Friday, April 11, 2014

What We Owe the New Atheists


Last week I gave a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA, on the theme “What We Owe the New Atheists.”  You can read the text and/or listen to the audio of the lecture at TAC’s website.  The faculty, students, and guests who attended were a wonderful bunch of folks and I thank them for their very kind hospitality. 

488 comments:

  1. @ Ben_Yachov

    Happy Anniversary, Ben!
    His ways are not our ways, indeed.


    May the Lord bless you and your family!
    Да благословит и сохранит Бог тебя и твою семью!

    P.S.
    Sorry for being a bit familiar with the "ты" and all, it's just how these wishes work

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  2. Georgy,

    Thank God for echoes. (Or at least some species thereof.)

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  3. The mention of Aquinas' views on omnipotence reminds me of something I read on the old 'Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it' I don't think too highly of the original version, of course, but it can be rephrased as "Can God make X?" with 'X' defined as something that its maker cannot lift. This happens quite regularly in day-to-day life.

    This can be avoided by stating that "'Y is omnipotent means 'Y can do X' is true if and only if 'Y does X' is logically consistent." But this would seem to make a being for whom it is not logically consistent to do anything at all omnipotent.

    Two side notes: Happy anniversary, BenYachov, and Agents of SHIELD is awful, step2, and should count as a positive example against your case.

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  4. Fake Herzog,

    I took a look at the paper you linked to (thank you) and it was obvious right off the bat
    just how many assumptions they had to make that can not in any way be verified in a manner solid enough to stake a case on. If you look into the literature of skeptical investigations into all manner of supernatural claims, ghosts stories, esp, psychic predictions etc, you always start with amazing sounding stories. When you actually have access to the real people making the claims, and access to contemporary "evidence" what tends to happen is that people's stories change. What they were reported to have said, was misleading. Corroborating witnesses end up saying "Well…I didn't actually see exactly…that…what I meant was…" and evidence is not there. Amazing stories come apart and fizzle away. The recent story of the surgeon Eben Alexander is such an example, who claimed to have died and visited heaven. Read his own "eyewitness claims" in the book and it sounds incredible. But when we have access to the actual claimant, and to other purported people involved in such stories, and to evidence, guess what always happens? When interviewed, those who treated him contradicted some of his claims "Uh, actually, that's not exactly what happened…."

    And the miraculous fades away again into the prosaic. Benny Hinn fills stadiums with thousands of people thinking miracles are occurring, with all sorts of claims of miracle headings. But…when you have access to the eyewitness and to the evidence, you find out
    the diabetes is still there, the high blood pressure is still there, the person is still in a wheelchair, etc. They idea that, UNLIKE virtually every other supernatural claim that has been investigated, the eyewitnesses stories and evidence would hold up to scrutiny, not change, not be undermined by what we'd find might actually have been the case, is just a massive assumption.

    It is just an astonishing lowering of the bar. And it's why those types of papers would only ever be convincing to already committed Christians. The very fact that these purportedly "strong cases" are papers that mostly just circulate among Christians, to be found convincing only by Christians, highlights the difference between the type of actually strong empirical cases made scientifically. The type which have actually surpassed the crucibles of scrutiny necessary to pass into general acceptance, and which become accepted around the world, across cultures. Papers like these aren't even in the rear view mirror of what we normally demand for such incredible empirical claims.


    2 "But who is to say this will satisfy someone like Dawkins or Myers? Other folks on this thread have already pointed out that this could be an alien who is trying to trick us into believing it is god."

    The point would be on my argument that if Dawkins and Myers think consistently, they could be convinced. Whether they happen to be or not could be due to some psychological reason, or not thinking consistently (which happens to the best of us). After all, YOU think if they were thinking consistently they would be theists, right? But the fact they aren't convinced doesn't make you wrong. Same here. (Though, I do think they would be convinced - Myers isn't really thinking this through).

    Cheers,

    Vaal

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  5. BenYachov

    Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately you don't leave me much to work with since almost all of that avoided answering
    the rather direct questions I put to you. Tossing around labels like "Positivism" and alluding to that philosophy being dismissed isn't an argument or an answer. (And you seem to hold some naive assumptions about Positivism, Empiricism and the like. But nonetheless, it would be more productive to address what I write, not what you think about Positivism).

    Yes I read Prof. Feser's recent post and it substantiates what I'm getting at perfectly. He affirms that the metaphysical God - "that in which all things participate but which itself participates in nothing, that which thereby sustains all things in being -- that that “became flesh and dwelt among us.” 

    It is the most bizarre thing that, presuming you accept the above, that you'd then deny that God could provide empirical evidence for us.
    That's just what the Christian story said God did for some ancient eyewitnesses!

    What am I to do except just point to the contradiction?

    "I don’t recall saying God who is Pure Act can’t actualize any potency he wants directly. I just don’t think you can know scientifically it was he who did it. I would have to rely on eyewitnesses or other evidence but not empirical."

    First of all, eye witnessing IS empirical. Secondly, why in the world would you have to rely on eyewitnesses? Why couldn't God manifest evidence for you? Does he hate you and like those other "eyewitnesses" or something?


    "If God supernaturally sets a tree on fire vs me pouring Gas on another and lighting a match I don’t see how science can show anything other then both trees are now burned."

    This is always the most amazing thing to me, and it seems to occur whether I'm discussing this with the most naive-sounding Christian or more informed Christians such as those here. God is supposed to be the most awesome entity imaginable.
    All Mighty. And yet when it comes to asking for empirical evidence, suddenly the theist's imagination deserts him, and God's power shrinks to the point that God couldn't
    even prove himself to some wily skeptics in their lab coats!

    Ben, think about this with a bit more imagination: God, if all powerful and able to control matter in any way He desired, wouldn't have to do these hidden, ambiguous, little magic tricks as you depict there. He could manifest physically (as he did as Jesus) or even just manipulate matter to manifest a physical talking human Avatar - however he wants to do it - through which to interact with us. And an All Powerful God could direct the matter and energy to do any astounding thing He wanted as a demonstration of His power. It simply follows that an All Powerful Being COULD do such things.

    As I said, your replies betray a syndrome that I mentioned before: many Christians seemed to have put this bowl over their imagination when it comes to actually thinking of their God's power to produce evidence. Since you already accept the Christian story as the way God revealed Himself to humankind, then it's assumed "that's the type of evidence one ought to expect from and Omnipotent Being." Hence thinking God could, or should, do any more…there's got to be something wrong with we puny humans asking for that.

    It's weird that the atheist has to be the one to give more credit to God and what He'd be capable of.

    Vaal

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  6. Georgy Mancz,

    dguller seems to have taken over with some of the same type of points I'd be making.

    "The claim I'm making is that if what I describe here is what has happened (soul informing it's matter once again), that would require God, wouldn't it?"

    I believe, as duller I think has intimated, that this would be begging the question. It's assuming a resurrection happened, and happened in just the way that…conveniently…is the way you believe a God would have to have done it.

