Christian apologist Jim Wallace thinks that explaining the Resurrection is easy—God was behind it all. Drop the God explanation, and atheists come up short explaining the facts: Jesus was a historical person, the gospels report that the tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples were willing to die to defend the Jesus claims, and there was little chance for legend to creep in to the story. I dismantle these “facts” in part 1.

Let’s move on to the atheist response. Wallace imagines theories such as that the disciples stole the body, the women went to the wrong tomb, Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, or that the risen Jesus was simply hallucinated.

Considering this, Wallace wonders “why there are 6 or 7 non-Christian theories and then the one Christian theory.”

Let’s start with a joke

I personally have little interest in these particular theories. But before I get to the one that I prefer, did you hear the one about the man walking along a street at night? He came across another guy bent over, slowly walking around at the edge of a parking lot, obviously looking for something.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for my keys. I lost them over there.” He points to a distant part of the parking lot.

“Then why are you looking for them here??”

“The light’s better here.”

Similarly, why do apologists spend so much time lovingly attacking arguments like “wrong tomb” or “swoon theory”? Because the light’s better here. These they think they can knock over.

And let’s sidestep their insistence that we pick up the story at a certain point and explain things naturally. I have no obligation to explain the resurrection given the empty tomb just like I have no obligation to explain the yellow brick road given Oz. The ball’s in the apologist’s court to show that it’s history.

As for Wallace’s puzzlement about why there are a bunch of non-Christian theories, there aren’t. There is no miscellany of arguments that must all harmonize somehow. You bring out your “God did it,” and I’d prefer any one of these naturalistic theories instead.

How the heck do you explain the Resurrection? The Jesus story was legend.

My preferred explanation (which gets insufficient consideration from the apologists) is that the gospel story is legend. There was something in the beginning—during a period of turmoil within Judaism, a charismatic teacher created a small movement—and legendary accretion over the decades did the rest. Ideas like gods impregnating humans and gods resurrecting worthy people were familiar elements of other religions, and these got attached to the Jesus story with the retelling.

“Wait—you say this Jesus guy was executed by the authorities, and that’s it? Not very impressive. I worship Dionysus, and he was raised from the dead by Zeus.” How many times would this happen before the Jesus story added the Resurrection? (I give this as simply a possible legendary addition. The Resurrection could’ve become part of the gospel story in other ways.)

A related theory, championed at this blog in particular by Greg G. (one of our most eloquent commenters), discards even that small historical core. The stories and ideas in Mark, the first gospel, can all be traced back to precedents in earlier literature—Jewish scripture and Hellenistic books of history or fiction available at the time. In other words, the first gospel was deliberate fiction from the start. This parsimonious theory, then, doesn’t assume any historical origin.

(This is my paraphrasing, so I invite those who’ve thought about it more to correct me as necessary. This is the Christ Myth theory, but I didn’t introduce it as such because it emphasizes the “Jesus didn’t exist” part, when the “Mark was fiction” part is more interesting and relevant for this post. Perhaps this alternative angle into the same theory could be called the Pious Fraud theory.)

Christian unity

As for Wallace’s “one Christian theory,” let’s not overemphasize Christian unity. Christians disagree on many important issues, such as Arminian vs. Calvinist thinking, Trinitarian vs. Arian (and Unitarian, Binitarian, and other beliefs) thinking, plus lots of other conflicts over the centuries where the losing philosophy was declared heretical. Christian big-tent thinking is roughly, “Ignoring the areas where Christians don’t speak with one voice . . . Christians speak with one voice.” And now Christians look like just another manmade religion, with factions bickering over who’s right.

The ineffectiveness of “God did it”

Finally, consider the conclusion Christians are so eager for us to reach, “God did it.” It’s a powerful explanation, though a little too powerful. It can explain anything and, in so doing, it explains nothing. It can’t be falsified, and if I say, “God did X,” you can’t prove me wrong because God could do anything. If you say that X isn’t something God would do, I could either say that God moves in mysterious ways (too grand for your mortal thinking) or dismiss your poor understanding of how God thinks.

More practically, “God did it” is just a repackaging of the unknowns and so explains nothing. We’ve answered, “How did Jesus get resurrected?” by replacing it with, “Who is God, and why is there suffering, and why is God hidden?” (and so on). Introduce the Bible into the conversation, and that just introduces more problems—“Why are there so many unanswered questions, and why did Jesus leave so much dogma undecided, and why is it contradictory?” (and so on).

Declare victory and go home

You can always just say that the atheist is cheating. If those atheists were honest in their evaluation of your argument, they’d be on their knees, sobbing out the Sinner’s Prayer. Here, Wallace thinks he’s found the problem.

