In the comment thread of my last post, some of us mentioned that it’s hard for us to understand the point of view of Christians who believe the Bible can be inspired by God, without holding to the doctrine of inerrancy. unkleE left the following comment:
How is it that in everything else in life – whether it be ethics, or politics, relationships, science, history, law, even disbelief – we are willing to make decisions based on non-inerrant evidence and reasoning, but when it is belief in God we require inerrant evidence? I reckon your first thought might be that the stakes are so much higher. But that logic applies to disbelief as well. If we applied that logic, no-one would be an atheist because they didn’t have inerrant knowledge for that conclusion. You would not have any belief either way until you gained inerrant knowledge.
He then suggested that I might want to do a post on this topic (you’re reading it!), but there were also a couple of other comments that I think are worth including here. nonsupernaturalist said this:
My answer would be that ethics, politics, relationships, science, history, and law do not involve supernatural claims. When someone makes a supernatural claim, the standard of evidence required by most educated people in the western world to believe that claim is much, much higher than a claim involving natural evidence.
Let’s look at “history”. If someone tells me that most historians believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon or that Alexander the Great sacked the city of Tyre, I accept those claims without demanding a great deal of evidence. However, if someone claims that the Buddha caused a water buffalo to speak in a human language for over one half hour or that Mohammad rode on a winged horse to heaven, I am going to demand MASSIVE quantities of evidence to believe these claims.
I think that most Christians would agree with my thinking, here, until I make the same assertion regarding the bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Then Christians will shake their heads in disgust and accuse me of being biased and unreasonable.
No. I am not being biased and unreasonable. I am being consistent. It is the Christian who is being inconsistent: demanding more evidence to believe the supernatural claims of other religions than he or she demands of his own.
And it isn’t just supernatural claims. Most educated people in the western world would demand much more evidence for very rare natural claims than we would for non-rare natural claims.
Imagine if someone at work tells you that his sister just gave birth to twins. How much evidence would you demand to believe this claim? Probably not much. You would probably take the guy’s word for it. Now imagine if the same coworker tells you that, yesterday, in the local hospital, his sister gave birth to twelve babies! Would you take the guy’s word for it? I doubt it.
So it isn’t that we skeptics are biased against Christianity or even that we are biased against the supernatural. We are simply applying the same reason, logic, and skepticism to YOUR very extra-ordinary religious claim that we apply to ALL very rare, extra-ordinary claims, including very rare, extraordinary natural claims.
And Arkenaten said this:
I cannot fathom how you can disregard something like Noah’s Ark as nonsense and yet accept that a narrative construct called Jesus of Nazareth could come back from the dead.
Personally, I feel very much the same way that nonsupernaturalist does. The first part of unkleE’s question that I’d like to address is his statement about nonbelief:
If we applied that logic, no-one would be an atheist because they didn’t have inerrant knowledge for that conclusion.
I think this depends on what one means by “atheism.” I’m not really interested in trying to determine what the official definition of the term is; rather, I’d like to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing within the confines of this discussion. When I refer to myself as an atheist, I simply mean that I don’t believe any of the proposed god claims that I’ve encountered. I’m not necessarily saying that I think no gods exist, period. And if I were to say that, I’d give the caveat that I could easily be wrong about such a belief. This notion of atheism, the position that one hasn’t been convinced of any god claims, is often referred to as “weak atheism” or “soft atheism.” Personally, I think that should be everyone’s default position. No one should be a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Christian until he or she has been convinced that the god(s) of that particular religion exist(s). If we didn’t operate in this way, then we’d all immediately accept the proposition of every religion we encountered, until its claims could be disproven. This would make most of us Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, pagans, and atheists all at the same time. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. So on those grounds, I don’t agree with unkleE’s assertion that we would need inerrant information to not believe something.
Furthermore, when it comes to the claims of Christianity, I can accept or reject them completely independently of what I think about the existence of god(s). Many times, discussions about the evidence for and against Christianity slide into discussions about whether or not a god exists. People bring up the cosmological and teleological arguments. While those discussions can be important, I think they are really just distractions when we’re talking about a specific religion. I’m okay conceding that a god might exist, so I’d rather focus on the pros and cons of Christianity to see if it could possibly be true. After all, it could be the case that God is real, but Christianity is false.
unkleE’s comment started like this:
How is it that in everything else in life – whether it be ethics, or politics, relationships, science, history, law, even disbelief – we are willing to make decisions based on non-inerrant evidence and reasoning, but when it is belief in God we require inerrant evidence?