    Aliens, for instance wouldn't have to rend Jesus' substances apart - they could have produced an illusion he was ever dead. Hell, we can do that!

    But one hardly need to appeal to aliens. All sorts of natural explanations could apply, and the idea that a swoon-like theory is so improbable (when we have examples of that actually occurring) that one must appeal to the intervention of the Creator Of The Universe…it's just such a gratuitous leap to get the Christian where he wants to be.

    Not to mention there are so many hurdles to jump over just to try to establish as "facts" even what the apostles saw, or think they saw, or actually believed. As I mentioned above, there are just piles of stories of more rigorous scrutiny of groups of people making supernatural, or extraordinary claims, and when you have access to the people themselves and can check their stories against available evidence, the stories tend to alter and/or they are not supported by, or are contradicted by, the available evidence. There is simply no reason to think this thousands-year-old story would be some exception.

    But the fact we can't actually talk to the apostles or examine any evidence, which should be recognized as a liability, becomes a virtue in Christianinity because the flip side is that nobody can "prove" it wrong, so Christians can consider it a live option and take this eyewitness claims as more soundly established than is possible.

    Vaal

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  7. @Vaal

    >Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately you don't leave me much to work with since almost all of that avoided answering
    the rather direct questions I put to you. Tossing around labels like "Positivism" and alluding to that philosophy being dismissed isn't an argument or an answer. (And you seem to hold some naive assumptions about Positivism, Empiricism and the like. But nonetheless, it would be more productive to address what I write, not what you think about Positivism).

    Rather it seems to me you don’t want to engage me on the fundamental level so you are deflecting. From your own statements thus far it is clear you believe science alone is the basis for knowing if God exists or not. & that it is the basis for
    reliable knowledge in general. You clearly hold at least on the practical level some form of Positivism & address religion threw those rose colored glasses. I maintain with Feser and pretty much everyone here the existence of God is shown threw
    philosophy. Natural Knowledge in general comes from philosophy and science.

    Since we have no common ground on which to have a discussion your naive pleas I should “just address what you write” are irrational. Arguments have warrants & underlining assumptions & your warrants and mine clearly are not the same. Unless we work those out we will talk past each other and waste each other’s time.

    If you can’t recognize that simple fact then a discussion between us would be futile.

    >It is the most bizarre thing that, presuming you accept the above, that you'd then deny that God could provide empirical evidence for us.

    I dont recall saying such a thing? Of course God could reveal himself to us. But you can’t use science to discover his existence directly. You need philosophy. Did you even read the first link I gave you on positivism? If that is too much read the first link which is a two part essay called BLINDED BY SCIENTISM.

    >What am I to do except just point to the contradiction?

    Dude I’ve read a large chunk of Feser’s works. I know the context of his statements. You would be hard pressed to see him claim the existence of God is some type of empiricist Scientific conclusion. That is the antithesis of his whole approach. Proof texting his words and reading into them a self-serving meaning I know they don’t possess is a waste of my time.

    >First of all, eye witnessing IS empirical. Secondly, why in the world would you have to rely on eyewitnesses? Why couldn't God manifest evidence for you? Does he hate you and like those other "eyewitnesses" or something?

    I am confused here? Are we arguing the existence of God or are we arguing how we know if their are miracles(like the resurrection)? Because if its the later you would be better served talking to Mancz & the others. I only do Natural Theology & maybe I take the time to explain some of the details of revealed theology & doctrine. But that is my skill set.

    >This is always the most amazing thing to me, and it seems to occur whether I'm discussing this with the most naive-sounding Christian or more informed Christians such as those here. God is supposed to be the most awesome entity imaginable. And yet when it comes to asking for empirical evidence, suddenly the theist's imagination deserts him, and God's power shrinks to the point that God couldn't even prove himself to some wily skeptics in their lab coats!

    This is confusing? Are you asking if God can reveal himself directly to anyone if he chooses? Well obviously! Are you asking why doesn’t he? Well I don’t know & I only know given God’s classic nature he has no obligation to us to do so.
    You seem to be equivocating between what scientific evidence there is for God vs asking why doesn’t he just talk directly too us?

    Dude speak plainly. Ask one or the other & stop equivocating.

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  8. >And an All Powerful God could direct the matter and energy to do any astounding thing He wanted as a demonstration of His power. It simply follows that an All Powerful Being COULD do such things.

    Yes I personally believe the Sun likely Danced at Fatima but what does this have to do with what you consider evidence for God’s existence? What is your point?

    Are you asking “Why doesn’t God just reveal himself directly to us?” or are you asking “What is the scientific evidence for the existence of God”? Because what you are saying to me seems ambiguous?

    >As I said, your replies betray a syndrome that I mentioned before: many Christians seemed to have put this bowl over their imagination when it comes to actually thinking of their God's power to produce evidence.

    I don’t dispute if God wanted too He could set a bush in my yard on fire and start Yapping to me. I would dispute given His Classical Nature he has any obligation to do so for me.

    >Since you already accept the Christian story as the way God revealed Himself to humankind, then it's assumed "that's the type of evidence one ought to expect from and Omnipotent Being." Hence thinking God could, or should, do any more…there's got to be something wrong with we puny humans asking for that.

    As a Catholic I don’t believe divine revelation is the only way he reveals himself. Natural Theology and Philosophy come first. You are talking about some other “god” neither of us believe really exists & you don’t seem to want to learn about the God I actually believe in. Well that is your choice but I don’t see how we can have a productive conversation here?

    >It's weird that the atheist has to be the one to give more credit to God and what He'd be capable of.

    Actually it is unremarkable to me that too many Atheists (even those of good will like yourself) equivocate between different God concepts & are seemingly incurious as too what the difference is between them. But it is not helpful.

    Just saying.

    Peace to you.

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  9. Vaal writes,



    Take our everyday casual reasoning about our experience. You find water dribbling from the ceiling of your bathroom (as we did recently). How do you decide what caused it? The informed, rational person understands it could have multiple causes, hence you can't just arbitrarily believe "a leaking pipe" caused it if "a hole in the roof letting rain in" could also be the cause. You investigate and control the variables before saying "this caused it." Without a way of
    accounting for more than one cause and having a strategy for raising confidence in one explanation over the other, you are not being "epistemologically responsible" in your conclusions.

    Science is essentially our most rigorous response to this basic problem of variable causes/explanations, where we are most rigorous in dealing with the variables, showing the most care in where we proportion our confidence.


    The problem is that this is a very simplistic way of looking at the issues of human knowledge, and, what is more, the example is also simplistic and doesn't make room for all kinds of human knowledge.

    Certainly we may test things in a scientific way, more or less sophisticatedly, to come to knowledge. But we may also use reason and deduction to come to knowledge. We may come to historical knowledge using the historical method. There is the knowledge one may glean from art. We may even come to the knowledge of common sense and our everyday lives. These different kinds of knowledge operate, often, on different fields of human experience or reality. The scientific method is almost entirely concerned with what is quantifiably measurable and testable, for example. There may also be different levels of certainty for the different methods - often our historical knowledge is far from certain. But all these forms of knowledge are indeed knowledge, as long as they used properly, and men may combine them although they are not necessarily all reducible to one superior form (ignoring the question of the Noetic for now).

