Replies

Thank you for your non-hostile response!
I respect your saying that you regard the Biblical evidence as “adequate.” So what you’re saying is that Carl Sagan’s famous quote “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is too strict a standard, and that you prefer the guideline “Extraordinary claims are satisfied by ‘adequate’ evidence,” right?
Then shouldn’t you also find the eleven sworn affidavits testifying to the actuality of the “golden plates” of Mormonism at least “adequate?” In fact, there are probably hundreds of different supernatural events, inexplicable occurrences, etc. (levitating swamis, angelic apparitions, cornfield symbols, mutilated livestock, alien abductions, and even alien seductions) which all happened in the last fifty years, for which much more evidence than the Bible provides could be submitted. Why don’t you believe in them all?
I, for my part, consider it rational to accept (as “likely” - not as absolute “truth”) eyewitness accounts and the like only if it pertains to normal, everyday occurrences - and even then, only if no better evidence is available.
In the case of clearly extraordinary claims (”I am a time-traveller from the future!”, “I was abducted by gray-skinned aliens!”, “He was born of a virgin!”, “He walked on water!”, “He cursed a fig tree, and it withered!”) which may even contradict widely accepted physical laws, I feel that it is justified to demand harder proof - for example, results which can be independently verified by experts under laboratory conditions.
Do you disagree?

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Not only do I not feel hostile, I enjoyed your reply. It reminds me of a conversation I had in a very happy time in my life, in the seventies when I was working on my doctorate, long before computers and blogs and things like that. I got into a conversation with a young undergraduate history major who was rather full of himself and thought he had just about everything figured out. Claimed to be be “above the fray,” “objective,” that sort of thing. “Proud rational pessimism,” is how he referred to his agnosticism. [I did wonder what pride had to do with objectivity.] As it turned out, his agnosticism was a thin veneer over actual atheism. Agnosticism is like that. Agnostics, when presented with “adequate” argument, simply keep raising the bar.

Anyway, this young fellow was interested in paranormal phenomenon, and was convinced that Jesus’ resurrection was just another one of these unexplained wacky things that happen sometimes, a “great mystery of the universe,” sometimes discussed in magazines, in certain types of TV shows, or even in the pages of the National Enquirer.
In others words, in his view the resurrection of Jesus does not “explain” anything, except perhaps highlighting the primitive gullibility of those who believed it.

He was astounded that I actually sympathized with much of what he said. I, too, have noticed how much wacky stuff there is out there, with do-it-yourself religions abounding. Joseph Smith, to whom you alluded, was a real piece of work in that regard. Note that Mormons appeal to a “burning in your heart” to authenticate their belief. They would be embarrassed if you brought up Smith’s superstitious “seer stone.” Like Buddhists, they do not stress any particular historical locus of vindication for their faith. It’s all in this “burning of the heart.”

I spent far too much time on this fellow, actually, when I had dissertation work to do. And I don’t really feel inclined to spend much time on it with you, as you seem a little hostile like he was, and I am reluctant to cover old ground But I will take a crack at it, trying to abbreviate a little.

You are correct. There is no reproducible experiment that can “prove” the resurrection happened, but there are no reproducible experiments to “prove” some of things that Carl Sagan holds sacrosanct, either. I rather had in mind the logical activity that goes on in a courtroom trial, where guilt or innocence is at stake. If I were you, I wouldn’t depend too much on Sagan in any future dialog you have with anyone about this. Consider his famous, “The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Now that is pretty popish stuff, far beyond a mere alleged resurrection. You might even call it “an extraordinary claim.” People like Carl make fun of intelligent design, the argument for the existence of irreducible complexity, the anomaly of the self-assembling mousetrap, teleology, the presence of nonrandom, externally determined order, that sort of thing. Yet he and his colleagues keep their electronic ears tuned to the heavens, looking for ordered, coherent (“intelligently designed”) signals from heaven. I don’t think it would be unkind to call this cosmic hypocrisy.

Sagan’s comment and proof comes from the philosophy of David Hume, who said the probability for the authenticity of an alleged event is proportional to how many times it has seen before. Since natural laws are well-established, the probability for an alleged miracle approaches zero!