To piggy-back off the comments I just made, I don’t necessarily require inerrant evidence to believe in God. I think the necessity for inerrancy comes from the kind of god being argued for. The Abrahamic religions teach that there is one God who is supreme. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, completely just, etc. I know there are sometimes caveats placed on those labels. For instance, can God create a rock so large that he can’t lift it? Arguments like that illustrate that being all-powerful doesn’t mean he’s outside the laws of logic. And the same goes for all-knowing. It’s sometimes argued that he knows all that can be known… perhaps there are some things that can’t be known? The waters can get muddy pretty quickly, so I think it’s best to refer back to the religion’s source material (the Bible, in this case) to learn more about the characteristics of this god.
In the Bible, God seems to be big on proofs. When God wanted Noah to build an ark, he spoke to him directly. Noah didn’t have to decide between a handful of prophets each telling him different things — God made sure that Noah knew exactly what was required of him. The same was done for Abraham when God wanted him to move into the land of Canaan, and when God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac. When God called Moses to deliver the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, he also spoke directly to Moses. And on top of that, he even offered additional proofs by performing signs for Moses. And when Moses appeared before Pharaoh, God again used signs to show Pharaoh that Moses did indeed speak on God’s behalf. Miraculous signs were used throughout the period of time that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness. And we can fast forward to the time of Gideon and see that God used signs as evidence then as well. Throughout the Old Testament, signs were given to people to show God’s involvement and desires. There are even examples where God punished those who listened to false prophets who hadn’t shown such signs, such as the man of God who listened to the instruction of an old prophet who was actually lying to him. God sent a lion to kill the man (I Kings 13:11-32).
The New Testament is no different. Jesus and his apostles perform all kinds of miracles as evidence of Jesus’s power. When the Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Satan, he pointed out how nonsensical that would be, showing that such miracles were intended as a display of God’s approval (Matt 12:24-28). And the Gospel of John also argues that these miracles were intended as evidence:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
— John 20:30-31
Not only did Jesus and his disciples use miracles to make their case, they also appealed to Scripture. Throughout the New Testament, you find references to the Old: “as it is written,” “as spoken by the prophet,” etc. That in itself doesn’t necessarily make the case for inerrancy, but it at least shows that they expected the scriptures to be accurate.
If God cared so much during the time periods talked about in the Bible, why wouldn’t he care just as much today? How can Jesus say that “not one jot or tittle of the law will pass away” if God’s not really all that concerned about how accurate the “jots” and “tittles” are? And yes, like unkleE said in his comment, I do think the fact that the stakes are tremendously high on this question makes it that much more necessary to have good evidence. While the Bible gives us countless examples of those who received direct communication from God or one of his representatives, we find ourselves living in a time when we’re surrounded by competing claims about which god is true, and which doctrines are the right ones. I used to believe that the one tool we had to cut through all that noise was the Bible. It was the one source we could go to to find what God wanted from us. And we could trust that it was his word because of the amazing prophecy fulfillments that it contained and that despite its length and antiquity, it was completely without error. In other words, I thought it was a final miracle to last throughout the ages. And because of its existence and availability, we no longer needed individuals who went around performing miracles and spreading the gospel.
That’s how I saw the world. Of course, since then, I’ve discovered that the Bible doesn’t live up to that high standard. I have many other posts that deal with its various problems, so I won’t try to detail them now. But I simply don’t see how the God portrayed in the Bible, a god who is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, etc, would inspire individuals to write down his incredibly important message to all of mankind, yet not make sure they relay it completely accurately. It doesn’t always agree with itself, it contains historical and scientific mistakes, and sometimes it advocates things that are outright immoral. It’s understandable why a number of people would fail to be convinced by such a book; therefore, it would be impossible for an all-loving and completely just God to punish people when they’re merely trying to avoid the same fate as the man of God who trusted the old (false) prophet.
Finding Truth 
I have ordered popcorn and wait with bated breath for UnkleE’s next move: Will he proceed with more philosophical mind games or will he admit that he uses a very different standard of probability for his extra-ordinary claims than he himself uses for the extra-ordinary claims of other religions, palm readers, and disciples of the paranormal.
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Does one need to consult a philosophical formula to evaluate the probability that the Buddha caused a water buffalo to speak in a human language for over thirty minutes?
No. One only has to use common sense.
