apologetic mill. To those who have heard Craig debate a few times, this will not be a surprise.

As if to illustrate his pragmatic debating ethos, Craig offered a quote from Stephen Hawking: "Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang." Aside from the neutrality of the quote — Hawking appears to be stating what he thinks others believe — it seems like a gratuitous and selective appeal to authority, as Craig has previously described Hawking's explanation of the beginning of the universe in The Grand Design as "metaphysically absurd".

As part of Craig's thesis that science has not buried God, he claimed that the big bang theory — that the universe had a beginning — is an example of how science verifies theological claims. He cited Borde, Guth & Vilenkin in this endeavour, as they apparently show that all models of the beginning of the "universe" — whether that's our own universe or any number of other universes in a multiverse — cannot be "past eternal". That is, the universe must have had an absolute beginning. Well, that's what the Bible says! QED! What the implications of the Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem actually are in respect of the finiteness or otherwise of the universe became a recurring theme in this series of debates — but not, generally, in a good way.

Craig's version of cosmology has always seemed to me — a non-cosmologist — overly simplistic. The beginning of the universe entails the beginning of time as well as the beginning of space, which Craig acknowledges, but he conveniently ignores the problem of causation without time. Without time, cause and effect have no meaning, so to say that anything that has a beginning (including space-time) must have a cause, is to talk nonsense. So, the universe had a beginning. Why? It's impossible to know. Craig, however, thinks otherwise, using what he called the Contingency Argument:
  1. Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause).
  2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
  3. The universe is an existing thing.
  4. Therefore the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.
Apart from the obvious tautology, this argument (originally from Leibniz) has serious flaws right from the start. In the first premise there is the suggestion that something that is necessarily existent is somehow explained by that necessity. But where's the explanation in saying something exists just because it must? The reason that this kind of "logic" is acceptable to theists is that it's what they use to justify God. God exists because he must. Then there's the matter of an external cause. It sounds reasonable, but if you're applying this argument to the existence of the universe the only way it works is if the definition of "universe" is such that it has something external to it. If that's what Craig means, then this argument is of no use because it's not doing what he wants, which is to explain the existence of the Universe with a capital U — the universe that includes everything and therefore by definition it's a universe with nothing external to it.

But the second premise is surely the ultimate hubris: "If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God." This isn't a premise, it's a conclusion. That Craig can put up a slide like this with a straight face is simply astonishing.

Naturally Krauss and Craig both argued about the nature of "nothing", and it was here more than anywhere else in their debates that they consistently talked past each other. Krauss talked about "nothing" as a quantum vacuum, in which particles can spontaneously pop into and out of existence. Craig maintained, rightly, that because the quantum vacuum contains energy fields it isn't nothing. What Craig means by nothing is the philosophical nothing, the nothing-at-all, anywhere, anywhen. And what he's asking is why is there something — anything at all — rather than a state of absolute nonbeing.

But such a "why question" really is — as Richard Dawkins would say — a silly question. It's clear from the outset that this state of absolute nonbeing is not an option. It's not "one of a number of possibilities" — it's the total absence of possibilities. Indeed it's the total absence of anything, and as such it's not even worth talking about. It seems to me that a state of absolute nonbeing is no more than a philosophical concept, and I see no reason to even consider that such a state was ever the case. To ask "Why is there something rather nothing?" is to suggest in the question that "something" and "nothing" are somehow equivalent to each other, as if they are two sides of the same coin — and in Krauss's view they are, if "nothing" is taken to mean empty space. As a cosmologist he directs his efforts to that question, and the physics he talks about is addressing the question of why do we have a universe of galaxies, stars and planets rather than empty space. Craig says that's not the question being asked. But the question, "Why is there something rather than a state of absolute nonbeing?" is nonsensical, because these two are not equivalent. It's like asking "Why is there political intrigue rather than glass-fibre loft-insulation?"

http://youtu.be/V82uGzgoajI


The second debate, in Sydney, was supposed to address this question directly. Krauss delivered a very condensed version of his "A Universe from Nothing" lecture, and showed a slide of an email he had received from Alex Vilenkin which in effect stated that it may be erroneous to state that no valid theory of the beginning of the universe could legitimately posit a past-eternal universe. Krauss also picked up on Craig's use of unsound premises in his Contingency Argument for the existence of God.