    I keep asking, but you keep avoiding showing why this picture of human knowledge is incorrect.

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  10. Vaal writes,

    Not to mention there are so many hurdles to jump over just to try to establish as "facts" even what the apostles saw, or think they saw, or actually believed. As I mentioned above, there are just piles of stories of more rigorous scrutiny of groups of people making supernatural, or extraordinary claims, and when you have access to the people themselves and can check their stories against available evidence, the stories tend to alter and/or they are not supported by, or are contradicted by, the available evidence. There is simply no reason to think this thousands-year-old story would be some exception.

    Your language is very slanted. You are implicitly ruling out miracles or the supernatural from that start.

    Anyway, witnesses to just about anything can give inconsistent and conflicting evidence, so I'm not sure what that proves.

    The paranormal has long been an interest of mine and I have read much about such incidents and I can say you are giving a decidedly one-sided account of them. There are a myriad of cases where the evidence of witnesses and other forms of evidence cannot easily be dismissed. Sometimes this evidence is just that of eye-witnesess (whom we have no especial reason to think they are lying) and sometimes there is physical evidence or evidence of some other sort.

    At one point I think you actually say that virtually every claim of the paranormal has been shown to be very unlikely to be true. This is just manifestly untrue.

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  12. @Vaal

    Sorry, but I wonder if you actually read my comments.

    “I believe, as duller I think has intimated, that this would be begging the question. It's assuming a resurrection happened, and happened in just the way that…conveniently…is the way you believe a God would have to have done it.”

    How many “if”’s do I have to put in order to make a point?. What question am I begging when I say that subsistent form being reunited to its matter is something only God can do?..
    “Aliens, for instance wouldn't have to rend Jesus' substances apart - they could have produced an illusion he was ever dead. Hell, we can do that!”


    Again, what makes you say that? Any concrete pointer to the involvement of aliens (also, remember the point made about aliens being parsimonious made earlier) that you happen to have?
    “But one hardly need to appeal to aliens. All sorts of natural explanations could apply, and the idea that a swoon-like theory is so improbable (when we have examples of that actually occurring) that one must appeal to the intervention of the Creator Of The Universe…it's just such a gratuitous leap to get the Christian where he wants to be.”


    And here again you’re appealing to vague Humean generalities. You have examples of a man surviving after being scourged, carrying the cross, crucified, hit with a spear, buried in a closed tomb? Do you really think one doesn’t need to be at all precise about the analogies one makes?..

    “Not to mention there are so many hurdles to jump over just to try to establish as "facts" even what the apostles saw, or think they saw, or actually believed. As I mentioned above, there are just piles of stories of more rigorous scrutiny of groups of people making supernatural, or extraordinary claims, and when you have access to the people themselves and can check their stories against available evidence, the stories tend to alter and/or they are not supported by, or are contradicted by, the available evidence. There is simply no reason to think this thousands-year-old story would be some exception”.


    Exactly what is “more rigorous” according to you is clearly suspect here (you’ve provided us with an exposition of your epistemology), and anologies are still vague.

    “But the fact we can't actually talk to the apostles or examine any evidence, which should be recognized as a liability, becomes a virtue in Christianinity because the flip side is that nobody can "prove" it wrong, so Christians can consider it a live option and take this eyewitness claims as more soundly established than is possible.”

    Do you realise eye-witness reports of dead men are still eye-witness reports in court? It would seem you’d want to abolish history altogether (yeah, subject Napoleonic Wars to rigorous testing and experiment). Again, as I suspect you’d want to reply with analogies to the present, the claim is that cases you site ARE NOT analogous: not the miracles, not the reports, not the circumstances of the report being made. And I insist that “event reported is supernatural” is not precise enough for the purposes of your argument.

    The cumulative case for the Resurrection deals with alternative hypotheses (yes, people still bother to make them, rather than retreating into “it just happened so long ago!”) and with the available evidence. If you believe its premises to be factually wrong (the point we’ll discuss, I hope, with dguller), it’s a different story. But positing aliens and other uknown factors akin to “deus deceptor” or “uknown objective historical processes” (a Marxist example, heh) is not it. And people understand that, that’s why, for example, mythicists seek to prove that the “Easter faith of apostles”, say, was unoriginal and can be wholly derived from existing systems, that St. Paul didn’t believe in the bodily Resurrection of Christ, etc.

    P.S.
    Sorry, something’s happened to the format.

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  13. Georgy:

    The approach is not to claim that “swoon theory”/the hallucination theory/Christ's body being stolen/conspiracy of the disciples (discussed here earlier, I believe) are impossible or improbable per se, but per accidens, in context of what we know. For example, Christ surviving scourging, carrying the cross, being crucified, then sealed off in a tomb, clothed there – all of this would preclude His survival. Context and what it allow for is what's paramount, not some vague Humean generalities.

    I don’t see that as solving the problem. Let us assume that the Gospels are historically correct on the following events:

    (1) Christ was crucified and died on the cross
    (2) Christ was buried in the tomb
    (3) Christ’s body was later found to be absent from the tomb
    (4) His apostles believed that they perceived a resurrected Christ and communicated this belief to others

    Clearly, (1) and (2) are not miraculous, and do not require any supernatural explanation. (3) also does not require a supernatural explanation, because it can be accounted for by some ordinary human being, or a group of ordinary human beings, simply removing Christ’s dead body from the tomb. (4) also does not require a supernatural explanation, because it can be accounted for by a group of traumatized and shocked followers experiencing a mass hallucination of their deceased leader, which served to minimize the cognitive dissonance that they were likely experiencing at that moment. And the evidence for (3) and (4) is that such events have happened before and thus are not farfetched and distant logical possibilities.

    Again, I find a natural account much more plausible than your account, i.e. that God himself had to assume a human form in order to share the torments and sufferings of humanity, including a tortuous and humiliating public death, in order to redeem mankind, and then God resurrected himself in glory and communicated with his followers. And if the only evidence for this account is the witness accounts that are much more likely explained by my account, then that further decreases the evidentiary support for your position.

    The innovativeness and novelty of concepts is what's important here.

    I am a psychiatrist, and I can assure you that the religious hallucinations and delusions of psychotic individuals are often both innovative and novel. And it occurs far more commonly than a God-man being killed by crucifixion, and then resurrecting himself and appearing to his followers.

    The main reason I mention the fact that the report was made rather early (again, before the writing of the Gospels, as evident in St. Paul's First Epistle to Corinthians (ch. 15), where he relays the account received from the Apostles shortly after his conversion and communication with the Apostles) is that it speaks very strongly against it being a myth, report being made soon after the event.