Does one need to consult a philosophical formula to evaluate the probability that Mohammad flew on a winged horse to heaven?
No. One only has to use common sense.
Does one need to consult a philosophical formula to evaluate the probability that a first century, three-day-brain-dead preacher walked out of his sealed mausoleum and flew off into outer space?
No.
One only has to use…
…good ol’ common sense!
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“I’m surprised that your faith starts with what the historians say about Jesus. ….. didn’t your faith actually come from something else first? Please correct me if my assumptions are wrong here.”
Hi Nate, this seems to be a good place to start answering a slew of questions and comments.
1. I was not brought up as a christian. God was virtually never mentioned in our home, though if you’d have asked them, I think my parents would have said they believed in God in some vague way. But I was sent to Sunday School as a child (this was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when that was sort of the normal and decent thing to do). My conscious belief began when I was 15, and my commitment to following Jesus when I was about 17.
2. So it is true, historically, that I came to belief with different basic beliefs than I have today. But even then those beliefs never included inerrancy. The Reformed faith I was taught as a teen believed in “infallibility” (the Bible will reveal spiritual truth correctly) but not inerrancy. After 50+ years of reflection, I still hold a similar belief today, though much less mechanical.
3. And yes, of course my beliefs are based on more than just the historical facts, same as everyone else. Using your example of the resurrection, there are certain historical facts which the majority of secular historians accept – Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, his tomb was later found empty and/or his disciples had visions of him alive afterwards, he was believed to have been resurrected from the very early days of the christian movement, and this belief was an important factor in the growth of christianity.
Now what do we do with that information if we are willing to accept what the historians say? You do one thing with it (I guess you probably think the disciples saw visions because they were suffering serve cognitive dissonance, there was a mistake about the empty tomb, and the rest is history) whereas I believe the stories that they told because I think the external evidence points to there being a God, and Jesus was his representative on earth, so this wasn’t at all impossible. But the point is, both of us have a mixture of evidence and opinion in our final beliefs. But mine (and I presume yours) start with the evidence and build.
4. While I think the historical process we each went though to get to our current beliefs is interesting, and tells us something about each other, I don’t think it bears on the rationale for belief. So when asked, I always give my current rationale.
Hope that explains things. Thanks.
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“No, I’m not assigning equal probability. I am not assigning any probability at all.
You are right, that I have no opinion either way. And that’s because it doesn’t actually matter to me (either way). But it does not follow that I see either as equally likely. If anything, I see both as ill defined, as unclear.”
Hi Neil, thanks for that clarification. My only question to you would be this. Do you think your comments online would show an equal number critiquing christian and anti-christian views? If not, what does that say about your beliefs? I don’t know, just interested in your perspective. Thanks.
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Hi Dave, there are several Daves around these sorts of discussions, so I don’t know which one you are or whether I have discussed with you before. But g’day!
“Trying to suggest that P2 should be given equal standing with P1 is not logical.”
I’m sorry, but you have misunderstood me here. I never ever suggested they should be given equal standing. All I did was ask the questions, to which I have received several answers, and observe that since they are of the form A and ~ A, the combined probabilities should add to 1. And because they are both propositions, it is reasonable to assess them by looking at evidence.
“Let’s pick the proposition that Jesus came back from the dead. ….. Using our common knowledge that all of the billions of 48+ hour dead bodies throughout human history have remained dead we can accept that our starting position should be 100% P1 is false. “
I think almost any philosopher would tell you there are a couple of fallacies here. Here’s a few thoughts:
1. Your statement that all the billions of dead through history have remained dead is an assumption which you cannot prove. All you can say is that when we have tested scientifically, you aren’t aware of any that have come back to life. But there have been many claims of resurrections over the years, and some of them have good medical evidence, most don’t. If you believe in evidence, you’d have to check out all these cases before you can say what you said.
2. Worse, your assumption is the very thing we are discussing. So you prove< Jesus couldn't have been resurrected by assuming non-one can be resurrected. That is another fallacy.
3. Applying your assumptions about other people to Jesus is also a fallacy. Consider the statement hypothetically made in the year 2005; "There are hundreds of millions of people in the US, so odds of anyone becoming President of the US are very very small. And no black man has ever become President. Therefore it is almost impossible that Barack Obama will become President."
The problem with that statement is that Obama belonged to a subgroup of people in the US who had a much greater chance of becoming President (he was a lawyer, a good speaker, he was political engaged, he was a candidate, etc). So the general odds don't apply to him.
