The Argument from Silence applied to the gospel says that Jesus’s miracles were so remarkable that they should have left a mark in the record of historians who were outsiders to the Jesus movement. If we find these stories only in Christian sources, that suggests they didn’t happen.

The Christian argument comes from a video by InspiringPhilosophy (IP). To start at the beginning and see the eight points of the Christian argument in more detail, go to part 1.

The points sound compelling but don’t stand up to critique. The next three points argue that we shouldn’t expect much of a historical record.

3. Poor literacy meant few authors

4. Writing materials were expensive

5. Few people had spare time to document an event

I agree with these, and I’ll add that time takes its toll. We have a tiny fraction of the documents written in the first century CE.

Naysayer argument

IP is arguing that competing arguments would be destroyed by time, but let’s pause to see what this means. This claim favors the Christian who wants to attack the Argument from Silence (AfS), but it hurts the Christian who wants to use the Naysayer hypothesis.

What is the Naysayer hypothesis? It’s a popular Christian argument that says if the gospel story were wrong, you’d have many naysayers who would’ve shut it down. “Hold on,” they’d say. “I was there, and it didn’t happen like that.” From Jesus’s miraculous cures to his triumphant entry into Jerusalem to his resurrection—people from that time would’ve spoken up to shut down the gospel claims. Christianity would’ve been stillborn.

A key part of the Naysayer argument is that the naysayers’ rebuttals would’ve been written and then copied through time so that we’d have them today. Since there are none, the initial assumption that there would’ve been naysayers poking holes in the gospel story must be false, and no naysayers means that the gospel story must therefore be true.

Returning to these three claims IP makes about poor documentation of events, I agree, but this shoots them in the foot if they want to use the Naysayer hypothesis.

(BTW, the Naysayer hypothesis is crap.)

Strip away the miracle claims from the gospel story, and you’re left with the story of a Jewish teacher who did little worth documenting.

6. Each author has their own agenda

IP adds: that agenda might not include the miraculous events noted by another source.

Let’s return to the reanimated dead walking the streets of Jerusalem and seen by “many people” (Matthew 27:53). The first fruits of the new Age were the resurrected Jesus plus the “many holy people” returned to life. Why wasn’t that in Luke? These two synoptic gospels (“synoptic” means seen from the same point of view) shared so much that you’d think that something this monumental would’ve also been shared, especially since this story takes just a verse and a half in Matthew.

Actually, I agree that Matthew had a different agenda from Luke. They weren’t historians or journalists, and recording history wasn’t their agenda—each had their own religious agenda. That explains both why they differed and why they’re not reliable history.

If God needed them to write accurate histories, I’m sure he could’ve arranged that.

7. An author might deliberately ignore an enemy

IP says: an author might want to snub a political or religious rival.

Outside of the circles of Christians, secular or Jewish authors would not care or like Jesus enough to mention his deeds. And if he did make a big enough mark, the clue would be to only mentioned it briefly, to not make it seem like he was very important.

But there are counterexamples like Origen’s Contra Celsum, which was a Christian response to an attack by a pagan named Celsus. The only surviving work documenting the Celsus argument is Origen’s rebuttal. Or take Marcion, a Christian heretic. No copy of Marcion’s gospel survives, but it has been largely reconstructed from quotations in the writings of early Christians such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius.

While it’s true that an author might ignore an enemy, these examples prove that the reverse is also true, that they might take pains to document an enemy.

Additionally, the actions of rabble rousers such as Jesus could easily have made it into official correspondence. Christians often cite one example of this, the letter Pliny wrote to Emperor Trajan in 112 CE. Pliny was governor of a province in Asia Minor, and he was updating the emperor on the Christian movement.

IP laments the ravages of time:

We have lost most of what would have been written in the ancient world simply because records were not made to last 2000 years. They were made to last more like 200 if you were lucky.

This is getting close to the argument that goes, “Be realistic—you can’t expect security cameras recordings!”

But of course if omnipotent God wanted his message to be complete and unambiguous throughout time, he could have effortlessly made that happen. He can’t speak the universe into existence and yet be unable to reliably communicate the most important message on one dust speck of a planet.