When it was Craig's turn he began by clarifying what he meant by "nothing", but as I've already explained, the nothing that is not anything at all is an uninteresting philosophical concept of no practical use, no likelihood of being a description of an actual state, and therefore in my opinion not worth discussing. When certain philosophers say that the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of the most crucial questions that can be asked, I beg to differ.

Craig reiterated the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument, claiming that the cause of the universe must be a non-physical immaterial being beyond space and time. There are multiple problems with this assertion. Why must the cause be a "being"? Do we have any examples of non-physical immaterial entities causing anything in the real world? If such an entity is "beyond space and time" how can it have an effect on anything in the real world (which is of course within space and time)? Finally, what does "beyond space and time" even mean, when applied to causative agents? Craig was just using big words to disguise the lack of evidence for his preferred "explanation". Despite what he claimed in the first debate he really was using a "God of the gaps" argument, but dressed up in fancy language.

http://youtu.be/7xcgjtps5ks


By the third debate (Melbourne) I still had no real understanding why Krauss would want to engage with Craig, other than to settle a few scores. Craig began with his usual redefinition of the topic, from "Is it reasonable to believe there is a God?" to "Are there better arguments for God's existence than against God's existence?" This might seem innocuous, but notice the subtle shift in the burden of proof. From having to provide reasons for belief in God — reasons that are compelling enough to show that such belief is reasonable — Craig now only has to provide some arguments for God's existence in opposition to arguments against. His opponent, however, now has to provide better arguments to prove a negative.

Craig used six arguments to show why, in his opinion, it is reasonable to believe there is a God: the Kalām Cosmological Argument; Mathematics; Fine Tuning; Objective Morality; the Resurrection of Jesus; and the Personal Experience of God. We've heard these countless times, and I don't intend to go into them here. Suffice to say, I don't buy any of them.

The debate degenerated into petty arguments about whether Craig really had misinterpreted the Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem, as Krauss claimed. Craig had obtained a copy of the email that Alex Vilenkin had sent to Krauss, and which Krauss had shown in an edited form. Craig claimed that Krauss had edited out sections favourable to Craig's argument. Krauss denied this. Subsequent to the debates Craig's supporters were citing this as hypocrisy on Krauss's part — Krauss being dishonest while claiming Craig was dishonest. And subsequent to that, Krauss published a joint open email from himself and Vilenkin showing their agreement that Krauss's edited version of Vilenkin's email did not distort its meaning. Petty and distracting, and in my opinion a further indication that Krauss should not have bothered with these debates. Particularly in this last one there were extended moments when Krauss came over as cantankerous, dismissive and constantly interrupting. By the end I still didn't know why he agreed to participate. Perhaps the City Bible Forum offered him lots of money.


When I did get around to listening to the relevant Unbelievable? podcast, I heard Krauss give his reasons for engaging with Craig. Firstly to explain how science works, and secondly:
The other thing that I try and do is counter misrepresentations, not only about science, but about nature, by people who have vested interests, and in this case I agreed to do these because having had interactions with William Lane Craig before, it was clear to me that he misrepresents science completely, in order to try and provide justification for beliefs he has that are just his beliefs, yet he presents them as if with the authority of science, which he certainly — demonstrated in these dialogues and in other cases — he certainly doesn't understand. And I felt it was really important to attack that credibility for people of goodwill who don't know, and they listen and they think "well, when this man is quoting scientists, or he's quoting science, he's doing it accurately" and I tried to show, especially in the first discussion, there's very little accuracy there whatsoever.
Host Justin Brierley interviewed Krauss and Craig separately on his show — though it's not clear whether each interviewee heard what the other said until after the whole programme was recorded. My guess is that they didn't. Frankly the whole thing was pretty tedious, with accusations flying in both directions. Nevertheless Craig still got the last word, characterising Krauss as "incapable of carrying on a civil conversation." As it happens I've met Lawrence Krauss on two separate occasions and he was perfectly charming both times, but the impression left by these debates and the Unbelievable? programme is one of cantankerous belligerence with a score to settle. Craig, on the other hand — in the debates at least, if not on Unbelievable? — came over as patient and forbearing.

It's a shame, because Lawrence Krauss is right, and William Lane Craig is wrong.