Same with jesus. By all measures he wasn't an ordinary Joe. Ordinary Joes don't start religions that grow to 2-3 bn followers, and become perhaps the most influential person in history. Ordinary Joes don't convince people they have powers of healing, that they are the Messiah, etc. Jesus belongs to a rare group of people that can plausibly be considered the son of God. (I know you don't believe that, but many do, then and now.)
So the question isn't, for me, as you stated it. For me it is this. If the evidence of cosmology, the human brain and human experience points strongly to God existing, as I believe it does, and if Jesus was the son of God on earth, as I believe from his life that he was, how likely is it that God would raise him from the dead, and what is the evidence that he did?
I think most historians would say that the barriers to belief in the resurrection are not historical (i.e. the evidence is good – if it was a non-supernatural event, there'd be no reason to question it), they are metaphysical. And I have no metaphysical barriers to belief, though presumably you do.
So you see, it isn't as clear cut as you say, it depends a lot on the beliefs that we each bring to the question. I don't expect you to agree with me, but I'm hoping you'll see that if you want to frame a good argument against the resurrection, or against God belief, it would be good to avoid fallacies, assumptions and instead address the beliefs christians actually have. Thanks.
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“he was believed to have been resurrected from the very early days of the christian movement”
What did the women do after they found the empty grave ?
Luke 24:9-11 9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.
What did Peter do ?
Luke 24:12 ” Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.”
Let’s check John
John 20:2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
It doesn’t appear they knew anything about Jesus’ Resurrection , unkleE. How early do you want to go ? The resurrection appears to have been added later for Constantine’s Bible. Where am I going wrong ?
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“Ordinary Joes don’t start religions that grow to 2-3 bn followers, ”
I guess Muḥammad would then be elevated right along with Jesus ? Right ?
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Hi Jon, I don’t know if we have ever discussed before, so I want to clarify something to you before I respond. Nate and I are old (internet) friends. We disagree with each other and we discuss robustly but politely. I responding to your comment, I might appear critical of Nate, but you should know that I respect Nate greatly, I just think he is mistaken on some things.
So Nate thinks that if God existed, he would provide much better evidence, and if the christian God existed, the Bible would be inerrant, or close to it. It is him who has raised the issue of inerrancy, not me. I simply say that belief in God should be decided on the weight of evidence, not on some assumption of how God “should” have acted. So I think Nate’s emphasis on inerrancy, which I believe comes from his time in a very fundamentalist church, is a mistake that cuts him off from opportunities to know what I believe is the truth. He, of course, disagrees.
So as you rightly note, I don’t make any argument along the lines of the one you put forward. I recognise that other christians do, so if he was arguing against those christians, Nate would validly discuss inerrancy. But in his general beliefs, I belief his emphasis on inerrancy leads to him throw out the baby with the bathwater, to corn a phrase.
“How is it that in everything else in life – whether it be ethics, or politics, relationships, science, history, law, even disbelief – you evaluate the reliability of the evidence, but when it is belief in God you criticize us for considering the reliability of the evidence?”
I think this is a misunderstanding. I use evidence for all those things, as most people do. And I also do with belief. And I don’t criticise non-believers for considering the reliability of the evidence, in fact if I criticise them, it is for not adequately considering the evidence. In this case, I think a focus on inerrancy leads Nate to inadequately consider some of the evidence.
Hopefully I’ve cleared that up. If I’ve misunderstood you, please clarify. Thanks.
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“But there have been many claims of resurrections over the years, and some of them have good medical evidence, most don’t.”
False.
There have been many claims of REANIMATIONS which may or may not have good medical evidence to support them, but there has been only ONE resurrection claim: Jesus of Nazareth.
The Resurrection of Jesus claim is very different from the typical reanimation claim: “Mr. Jones had a massive heart attack and stopped breathing. The doctors pronounced him dead. His body was taken to the morgue. Hours later the employees of the morgue noticed that he was breathing! Jesus answered our prayers and brought Brother Jones back to life!”
Nope.
No such thing happened to Jesus, if we are to believe Christians and their holy book. Jesus didn’t just wake up; pick up with his usual life; live for a few more decades and then die again. Jesus allegedly walked out of his sealed tomb with a heavenly (supernatural), glowing, body which could teleport between cities and walk through locked doors! It was a body that did not need food or water…except when Jesus had an occasional craving for broiled fish, once in the Upper Room and once on the shores of the Sea of Tiberius…and…his body was a supernatural body that would never get sick and would never DIE!
