In a 2010 book, New Testament scholar Michael Licona said that the zombie apocalypse of Matthew 27:52, where many of the dead came back to life after Jesus died, didn’t literally happen. To many of us that’s an unsurprising observation, but this caused quite a controversy within the scholarly evangelical community.
According to Christianity Today:

[Norman] Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture. He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it “unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism.”

“Recant”? Is this the Inquisition? Was Licona, like Galileo, shown the instruments of torture and encouraged to choose the correct path?
To be clear, the only objectionable item in Licona’s entire 700-page book was the reinterpretation of this one incident in Matthew, and yet he was pressured out of his job as professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES), and his position as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board was eliminated. A single question about biblical inerrancy was, for some, intolerable.
The other side of the issue
We can try to see this from the standpoint of SES. They have a purpose statement, which says in part that the institution assumes “the infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Licona was likely asked to commit to this statement, and his book could be seen as a breach of this commitment.
These kinds of statements of faith are common, and I found them for Bob Jones University, Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and others. I attended the International Academy of Apologetics in 2011 (admittedly an odd place for an atheist to be for two weeks, but that’s another story), and their statement of faith, binding on the faculty, said that the Academy “accepts the Holy Scriptures as the revealed and inerrant word of God.”
Biola has a statement of faith that students must sign. No pretense of free intellectual inquiry here—students must accept the conclusions before their first lecture. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of the Inquisition, in 1997 Biola put three suspect faculty members “through multiple interviews to gauge their adherence to Biola’s doctrinal stances.”
Unexpected consequences
Let’s grant that a university can dismiss a professor for breaching a contract, even one so odd as the one at Licona’s former home. What’s rarely discussed is the consequence of these mandatory statements: they mean that Christian scholars at evangelical institutions are unable to be objective. With their job on the line, their hands are tied. They can’t always follow the facts where they lead. The public pillorying of Licona shows the consequences of intellectual honesty.
This incident has opened my eyes. Whenever I see or hear claims by Christian scholars, I will now wonder if a statement of faith applies. The next time I read an article by William Lane Craig, for example, I will read it with the caveat that he’s bound by Biola University’s doctrinal statement that says, in part, “The Scriptures … are without error or defect of any kind.” When he argues that the Bible is accurate, I won’t know if that’s really his honest conclusion or if that’s just his institution talking.
This even affects Norm Geisler, Licona’s chief accuser. Geisler is a professor at Veritas Evangelical Seminary, whose statement of faith says, “We believe the Bible … is verbally inerrant in the original text.”
How can we take seriously anything said about Christianity by Craig, Geisler, or indeed any scholar who is intellectually constrained in this way?

A thorough reading and understanding of the Bible
is the surest path to atheism.
— Donald Morgan

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 11/14/11.)

Photo credit: Vectorportal

Remember Uri Geller? He was the psychic (or entertainer) who bent spoons and performed similar demonstrations in the 1970s and later. He claimed that extraterrestrials gave him paranormal powers, but wet blankets like stage magician James Randi stated that all of Geller’s claimed paranormal demonstrations were done with conventional stage magic. Randi showed this by publicly duplicating all of Geller’s tricks.
Geller responded: “Sure, there are magicians who can duplicate [my performances] through trickery.” In other words, just because others can do these things as tricks doesn’t mean that he’s not doing them using paranormal powers. But Randi observed that if Geller was actually doing what he claims, “He is doing it the hard way.”
Miraculous Bible claims
I was reminded of Geller when I recently read a defense of one of the Bible’s miracle claims. Maybe it was the Genesis flood story (which looks a lot like the prior Gilgamesh epic). Or the creation story (which looks a lot like the prior Sumerian creation story). Or the Jesus virgin birth story (which looks a lot like prior virgin birth claims of other great men). Or the Jesus resurrection story (which looks a lot like prior dying-and-rising stories of other gods from cultures in the eastern Mediterranean).
It doesn’t much matter which Bible story the apologist was trying to shore up—the defense is the same. It’s the Uri Geller defense. Geller would say that just because they did his stunts through tricks doesn’t mean that he’s not doing them for real. And the Bible apologist says that just because other cultures anticipated some of the Bible’s fundamental miracle claims long before a Bible story was written doesn’t mean that that Bible story isn’t for real.
Granted. But if Randi can duplicate Geller’s demonstrations as tricks, that makes the null hypothesis that Geller’s paranormal claims are fraudulent. Geller has the burden of proof to show that this simple and obvious natural explanation is wrong. And if we have precedents for many of the Bible’s miracle stories, that makes the null hypothesis that these are just ancient Jewish versions of well-known supernatural stories. The apologist has the burden of proof to show that, while the other stories are just myths and legends, the Bible miracles actually happened.
Yes, but those earlier stories don’t count!
Some apologists try to dismiss the earlier stories, but early church father Justin Martyr tried to spin the similarities between Jesus’s virgin birth claim and those of other gods to his advantage. Why should the Greeks dismiss this miracle claim of Jesus, Justin asked, when they make similar claims about their own gods?
About the Jesus resurrection story, Justin speculated that the similar Dionysus story was planted in history by the devil himself. (I give Justin’s arguments in more detail here.)
Another angle is to emphasize that each Bible story is different from its precedents. Of course it’s different—if the Jesus story were identical to that of Dionysus (say), we’d call him Dionysus instead of Jesus. The question is: how can we trust a Jewish or Christian story as history when it came out of a culture swimming with older (false) stories with the same supernatural claims?
How we deal with similar claims.
Psychics might really be talking to the dead. Though that’s not where the evidence points, desperate customers want the psychics’ story to be true.
Crop circles might really be made by extraterrestrials. Though that’s not where the evidence points (creators have documented how they do it), crop circle enthusiasts dismiss the mundane explanation.
Uri Geller might be for real, though that’s not where the evidence points. Similarly, the Bible miracle stories might be true, but similar miracle stories in nearby cultures make copying by Bible authors the best explanation.
We can’t prove that the Bible’s miracle claims aren’t for real, despite all the precedents, but that’s the way to bet. The plausible natural explanation makes the supernatural explanation unappealing and unnecessary. Only someone with a desire to support a preconception wouldn’t follow the evidence where it leads.