The better , and the only reason why you don’t like the Christian theory, is because you don’t think a miracle is reasonable. You have a presuppositional bias against the miraculous.

And you don’t?? I suspect we’re equally skeptical about supernatural claims . . . except when it comes to Christian claims. You give them a pass, while I do my best to insist on evidence in proportion to the extraordinary character of the claim, regardless of whether they support my worldview or not.

Looks like that makes me the one who treats things without unfair bias. More here.

No, Mssr. Atheist, you can’t use science

Wallace concludes with a Molotov cocktail from a new quarter.

So you think that everything in your world can be explained by natural causes and natural forces; you think that everything in your environment, [the entire history of] the universe can be explained by nothing more than space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry? How do you explain the beginning of the universe (which you cannot explain using space, time, matter, physics, or chemistry, because none of those things are available to you)? We know from the science that everything comes into existence, not from some other form of space, but from nothing.

There’s lots I could say here, but I’ll cut it short and simply note (1) I have no obligation to answer any scientific question to make an atheist argument, and (2) this challenge is about cosmology, while our topic is Christianity’s unbelievable explanation for the Resurrection. If you think you’ve got a showstopper of an argument (or simply want the best answer from a scientific field that you’re a novice in), go talk to a relevant scientist.

I’m sure that no scientific question you could pose would surprise scientists or shake their confidence in the science. More to the point, none would convert to Christianity as a result. What does that tell you about the power of this question about the origin of the universe?

As usual, the supernatural is unnecessary in explaining the objective facts surrounding the Resurrection. As the French mathematician Laplace is reported to have said two centuries ago about the absence of God in his book on celestial mechanics, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

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Image from Francisco Delgado, CC license
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Christian apologist Jim Wallace has an explanation for the Resurrection story. He gives his winning argument in a recent video, “Why Naturalistic Explanations for the Resurrection Are… Lame.” Here is his challenge to the skeptic:

What is it that’s keeping you from thinking that [the Christian explanation for the Resurrection] is a reasonable inference?

His argument gives a bunch of facts and demands an explanation. He has his explanation—God did it. Well, Mssr./Mme Atheist? Find a better explanation than that.

4 facts about the Resurrection

Let’s examine the facts that he offers.

1. Jesus was a real person. “It’s ludicrous to think that Jesus never lived.”

Nope—hardly ludicrous. Some religions were started by a real, historical person, such as Joseph Smith (LDS),  Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), and L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology). And others have a named figure at their beginning who might not have been historical.

Was there a real Mohammed (Islam)? Buddha (Buddhism)? Zarathushtra (Zoroastrianism)? Probably.

Was there a real Moses (Judaism)? Laotzi (Taoism)? John Frum (Vanuatu cargo cult)? Probably not.

I reject option 1, the gospel account of the supernatural Jesus, but that still leaves two more options: (2) Christianity was created with a real man at the beginning and morphed into the gospel story, or (3) it started without a real man. The scholarly consensus rejects 3, but it’s not a ludicrous option. It’s possible.

2. “The tomb [was] empty . . . [and they] claimed that he rose from the dead, . . . [and] there was apparently no body that was ever recovered.”

These aren’t objective, historical facts. They’re just claims made in a story, so let’s not give them more credibility than they deserve. More here.

3. “People were willing to die for their [claims about Jesus]”

You don’t even have a story about disciples being willing to die to defend the Christian claims about Jesus, let alone history.

Start with the story of Jesus himself. He was said to be the Jewish king, and he was killed. That makes sense—set yourself up as a rival to the king installed by the Romans, and they get cranky. That’s sedition, a capital offense. They will kill you for that. That doesn’t mean that the Jesus crucifixion story is history, of course, just that this part of the story hangs together.

Where’s the equivalent for the disciples? Were they executed by the authorities or murdered by a mob? What were their crimes? The earliest record dates from close to two centuries after the death of Jesus and it only gives method and place of death. And if, like Jesus, they were killed by authorities for sedition or some similar crime, then they didn’t die defending claims about Jesus. More here.

4. Scripture was written very early. There was little chance for legend to creep in.

The gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus, which isn’t “very early.” Apologists usually make relative claims here, comparing the statistics of the New Testament to those of other writings of the time, but these comparisons are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether this or that New Testament book has more manuscript copies, was written closer to the events it claims to record, or has a shorter gap from originals to our best copies compared to other ancient writings. We don’t care whether it’s the best on any of these metrics; we care that it’s reliable enough to support Christianity’s remarkable supernatural claims. It’s not.