So, you see, UnkleE you cannot equate the thousands of “reanimation claims” with the resurrection claim. What Christians claim to have occurred on that first Easter morning had never happened in the past and has never happened since. It was a unique, ONE time event.
So what is the probability of a very extra-ordinary event which even its proponents admit has never happened before or since? Answer: Very, very, very low.
That is basic statistics.
So how do you arrive at your much higher probability, Unkle E? I believe it is this: You conflate evidence for the existence of a Creator for evidence for the existence of Yahweh/Jesus the Christ. The problem is, however, that you need the Resurrection to prove the existence of Yahweh/Jesus the Christ. So you have created a circular argument, known as Begging the Question. Here it is:
1. The very extra-ordinary (never having occurred before or since) Resurrection is a historical fact because Yahweh exists.
2. Yahweh exists because there is evidence for a Creator and because the Resurrection is an historical fact.
No can do, Unk.
You need to accept and admit that the probability of a resurrection (not a reanimation) is incredibly low. Then you need to accept and admit that the evidence for the existence of a Creator can in no way be assumed to be evidence for Yahweh. We need specific evidence for the existence of a being named Yahweh. And finally, you CANNOT use the Resurrection as evidence for the existence of Yahweh. That is a circular argument. You need to prove the Resurrection based on its own evidence, which unfortunately for Christians, is based on four anonymous books written DECADES after the event, two of these books plagiarizing very large percentages of the content of the first, written in far away lands by non-eyewitnesses.
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Yes, I believe we met in this thread some time ago. I’ve read a lot of Nate’s archives (and many of the comments!), and I’ve enjoyed many of your discussions.
https://findingtruth.info/2016/05/10/in-case-you-noticed-all-the-recent-comments/#comments
Perhaps I have misread Nate, but my impression is that he would be open to finding the Christian God plausible if the weight of the evidence for the Christian God were sufficiently compelling. But the broad unreliability of the Bible counts as a significant piece of evidence against the Christian God. While I invite Nate to correct me if I am wrong, I doubt that Nate would find a single Biblical error, by itself, to be a dispositive refutation of the Christian God if there were significant other evidence in favor of the proposition.
I think we can agree that inerrancy is not necessary for some versions of the Christian God proposition to be true.
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Hi Jon, yes, we can agree on that!
And I’m sure you are right that Nate is open to evidence and he finds what he sees as the unreliability of the Bible as evidence against the Biblical God.
Just by way of explanation, the title of this post is “Is It Fair to Expect Inerrancy from the Bible When We Don’t Expect It from Other Sources?”, so that is why I am talking about inerrancy.
Thanks.
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HI Nate, we come back to our original comments. As usual, I having exchanged views, I don’t wish to drag this out, so I’ll try to work towards a conclusions.
” I don’t mind having a burden of evidence for my position.”
No, I know that is true. My point was simply this.
In our discussion on your previous post, which sparked this post, you said: “I don’t really understand why someone would still believe Jesus is divine and the god of the Bible is legit once they recognize that the Bible is not inerrant and likely has some uninspired material.” So you linked reasons to disbelieve with inerrancy. I suggested that your standards of evidence were inconsistent.
Then in this post you say: “When I refer to myself as an atheist, I simply mean that I don’t believe any of the proposed god claims that I’ve encountered. I’m not necessarily saying that I think no gods exist, period.” In the context, it seemed to me that you were using this to justify an inconsistent standard of evidence.
So I asked you the question about the two propositions, and you were quite clear that you supported P2 – that the christian God doesn’t exist. But this is a stronger statement than the one in this post. The first says no belief, the second says strong disbelief.
That is really the point I wanted to make. It’s the difference between lack of belief (a neutral view) and disbelief (a strongly negative view). And it seems to me that many who make a claim to a neutral view, as you appeared to, actually have a strongly negative view, as it now appears that you do.
Do you think I have summed that up fairly?
“I’m not sure that I would actually require any kind of inerrant evidence to make me believe such a god exists. However, if that god really is perfect and really does want to impart a message, then I would expect the message to be perfect.”