8. Skeptics want a no-win situation for Christians

IP characterizes the skeptics’ approach this way: if an ancient source is Christian, it must be biased. But no non-Christian would write about Jesus, so if they do, they must actually be Christian and therefore biased.

IP is talking about a non-Christian who’s really a Christian. Is this a Christian just pretending to be an atheist? We’ve actually seen a few of these here. Their arguments sound roughly like, “Well, I’m an atheist, but ya gotta hand it to the Christians for having arguments that are so danged compelling.” Their implausible atheist-Christian position flags them as bogus.

Curiously, there is a first-century example of this. I’ve already mentioned the Testimonium Flavianum. This passage was added to the work of Jewish historian Josephus to make him sound like a fan of Jesus. It stands out as fraudulent because no Jew of the time would write that.

Someone’s position is usually clear, and a first-century opponent of Jesus could have given an honest account of what they saw. Based on the examples of Celsus, Marcion, and Pliny above, people who were against Christianity argued unambiguously against Christianity. And something as nonpartisan as zombies in Jerusalem would intrigue anyone with a pen, whether a follower of Jesus or not.

Conclusion

IP wraps up:

So arguments from silence? Yeah, they don’t work. If any skeptic tries to throw this out at you, it is a pretty clear sign they have never read any ancient history. [Consider] asking them if they apply this criteria to Hannibal, Alexander the Great, or Josephus. 99% of the time, it’ll be pretty clear they do not, and it will reveal how fallacious their reasoning is.

No, let’s make sure you’re consistent. The stories of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, and other great leaders from history contain miracle claims, but historians scrub out every one. The result are the remarkable naturalistic stories of these important figures that we have in history. Jesus, by contrast, is nothing without the miracles. Strip away the miracle claims from the gospel story, and you’re left with the story of a Jewish teacher who did little worth documenting.

See also: Historians reject the Bible story

IP brought up Hannibal, so let’s see what ancient sources said about him. This is from historian Richard Carrier:

We have the writings of numerous historians within a century or so of Hannibal’s death, writing detailed histories using critical and rational methods, and [like other eyewitness writers] not composing mythical hagiographies….

We have nothing like this explosion of quotable histories of Jesus within 120 years of his death. In fact, we have exactly zero histories of Jesus. Only a line or two in a few historians nearly a century after the fact or more, who have no identifiable sources outside the Gospels, which in turn are mythical hagiographies anonymously composed by literary propagandists after the lifetime of any known eyewitnesses.

Exactly unlike Hannibal.

Remember that the dogmatic version of the Argument from Silence—if you don’t see the expected historical sources then it didn’t happen—is not what any thoughtful person is arguing for. The AfS simply acts as a warning, just one of hopefully several inputs to a decision.

The core question when applying the AfS is, what would we expect? IP is right that not a lot would have been documented, and not a lot of that would have survived, so our expectations must be reasonable, but there were historians. For example, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews from about 93 CE has survived, probably because Christians copied it through the centuries. If Christians had protected it, it’s unlikely any mention of Jesus’s miracles would have been erased. It was in the right place and the right time to record Jesus’s miracles, and yet, aside from the fraudulent Testimonium Flavianum, we see nothing.

When we look at early sources, do we see the widespread documentation of Jesus as a miracle worker (the only legitimate one among countless frauds), or do we see documentation only from one religion (among countless)?

IP wants to imagine the all-powerful son of God, a person of the Trinity and a miracle worker eager for publicity, making a personal visit to our little planet. But when he gets here, his speech and actions are so uninteresting that history sees him as merely (to quote IP) “one Jewish rabbi, primarily speaking to uneducated peasants in a small backwater province of Rome.” IP can’t have it both ways.

The Argument from Silence helps decide whether we jump into the familiar arms of Legend or if the unbelievable supernatural option might just be believable. It helps the Christian reject bogus claims from history as much as it helps the skeptic.

If you’d come today
You could have reached a whole nation.
Israel in 4 BC
Had no mass communication.
— “Superstar,” from Jesus Christ Superstar

What do you do when you expect history to record something, but it doesn’t? This is the domain of the Argument from Silence, which says that such a gap in the historical record suggests that the event didn’t happen.

