Circular hallucinations are circular

"Were the Resurrection Appearances of Jesus Hallucinations?"

This is the question Michael R. Licona asks in the title of Chapter 36 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God. In the second paragraph Licona quotes the apostle Paul: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless." And therein lies a problem.

Christianity places so much stock in the resurrection, Christians arguing for the truth of Christianity seem to go a bit crazy about it, clutching at the flimsiest straws to show that Jesus rose from the dead, and therefore Christianity is true. So it is with this chapter — Licona tries to show that the disciples could not all have been suffering from a common hallucination, because, he says, hallucinations don't work like that: just as people don't share the same dreams, they don't hallucinate the same events. But this isn't necessarily the case — there's such a thing as mass hysteria, for example.

Licona attempts a statistical approach:

About 15 percent of the population experience one or more hallucinations during their lifetime. Research has shown that some personality types are more prone to experiencing them. Women are more likely to experience them than men. And the older we get, the more likely we are to experience a hallucination. So, it should come as no surprise to discover that senior adults who are in the midst of bereaving the loss of a loved one belong to a group that experiences one of the highest percentage of hallucinations; a whopping 50 percent! (See Aleman and Larøi, Hallucinations: The Science of Idiosyncratic Perception, American Psychological Association, 2008.)

With these things in mind, let’s consider the possibility that Jesus’ disciples, the Church persecutor Paul, and Jesus’ skeptical half-brother James experienced hallucinations of the risen Jesus. All of the twelve disciples, Paul, and James were men, who were probably of different age groups and probably of different personalities. That the Twelve were grieving is certain. Yet proposals that the disciples were hallucinating must argue that more than 15 percent of them had the experience. In fact, more than the whopping 50 percent we find among bereaving senior adults would have experienced them. Indeed, it would have been a mind-blowing 100 percent! Moreover, it must likewise be proposed that when these hallucinations occurred, they just happened to do so simultaneously. And it just so happened that they must have experienced their hallucinations in the same mode for them to believe that they had seen the same Jesus. In other words, if a group hallucination had actually occurred, it would have been more likely that the disciples would have experienced their hallucinations in different modes and of at least slightly differing content. Perhaps one would have said, “I see Jesus over by the door,” while another said, “No. I see him floating by the ceiling,” while still another said, “No. I only hear him speaking to me,” while still another said, “I only sense that he’s in the room with us.” Instead, what we have are the reports that the disciples saw Jesus.

Licona appears to be claiming that because all of the Twelve saw Jesus risen, then it must be statistically true. But we don't have twelve gospels, so we don't have twelve independently attested eyewitness accounts. We don't know what the disciples saw, we only have relatively few second-hand reports of what they allegedly saw. The gospel accounts were written some decades after the events recorded, and those involved may well have built up a favourable picture in their minds — a picture that tended to converge on common aspects of what they all remember, despite possibly comprising wildly divergent elements. It's not something we can know with any degree of certainty, even if believers want it so very much to be true. Given the fantastical nature of the claims, the lack of correspondingly strong evidence leaves the balance of probabilities firmly on the side of skepticism.

Finally, as if his readers have already forgotten his own Chapter 33 in this book, Licona tries once more to use circular reasoning to prove his case:

There is at least one more difficult problem for those claiming that the appearances of Jesus were only hallucinations: Jesus’ tomb was empty. If Jesus had not, in fact, been raised from the dead and the appearances were hallucinations, once must still account for how Jesus’ tomb had become empty. Aside from the fact that hallucinations are horribly inadequate at explaining the appearances as we observed above, even if that were not the case they cannot account for Jesus’ empty tomb.

It's legitimate to claim that hallucinations cannot account for the empty tomb, as long as you don't try to use the empty tomb to account for the resurrection — as Licona has already implicitly done by co-editing a whole chapter devoted to just that.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952863

Absence of corpse isn't evidence of resurrection

I'm unsure why the "empty tomb" is supposed to be a big deal. If an inanimate object is placed at a particular location, and is subsequently not found where it was placed, one does not normally jump to the conclusion that the object moved of its own accord. Being inanimate, incapable of independent locomotion, the object — or rather its lack — is most likely to be explained by having been moved by a person or persons unknown. If the location in question is a tomb, and the object a corpse, the most plausible explanation for the corpse's absence is that it's been stolen.

Be that as it may, Gary R. Habermas expends some additional words in "The Empty Tomb of Jesus", Chapter 34 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, on the "criterion of embarrassment" — that reports of the empty tomb came from women, whose testimony was at the time held to be generally less reliable than that of men. The problem with the criterion of embarrassment is that it cuts both ways, and is therefore worth very little: we can just as easily say, "it must be true because it's so incredible" as we can say, "it must be true because it's so credible." (Would the gospel accounts of the empty tomb be any more believable if they contained the reports of known liars, or children, or perhaps even talking donkeys? I think not.)

Unfortunately Habermas goes one worse, and like Michael Licona in the previous chapter engages in circular reasoning:

Fourth, most recent scholars seem to agree that, while Paul does not explicitly mention the empty tomb, the early tradition that this apostle reported to others in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 implies an empty tomb. The listing of the Gospel content moves from Jesus' death, to his burial, to his resurrection from the dead, to his appearances. This sequence strongly suggests that, however it may have been transformed, Jesus' body that died and was buried is the same one that was raised afterwards. Thus, what was placed in the ground is precisely what emerged. In short, what went down is what came up. Such a process would have resulted in the burial tomb being emptied.

That Paul does not specifically mention the empty tomb keeps this from being as strong a point as it could have been. Still, to say so clearly that Jesus' dead body was buried, raised, and appeared would be a rather strange process unless the tomb had been vacated in the process.

Habermas is implicitly using the empty tomb as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus (that's presumably why this chapter is included), but the paragraphs quoted above appear to use accounts of Jesus's post-mortem appearances as evidence for the tomb being empty. Do I need to point out again that this is a circular argument?

Then Habermas uses the well-worn trope of "would they die for a lie?" without examining the possibility that disciples might very well die for a delusion if they were sufficiently indoctrinated. The fact that the disciples were prepared to die for their beliefs has no bearing on whether those beliefs were true.

It does seem likely that the tomb was empty, but this only shows that the tomb did not contain a body. I find this unremarkable, and I'm at a loss to understand why Habermas is even concerned to establish it. Too bad I didn't get that chance to ask him myself.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbjesus.aspx?pageid=8589952861