I don’t want to argue
with people who believe the world is flat.
— Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong

Photo credit: Wikimedia

In 1917, two girls spent much of their summer playing by a stream. Repeatedly scolded for returning home wet and muddy, they said that they were playing with fairies. To prove it, they borrowed a camera and returned claiming that they had proof. That photo is shown here.
A total of five photos were taken over several years. The fairies were called the Cottingley fairies after Cottingley, England, the town where the girls lived.
A relative showed two of the photos at a 1919 public meeting of the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist organization. From there, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a devotee of spiritualism, took the baton. He wrote a 1920 article in The Strand Magazine that made the photos famous. To his credit, Conan Doyle asked experts to critique the photos. The opinions were mixed, but he decided to go with the story anyway.
Spiritualism, the popular belief that we can communicate with the spirits of the dead, was waning at the time of the article. Magician Harry Houdini, annoyed by fakers using tricks to defraud the gullible, devoted much time to debunking psychics and mediums in the 1920s until his death in 1926.
Houdini and Conan Doyle had been friends, but the friendship failed because of their opposite views on spiritualism. Conan Doyle believed that Houdini himself had supernatural powers and was using them to suppress the powers of the psychics that he debunked.
Research in 1983 exposed details of the Cottingley hoax, and the two principles finally admitted that they had faked the fairies by using cardboard cutouts of drawings copied from a book.
I learned of a modern parallel to this hoax at The Amazing Meeting in 2004. James Randi told the story of Project Alpha, during which he planted two fake psychics (Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, actually talented amateur magicians) in the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research in 1979. Randi contacted the researchers before planting his fakes to caution them how to avoid being deceived. The advice was thorough and genuine, and if they’d followed it, they would have uncovered the trickery.
Two years later, after the lab’s successes were well known within the psychic community and the fake psychics were celebrities, the deception was made public. The press was so bad that the McDonnell laboratory shut down.
The moral of the story: unless you’re a magician, don’t pretend that you can expose a magician. Said another way, just because you’re smart (and let’s assume both that the researchers were smart and most skeptics are smart), don’t think that you can’t be duped. This was Conan Doyle’s failing.
Magician Ricky Jay said, “The ideal audience would be Nobel Prize winners. … They often have an ego with them that says, ‘I am really smart so I can’t be fooled.’ No one is easier to fool.”

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden,
you are deemed fit for the [loony] bin.
If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it,
you are deemed fit to govern the country.
— Jonathan Meades

Photo credit: Wikimedia
Related posts:

• See all the definitions in the Cross Examined Glossary.

Related links:

• Paul Hoffman, “Why Are Smart People Some of the Most Gullible People Around?” Discover, 2/10/11.
• “Cottingley Fairies,” Wikipedia.
• “The Derbyshire Fairy,” Museum of Hoaxes.
• Emma Clayton, “Photographic expert uncovered hoax after testing cameras used by Cottingley cousins,” Telegraph & Argus, 11/17/10.