Monthly Archives: August 2017

Christians Who Just Don’t Get It (2 of 3)

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In part 1, we looked at the odd views of “John” the atheist.

  • John denies that morality exists (apparently he means that objective morality doesn’t exist).
  • John dismisses aspirations and loves as imaginary by equating them with the chemistry that makes them (just because we can understand how love works doesn’t mean it no longer exists).
  • John says that “there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife” (that’s not an atheist, that’s a sociopath).

Read that post if you want more. Let’s now move on to what is the more interesting aspect of this story, Christian bloggers’ eager and gullible embrace of John’s views.

John’s essay first appeared in “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” at Jim Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity blog. Wallace says, “John bluntly captured the true nature of morality when it is untethered to a transcendent source.”

I wonder why he accepts John’s nutty view of morality rather than those of many other atheists whose views contradict that—me, for instance.

Wallace makes clear the atheist’s problem: “[As an atheist,] I embraced a particular set of moral laws even though I couldn’t account for these laws in a world without a transcendent moral law giver.”

If you’re looking for a sensible worldview, you’ve backed the wrong horse. Naturalism explains morality with evolution, while Christianity posits God as a law giver without evidence. That’s how you tell the difference between science and religion—science is the one backing up its claims with evidence.

And Wallace is confused about how society works. “Without a true transcendent source for morality (and purpose), skeptics are left trying to invent their own, justifying their subjective moral rules as best they may.”

Societies around the world and throughout history have developed moral rules. Christians have a special book, and yet they have the same moral programming as anyone else. It’s not just Christianity that has the Golden Rule.

Wallace wraps up the lessons this way:

In my interaction with John, he told me he was weary of hearing fellow atheists mock their opponents for hypocrisy and ignorance, while pretending they had a definitive answer to the great questions of life. He simply wanted his fellow atheists to be consistent. As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.

Hold on—who is pretending to have definite answers to the great questions of life?

By “great questions,” I assume you mean questions like, (1) Why are we here? (2) Where did we come from? (3) What is my purpose? (4) What will happen to me after I die? Yes, Christianity has answers, but are those answers backed up with evidence? And other religions have different answers. Why imagine that yours are better? If theirs are made up, why not yours?

Remember science, the discipline that backs things up with evidence? It answers your Great Questions. It’s just that you don’t like the answers. (1) We’re here for no more cosmically significant reason than a goat or oak tree is here, (2) the Big Bang and evolution are parts of the explanation of where we came from, (3) your life’s purpose is yours to define, and (4) what happens to you after you die is the same as what happens when the goat or oak tree dies (more). Might there actually be supernatural explanations behind these questions? Sure, but no good evidence points that way.

As for John demanding that atheists be consistent and accept the consequences of their worldview, I am an atheist who doesn’t share his worldview. I’m not going to accept his “consequences” when they’re ridiculous.

Wallace concludes, “As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.”

Consistent? First, you’ve given no evidence that Christianity is not just pretend, which is what it looks like. Second, Christian morality is wildly inconsistent when Christians in the West must juggle modern morality (racial equality, gender equality, and slavery and genocide as abominations) with God’s actions in the Old Testament (an us vs. them tribal focus and God’s “chosen people,” subservient roles for women, and support for slavery, genocide, and even human sacrifice). Christianity’s “moral foundation” sucks.

Concluded with one final look at a Christian response to John the atheist in part 3.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around
a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal
is obviously some indication
of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

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Christians Who Just Don’t Get It

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Christians who attack atheists need to know their opponent. Sometimes, though, it’s clear they haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve written several posts (here and here) about supposed atheists who want the atheist community to acknowledge the benefits Christianity has provided to society and the powerful arguments in favor of Christianity. I won’t revisit those arguments (read the posts if you want my response), but this category of atheist argument is interesting. Let’s look at another example, this time from an atheist attacking the consequences of the atheist worldview.

There are dozens of Christian articles gushing about this atheist attacking atheism, but the first was “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” (2014) at the Cold-Case Christianity blog. I’ll first respond to the atheist’s points and then consider Christian apologists’ reactions.

The atheist speaks

I’ll use a masculine pronoun for this anonymous atheist because he was dubbed “John” in the original article. He begins by stating the atheist’s position, with a goal of showing that we’re all alone.