We’ll be responding to a Christian take on the argument, “Refuting Biblical Arguments from Silence” by InspiringPhilosophy (a video from roughly 2017).

InspiringPhilosophy (IP) opens by mocking atheists who agree that the argument fails, unless it’s used to attack the Bible. He says, “I’m astonished by how many atheists attempt this argument and assume it actually works.”

IP defines the argument:

The New Testament documents mentioned things that are so unbelievable, so magnificent, that if they truly happened, other writers surely would have mentioned them. Therefore, because no one else actually does, it probably didn’t happen and are just legends.

That sounds surprisingly good. I’ll state my definition more generally: Suppose one category of historical sources mentions events so remarkable that you’d expect sources in a second category to include them. If you don’t find those expected mentions, that casts doubt on the historicity of the first category.

And there were historians of the time who could have plausibly heard of the stories of Jesus as news rather than anecdotes filtered through the gospels.

To return to the Argument from Silence applied to the gospel story, take as an example the dead rising from their graves and walking through Jerusalem. The first category is Matthew 27:52–3, where we read about it, and the second category is every contemporary historian plus the remaining gospels, where we don’t. Are reanimated corpses seen by “many people” in Jerusalem—a sign that the end of the Age is at hand—remarkable enough to expect some sources in that second category to document it? Or would that be a faulty use of the Argument from Silence?

Here is the pushback from IP.

Points against the Argument from Silence

1. This argument doesn’t even get off the ground because it’s a logical fallacy.
2. Consider some remarkable examples from history that are poorly documented. For example, we have just one semi-contemporary record of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Do you want to cite the Argument from Silence to argue that this eruption never happened?
3. We’d expect silence because few people could read or write in the Palestine of Jesus’s day. That means few possible authors plus few possible readers.
4. Writing was expensive. The papyrus for a New Testament epistle might cost two days’ wages.
5. Few people had the luxury of free time to document an event.
6. An author would have a particular audience in mind and would focus on what his audience wanted and ignore the rest. If you can’t find something in a source, ask if the omission was simply off topic for the author.
7. An author might deliberately ignore someone on the other side of an issue as a deliberate snub—a political or religious rival, for example.
8. Skeptics create a no-win situation for Christians. If an ancient source is Christian, they’ll reject that for being biased. But if a non-Christian writes about Jesus, he doesn’t count because he must be a Christian. Why else would he have gone to the expense of writing?

Let’s respond to these points.

1. Argument from Silence is a fallacy

In a surprising move, InspiringPhilosophy almost immediately redefines the action taken by the Argument from Silence (AfS). We had a sensible definition (above) where the events in question “probably didn’t happen,” and I’d even tone that down. I’d prefer “might not have happened.” But that has now changed to black-and-white words and phrases like “dismiss,” “made up,” “fabricated,” or “assumed to be false.”

We now have a strawman definition that I don’t use. IP says that that dogmatic version is a fallacy, and I agree.

Christians changing definitions, even over the course of just two paragraphs as in this case, shouldn’t be new to us. For example, the definition of “faith” can vary between belief firmly grounded in evidence and belief not grounded in evidence, depending on an apologist’s audience.

Let’s proceed while keeping in mind these different definitions of the AfS.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

This popular adage helps inform the AfS. While absence of evidence is not proof of absence, it can certainly be evidence. If I have a drawer where I keep my keys, and I’ve poked through it three times this morning and still can’t find them, that’s good evidence of absence.

That’s the motivation behind the AfS. Not finding evidence where you’d expect to isn’t proof, but it’s evidence. Returning to the gospel story, not finding miracles about Jesus in the writings of contemporary historians isn’t proof that the supernatural claims are false, but it is evidence.

2. Consider some historical examples

IP cites the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum and says that we have only one letter documenting the eruption. Should we expect more? IP gives this perspective:

This eruption would have affected far more people—wealthy and educated people as well—than the deeds of one Jewish rabbi primarily speaking to uneducated peasants in a small backwater province of Rome.