    It makes it more likely that the apostles believed that the resurrection happened is true, but it does not make it more likely that the resurrection happened is true.

    The religious and cultural background is mentioned as factor precluding the disciples simply inventing something that novel and radical for no apparent reason (no material present).

    But it was invented for a good reason, i.e. to reduce their cognitive dissonance. It would be similar to what occurred with the UFO cult, the Seekers, who believed that an apocalypse was to come at a certain date, and prepared zealously for it, and when it did not arrive, they simply transitioned to believing that their preparation and prayers were what averted the apocalypse. There was nothing in their original set of beliefs that spiritual exercises could avert the apocalypse, but when it did not occur, then simply invented the new belief to cope with their disconfirmed expectations. Again, not that farfetched.

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  14. The basic thought is that positing these deceptive villains without some independent indication of their involvement at the time of the Resurrection would make explaining why they aren't deceiving us all even now impossible: one needs to differentiate, and in this situation I believe it's at least very problematic, as the aliens/demons are indistinguishable from the “deus deceptor”.

    Interestingly enough, Muslims believe that Christ was not crucified at all, and it only appeared that he was crucified (see Qur’an 4:157-8). So, that’s another possibility that would have to be ruled out before the death and resurrection of a God-man theory could be more likely.

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  15. Ben:

    Congratulations on your 24th anniversary.

    I suppose I will have to reconsider my disbelief in miracles after all. ;)

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  16. dguller,

    One might say that the exact orthodox Christian interpretation of Christ's resurrection is less likely than the other scenarios you mention, but how would one be more certain that it was more likely than some sort of broadly supernatural explanation. How would you quantify that, given the context of Christ's revelation and Christianity itself?

    Why do you disbelieve in miracles? I thought you accepted Classical Theism? These seems strange beliefs to hold together.

    Also, although there are aspects of the complete orthodox Christian message that might be harder to accept (the exact doctrine of the incarnation and Trinity), from a Classical Theist perspective, one might argue there is a certain truth in the basic idea of Christ's death and resurrection - that God, taking on the body of the creature who is the image of the cosmos and God Himself in microcosm (as man as been traditionally understood), He symbolically (in the deepest sense) reenacts His engagement with creation, with man, which moves away from Him (privation) and He draws back. Passion. Resurrection. Redemption.
    As a Platonist this is certainly how I understand Christ's sacrifice. So, I don't think it fair to suggest the idea of God taking on human form and being sacrificed is absurd.

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  17. A couple of quick comments:

    1) First for Vaal -- I'm sorry but you are not engaging the evidence we have for Christ's resurrection (which at least dguller attempts to do) and as Georgy says, you retreat to Humean generalities to defend your position. We have a specific case in front of us -- deal with the specifics. There are other specific cases, for example of people who have suffered brain deaths and then have been revived and claim they experienced heaven. There is a robust literature on these experiences and while I can't speak to Dr. Alexander, many people who have had these experiences are credible witnesses to their miraculous journey (and know things about their friends and family that they shouldn't know -- e.g. a dead sibling that no one told them about because he/she was aborted).

    But as for first century Palestine, you are amusingly silent. That is because we have excellent testimony and an amazing record of what the evidence suggests can only be the death and resurrection of the Christ.

    2) That brings me to dguller. I give you credit for at least trying to engage the evidence. Unfortunately for you, all the points you make have been made by skeptics throughout the ages and have been found wanting. For example, you say,

    "I am a psychiatrist, and I can assure you that the religious hallucinations and delusions of psychotic individuals are often both innovative and novel."

    Right. Except the apostles and the Gospel writers weren't psychotic individuals. Nor was Paul, who also saw Jesus. These are very sane individuals who risked their lives for serious reasons. Again, as Georgy has said already, you have to look at the evidence in historical context. What was life like in first century Palestine? Were the apostles trying to establish a religious cult for power? For money? For women? None of these things -- just the opposite. They risked everything (and in the case of Paul, gave up his prior beliefs and secure position within the Jewish community) for what they believed was the truth. And not some psychotic truth but a beautiful and world-changing truth.

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  18. Fake Herzog:

    Right. Except the apostles and the Gospel writers weren't psychotic individuals. Nor was Paul, who also saw Jesus. These are very sane individuals who risked their lives for serious reasons.

    You seem to be under a misapprehension about psychosis. Not everyone who is psychotic is grossly disorganized, agitated and bizarre. One can experience hallucinations and delusions, and yet remain functional in every other domain that is unrelated to the hallucinations and delusions. For example, someone can be delusional about their wife cheating on them, and yet still remain function well as a father, an employee, a friend, and so on. So, the apostles and Paul may have experienced a hallucination, or maybe a few hallucinations, and yet otherwise have remained fully functional.

    Again, as Georgy has said already, you have to look at the evidence in historical context. What was life like in first century Palestine?

    Were there no people who experienced hallucinations and delusions at the time? Were there no individuals who misattributed supernatural explanations for otherwise natural phenomena? Given the fact that people in antiquity tended to ascribe hallucinations and delusions to demonic possession, I’d say that the likelihood of someone experiencing a psychotic symptom and ascribing its origin to a supernatural source would be highly likely.

    Were the apostles trying to establish a religious cult for power? For money? For women? None of these things -- just the opposite.

    None of this is relevant. Why they strove to establish their religion is beside the point. The issue is that if the source of their zealotry was a hallucinatory experience, and from that experience, they deduced and interpreted various reasons for persist in their mission, the bottom line is that their subsequent reasons are invalid due to the invalidity of the source of their reasons, i.e. the hallucination itself.

    They risked everything (and in the case of Paul, gave up his prior beliefs and secure position within the Jewish community) for what they believed was the truth. And not some psychotic truth but a beautiful and world-changing truth.

    Psychotic individuals are certainly capable of engaging in behavior that puts their lives at risk. So, the sheer fact that the apostles and Paul engaged in risky behavior on the basis of their beliefs does not make their beliefs more likely to be true at all. It just means that they believed in them fervently to the point of being willing to suffer for them. However, people suffer and risk much on the basis of false beliefs, whether rooted in psychosis or not.

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  19. dguller, Scott, Georgy, Herzog, Vaal, Jeremy, Step2 and everyone.

    Thanks.

    Peace! Tonight is the night of Miracles.

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  20. dguller:

    "(4) also does not require a supernatural explanation, because it can be accounted for by a group of traumatized and shocked followers experiencing a mass hallucination of their deceased leader, which served to minimize the cognitive dissonance that they were likely experiencing at that moment. And the evidence for (3) and (4) is that such events have happened before and thus are not farfetched and distant logical possibilities."

    So the disciples just hallucinated that Jesus was with them. All five hundred of them. For forty days. And since Jesus is reported to have met and interacted with groups of the disciples, not just individually, it would appear that they all just so happened to hallucinate him doing and saying the exact same thing. Oh, and this intense wish-fulfilment fantasy wasn't recognised on at least three of the occasions it was seen. Sorry, I don't find the hallucination theory particularly believable at all. Sure, there are cases of mass delusions, but none of them, as far as I'm aware, are particularly comparable to Jesus' post-mortem appearances.