Sunday, 4 August 2013

My Kalām Krash

  1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
  2. The Universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore the Universe has a cause of its existence.
This is the Kalām Cosmological Argument for the existence of God — the favourite argument of William Lane Craig. It boils down to "The Universe had to be created by something, ergo, God." The KCA is also related to the argument that out of nothing, nothing comes. So let's look at the KCA a bit more (don't worry, this won't take long, and it doesn't involve any multiverses).

The current cosmological consensus is that the Universe began with the Big Bang, at which both space and time came into being. The essential part of the KCA is the notion of "cause". We know that causes always come before effects, because if cause and effect are simultaneous it's impossible to distinguish between the two. To put this another way, both the cause and the effect, if simultaneous, can be said to have come about spontaneously.

The notion of "before" is dependent on the notion of "time". At the Big Bang there was no time, therefore the common understanding of cause and effect cannot hold. Where the traditional relationship between cause and effect does not apply, the claim that effects depend on causes is no longer supportable. One cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility of the Big Bang arising from nothing, spontaneously — without a cause.

The first premise of the KCA needs to be revised:
  1. Everything that begins to exist (except the Universe) has a cause of its existence.
Fixed.


Tuesday, 9 October 2012

The ontobollocksical argument is not one of my favourites

A link to BBC Radio 4's In Our Time was posted in the Unbelievable? Facebook group, as it dealt with the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God. In a fit of snarky dismissal I posted the following comment:
This was followed by some disingenuous (I felt) puzzlement, which led me to expand on my remark:

  • Paul Jenkins My objection to the ontobollocksical argument is that it's entirely about concepts. A concept is something that exists only in minds, and no matter how much you conceive of an entity — or its maximal greatness — there's nothing to make that magical transition from concept to reality.

    Of course it's possible for something to exist as a concept as well as existing in reality, but these are two different things than can be causally related in only one direction: from the real thing to the concept of that thing — not the other way around. For a concept of an entity to have a causal relationship towards an actual entity something else has to be involved. The concept alone is not enough.

    The ontobollocksical argument is no more than a fancy and roundabout way of saying, "I can imagine something, therefore it must exist."
Yet further responses asserted I was wrong about this, and suggested I should deal with the premises of the argument — something I felt disinclined to do at the time, given that attempts were being made to shift the burden of proof on to me by mere assertion.

Nevertheless I stand by what I posted, and in case anyone's still interested here's how I deal with said premises. The ontological argument goes like this (from Wikipedia):
  1. Our understanding of God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.
  2. The idea of God exists in the mind.
  3. A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.
  4. If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being—that which exists in reality.
  5. We cannot be imagining something that is greater than God.
  6. Therefore, God exists.
Premise 1 is fine as far as it goes — you can conceive of God any way you want. But is it really possible to conceive of ultimate greatness? I think not, other than as a label for what is frankly an inconceivable nebulosity. Can you, for example, conceive of infinity? You can have the idea in your mind of a very big number, a number so big that there isn't any number above it — but can you hold that concept in your mind as a number, rather than as a label for something that is, in actuality, inconceivable? Saying — in the St. Anselm formulation — that God is a being than which no greater can be conceived is of no use because you can't actually conceive of even that. You can give it a label, but it's a label that cannot be attached to anything.

So the ontological argument falls at its first premise, proving only that it is — as it has always been — bollocks.

Sunday, 5 August 2012

I waste my time for you — Debate: Does God Exist?

This isn't the first time I've live-commented on Facebook while watching or listening to some online media or other. In line with my recent decision to repost (or archive — knowing how volatile other fora can be) my stuff from Facebook, here's my reaction to a 2004 debate linked to in the CFI group.


http://youtu.be/qMuHMVVoPjw
Debate - Does God Exist? Hare Krishna Monk vs Stephen Law (1-0)



Here's the YouTube blurb:
"They Said It Was Chance"

Open Discussion on the Existence of God between
HH Sivarama Swami and Dr Stephen Law at University College, London
And here are the comments posted in the Skepticule Extra Facebook group:

  • Fergus Gallagher What does "(1-0)" signify?
    4 hours ago ·

  • Paul Jenkins Don't know. I haven't watched it yet. (It looks suspiciously like a score...)
    4 hours ago ·

  • Fergus Gallagher Indeed it does.
    4 hours ago ·

  • Paul Jenkins I'm nearly half way through this now — just started with audience questions.