And here is the guts of our disagreement. Why would you expect that, granted that NOTHING in this world is perfect? And why do you keep treating the Bible as if it is a direct message from God? (I know that is what some christians claim, but it was mediated through human beings and that makes it at most indirectly from God, and more likely a human document with divine inspiration.) I feel you have made an assumption that is a straw man for me and most christians. You can reasonably use that assumption in discussion with inerrantists, but not as a general reason to disbelieve, surely?
That would leave us with what has been the main substance of your comments here – that you don’t believe the Bible provides reliable enough evidence for you to believe in Jesus. I think that is a quite understandable and reasonable statement, even though I disagree with it. I just think all you need to mount that argument is the Bible as historians see it, and that is all I need to argue my case too. I think inerrancy is a red herring, and I kind of think this discussion has demonstrated that.
“I do think inerrancy would probably be one of the Bible’s characteristics, if it really had been divinely inspired. And honestly, I think that’s what most Christians assumed throughout history”
I don’t think this is so. For a start, there is much argument within christianity about the meaning of “inspiration”, and whether that is a good word to describe “God breathed”. People distinguish between verbal and non-verbal (ideas or message), as I’m sure you know. Inerrancy only possibly follows from full verbal inspiration, and my understanding is that it was only formally proposed by Protestants in the last 2 centuries and actually only formally adopted in the Chicago Statement of 1978. Catholics have had a longer view of it, but their view doesn’t seem to have been as strong as the Protestant version you would be familiar with. I think the truth is that for centuries christians trusted the Bible’s reliability without formulating a doctrine of inerrancy.
I think that just about sees me out. Thanks again.
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To pick up Ark’s point:
One can disbelieve parts of biblical texts by giving arbitrary priority to other passages in the same collection. How I used to do it was by comparing other verses to the general messages that were attributed directly to Jesus. So, if verses didn’t actually reinforce an idea that Jesus promoted, then I would have simply disregarded it or attributed it as part of the law that Jesus came to change.
It all rests on an idea that Jesus’s message (whatever it was, and it is quite debatable) is of the utmost importance.
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Replying to UnkleE:
I don’t spend a lot of time criticizing religion. I do criticize YEC creationism and ID, but there are Christians on both sides of those issues. Most of what I discuss and criticize is of a secular nature (unrelated to religion).
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Thanks Neil for clarification. “No further questions your honour!” 🙂
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This is where the Bullshit begins and why unkleE really, really, needs to be called out.
Let’s look at his comment carefully so he doesn’t sucker us all in once more.
Facts? There are no facts available concerning the character Jesus of Nazareth. Not a single one.
So this is a flagrant lie right off the bat.
And who are all these secular historians that agree on all these ‘’facts’’? And exactly what are all these non-facts based upon? I cannot credit a single secular historian who considers the bible historically accurate and certainly not where it pertains to anything concerning the character, Jesus of Nazareth.
And which ‘’Jesus’’ was this? And which are the secular historians unkleE is referring to?
I don’t recall him ever offering a single name of a genuine bona fide secular historian.
Was it really? And exactly where is this tomb? Which archaeologist/s has positively identified the tomb of the character, Jesus of Nazareth and is on record ( peer-reviewed) as stating so?
I cannot think of a single one. Maybe unkleE knows of one? Perhaps he would like to volunteer a name?
What disciples are these exactly? What verifiable non-biblical evidence is there for a single one of these so-called disciples? And who are all these secular historians that agree these disciple existed?
Maybe unkleE needs to be asked politely to offer the names and links to all these secular historians that he so often relies upon to plead his evidence-based consensus (sic) case as I truly believe (and many others I’m sure) that he has been spreading his special brand of Rose Fertilizer for far too long and getting away with an enormous amount of nonsense as his argument has more holes than a Galilean Fisherman’s net.
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unkleE, “The problem with that statement is that Obama belonged to a subgroup of people in the US who had a much greater chance of becoming President (he was a lawyer, a good speaker, he was political engaged, he was a candidate, etc). So the general odds don’t apply to him.”
“Same with jesus.”
No it is NOT. There is no subgroup of people more prone to be the object of a supernatural event. What about Balaam’s donkey ? What subgroup was he in that made it more likely for him to speak ?
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Hi unkleE,
Let’s come at this from the other direction: what’s the purpose of the Bible?