    "But it was invented for a good reason, i.e. to reduce their cognitive dissonance. It would be similar to what occurred with the UFO cult, the Seekers, who believed that an apocalypse was to come at a certain date, and prepared zealously for it, and when it did not arrive, they simply transitioned to believing that their preparation and prayers were what averted the apocalypse. There was nothing in their original set of beliefs that spiritual exercises could avert the apocalypse, but when it did not occur, then simply invented the new belief to cope with their disconfirmed expectations. Again, not that farfetched."

    The two situation's aren't really comparable, though. For one thing, the notion of prayer averting something bad is far more culturally-accepted, at least in religious circles, than the idea of the Messiah being killed and then resurrected three days later was to first-century Jews. For another, the proposition that Jesus came back from the dead would lead us to expect evidence of this, e.g., his tomb being empty, and he himself being seen alive and well. The proposition that your prayers averted the apocalypse... wouldn't, really, or at least wouldn't lead you to expect any evidence that wouldn't also be evidence of there never being any danger of an apocalypse in the first place. So it would seem far easier for someone to convince themselves of the latter proposition than of the former.

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  21. Msgrx:

    So the disciples just hallucinated that Jesus was with them. All five hundred of them. For forty days.

    From what I can gather, the 500 disciples that Jesus appeared to after the crucifixion is at 1 Corinthians 15:3-9, which makes no mention of forty days. The forty days is mentioned at Acts 1:3, and it does not clearly state that he appeared to 500 disciplines, and it also does not state that he appeared to them continuously throughout the forty days. So, I think that you are conflating different claims. Furthermore, I think that the authors were not being precise with their numbers, and were only using them for rhetorical effect. In other words, I would take those numbers with a huge grain of salt.

    And since Jesus is reported to have met and interacted with groups of the disciples, not just individually, it would appear that they all just so happened to hallucinate him doing and saying the exact same thing.

    Did he say the same thing? Did each disciple record what Jesus communicated to them, and then compare that record with the other disciples’ records? I think that there are lots of gaps and wholes in the narrative that could be filled in a variety of different ways.

    The two situation's aren't really comparable, though. For one thing, the notion of prayer averting something bad is far more culturally-accepted, at least in religious circles, than the idea of the Messiah being killed and then resurrected three days later was to first-century Jews.

    The issue is the particular culture of that group, and the Seekers were not praying for the salvation of mankind, because they thought mankind was doomed. They were not praying. They were simply waiting for an alien to save them from the apocalypse that was scheduled to occur. For the Seekers, avoiding the apocalypse was the incongruent belief, but then it became obvious that such an event could occur after the fact.

    For another, the proposition that Jesus came back from the dead would lead us to expect evidence of this, e.g., his tomb being empty, and he himself being seen alive and well.

    Unless there was a better theory that accounted for those facts, which I think I have provided. The fact that my theory has the benefit of empirical confirmation of its main points -- i.e. there are other instances of corpses being removed from graves, and there are other instances of people in shock and grief hallucinating the presence of the deceased – makes mine certainly more likely than yours.

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  22. Ben,

    I am confused here? Are we arguing the existence of God or are we arguing how we know if their are miracles(like the resurrection)? Because if its the later you would be better served talking to Mancz & the others.,

    Yes, the issue I have been arguing, very explicitly and from my first post onward, concerns the empirical realm of reasoning. The reason I have spent such time on it is that we all, whether starting from classical theistic metaphysics or not, end up having to reason in this realm - the realm of experience. I've argued examples of empirical reasoning to elucidate the justifications and strategies that explain our empirical reasoning. (E.g. why we would come up with strategies like "parsimony," "accounting for variables," "hypothesis testing," "evidence" and "predictive power" etc. And that
    these are not principles that you can simply avoid when it comes to an empirical claim of any form, including that a God interacted empirically with the world, e.g. did miracles, appeared as human, rose from the dead, etc.

    All your metaphysics can be granted, and you still have to end up in the empirical realm of reasoning and this conversation.

    But, as you say, this is not so much your subject of interest, so that's fine by me.

    However, even on the level of the epistemological strategies that I have been arguing, rather than
    labelling it ("Positivism" - I don't need a primer thanks - I've followed the philosophy of science and it's debates for decades)…

    I have acknowledged empirical reasoning does not justify itself in some viscously circular manner, that it rests on deeper underlying assumptions and that from those assumptions, and given the apparent character of our experience, we adduce some rational strategies that become empirical reasoning.

    Can you point out how what I've actually argued, from my examples etc, is self-refuting?

    Or, if you don't wish to…at least accept my wishes for a Happy Easter!

    Cheers,

    Vaal

    ReplyDelete
  23. Jeremy Taylor,


    But we may also use reason and deduction to come to knowledge

    Of course. And empirical reasoning subsumes reason and knowledge in it's method.
    But in reasoning "about the world" or "about our experience," which has been my focus,
    you will be hard pressed to get this ONLY from deduction, without the premises being supplied
    via our other reasoning from experience (e.g. inductive-generalizations).

    We may come to historical knowledge using the historical method.

    In which we employ empirical reasoning. However, our confidence in conclusions about history have to be weighed with consistency against the standards by which we vet empirical claims TODAY. In other words: If TODAY 12 people claimed to have run a marathon, we would have little reason to adduce our strictest standards of vetting such a claim, as we already know from experience such phenomena are common.

    But if TODAY 12 people claimed to have seen a Perpetual Motion Machine, no amount of conviction on their part, no amount of "surprisingness" of the claim against their background beliefs, would warrant our taking their word for it. Science doesn't say "Well…they sure do BELIEVE it don't they? I guess it's time to accept this extraordinary claim that physics as we know it has been violated!"

    This is a claim that wold have to pass our strictest empirical standards of evidence, hypothesis testing, etc.

    The same logic goes for vetting claims of the past, where claims of phenomenon that our present experience supports can be provisionally accepted, but claims that are extraordinary, whether it be 12 people believing they'd seen a perpetual motion machine, or having seen a man resurrect from the Dead, would have to pass much more rigorous empirical muster. And it's just the fact that historical evidence in the form of people's strong beliefs that something remarkable happened don't come anywhere near meeting such standards. They don't even do that today!

    "There is the knowledge one may glean from art."

    This is often claimed, but can you give an example?

    If it's the case you recognize a truth in art, then it implies this is a truth you already know by other means. (Which I'd suggest is typically from empirical reasoning).

    If it's the case a piece of art reveals a truth, then on what grounds do you judge it "truth" or "knowledge?"

    Do all inferences from art count as knowledge? If I infer from John Carter Of Mars that Mars is inhabited by beings known as "Tharks" does that count as "knowledge?" Or from reading Greek Mythology that everyone believes in Isis? Assuming you agree those are dubious inferences, how do you decide which inferences from art are true or false, knowledge or error?
    If not by appeal to some outside method of deciding?