    HH Sivarama Swami has rather odd ideas about induction and deduction. Stephen Law is running his Evil God Challenge, based on an agreed definition of "God", but the discussion is now floundering as that definition becomes indistinct.

    Also (unless I misheard him) HH Sivarama Swami seems to be claiming that personal revelation can be proved experimentally.
    3 hours ago ·

  • Paul Jenkins We're now into what I would characterise as the "karma of the gaps in our understanding of causality" argument. (Or to put it another way, total BS.)
    2 hours ago ·

  • Paul Jenkins The swami seems to be conflating "order" and "structure" with "moral goodness". He has a very loose definition of God, which he appears to think allows him to make sweeping generalisations about God's character. Stephen Law, on the other hand, has been specific in repeatedly tying the definition down to omnipotence and omnibenevolence, which allows him to run his EGC to show that theodicies and the mystery card simply don't work.

    Then there's the argument about free will, which is a whole other kettle of worms.
    2 hours ago ·

  • Paul Jenkins Good summing up by Stephen Law. Show of hands: 62 to 17 (with 14 abstentions) in favour of HH Sivarama Swami.

  • Paul Jenkins The swami repeated his claim to have performed an experiment to show the existence of God, and that it was repeatable, but did not cite any peer-reviewed papers to back up his claim. Bizarrely he also claimed that those who have performed the experiment do not need to debate the matter — so what was he doing here?

  • Fergus Gallagher I didn't know SL had developed his EGC way back in 2004

  • Fergus Gallagher Worth watching?

  • Paul Jenkins Meh. I waste my time for you ;-)

  • Fergus Gallagher True secular altruism.

Wednesday, 16 May 2012

Judas: the ultimate betrayal of Dembski and Licona

So we come to the end, the final chapter, the ultimate culmination, the concluding, cogent case for the existence of God. At least, that's what I'd expect, in a tome touted as convincing evidence for the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere-present and perfectly good deity who created the universe. Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science, edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona, begins with this introduction (copied from Google Books):

 
Given the intention of the book as stated by the editors in their introduction, I'm surprised to find that the final chapter (number 50) is Craig A. Evans' "What Should We Think About the Gospel of Judas?" Evans' conclusion is that the Gospel of Judas should be pretty much ignored as non-canonical and untrue, so it makes for a limp ending — almost as if the editors ran out of material to make up their 50 "arguments". The chapter itself is not uninteresting, being a narrative of the discovery and subsequent chequered history of a papyrus manuscript, but it's entirely inappropriate as a concluding chapter to a book with such lofty declared aims. I can't help wondering if its editors lost not only interest in their project but also their will to live.

The story told of Judas Iscariot in this gospel is at odds with the Judas from the canonical gospels, and therefore has a fascination of its own, but it's irrelevant to the book's stated purpose, so it seems pointless to go into it any further. Evans says the story isn't true, for a variety of reasons (which with a little thought — and honesty — could also be applied to most of the New Testament).

So what are we left with? This book was presented as good evidence for faith, for God, for Jesus, for the Bible. It's none of those. If this is the best that Christian apologetics can produce, those students in Bart Ehrman's class are destined to be atheists.


4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible.aspx?pageid=8589952746
Click here for my reviews of the other 49 chapters...

Sunday, 13 May 2012

Biblical fan-fiction — not to be taken as gospel

In the same vein as Craig L. Blomberg in the previous chapter, Charles L. Quarles asks "What Should We Think About the Gospel of Peter?" (chapter 49 — the penultimate — of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God).

We should, apparently, think that the Gospel of Peter is a knock-off of Matthew (plus part of Revelation). Quarles summarises the Gospel, then proceeds to dismiss it as fanciful embellishment of accepted canon. He mentions a theory propounded by the Jesus Seminar's John Dominic Crossan:
John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, which is an organization residing on the theological left, has claimed that the Gospel of Peter was the product of a complex evolution. The earliest layer of the Gospel was a hypothetical source called the “Cross Gospel.” Crossan argued that this early layer served as the only written source for the narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. After the production of the NT Gospels, a later editor inserted material from the four Gospels into the Cross Gospel. An even later editor noticed tensions between the original and newer material in this patchwork gospel and polished up the document.