We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself.

Not exactly. It’s an accident in that there’s no evidence for it being intentional, but there are scientific laws which govern the formation of universes and the creation and evolution of life. That’s a lot more than “random chance.”

While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, [and] civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Someone needs a dictionary. These words are clearly defined, and, as defined, they exist. What I think he means is that there are no objective or transcendental forms of these traits, just the human-created ones.

This error is widespread among Christians, but et tu, Brute? Sure, atheists aren’t necessarily any wiser or smarter than Christians, but it’s hard to imagine an experienced atheist not seeing this error from the Christian side.

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

I imagine John Nihilist sitting alone in a corner of a café, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck sweater, reading Sartre or maybe Nietzsche, and smoking cigarettes as he sips coffee and muses about the utter meaninglessness of it all. It’s a shame that only objective meaning would satisfy him, because the regular kind works well for the rest of us.

One could wonder if this is a parody (and it gets worse), but since the Christian community has taken it as an honest statement, I’ll interpret it that way, too.

See also: Does This Atheist Have a Point? Or Is This a Sycophantic Poe?

John describes those “dreams, loves, opinions, and desires” as “fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses . . . that’s it.” Humans nurture children, create, and build only because out genes tell us to. We’re just bags of DNA. “Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.”

He says this as if it’s a dark, embarrassing truth, but he’s simply approaching the effect at the wrong level. Let me illustrate with another example. You could talk about love at the chemical level or worse, at the quantum level, but why would you? Not much poetry about love is written at this low level—you should focus instead at the personal level. We don’t disprove that love exists when we can explain the biology behind it.

Are you marveling about the importance of love, or are you interested in neurobiology? Pick one.

Or another example: you can talk about how evolution works with the different species as game pieces that mindless Evolution pushes around like pebbles pushed by mindless waves, but there is no human emotion or meaning at that level. Return to the level of the individual if you want to talk about laws, civility, and morals.

And back to John’s approach: yes, you can look under the hood to see how synapses, genes, and DNA work, but why then add dreams, love, creativity, and family to the same sentence? It’s like a magic show: you can enjoy the show in the audience, or you can peek behind the curtain to see how it all works, but these two approaches don’t mix.

This reminds me of Christian apologist William Lane Craig in anguish when, as a child, he learned that we all die. Yes, Dr. Craig, we all die, but that provides no evidence for Christianity. And yes, John, we can focus on synapses and DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also focus on love, meaning, and morality.

John really jumps the shark when he moves on to morality.

Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Nothing in your world stops you from raping and murdering? There is in mine. Penn Jillette has already slapped this one down:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

Humans are social animals, and evolution has favored pro-social behavior—trust, empathy, compassion, and so on. According to John, however, atheists like me who don’t ’fess up as sociopaths are “inferior” and “just a little bit less evolved.”

He’s so out of touch that I do wonder if this guy’s for real, but let’s set that aside. What’s more interesting is how he’s been received within the Christian community.

Continued in part 2.

Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life.
Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.
— Anon.

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What Good Is Philosophy? (2 of 2)

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nerf gun

In my last post, I summarized some of the useless fruits of the pop philosophy used by Christian apologists like William Lane Craig. Now, let’s look at issue from the other side to find the good within philosophy.

Something nice to say about philosophy

Philosophy contains important stuff. The laws of logic and the understanding of logical fallacies fall under philosophy, as does the study of ethics. The study of philosophy can be great training.

Alvin Plantinga argued that philosophy is relevant at the frontier of science when he said that philosophy is simply thinking hard about something. By that definition, Werner Heisenberg (a physicist) was doing philosophy when he came up with his uncertainty principle, Kurt Gödel (a mathematician) was doing philosophy when he discovered his incompleteness theorems, and Alan Turing (a computer scientist) was doing philosophy when he developed the Turing Test. Maybe string theory or ideas on the multiverse are philosophy.

A broad definition of philosophy doesn’t bother me, but note that all these “philosophers” were first scientists or mathematicians. That’s why they were able to make their contributions. While a scientist can put on a philosopher’s hat and do great work, the reverse is not true. A philosopher isn’t qualified to contribute to science or math. This was the problem outlined in the previous post with philosopher William Lane Craig’s ill-advised dabblings in science.