    I don't just rule out this is possible, but I'm suggesting it's a significant claim that needs to be argued for.

    Vaal

    (None of that is to say one can't curate truths through art, give new angles to raise consciousness of truths, etc).

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  24. Georgy Mancz

    "What question am I begging when I say that subsistent form being reunited to its matter is something only God can do?.."

    The question under debate has been whether the CLAIM of Jesus' death and resurrection
    requires appeal to God. Your appeal to "subsistent form" metaphysics is only relevant if one already ASSUMES Jesus actually died and lived again. But since that is exactly what is under debate, that would be begging the question.

    Since one can adduce other explanations which account for the burial and subsequent appearance of Jesus - e.g. Aliens only making it appear Jesus was dead, or more practically,
    a swoon-like theory in which Jesus did not actually die - then your metaphysics don't come into play unless you establish Jesus actually died and lived again.

    "And here again you’re appealing to vague Humean generalities. You have examples of a man surviving after being scourged, carrying the cross, crucified, hit with a spear, buried in a closed tomb? Do you really think one doesn’t need to be at all precise about the analogies one makes?.."

    But as I keep saying, all that assumes TOO MUCH to begin with: the reliability of all those "facts" you think must be "explained" derive from claims thousands of years removed from our ability to verify.

    Going back to the example "Proof Of Heaven," Dr. Eben Alexander's "eyewitness" account of visiting heaven. If Eben's claims were the only thing we had to go on then you'd have to accept things such as "The infection caused his brain to go "dead," i.e. totally non-functional." Well, how then could you explain his vision as a hallucination Mr. Skeptic. His brain was DEAD!

    Yeah. That would be tough IF that were a fact. Except that since Eben's claims are contemporary we can actually investigate his previous behaviour, his newer claims, interview other witnesses etc. Then we find out Eben's has not the most ethical, reliable person to begin with. Since we can interview the doctors we find out that Eban's coma wasn't, as he claimed, caused by the infection but was deliberately induced by the doctors. It also turns out that, despite Eben's claim he existed in "body alone" at that point his brain "all but destroyed" in fact he was in a typical medically induced coma, and every time they eased up on the anaesthetics he displayed all sorts of conscious behaviour, thrashing, trying to scream, grabbing at his tube, etc, so they had to keep re-inducing the coma - contradicting the claim his brain was "all but destroyed," and incapable of consciousness or delirium.

    This is what miracle claims typically look like ONCE you have access to the person making the claim, other witnesses, and other relevant evidence and facts. And long after Eben and the witnesses had passed away, if people had access to only Eben's story and his acolytes, they would wave it in the front of skeptics and say "His brain was virtually destroyed, it was impossible for him to hallucinate or dream, but he claims to have seen heaven during that time, so explain THAT skeptics!"

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  25. Georgy Mancz

    The relevance to the claims of the bible and swoon theory should be obvious here.
    We do not have access to Christ's body on the cross to see whether he really died, really was mortally wounded. We don't have access to re-question witnesses regarding "being speared" etc. We don't have access to those who examined his body to assess their competency in the matter. People are not always competent in diagnosing death. Here's someone who climbed out of her coffin after being presumed dead:

    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/zombie-gran-95-year-old-chinese-woman-746295

    We have no access to any witnesses who might have offered a different take on what happened (a la the doctors who can be interviewed in Eben's case).

    There is "fact" after "fact" in these resurrection claims that suffer this lack of access.
    That's why even asking "what's the best explanation for these FACTS" is dubious to begin with!

    If we were talking about claims that fit our normal experience, we can provisionally accept them. Someone was tortured to death? Ok. We know it happens, how it can happen. It doesn't particularly demand a higher standard of empirical confirmation. Someone was torture to death then rose from death? HOLD ON HERE…goes our critical thinking….we can't let that one slip by. Are you SURE he was truly dead? How do we know?

    You can't know from the distance of thousands of years removed. You can't have such confidence short of directly examining the evidence and direct access to all relevant witnesses, that Jesus was dead for sure. And we already know that
    misdiagnosis of being being "dead" happen, without any appeal to God being necessary.

    (And that's to not even bring up other naturalistic options like Jesus' body being stolen…and the objections to that are similarly based on assuming "facts" that, like Jesus' dying, can not be established with anything like the confidence necessary to start adducing miracles)

    Vaal

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  26. Georgy Mancz,

    This does not obviate historical methods. But competent historians (at least those without a pre-committed theological axe to grind) employ the principle of Analogy To The Present. As Bart Ehrman explained to W.L. Craig in their debate. The methods of the Historian can be used to place some confidence in events that do not contradict our current experience/knowledge of the world. But those methods (insofar as they rely on testimony) are not sufficient to establish extraordinary claims, such as miracles/resurrections, violations of the natural order. For the types of reasons I've already given.

    Vaal

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  27. "So the disciples just hallucinated that Jesus was with them. All five hundred of them. For forty days. And since Jesus is reported to have met and interacted with groups of the disciples, not just individually, it would appear that they all just so happened to hallucinate him doing and saying the exact same thing."

    ^^^^^ A perfect example of assuming a whole lot of debatable "facts" to begin with.

    5,000 people just declared to me they saw an Alien space ship show up at Mcdonalds. Explain to me how 5,000 people can just hallucinate together Mr. Skeptic1


    Are you going to just take my claim at face value that 5,000 said they witnessed the aliens? "Well...now I've got to explain how 5,000 people can hallucinate aliens together..."

    Vaal

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  28. Vaal if you can't see how tendentious your rhetoric is, it's hard to see why you're worth discussing the matter with. Try to tighten up your analogies a bit.

    Again, I say this with all good will. You may be right about everything here, but your rhetorical skills need sharpening if your case is to be made well. I hope I do not sound condescending.

    Case in point is your aliens at mcdonalds example. This whole time you've been floating the idea that aliens could have made it seem like a man came back from the dead! Aliens are a perfectly natural phenomenon, right?!

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  29. Vaal

    >Yes, the issue I have been arguing, very explicitly and from my first post onward, concerns the empirical realm of reasoning. The reason I have spent such time on it is that we all, whether starting from classical theistic metaphysics or not, end up having to reason in this realm - the realm of experience.

    You keep equivocating in you retoric. Obviously it's an old Thomistic-Aristotilian maxium "Whatever is in the intellect is first in the senses" but that is not the post Humean concept of Empiricism or Verificationism. At best it's superficially related.

    >I've argued examples of empirical reasoning to elucidate the justifications and strategies that explain our empirical reasoning. (E.g. why we would come up with strategies like "parsimony," "accounting for variables," "hypothesis testing," "evidence" and "predictive power" etc. And that
    these are not principles that you can simply avoid when it comes to an empirical claim of any form, including that a God interacted empirically with the world, e.g. did miracles, appeared as human, rose from the dead, etc.