Although Crossan’s theory has convinced few in the scholarly community, one scholar recently claimed “one can expect that all future research on Gos. Pet. will need to begin with a serious consideration of Crossan’s work” (Paul A. Mirecki, “Gospel of Peter,” ABD 5:278-81, esp. 280). If true, Crossan’s theory would have a devastating effect on confidence in the historical reliability of the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection in the four Gospels. According to Crossan’s theory, the sole source for the accounts of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection in the four Gospels was a document that was already so laced with legend as to be wholly unreliable even before it reached the hands of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The four Gospels would be unreliable adaptations of an unreliable tradition replete with talking floating crosses and a super-sized Jesus whose head bumped the heavens when he walked out of the tomb!
Such amazing (dare one say "miraculous"?) occurrences would surely be out of place in a "Gospel" — so therefore they didn't happen. Quarles goes on to claim that the Gospel of Peter must be something written much later, based on the original(s) but including invented and incredible extra details — a biblical version of fan-fiction. As far as it agrees with canon, it's true — where it differs, it's false. This doesn't seem to be a very rigorous examination of the evidence, such as it is; the veracity of the Gospel of Peter is assessed on the basis of whether or not it confirms what is already believed — a classic case of confirmation bias.

How much of this is of any consequence? At this stage, with only one more chapter to go, it makes no difference. I've already raised my concern at the editors' decision to place The Question of the Bible at the end of their book; these final chapters do nothing to allay that concern.


4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible.aspx?pageid=8589952754

Sunday, 29 April 2012

New Testament canon — a boat that must not be rocked

Craig L. Blomberg continues his exposition of scriptural arbitrariness with "What Should We Think About the Coptic Gospel of Thomas?" — chapter 48 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God.

The answer appears to be, "Whatever you'd like to think." Again Blomberg demonstrates the circularity of deciding what is or is not canonical. The Gospel of Thomas is taken to be "true" where it exhibits a measure of agreement with the so-called canonical gospels, and contentious where it disagrees. This inevitably makes the Gospel of Thomas not much use to anybody, because if it's only true where it agrees with the other gospels, and false otherwise, it doesn't add anything. If biblical scholars have already made up their minds, why should they give any attention to something that contradicts what they already know? This is the very essence of confirmation-bias and cherry-picking. It's as if the scholars know what the story in the New Testament is supposed to say, and therefore anything that doesn't agree with that story is excluded. If you cut out the stuff you disagree with, you will by definition be left with things you agree with. This is scholarship? Whatever else it might achieve, this doesn't inspire confidence in the Bible as a historical document.

The Bible says some outlandish things, to be sure. It may have been merely politic, therefore, to reject Thomas as a gospel that might push the entire collection over the edge of credibility:
Thomas, or Gnosticism more generally, can at first glance appear more "enlightened" from a modern (or postmodern) perspective than parts of the New Testament. But if one is going to accept a Gnostic world view, one has to take all of it. And the final saying of this enigmatic Gospel has Peter telling Jesus and the other disciples, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus replies, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Modern appropriations of Thomas seldom incorporate this perspective! Indeed, Thomas can appear superior to the canonical Gospels only by highly selective usage of its teachings. Despite what some may claim, it does not open any significant window into first-century Christian history and origins, only into its later corruption.
At the very least, I can't see that running well with the "women bishops" faction.


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Sunday, 15 April 2012

An arbitrary collection of texts becomes "canonical"

The New Testament is a collection of books written at different times by apparently different people. (As such, by modern literary definitions it's actually part "collection" and part "anthology".) The collection has not always contained the same books, and in "The New Testament Canon" — chapter 47 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for GodCraig L. Blomberg explains how things have changed since it was first "collected".

What he writes may be a fair account of the changes over two millennia, but it's not of much consequence. None of what he writes says anything about whether on not any particular book should or should not be included. None of it is evidence. The whole enterprise seems to be no more than a series of arbitrary assertions — if not by Blomberg then by those he cites.