I get annoyed with philosophers putting on an imaginary lab coat and playing scientist like a child plays house. Craig imagines himself strutting into a meeting of befuddled scientists and saying with a chuckle, “Okay, fellas, the Christian philosophers can take it from here” and seeing them breathe a sigh of relief that the cavalry has come to save them from their intellectual predicament. He imagines that he has something to offer on questions that his discipline couldn’t even formulate.

In perhaps the height of hubris, Craig the non-scientist permits himself to pick and choose the areas of science that are valid. He likes the idea of a beginning to the universe, so the Big Bang is A-OK with him. But complexity in life without the guiding hand of God doesn’t sit so well, so he questions evolution.

I pick on William Lane Craig here just because he’s a well-known example. Other Christian apologists take similar positions.

Contributions in science vs. philosophy

Every year we see lists of the top scientific discoveries of the previous year, and 2016 didn’t disappoint. We detected gravity waves with the LIGO experiment, we found a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (the star closest to earth besides the sun), NASA’s Juno spacecraft began orbiting Jupiter, the New Horizons spacecraft finished transmitting its data taken of its Pluto flyby, clues suggest a mysterious Planet 9 in our solar system, Greenland sharks can live to 400 years, and more.

I couldn’t find a list of the Top Ten philosophical breakthroughs for 2016.

Philosophy as a caltrop

While thoughtless and ungrounded pop philosophy is one problem, weighty arguments such as the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument are another problem. This is philosophy as a caltrop.

A caltrop is a defensive weapon used when the opponent is getting too close. These and other complicated philosophical arguments can be handy when the expected evidence for God isn’t there. You want to discard the God hypothesis? Hold on—first, you must respond to this ponderous argument. And there are more behind it. These arguments are effective because they’re confusing, not because they’re correct.

What does it say about Christian apologetics that such arguments are necessary? If you want to see what keeps the planet warm, go outside on a sunny day and look up. A god who is eager to have a relationship with us and is so much more powerful and important than the sun should be at least as obvious. Complicated philosophical arguments simply paper over the glaring fact that evidence for God is negligible and that we have no justification for belief.

Philosophy is useful in the hands of scientists. But philosophers? What have they done for me lately?

Religion was our first try at philosophy,
it was our first try at epistemology.
It’s what we came up with when we didn’t know
we lived on a round planet circling the sun.
— Christopher Hitchens

Philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of.
— Peter van Inwagen

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/14/14.)

Image credit: Tim Pierce, flickr, CC

 

What Good Is Philosophy?

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This post will annoy some of my friends, and maybe with good reason. Perhaps I have it wrong. I’m sure you’ll let me know if I do.

Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig often bring popular philosophy into the study of problems in physics and biology as if they’re making an important contribution to the scientific conversation. Offering common sense tips serves no purpose, because obviously the scientists are already aware of them. But scientists aren’t Craig’s audience. He’s posturing to ordinary people.

Pop philosophy example #1

For example, Craig has said, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause.” That follows from our everyday experience, but surely a world-class philosopher won’t be satisfied with just a platitude. He must offer something more formal to ensure that it applies beyond our everyday experience.

Nope. Craig defends it this way:

[This] step is so intuitively obvious that I think scarcely anyone could sincerely believe it to be false. I therefore think it somewhat unwise to argue in favor of it, for any proof of the principle is likely to be less obvious than the principle itself.

I guess we know that this intuitive observation is true just cuz.

Wouldn’t it be simpler as “Everything has a cause”? Craig tips his hand with the clumsy “begins to exist” qualifier. If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause, and Craig can’t have that. He wants to imagine that God has no beginning and so needs no cause, and so Craig adds the phrase to preserve his presupposition. He appeals to common sense when it suits him but ignores it when it doesn’t.

Worse, in this example, Craig’s intuition turns out to be wrong! The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics (there are other interpretations, but this one may be the most popular among physicists) says that some events at the quantum level have no cause. For example, when thorium-234 naturally decays into protactinium-234, the nucleus emits an electron. The electron wasn’t in the nucleus before, and it had no cause. The universe at the beginning of the Big Bang might have also been a cause-less quantum particle.

Craig could respond that this interpretation may be overturned. That’s right, but Craig has lost certainty in the truth of his platitude. (More in response to Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument here.)