    Since I only concern myself with arguing for the existence of God via philosophy explaining dogmatic theology & I forgot to mention The Problem of Evil that is of little interest too me.

    >All your metaphysics can be granted, and you still have to end up in the empirical realm of reasoning and this conversation.

    At best there is a superficial points of contact between post Humean empiricism and Aristotle's moderate realism. But they are not the same.

    >But, as you say, this is not so much your subject of interest, so that's fine by me.

    Very well then. Cheers.


    >However, even on the level of the epistemological strategies that I have been arguing, rather than labelling it ("Positivism" - I don't need a primer thanks - I've followed the philosophy of science and it's debates for decades)…

    Well you should still look at the links if only to see where I am coming from. Or not. It's up to you no pressure or obligation.


    >I have acknowledged empirical reasoning does not justify itself in some viscously circular manner, that it rests on deeper underlying assumptions and that from those assumptions, and given the apparent character of our experience, we adduce some rational strategies that become empirical reasoning.

    In short you have to make a philosophical argument.:-) & rely on it for it's allieged truth.;-)


    >Can you point out how what I've actually argued, from my examples etc, is self-refuting?

    I never said your examples are self-refuting. Positivism itself is self-refuting since it sees the only valid knowledge as what comes from scientific verificationism yet this concept itself can't be scientifically verified. Any attempt to justify it falls on making some type of philosophical argument & the whole purpose of Positivism is to get rid of philosophy. Make it "dead" as Stephen Hawkings proclaimed in THE GRAND DESIGN. Which BTW I found to be a greviously offensive book. Not because of Hawking's disbelief in God. That I have no problem with but calling philosophy "dead" was a crime against reason & near unforgivable.

    So there you have it. Cheers again.


    >Or, if you don't wish to…at least accept my wishes for a Happy Easter!

    You too guy. Peace.

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  30. Vaal,

    What do you mean by empirical reasoning? This seems to be at the heart of your epistemology, but it is not apparent that empirical reasoning is simply the scientific method, or that science is the epitome of such reasoning. Here you err, it seems to me, if that is your suggestion. I would certainly like to see an argument - that is not very vague and simplistic - for why natural science is not just a particular form of more general human knowledge adapted for specific aspects of reality.

    Deduction makes use of induction certainly, but it is not bound by it, so to speak. Not only can one reason far from the initial sensual experience, but reason must make use of intellectual abstraction that, whilst usually based upon sensual induction, gives one access to concepts that are not empirical (in the sensual or corporeal meaning). Also, whilst it is true that reasoning must usually begin with sensual induction, it is also true that making any sense of our sense experience requires reasoning - it is a two-way relationship. When it comes to so rarefied a method of empirical knowledge as natural science, reasoning is prior. One cannot do natural science without a foundation of reasoning, which shows that natural science is not in some sense an archetype of human knowledge but just one form of knowledge for one field of reality.

    I do not disagree with what you say about the historical method, although this says little about miracles - it stil all depends how miracles and you certainly haven't shown they should be ruled out a priori or anything close.

    What your reply does not really show is why natural science is somehow the cornerstone of knowledge. As far as I can see your initial claims have completely collapsed and you are not properly defending them.

    On art, well as a Platonist I believe that art - form - may capture Ideas and that, if the art is constructed properly and one approaches it correctly, it may be a means to gaze upon the idea through the work of art. This is essentially the same as the theology of icons, which claims that the archetype is present in the image of the icon.

    But on a more mundane level, I would argue that a work of art may capture truths of reality and, especially, human nature and that its audience may apprehend these truths. If one watches King Lear, for example, with sufficient openness and attention, one might get a glimpse into human nature and the human condition. Such knowledge is not primarily discursive. You might still call it empirical, but you are using that term vaguely and without truly showing its implications.

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  31. By the way, I don't know anyone who doubts that all knowledge is empirical, if all you mean is that all knowledge must be experienced. It is not just experience, but sense experience that a meaningful empiricism must tie knowledge to.

    Sense experience is not prior to reason, however. One cannot have sense experience without, in some sense, logic and reason. In fact, for all intents and purposes, I think reason is prior to most sense experience, in that one must be able to rationally grasp and understand it before one can make sense of it. It is reason and not sense experience which is the higher form of knowledge.

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  32. dguller:

    "From what I can gather, the 500 disciples that Jesus appeared to after the crucifixion is at 1 Corinthians 15:3-9, which makes no mention of forty days. The forty days is mentioned at Acts 1:3, and it does not clearly state that he appeared to 500 disciplines, and it also does not state that he appeared to them continuously throughout the forty days. So, I think that you are conflating different claims. Furthermore, I think that the authors were not being precise with their numbers, and were only using them for rhetorical effect. In other words, I would take those numbers with a huge grain of salt. "

    I'm quite aware that the two claims come from different places. (Hey, if the Gospel writers can use numbers for rhetorical effect, I can as well.) Obviously Jesus wasn't directly in front of 500 people continuously for 40 days. But even allowing for inaccuracy and rhetorical exaggeration, the take-away from these passages is that Jesus appeared to a lot of people for a long period of time. That's quite different to an individual on their own hallucinating that a dead loved one is in the room with them.

    "Did he say the same thing? Did each disciple record what Jesus communicated to them, and then compare that record with the other disciples’ records? I think that there are lots of gaps and wholes in the narrative that could be filled in a variety of different ways."

    If Jesus appeared before groups of several disciples (as he's recorded as doing several times), and held a conversation with them and the disciples replied (ditto), then they'd realise pretty quickly if each of their Jesuses were saying and doing different things. To keep the illusion of Jesus actually being there talking to them, they'd have to all hallucinate him doing the same things; and of course such hallucinations are so rare that they're pretty much only ever invoked as an explanation when... well, when somebody's trying to explain away the Resurrection, really.

    "Unless there was a better theory that accounted for those facts, which I think I have provided."

    No, the Resurrection would still lead us to expect those facts, even if there are other theories which would lead us to expect the same facts.

    "The fact that my theory has the benefit of empirical confirmation of its main points -- i.e. there are other instances of corpses being removed from graves, and there are other instances of people in shock and grief hallucinating the presence of the deceased – makes mine certainly more likely than yours."

    These similarities vanish when examined closely, though. Hallucinations of dead loved ones mostly occur to individuals, whereas mass delusions mostly seem to involve people becoming convinced that there's some kind of plague going around and developing psychosomatic symptoms. What you'd really need for the analogy to be valid would be several people all hallucinating that a dead person has come back and interacted with groups of them.

    Incidentally, it's perhaps worth remarking that if the Disciples did hallucinate seeing Jesus, the more natural reaction would surely be "Whoa, a ghost!", not "Whoa, Jesus is alive again!" Ghosts were, after all, already believed in by plenty of ancient people, unlike individuals being resurrected a few days after death. There's a reason why in the Bible Jesus makes a point of eating in front of the Disciples and making them touch his wounds.