If this dramatic disaster was poorly documented, IP argues, why expect more for “one Jewish rabbi”?

But using the AfS to weigh the evidence for Jesus is no ordinary use of the argument. The ministry of Jesus was God’s solution to mankind’s biggest problem. In four instances in the gospel of John, Jesus says that his miracles are evidence of his divine mission. In other words, Jesus intended to make a public splash.

Let’s give the almighty Creator of the universe some credit for being almighty. If God wanted the works of Jesus widely known, they would’ve been. To say that God’s record of Jesus was eroded by 2000 years of time just like any other ancient record is to misunderstand what “omnipotent” means.

Remember also that Vesuvius is just a volcano. No one doubts that they erupt. In fact, this particular one has erupted many times since 79 CE and has covered the area of Pompeii repeatedly. The eruption of Vesuvius was and remains one of those “when, not if” events.

That makes the eruption of Vesuvius an unsurprising, perhaps even mundane event. The story of that “one Jewish rabbi” is supposed to be the remarkable one.

Suetonius the historian

IP wants to declare any appeal to the Argument from Silence to be flawed, so let’s consider an example outside the gospels. You’re probably familiar with the term “cross the Rubicon” to mean a major, irreversible step. This expression comes from the time of Julius Caesar, when no general was allowed to bring his army into Italy. When in 49 BCE he and his army did cross the northern border—identified by the river Rubicon—he in effect declared war.

But Caesar had some divine help. As he paused at the river’s edge before making the leap, an apparition “of wondrous stature and beauty” urged him to cross. He did, this triggered a civil war, he won the war, and he became dictator of Rome.

We know about the spirit because of one historian, Suetonius, whose work is mined by Christians for hints of Jesus. Must we conclude that this actually happened? Or perhaps we can (dare I say it?) use the AfS to say that without corroborating sources, this remarkable claim is not historical. And also throw in that a supernatural claim, such as this one, has a much bigger burden of proof.

This makes IP’s position difficult. If the AfS can be used, we can get rid of Suetonius’s apparition, but then it can be used to argue that the remarkable claims and supernatural deeds of Jesus didn’t happen. If the AfS can’t be used, we have one fewer arguments by which to argue that the apparition wasn’t historical (h/t commenter Lex Lata).

Contemporary historians who could’ve mentioned Jesus

And there were historians of the time who could have plausibly heard of the stories of Jesus as news rather than anecdotes filtered through the gospels. Ignoring mentions of Christians (but not Jesus) and additions made by others (like the Testimonium Flavianum, added to Josephus’s writings), candidate historians are Seneca, Tiberias, Philo, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, and more.

Concluded in part 2.

You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time
if you’re sitting on your butt.
And who wants to leave butt prints
in the sands of time?
— Bob Moawad

Does science have questions? Christianity has answers!

This is Stupid Argument #44: “Time’s up! Now answer all the fundamental questions of science.” (Don’t blame me—I’d stop listing stupid arguments if Christians would stop making them.)

The discussion of these arguments begins here—go to the appendix at that post for a list of all these arguments to date.

To illustrate this stupid argument, here are comments by Christian apologist Jim Wallace (audio interview @ 20:30). When an atheist, he says he wondered if he was justified in believing “that everything in the universe could be accounted for with nothing more than just space, time, matter, and the laws of physics and chemistry—because that’s all I would have to work with if atheism was true.” I guess he was an inquisitive guy because he had a lot on his mind:

Does that explain the universe the way we see it? Can it explain the beginning of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, can it explain the origin of life or the appearance of design in biology, can it explain consciousness or free agency or objective transcendent moral truths? Everyone has to explain evil, whether you’re a theist or a nontheist. These are the things that everyone has a burden to explain.

Let’s first clear away the smoke to see what is actually being argued here. The Big Bang is a rough explanation of the beginning of the universe. Fine tuning of constants in the universe is curious, though not much of an argument for God. The origin of life (abiogenesis) is indeed a puzzle, though too much is made of the appearance of design, which is neatly explained by evolution. Science still has questions about consciousness, though there’s no evidence of objective morality. And the Problem of Evil asks why a good god allows bad things to happen. Atheists don’t propose a god, so this is solely a problem for theists.