Pop philosophy example #2

Another example is, “Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.” Actually, this isn’t from Craig but from a song from the film The Sound of Music. Craig’s pop philosophical version is no more profound: “Out of nothing, nothing comes.”

True to form, he vacuously defends his fundamental axiom by saying that it “is as certain as anything in philosophy and . . . no rational person sincerely doubts it.” Apparently it’s the fear of Craig calling us irrational that supports this axiom, not reason. One wonders if Dr. Craig would accept this childish argument from one of his students.

And note how he attacks his own position. If something can’t come out of nothing, how can God have created the universe out of nothing? Even more confusing, it’s not clear that God did create out of nothing. The Old Testament has different creation stories, including one where Yahweh creates the world out of the carcass of the slain chaos monster Rahab (this Combat Myth is discussed in depth here).

Pop philosophy example #3

A related challenge is Leibniz’s “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That’s a provocative question until you realize that it assumes that nothing is the default. But why would that be? That’s a bold claim that must be defended.

And why would Christians attack with this challenge when they don’t assume that nothing is the default? They assume that God is, which is yet another claim that is asserted without evidence.

In the same way that Newton challenged the common-sense axiom that an object’s natural state is to be at rest (it isn’t, and his First Law of Motion overturns this assumption), physicist Vic Stenger concludes that nothing is actually unstable and would decay into something.

Asking why there is something rather than nothing may be as irrelevant a question as Johannes Kepler asking why there are five planets. Thanks, but I think I’ll get my cosmology from the cosmologists, not from pop philosophy.

And so on

There are other empty platitudes. That an infinitely old universe is impossible since a gulf of infinitely many moments of time would be impossible to cross. That the order in our universe demands an Orderer. That there must have been a First Cause (and the rest of Aquinas’s Five Ways). And so on.

Common sense has its place, but have the humility to realize that, at the frontier of science, it’s a poor guide. If a simple platitude resolved a difficult puzzle, we wouldn’t be at the frontier of science.

When the latest discoveries offend your common sense, the problem is yours, not the science.

What’s sauce for the goose . . .

Let’s be fair. Skeptics like me also use common sense arguments—no one can rise from the dead, there are no unicorns, and so on. But these are simply starting points, initial assumptions. I’m happy to reconsider them, examine the evidence behind them, and hear evidence that my position is wrong. You say that someone has been raised from the dead? Okay, let’s see the evidence.

The same is true for the fundamental axioms of science, math, and logic. We don’t take logic’s Principle of Identity or 1 + 1 = 2 on faith; these are tested continually. Once we find a new exception, we will take steps to avoid the error.

It’s evidence vs. faith. I use evidence-based common sense starting points, while Craig uses philosophical platitudes that sound right but are sometimes simply taken on faith.

Stephen Hawking has no patience for philosophical intrusions into science. In The Grand Design, he considers mankind’s big questions (“How does the universe behave?” “Where did this all come from?” and so on):

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. It has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly in physics. As a result, scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

That may be a bit much, even for me. But bringing up pop philosophy when the topic is physics is like bringing a popgun to a gunfight.

If a thousand philosophers pontificate for their lifetimes about scientific fields in which they’re not trained, will they ever say anything true? Probably, but how do we know what is the true part? Science. Let’s cut out the middle man by just listening to science.

Concluded with some positive things to say about philosophy in part 2.

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists
as ornithology is to birds.
— Richard Feynman

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/12/14.)

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So How Does an ATHEIST Explain the Resurrection Story?

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My recent posts have focused on Gary Habermas’s claim for a scholarly consensus in favor of the resurrection of Jesus (discussed here) and his minimal facts argument supporting the resurrection (here, with lessons learned here).

His arguments might be great when preaching to the choir, but they don’t hold up to a skeptical critique. But if the Christian explanation is wrong, what does explain the facts?

Let’s begin by making clear where we’re going and how we’ll get there.

The claim: The gospels each claim that Jesus rose from the dead, but a natural explanation is plausible. To be clear, I have no interest in finding a natural explanation for the resurrection; I’m looking for a natural explanation for the story of the resurrection.

The facts: I’m taking as evidence for this claim the books of the Bible, documents from the early church fathers, and writings of early historians. (Noncanonical books also exist—the Gospel of Thomas, for example—but these aren’t part of apologists’ arguments, so I’ll ignore them.) I like Habermas’s starting point: “I am not basing my argument for Jesus’ resurrection on the inerrancy of the Bible or even on its general trustworthiness” (The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 212).