See, that’s interesting to me, because I tend to see this historical argument in the same way. Simply put, people don’t come back to life. There’s no reason for us to pretend otherwise — that’s why it would be a miracle if it really had happened. No reasonable person should jump on the conclusion that a miracle occurred unless there’s incredibly good evidence to support it. Christians simply don’t have that kind of evidence. The historical argument tries to mask the fact that the evidence isn’t strong enough, because these Christians believe for other reasons. Maybe they want to believe because they like the idea of going to Heaven, or maybe it’s just that they can’t imagine not believing. But there are all kinds of things that could have happened around Jesus’s death that might have sparked Christianity without needing an actual resurrection. So I find it difficult to believe that anyone truly believes in the resurrection just because of the historical “evidence.”
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I think so too, but I think it’s only because they didn’t have to. As I said in my earlier comment, the only reason people believed in a young earth, a 6-day creation event, geo-centrism, etc is because science hadn’t yet shown how inaccurate all that was. If God can make a donkey talk, and if he can create light, then why couldn’t he have done all the other fantastical things that many Christians today view as legend or allegory? When people think the Bible speaks for God, they assume they can trust everything it says. And why not? That’s a reasonable position. I think what’s less reasonable is seeing how the Bible isn’t all that reliable, but still thinking it’s somehow an authority on God.
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I think what fundamentalists get right is that you need some kind of standard. It doesn’t have to be perfect inerrancy, but it should at least be something like “The entire bible is an intended revelation from God”. Without that standard you end up with a pick-your-flavor God and you can select which parts you want to believe in. If OT genocide makes you uneasy you can chalk that part up to human error or human fabrication. You can say that anything Paul wrote was from his own mind and anything Jesus is said to have said was from God. You can say that the book of Revelation is completely false and not at all inspired by God. I think that once this starts to happen it is a slippery slope to realizing that you’ve created your own imaginary friend that thinks a lot like you do.
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Even if we skeptics would agree to Gary Habermas’ “Minimal Facts”, which includes an Empty Tomb, there are many, many, much more probable, natural explanations for all these “facts” before arriving at the probability of a supernatural resurrection.
The truth is that the evidence for the Resurrection is very, very poor. When push comes to shove, in every debate I have had with Christians regarding the Resurrection, their view regarding the probability of the Resurrection is really not based on the evidence for the Resurrection, but on the evidence for the existence of Yahweh. Their belief in the existence of Yahweh makes it impossible for them to see the weakness of the actual evidence for a Resurrection. But when asked for the evidence for the existence of Yahweh, they appeal to the evidence for a generic Creator.
This is the weak link in UnkleE’s worldview.
Bottom line: UnkleE and his fellow Christians need to provide the evidence for the existence of Yahweh, not a generic Creator. Without doing so, most educated non-Christians are never going to accept their ancient supernatural tale as historical fact.
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Habermas does not include the empty tomb among his Minimal Facts. Quote: “I have never counted the empty tomb as a Minimal Fact; it is very obvious that it does not enjoy the near-unanimity of scholarship.”
http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/southeastern_theological_review/minimal-facts-methodology_08-02-2012.htm
To the extent that many scholars do accept an “empty tomb”, remember that it might only mean that the followers could not find the body, or that the body was moved, not that the tomb (or grave) where the body was buried was miraculously empty. Personally, I think the more likely explanation is much simpler. Jesus died and was thrown into a common grave. His apostles had already fled the scene. The women who remained reported they were unable to find the body. One of the apostles either believed he would return (as the Messiah), or had a dream in which he seemed to speak to Jesus. This made him special — a divine being had chosen him! — so other apostles began claiming similar experiences, and the movement was reinvigorated around this new belief.
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Thanks for the info on Habermas’s approach, Jon! I didn’t know that.
Incidentally, I currently have a similar view about how the resurrection story got started.
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Great post. I think you addressed his points quite well, especially when you factor in the whole direct communication from god (was supposedly done back then, but not now). It goes back to nonsupernaturalist’s comment: if you are going to make an extra-ordinary claim, then there’s got to be *some* proof. No one today would take the crazy-guy-on-the-street’s claim that god is talking to him – no one.
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I can in no way approach this topic in the “scholarly fashion” as some of the others. But as I was reading the various opinions, a thought occurred to me.
Believers live and approach life based on biblical times, thus believing in all things supernatural. Non-believers see life from the perspective of the world we live in today, which tends to lack supernatural activities.
IOW, the believer is thoroughly convinced in the reliability of events that happened thousands of years ago, whereas the non-believer examines these same events in the light of modern thinking and finds them lacking in credibility and substance.
Of course, the ongoing “battle” is to convince the other person of the “error” in his/her thinking. 😉
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