So what’s left? The cause of the Big Bang (if that’s a valid concept) and abiogenesis are important research areas, with consciousness and perhaps free will as additional challenges. After dismissing the tangential issues, we’re left with the observation that science has questions to answer. That’s true. And obvious. Why then the long list of questions? Because it sounds stupid to plainly state his argument, “There will always be questions within science, but ‘God did it’ explains them all; therefore, God.”

Wallace demands, “These are the things that everyone has a burden to explain,” but his sense of urgency is groundless. Yes, there are unanswered questions, but so what?

[Then I examined] the universe from the perspective of my philosophical naturalism to see if my atheism had any explanatory power.

Sure it does, just not in the field of science. While the Christian claim “God did it” has no evidence backing it and is unfalsifiable (and therefore useless as an explanation), the hypothesis “there is no god” does follow from the evidence and neatly untangles the tough problems that tie Christians in knots.

[I already accepted] several extra-natural explanations as an atheist, because if nature is just space, time, matter, and physics, well, there’s lots of things that those things won’t account for, and so I’ve got to step out of my naturalism just to explain those things and so what am I doing here?

In other words, Time’s up—I need the answers now! No, I’m sorry, “Science is working on it” will not be accepted as an answer. You must completely explain all remaining scientific questions right now.

Or at least that’s how apologists like Wallace imagine things. For some reason, we shouldn’t look for further progress from the only discipline that has taught us anything about nature and which has given us our modern technology-intensive world. No, we should rely on the discipline that weaves contradictory stories about the supernatural, that has no use for evidence, and that has never taught us anything accurate about reality.

See also: Christianity’s Bogus Claims to Answer Life’s Big Questions

Continue to Stupid Argument #45

Of the two great, evil, criminal gangs to emerge out of Italy,
why is the Mafia the one that gets most of the bad press?
— commenter RichardSRussell

Faith statements may seem reasonable at first glance. There’s plenty to criticize, but let’s first see them from the standpoint of the Christian organizations that use them.

What’s a faith statement?

Faith statements are declarations like these.

• “The mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is to advance the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design rather than a blind and undirected process.”
• A fragment from the faith statement of Houston Baptist University: “[Those connected with HBU must believe] that man was directly created by God, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, as the Son of God, [and] that He died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave.”
• A fragment from Answers in Genesis: “By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.”

These are the opposite of a summary of how the scientific method works.

If you want to donate to a Christian organization, you need to see if their beliefs line up with yours since there are lots of interpretations of Christianity. The faith statement helps make that evaluation.

Christian scholars’ parallel world is just a play table with clay and crayons.

Academic freedom and conflicts of interest

Faith statements are good for donors, but they’re crippling for the institutions that have them. A faith statement is a commitment to a conclusion. By accepting the conclusion beforehand, institutions governed by them forfeit their ability to defend or even comment on the points in those statements.

By committing to the faith statement, scholars are ruling out certain conclusions before they’ve done any research. For example, the HBU statement says Jesus was born of a virgin. By signing that statement, a professor is publicly stating (among other things), “I promise to never conclude that the virgin birth was just a myth.”

And when they conclude that the virgin birth is history, why believe it? That’s just the faith statement talking, and they were obliged to reach that conclusion. The same is true when the Discovery Institute reports that intelligent design beats evolution or Answers in Genesis argues for a 6000-year-old earth.

Might the scholar simply have come to an unbiased conclusion? That’s possible, but how would we know? The scholar has no reputation for reliability because their institution doesn’t have one. The faith statement destroyed it.

Mike Licona is a Christian scholar who found out the hard way that faith statements have teeth. In 2011, he lost two jobs because, in a 700-page book, he questioned the inerrancy of a single Bible verse.

There is a stick raised above these Christian scholars that demands that they toe the line or else. With some conclusions predetermined to be correct and others incorrect, how do we know that their work is an honest search for the truth? We don’t, and indeed the work of every Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement is suspect.