Note the distinction between “These documents say that Paul was converted,” which is a valid initial fact, and “Paul was converted,” which is not.

Given these facts, we will try to explain the resurrection with a natural explanation—that is, without taking the gospel story as history.

Gary Habermas is pessimistic about our project:

No plausible natural explanations can account for all of the known facts regarding the resurrection of Jesus. Never in history has there been such a unique combination of events. . . . A huge problem is that no single natural option, however unusual, can explain all of the evidence for the Resurrection (Case, p. 142).

Despite his certainty of our failure, let’s push on and consider the various elements of the Bible story.

Why did church fathers write what they did?

The Christian leaders from the first and second centuries believed (and wrote about that belief) just like people do today. Nothing supernatural here. We can explain them in the same way that Habermas explained the Muslims who attacked on 9/11: “Deceived? Yes. Liars? No” (Case, p. 93).

Why does the Old Testament say what it says?

The Old Testament looks just like it was written by primitive people from that region of the world. We see polytheism and support for slavery and genocide. We see in early Judaism the Combat Myth, which came from earlier Babylonian and Akkadian stories. We see Sumerian cosmology in the Genesis creation story. Early Judaism was simply another Canaanite religion, and we even read about Elohim and Yahweh in Canaanite holy books that preceded the Old Testament.

Here again, the natural explanation is plausible (I would say “overwhelming,” but our goal is simply to offer a plausible natural alternative to Habermas’s supernatural one).

Why did historians like Josephus write what they did?

Historians who followed Jesus said at most, “there are people called Christians who worship a man named Jesus,” hardly compelling evidence for the supernatural stories about Jesus. (I’ve written more on Josephus here.)

And now for the main event:

What explains the New Testament resurrection story?

If Jesus died around 30 CE and the first gospel was written forty years later, that’s a long time (in an unsophisticated prescientific culture) for the story to evolve. The gospels were written in Greek, which means that the Jesus story was filtered through Greek culture, full of their own stories of miracles and gods (one example: the story of Dionysus dying and rising from the dead). Some early Greek Christians might well have been former worshippers of Dionysus. If the Jesus story didn’t have him rising from the dead before they heard it, there’s a good chance that it did after they got through with it.

I’m not proposing malicious tampering with the story or claiming that any part is a hoax. I’m simply saying that human memory is notoriously inaccurate, and oral history is an error-prone process. Even in our own time, you can find errors in newspaper stories from the previous day. Stories change with the retelling.

As to the elements that are unique to Christianity, how does any new religion branch away from its earlier beliefs? Christianity isn’t the only religion that made innovations.

That’s it. It was oral history for decades in a culture full of supernatural tales, and it picked up changes and “improvements” along the way before being written.

And there are other possible variations along Christianity’s path. Maybe someone was lying along the way. That’s hardly surprising—we know that people lie. You might ask for their motivation. I dunno, and I don’t much care—we understand those times so poorly that there could be lots of surprising reasons. Are you going to trot out the literal, supernatural interpretation of the Jesus story and claim that that’s more likely?

Or maybe our understanding of the early church is significantly wrong because of deliberate changes to the gospels in the centuries-long period after initial authorship but before we get our first complete New Testament copies in the fourth century. Gospels could have been amended or added to, and competing gospels could have been discarded or destroyed. To give one uncontroversial example, half of the “Pauline” epistles—those that claim to have been written by Paul—were not.

Or maybe Jesus never existed. Paul was writing about a mythical Jesus in the unspecified past (his understanding of the gospel story is basically nonexistent), and later authors could have historicized the story.

QED

I only claim to have sketched out plausible natural paths through the facts. You might find better ones. My goal is to show that some natural path is possible. With the facts plausibly explained, that defeats the supernatural claim.

Habermas claims that (1) Jesus died by crucifixion, (2) the disciples believed, (3) Paul believed, (4) James believed, and (5) the tomb was empty. He says, “Two thousand years of attempts by critics to account for these facts by natural causes have failed” (Case, p. 128).