An arbitrary assertion begins Blomberg's second paragraph:
It is true that God's law and God's word last forever.
Aside from the irrelevance of such an unsubstantiated statement, it illustrates a mindset that's not geared towards persuading an unbeliever. Later on in this three-page chapter — after discussing why the books are in a particular order (again mostly arbitrary, it seems) — Blomberg gives criteria for deciding what's in and what's out:
Indeed, three criteria prevailed for sifting the canonical from the non-canonical. First and foremost was apostolicity—authorship by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle—which thus, for all practical purposes, limited the works to the first hundred years or so of Christian history. Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians came to call the Old Testament. Finally, the early church used the criterion of catholicity—universal (or at least extremely widespread) usage and relevance throughout the church. This excluded, for example, the Gnostic writings, which were accepted only in the sects from which they emanated.
Here we see the rôle of tradition contributing to arbitrariness. "Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture..." So it's an accident of chronology that determines the running here. The problem is that it's begging the question: trying to decide what should be in scripture by referring to scripture itself.
While Catholics and Protestants to this day disagree on the canon of the Old Testament, both branches of Christianity along with Eastern Orthodoxy agree on the contents of the New. For sixteen centuries there has been no significant controversy within Christianity regarding the extent of the New Testament canon. Christians are on solid ground in affirming that these twenty-seven books belong in the New Testament and that other ancient writings were excluded for good reason.
Depends what you mean by good, I suppose — not that it really matters.


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Tuesday, 10 April 2012

An unreliable assessment of the reliability of the Gospels

In Craig L. Blomberg's "The Historical Reliability of the Gospels" — chapter 46 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God — one can almost sense the rose-tinted spectacles through which the author apparently reads his Bible, carries out his research and writes this essay on how he really, really wants the Gospels to be true, and how everything discovered about them confirms that they are indeed true, or are probably true, or more likely true than false, and how any evidence that suggests the Gospels are "unreliable" cannot itself be relied on because it has come up with the wrong answer.
Can the major contours of the portraits of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels be trusted?  Many critics would argue not.  The Jesus Seminar became the best-known collection of such critics during the 1990s as they alleged that only 18 percent of the sayings ascribed to Jesus and 16 percent of his deeds as found in the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, plus the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, bore any close relationship to what he actually said and did.  At the same time, a much more representative cross-section of scholars from about 1980 to the present has inaugurated what has come to be called the Third Quest of the Historical Jesus, in which a greater optimism is emerging about how much we can know, from the Gospels, read in light of other historical cultural developments of the day.
I can't help wondering what this "much more representative cross-section of scholars" is representative of. Most likely it's representative of scholars who believe the Gospels are reliable. The fact that Blomberg states that "a greater optimism is emerging" shows that he's not assessing the evidence from a neutral standpoint. I accept that he has a view on the matter, but his phraseology here indicates he's in the grip of confirmation bias.

He goes on to reiterate a claim that has appeared previously in Evidence for God — that the sheer number of copies of manuscripts counts towards their accuracy, which simply (and obviously) isn't the case. If I have an unreliable document and photocopy it a hundred or even a thousand times, the reliability of that document remains unchanged.

Blomberg also mentions archeological evidence, but this was dealt with in the previous chapter and is similarly unconvincing — or irrelevant — as far as the supernatural claims of the Gospels are concerned. He then discusses the differences between the Gospel accounts, attempting to have his cake and eat it. Where they agree, the Gospels demonstrate their reliability. Where they disagree, that's entirely what he would expect, given their mode of transmission. On the one hand we have variations due to the vagaries of the oral tradition, on the other we have remarkable veracity due to the reliability of the oral tradition.
But first-century Judaism was an oral culture, steeped in the educational practice of memorization.  Some rabbis had the entire Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) committed to memory.  Memorizing and preserving intact the amount of information contained in one Gospel would not have been hard for someone raised in this kind of culture who valued the memories of Jesus' life and teaching as sacred.
I dare say a scholar or rabbi could have done this, as I'm sure could Derren Brown today. But the people who are alleged to have performed this feat of recollection were not known to be rabbis or scholars. Matthew, we are told, was a tax-collector, or maybe a publican, Mark was possibly Jesus's half brother. John was a fisherman, and Luke may have been a "compendium" character used for narrative effect and who never actually existed. Not that we even know that the Gospels were authored by the men whose by-lines they bear. Given what little we do know of these characters, therefore, it's stretching a point to suggest that the reliability of the Gospels can be founded on feats of memory the authors were unlikely to be able to perform.

Taking all the above into account, it would appear that the historical reliability of the Bible can be reliably assessed as "not reliable".