Thus, the more unusual something is, the more we should question it. Lesser known is the flaw in Hume’s logic: His point of view, when logically pressed, would forbid belief in any event that is alleged to have happened only once!

In contrast to Sagan, consider Aristotle’s famous dictum, as applied to ancient documents: “The benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not assigned by the critic to himself.” Aristotle was speaking of types like noted scholar Rudolph Bultmann, who loudly announced that “miracles simply do not occur,” then proceeded from this petrified axiom to claim to be “objectively” investigating the authenticity of New Testament documents.

If a miracle occurs, it is a contradiction of natural “law,” by definition! If miracles were common, they would not be miracles. One cannot predict the likelihood or credibility of a train’s arriving late by simply studying the train schedule (natural behavior).

Even unusual allegations can be handled open-mindedly. If you claim you had a purple striped zebra (but it had died recently), I would be willing to use Aristotle’s dictum to give you the benefit of doubt long enough to hear a lawyerish, courtroom-style defense, with pros and cons voiced by lawyers and eyewitnesses who thought in terms of logic and authentication, rather than faith and subjectivity.

If the Resurrection of Christ were an isolated event, like crop circles and alleged saucer sightings, I could actually agree with you. But it is set into a matrix of written documents, therefore it drags in the issues of textual purity and reliability, bibliographical soundness etc. These are all things that can be assessed, measured, compared, and judged. The miracle of the resurrection occurred only after it had been foretold centuries earlier. It is part of a coherent body of writings produced by 40 authors, each writing in different places, and in different moods and contexts, spread over huge amounts of time. It even records the foibles and flaws of the heroes of the faith. Of course, my young correspondent was not impressed. He just kept raising the bar.

There was a law professor named Simon Greenleaf, a skeptic of the resurrection. He was the author of a well-accepted law text on the Laws of Legal Evidence. Some of his Christian law students challenged him to take his own jurisprudential criteria and apply them to the Resurrection. All were surprised when Greenleaf wound up committing his life to Christ, authoring a text about how the resurrection stands up to legal scrutiny.

I could cite other instances of ex-skeptics, Lew Wallace, for example, who authored the novel Ben-Hur. In doing research for the book, involving an investigation of the last days of Jesus’ life, he professed conversion, and wound up writing “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.”

I understand your insistence that something like the Resurrection should demand extraordinary proof, but such proof would leave no room for faith. If you asked a girl to marry you, how much “proof” of her good standing in the community, or the probability that she would remain faithful, would you demand? Would you not accept a reasonable assurance, or would you hire a private detective? Would she not then prove her faithfulness?

Christ’s resurrection is presented as the vindication for His deity, but there is more to Christianity than the bare-bones intellectual belief that it happened. It is more like getting married. You must trust that Christ’s perfect track record as the Son of God has been credited to you, as if it were yours, so that eternal life is yours, as Christ’s righteousness imputed to you makes you acceptable to God the Father. God changes a heart, then works supernaturally in it, to conform it to the holiness of Christ. “Hostile” is the last thing my relationship with Christ makes me feel. Of course much of this would have sounded like philosophical gibberish to me at one time. God does not merely make you “be a good person.” He also changes the way you think, even if you previously considered yourself an intellectual.

No, I do not feel hostile at all, and I hope you do not. I only insist that whether Buddhism is “better” or “just as good” as Christianity is quite beside the point. I used to be quite the skeptic myself. The turning point for me was the discovery that all these objections people have about miracles have been around a long time, and none of them have prevented intellectuals from professing the Christian faith.

Remember not to make the worst mistake an intellectual can make on this subject: Rejecting that which you do not understand. If you are a serious seeker of truth, I am glad to climb into the arena of ideas with you. I will cater to your integrity, but I am not going to pander to your (or anyone else’s) arrogance. If you want to follow David Hume, then we will have to part ways. Otherwise, in deference to Aristotle, maybe we can talk.

The young fellow, by the way, finally quit writing to me. His last words were something like this: “You have convinced me that the literary authenticity of the bible is better than I thought, and that a person can be an intellectual and a Christian at the same time. But I have decided to explore Zen Buddhism. Good-by.

Go figure.

Best regards...