What’s to explain? You’ve got a marvelous story full of miracles from a distant culture 2000 years ago, and you’re wondering which bin to put it in? Stamp it with “Myth/Legend” and let’s move on. The gospel’s miracles, the doubts turned into beliefs, and the enthusiastic eyewitnesses are just a story.

If somewhere within the Bible,
I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5,
I wouldn’t question what I’m reading in the Bible.
I would believe it, accept it as true,
and then do my best to work it out and understand it.
— Pastor Peter LaRuffa in
2014 HBO documentary “Questioning Darwin”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/5/14.)

Image credit: Ted, flicker, CC

8 Lessons Learned from the Minimal Facts Argument (2 of 2)

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In the aftermath of our analysis of Gary Habermas’s minimal facts argument from The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, here are the final lessons learned. (Read part 1 here).

5. Follow the facts. Don’t start with your religious presuppositions.

Habermas makes this error many times. For example:

The laws of nature would be no match for an omnipotent God who chooses to act by superseding those laws (p. 141).

Yes, if we assume God first, we can imagine him having his good reasons. For example, why is there evil? (God has his reasons; don’t worry your pretty little head about it.) Why is God so hidden? (God is way smarter that you and must be hidden for a good reason.) Doesn’t science reject miracles? (Bending the laws of nature would be easy for the god who made them.)

If you start with your presuppositions, you can select and arrange the facts to support them, but no thoughtful person argues this way. This is the hypothetical god fallacy. What makes a powerful argument is showing that starting with the agreed-to facts, an objective observer would come to a conclusion.

Never start with your presuppositions and then show how the facts can be rearranged to support them. That’s backwards.

Habermas says that the resurrection “accounts for all five [minimal] facts very nicely” (p. 76). Okay, but so does the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (Show me how the Flying Spaghetti Monster can’t explain any aspect of the gospel story and I’ll show you how you underestimate the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

The apologist can say that we can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, that God is always smart enough to stay ahead of science and clever atheist arguments. But that puts the burden of proof on the wrong shoulders. If you can’t support the burden of proof, then stop making extraordinary claims.

6. Failure to acknowledge the magnitude of your claim

Habermas wants to win by default. He says: here are the secular claims; they’re all wrong; therefore, I win. For example:

We have observed that all opposing theories to Jesus’ resurrection are extremely improbable, if not practically impossible (p. 188).

Why bother weighing Habermas’s claim when he’s the only one left standing? What he fails to acknowledge is that his might be the most remarkable claim ever: that the universe was created by a supernatural being, that this being created humans on the dust speck we call Earth, that he appeared on Earth as a man to provide a loophole in a rule that he created himself so that we can get into heaven, and that this claim is for real, despite looking very similar to a thousand other manmade religions. I don’t remember a single word from Habermas acknowledging the complete insanity of the claim.

Maybe Habermas’s supernatural claim is correct, but he must acknowledge the enormity of the claim he’s making and the correspondingly enormous quality of evidence necessary to support that claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Habermas must make the positive case, not just attack his opponents.

(And I can’t let Habermas’s bold claim stand unchallenged: “all opposing theories … are extremely improbable” is completely unfounded. At best, the powder-puff arguments that Habermas attacked are improbable. Read the full critique from a few days ago for more.)

7. Evaluate similar claims with a similar bar of evidence

Apologists should test their arguments by imagining an equivalent argument from someone in another religion. Would they be convincing to you? If not, why imagine that yours will be to me?

8. The consensus of New Testament scholars says so

While a poll would be easier and more reliable, Habermas prefers to infer the scholarly consensus from published articles, and this creates problems. Since Habermas won’t show his database to anyone, we don’t know how comprehensive or unbiased it is. Not everyone who has an opinion on gospel questions (Was there an empty tomb? Was there a resurrection?) will be equally motivated to write a paper and try to get it published. Most importantly, his sample is surely under-represented by historians and over-represented by Christians.

This was more thoroughly debunked in the first post in this series.

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down

Like Weebles, the roly-poly toys that won’t fall down, the individual claims in Habermas’s minimal facts argument will bounce back up. They’re immune to contrary evidence because they’re not the result of an unbiased following of the evidence.

Perhaps they can at least provide examples of what to avoid.

Continue with “So How Does An ATHEIST Explain the Resurrection Story?“

If you can’t be a good example,
then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.
— Catherine Aird

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/3/14.)

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