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Monday, 9 April 2012

As far as the Bible is confirmed as true, it is mundane

"Archaeology and the Bible — How Archaeological Findings Have Enhanced the Credibility of the Bible" is chapter 45 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God. John McRay's claims for such "enhancement", however, put too great a strain on the word's meaning. The archeology he cites in this chapter only enhances the Bible's credibility if cherry-picking and confirmation-bias constitute valid reasoning.
The Bible is a collection of many kinds of documents written over a period of about fifteen hundred years. Beginning with the composition of the first five books (the Pentateuch), the sixty-six total documents were completed by the end of the first century A.D. They were composed in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages in various geographical settings and different historical periods. Archaeological discoveries relating to these settings and periods have enlightened the cultural context in which many of the recorded events occurred and enhanced the credibility of the Biblical record, both the Old and New Testament periods. For example, many events recorded in the last one hundred years of this period of biblical history, during which the New Testament documents were written, have been illuminated through significant archaeological discoveries. Following are some of these impressive finds. Space limitations will not allow discussion of the fourteen hundred years of Old Testament sites.
In this first paragraph we can see McRay already narrowing his focus to exclude inconvenient facts. He's not going to discuss the Old Testament, so the absence of any archeological evidence for the Exodus is conveniently glossed over. And note his wording: discoveries have "enlightened the cultural context" and "enhanced the credibility of the Biblical record." He's clearly admitting that these discoveries are not proof that the Bible is true.

The findings he cites are these (using his headings):

Pool of Siloam
Rolling Stones at Tombs
Tomb of Caiaphas
Capernaum Synagogue
Acts 17:6 and Politarchs in Thessalonica
Erastus in Corinth
Romans 13:3 Inscription in Caesarea Maritima
Paul before Gallio at the Tribunal in Corinth

These appear remarkably mundane — some location mentioned in the Bible actually existed; some official mentioned in the Bible appears on ancient inscriptions; some of the events described in the Bible actually occurred. Note, however, that none of these attests to miracles or supernatural beings. The Bible may well contain some "truth", but as far as that truth is confirmed by archeology that truth is ordinary.

One might be tempted to suggest that though there are events in the Bible that have yet to be confirmed, and places in the Bible whose existence has yet to be confirmed, archeological evidence may arise in the future to confirm them. But one should not report all the so-called confirmations, dismissing items still to be confirmed, while actively ignoring positive evidence that contradicts the Bible — such as the the problems mentioned by Daniel B. Wallace in chapter 43:
Which evangelical would not like a clean harmony between the two records of Judas’ demise, uniform parallel accounts of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, or an outright excision of the census by Quirinius? And who would not prefer that in Mark 2.26 Jesus did not speak of David’s violation of the temple as occurring during the days of “Abiathar the high priest”? These are significantly larger problems for inerrancy than the few, isolated textual problems—and they are not in passages that are capable of facile text-critical solutions.
Some scholars, it seems, are prepared to admit there are problems. John McRay's approach, however, appears to be a disingenuous attempt to suggest that there is good evidence for the truth of the whole of the Bible. There isn't.


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Saturday, 31 March 2012

Textual transubstantiation

"Why All the Translations?" is the question Denny Burk asks in the title of chapter 44 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God. It's a good question; it seems likely that we have more translations of the Bible than of any other ancient text (Beowulf, say, or the works of Chaucer, Homer, Plato, Omar Khayyám...). The only reason for this I can come up with is that many people have been dissatisfied with the extant translations and thought they could do better — and believed it was important to do better.

Burk points out that there are three approaches to translating the Bible: formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and paraphrase. The King James Version is apparently a formal equivalence or word-for-word translation, while the New International Version is a dynamic equivalence translation, which Burk describes as a thought-for-thought rendering. This gives a clue as to why there are so many ways one can interpret scripture. The version I see cited most often is the New International Version, which according to Burk is not a word-for-word translation but one where the translators have endeavoured to get inside the heads of the original authors. This in itself requires a degree of interpretation, so it's not surprising that when Biblical scholars are engaged in exegesis they feel free to contribute their own interpretations.

The third option — a paraphrase translation — isn't really a translation at all. Burk quotes Paul D. Wegner in The Bible in Translation, describing a paraphrase as a "free rendering or amplification of a passage, expression of its sense in other words."

All this concern over different translations cannot help but raise the suspicion that the real reason there are so many is that no-one knows for sure what the original really said, let alone what it meant.


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