Would you accept a miracle claim from a religious tradition not yours if you read it in today’s newspaper? If not then you see the problem.

These “facts” don’t amount to much, leaving nothing that’s puzzling to explain. This is what’s left:

1. The entirety of the Jesus story might be legend, in which case there was no historical Jesus at the beginning.
2. The gospels make lots of claims, but they’re just stories.
3. “No one would die for a lie” is no argument since we have no reliable documentation saying that any disciple died to support the gospel claims.
4. The New Testament documentation isn’t reliable enough to support its supernatural claims. (Could any document be?)

Comparing the Christian and skeptical positions

Those are the unimpressive facts that Wallace wants to start with. He sees God’s hand behind all this.

How do skeptics respond? How do they explain the Resurrection naturalistically? Though Wallace doesn’t explicitly enumerate them, he is apparently thinking of explanations like these.

1. The disciples stole the body to make it look like a miraculous resurrection.
2. The women went to an empty tomb, but it was the wrong tomb.
3. Jesus wasn’t quite dead when he was removed from the cross. In the tomb, he revived (swoon theory).
4. The distraught disciples imagined or hallucinated the risen Jesus.

And there are more.

Wallace wonders “why there are 6 or 7 non-Christian theories and then the one Christian theory” to explain the Resurrection. He says:

Why do you have [6 or 7]? Why not just 1? Because those don’t work, and you know they don’t work. The guy who invented #6 doesn’t think excuse #5 works, and the guy who invented #4 does not think 5 or 6 work. All these guys don’t agree with each other, they’ve got their own theory and think the other guy’s theories are lame. I agree with you there—they’re all lame.

Let me approvingly quote from a source Wallace should find credible, Gary Habermas and Mike Licona in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus: “When it comes to reports of miracles, the historian must seek a natural explanation before considering a supernatural one.” The supernatural alternative is so incredible and without precedent that any of these naturalistic explanations is more plausible than “God did it.” And for every instance where you’re tempted to point to a Bible verse that weakens one of these theories, remember another naturalistic argument, that the Bible is an unreliable source for potentially many reasons (deliberate change by a copyist, that verse is contradicted by another elsewhere in the Bible, it’s a story, this thought experiment, and so on).

You want one theory? Okay, here it is: simple, natural explanations are sufficient to explain the facts surrounding the claims for the Resurrection. The supernatural is an unnecessary addition.

Concluded in part 2 with my preferred explanation, plus a critique of the Christian explanation.

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Image from Raychan, CC license

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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.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Theologian Gary Habermas has for over fifteen years cataloged articles debating the empty tomb of Jesus and the resurrection. From the thousands he has collected, he concludes:

75% of scholars today say that resurrection or something like it occurred.

(He also cites the same percentage in favor of the empty tomb, but the resurrection is the more sensational claim.)

It would seem that scholars are heavily in favor of the resurrection conclusion. However, a closer look (informed in large part by an excellent article by Richard Carrier) shows a very different conclusion.

This is not peer-reviewed scholarship

Habermas admitted in 2012, “Most of this material is unpublished.” With his data secret, his conclusions are uncheckable. Carrier says that Habermas has denied repeated requests to review his data.

Habermas cites the ever-growing list of articles in his database (3400 at last count), but what does the 75% refer to? Is it 75% of the database articles? If so, how does he deal with multiple articles from one author? Or is it 75% of authors? If so, are professors and street preachers weighed the same? If it’s 75% of scholars, are experts in the fields of theology and philosophy given equal weight with experts in history? What journals and other sources does he search?

Habermas assures us that he is careful to include scholars both friendly and unfriendly to the resurrection idea, but how do we know without seeing the data?

Who’s motivated to publish?

Suppose someone has an opinion on the resurrection and is considering writing an article, pro or con. Are those defending the resurrection more motivated to write an article than those who reject the idea? Are resurrection defenders more likely to find a publisher?

Carrier gives Atlantis as a possible parallel. Even though belief in Atlantis is a fringe idea, there may be more published articles defending the idea of Atlantis simply because defenders are more motivated, and those who reject Atlantis may feel that this is uninteresting or that the few skeptical articles out there already address the issue.

That Habermas’s database can’t correct for motivation and hasn’t been peer reviewed makes his conclusions useless, but there’s more.

A Christian bias

What fraction of the pro-resurrection 75% are Christians? Not having the data, we don’t know, but I’ll guess 99%. I’ll grant that Christians are as smart as anyone else, but does their religion bias their conclusions?

Here’s why I ask: consider polling a group of Muslim scholars. They have no bias against the supernatural, and they understand the Jesus story. But ask them about the resurrection, and they will universally reject it.