Accepting and rejecting claims because of dogma rather than science got the Church into an embarrassing situation when it rejected Galileo’s heliocentric solar system. They only publicly retracted their error in 1992.

There are close to a thousand religiously affiliated U.S. colleges and universities plus many more ministries that make intellectual claims. The cloud of scholarly untrustworthiness hangs over a lot of Christians.

Disclosure: how things work in the real world

Faith statements are a restriction on academic freedom according to The American Association of University Professors. And in other areas of intellectual discourse, this kind of constraint would be disclosed. For example, many medical journals have policies that demand that authors disclose conflicts of interest. The same is true for science journals (source). The American Historical Association’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” calls for historians to disclose any research assistance that could bias their conclusions.

Journalists are careful to avoid not only conflicts of interest but even the appearance of such conflicts. You’ve probably seen articles with an aside such as, “Full disclosure: I have a close relative who works for the company that is the subject of this article.”

The equivalent in judicial, legal, or governmental fields is called recusal—abstaining from participation in an issue that would cause a conflict of interest.

Does it matter when research about climate change is funded by a fossil fuel company rather than Greenpeace? Does it matter when research about smoking is funded by the Tobacco Institute rather than the National Institutes of Health? Does it matter when research about gun violence is funded by the National Rifle Association rather than the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence?

Just because research is funded by an organization with an interest in the result doesn’t mean that the research is flawed. The point is simply that that all potential biases should be made public.

Carry this thinking into Christian scholarship. Every blog post, journal article, book, or lecture from a Christian scholar constrained by a faith statement should disclose that constraint.

The parallel world of Christian scholarship

Christian scholars seem to admire the respect given to fields like journalism, medicine, science, and so on. But rather than earning that respect the old-fashioned way, Christian scholarship creates a parallel world with training wheels.

Creationists can’t get published in Nature or Scientific American? No problem—Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis has created its own “peer-reviewed journal,” Answers Research Journal. The problem is that this is a journal constrained by yet another faith statement. The author submission guidelines make clear that any paper will be rejected if it “conflicts with the best interests of [Answers in Genesis] as judged by its biblical stand and goals outlined in its statement of faith.”

Christian colleges can teach whatever they want and call it “science.” That they have a religious shibboleth for science means that it’s surprising and even newsworthy when they teach evolution—that is, when they teach actual science.

They give themselves the right to domesticate science to avoid anything that steps on their theological toes and have their own science-y books, conferences, and home-schooling curriculum.

But Christian scholars’ parallel world is just a play table with clay and crayons. They only dream that they’re sitting at the adult table. Christian scholarship has sold its soul.

Here’s the cause-and-effect relationship. Donations power the Christian machine, and they don’t happen without a faith statement; a faith statement means that any “scholarship” is suspect; poor scholarship means that Christian scholars can’t play with the big boys; and that leads to their parallel Christian world with a forlornly low bar that they can cross.

Correcting the problem

With this article, I’m calling on Christian scholars to disclose any faith statements they’re bound by. This is a mandatory first step toward legitimacy. I suggest something like, “The conclusions in this article are suspect because the [institution] faith statement obligates the author to reach this conclusion” prominently displayed where appropriate.

Not admitting to a faith statement that prevents honest research is to break the ninth commandment against lying. Unfortunately, any who read this will ignore it because to do otherwise would risk breaking the spell. It would call attention to a weakness.

What’s surprising is that they will ignore it without embarrassment. They don’t need to whisper about damage control among themselves. They can publicly use the word “recant” when demanding that an errant scholar return to the fold, unconcerned that it makes them very unlike the scientists, historians, and the other conventional scholars they admire. That was the word used against Mike Licona, the Christian scholar called to account (above). They used “recant” four centuries ago for Galileo, and they were unafraid to use it for Licona a few years ago.

But times are changing. In the time of Galileo, the church wasn’t questioned in the West. They held the intellectual high ground. That’s no longer true, and I expect that the need for credibility will increasingly conflict with the need for donations. Ignoring conflicts of interest and doing “scholarship” with Christian training wheels will become increasingly ridiculous.

This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests
for the purpose of defending doctrines
not able to take care of themselves.
— Robert Green Ingersoll