The Christian might respond that Muslims are biased by their religious beliefs to dismiss the resurrection. That’s true, but then why are Christians, who are biased to accept the resurrection, allowed to weigh in on this issue?

Is 75% a big deal?

Habermas admits that 25% in his database reject the resurrection claim. Even if we were inclined toward Habermas’s conclusion, is this the foundation on which to build the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and most of some scholars accepting the resurrection ain’t it.

In an Olympic figure skating event, just 75% of the judges might pick the winner, but that’s not a reliable route to validate a fundamental truth claim.

Or maybe that 75% is compelling!

William Lane Craig defends Habermas’s conclusion this way:

[Ask those who reject Habermas] what source of information they have that leads them to disagree with over 75% of the trained scholars who have studied this question. How did they come by such insight? How would they refute the evidence of the resurrection which has led so many scholars to the contrary conclusion?

Habermas is happy to reject the conclusion of 99% of the experts who understand evolution (see his attitude toward evolution here, here, and here). Ditto for William Lane Craig. Neither is in a position to object to anyone rejecting the 75% conclusion about the resurrection.

There are no grounds by which a layman like Habermas can reject a consensus in science. This problem doesn’t exist within religion because there is no consensus! (I explore that more with the example of the Map of World Religions.)

Habermas ignores the all-important “excluded middle”

Habermas counts votes in only two categories. To see the mistake behind this, consider a 1979 ad for the Bic razor that claimed, “In our test, 58 percent found the Bic shave equal to or better than the Trac II shave.” Notice that the 58% is composed of two subsets: those who found the Bic better (it was the cheaper razor, so I’m guessing this was quite small) plus those who had no opinion. We can only guess, but suppose the fractions were 8% for Bic better, 50% couldn’t tell, and 42% for the Trac II better. With this, the message is suddenly quite different, and it all comes from slipping the large Undecided group into your preferred category.

That’s the problem with Habermas. He counts two categories of authors who cared enough to write a paper and succeeded in getting it published, (1) those in favor of the resurrection hypothesis and (2) those not. But don’t forget category 3, “Other,” composed of scholars who have no opinion or who couldn’t be bothered.

Historians may be the only category of scholar qualified to have a relevant opinion on the historicity of the resurrection (though Habermas doubtless includes many philosophers and theologians). Few historians of pre-Roman Britain or ancient Egypt or Ming dynasty China will have written about the resurrection, but the consensus of historians universally scrubs supernatural stories out of history. Historians are an enormous silent majority that Habermas doesn’t count and that would discard his conclusion if he did count them. Relevant scholars who reject or have no opinion on his hypothesis doubtless overwhelm those who accept it.

What biblical scholar can speak freely?

How many of the scholars in Habermas’s database signed a statement of faith at their place of employment? That is, how many are not free to follow the facts where they lead but have their jobs and even careers on the line if they stray?

Consider what happened to Mike Licona when he wrote a 700-page book in 2010 containing a single conclusion objectionable to fundamentalists. He lost two jobs and was out on the street. Christian scholars in such positions are unable to be objective, and every scholarly conclusion of theirs is suspect. Their statements of faith hang like a Sword of Damocles over their heads.

This includes Gary Habermas himself. The statement of faith at his Liberty University says, in part, “We affirm that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, though written by men, was supernaturally inspired by God so that all its words are the written true revelation of God; it is therefore inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.”

Dr. Habermas, about that conclusion of yours: is that you or your faith statement talking?

But forget all that for a moment. Let’s pretend this argument—“Given the crucifixion, heavy stone, and guarded tomb, how do you explain the empty tomb??”—is strong. The most we could say in response is, “Wow, good question—I dunno.” Habermas wants to jump to the most ridiculous option possible, that it’s all part of the perfect (yet unaccountably convoluted) plan of a supernatural being who created the universe.

Anything explained has been explained to date with naturalistic explanations, and Habermas would need to show why this situation is the counterexample. Until then, we already have a bin for the hundreds of other false supernatural tales, and that’s where this one belongs.

Recommendation to Habermas

Habermas says about his database, “The result of all these years of study is a private manuscript of more than 600 pages.” That’s an impressive project, and yet his argument crumbles under scrutiny. This frequently-cited database is no proxy for a simple poll of historians.

A poll would have been far less work, and it actually would’ve provided useful information—just not the information that Habermas would like to see.

Continue: “Responding to the Minimal Facts Argument for the Resurrection”

If Christ has not been raised,
our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
— 1 Corinthians 15:14

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/17/14.)

Image credit: Paolo Braiuca, flickr, CC