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  33. Vaal:

    "5,000 people just declared to me they saw an Alien space ship show up at Mcdonalds. Explain to me how 5,000 people can just hallucinate together Mr. Skeptic1


    Are you going to just take my claim at face value that 5,000 said they witnessed the aliens? "Well...now I've got to explain how 5,000 people can hallucinate aliens together...""


    I wouldn't take their claim to have witnessed *aliens* at face value, although I would say that they'd seen *something*.

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  34. @Vaal:

    "[O]ur confidence in conclusions about history have to be weighed with consistency against the standards by which we vet empirical claims TODAY. In other words: If TODAY 12 people claimed to have run a marathon, we would have little reason to adduce our strictest standards of vetting such a claim, as we already know from experience such phenomena are common.

    But if TODAY 12 people claimed to have seen a Perpetual Motion Machine, no amount of conviction on their part, no amount of 'surprisingness' of the claim against their background beliefs, would warrant our taking their word for it."

    This is more of a response to my question than the response you actually gave directly.

    So are you saying, then, that we have more warrant TODAY for disbelieving that perpetual motion is possible even by miracle than anyone had two thousand years ago? And likewise with regard to a claim of resurrection?

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  35. By the way, maybe it is a minor point, but calling miracles hallucinations still leaves open the question of what a hallucination is.

    But, anyway, although hallucinations are a common naturalistic explanation for the paranormal, it is often a very convenient one - even leaving aside the vague nature of idea we have of what a hallucination is - that seems to require more thought and investigation. This is because hallucinations, as far as I can see, tend to be disordered and the mark of a disordered mind (or one that is at least temporarily so). Whereas, when it comes to the paranormal, it is often the case that such hallucinations are not so - they often come to people who are otherwise quite mentally stable and are reasonably ordered.

    An interesting example are near death experiences (NDE). The sceptics (who are not real sceptics, mostly only being sceptical of what seems to violate scientistic naturalism) tend to dismiss these are hallucinations, but if they are, they are peculiar hallucinations which are not disordered and which tend to have many of the same elements

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  36. Matt Sheean,

    Helpful criticism is ok by me; I just wish your particular example was more helpful. Because I did not see the failure of that rhetoric to hit the mark.

    msgrx's challenge was predicated on the idea that one has to explain how five hundred people
    would have claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. But of course, we don't have 5 hundred personal testimonies! We have someone else CLAIMING Jesus appeared to that many people. You don't have to go accounting for a "fact" that is simply claimed and is part of the very story being questioned!

    My claim about 5,000 people seeing Aliens at Mcdonalds is a standard informal reductio ad absurdum and, unless you can explain otherwise, it makes this point just fine.

    Or do you mean to say you get the reductio, but that I've somehow been inconsistent about Aliens?

    If you mean that, then I would have thought it obvious I have only adduced Aliens as a form of "if you are going to appeal to far out explanations like a God raising a man from the dead, then here's another far out concept that would account for it as well." That's why I said that regular old "misdiagnosis" type explanations are more practical. You can't seriously think a skeptic like me is looking at the bible and declaring "We Should Explain This With Aliens!" The whole point I've been harping on is the analogy to our present experience, that we don't need to appeal to far out explanations when we've got evidence for much more prosaic possibilities.

    Why do you think I spent my time talking about the "Proof Of Heaven," story, and references to the woman being judged "dead" from injury, who days later emerged from her coffin???

    Having made the point, with current-day examples, for why we can't place such confidence in the claims of people 2,000 years ago regarding an extraordinary claim, without better access to witnesses and evidence, do you disagree? If so…how have my arguments and examples not been relevant?

    Vaal

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  37. Msgrx:

    But even allowing for inaccuracy and rhetorical exaggeration, the take-away from these passages is that Jesus appeared to a lot of people for a long period of time. That's quite different to an individual on their own hallucinating that a dead loved one is in the room with them.

    But that is a difference of degree, and not a difference in kind. If one person can hallucinate an experience of Jesus, then why not two, or three, or four? And once you factor in the fact that these individuals talked to one another, incorporated each other’s experiences, and began experiencing source amnesia, then it makes sense that many people thought they remembered seeing Jesus when either they were hallucinating, or they heard about someone else’s experience, and incorporated it into their own memories as their own experiences. Again, all of this is well documented in empirical psychology, and thus is not some far-fetched logical possibility of some kind.

    If Jesus appeared before groups of several disciples (as he's recorded as doing several times), and held a conversation with them and the disciples replied (ditto), then they'd realise pretty quickly if each of their Jesuses were saying and doing different things.

    And then in order to reduce cognitive dissonance, they would have a number of options. For example, they would be able to claim that some of them were lying, and reject their accounts as false, possibly by prioritizing the experiences of those who were closer to Jesus. Also, they could subconsciously revise their memories to be consistent with one another, forgetting any relevant differences between their accounts in order to preserve the veracity of their claims. Again, all of these are well-documented psychological phenomena that do not require any supernatural explanation.

    To keep the illusion of Jesus actually being there talking to them, they'd have to all hallucinate him doing the same things; and of course such hallucinations are so rare that they're pretty much only ever invoked as an explanation when... well, when somebody's trying to explain away the Resurrection, really.

    No. They would only have to believe that they experienced Jesus talking to them, which could either be due to some of them actually hallucinating Jesus, and others hearing the accounts of those who had hallucinated Jesus, and through origin amnesia, and other subconscious psychological strategies, believe that they themselves had the same hallucinations.

    Also, bereavement hallucinations are actually quite common. One study found that 80% of elderly people who had lost a loved one experienced a hallucination of the deceased, even up to a month later, and sometimes would actually have conversations while awake with the hallucination. It would actually have been highly unlikely that no-one would experience Jesus after his death.

    And this all assumes that the accounts in the New Testamant are historically accurate to begin with.

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  38. These similarities vanish when examined closely, though. Hallucinations of dead loved ones mostly occur to individuals, whereas mass delusions mostly seem to involve people becoming convinced that there's some kind of plague going around and developing psychosomatic symptoms. What you'd really need for the analogy to be valid would be several people all hallucinating that a dead person has come back and interacted with groups of them.

    No, I would need some people having such hallucinations, and other people who heard about these experiences convincing themselves that they themselves had the same hallucinations by origin amnesia, for example. All of which is much more likely, given that it rests upon well-attested psychological phenomena, than that Jesus was a God-man who sacrificed himself to die on the cross, and then resurrected himself to save mankind, and presented himself to various followers to communicate this supernatural truth.

    I mean, do you believe that the twenty people who were executed in Salem were actually witches? There were multiple witnesses that claimed that those individuals engaged in witchcraft. And yet you likely would not agree that they were witches. Instead, if you are reasonable, you would believe that they were innocent people who were falsely accused on the basis of a number of individual and group psychological influences. Why not apply the same standard to the resurrection stories? If there are psychological factors that are firmly established to occur in human beings that could account for it, then why deliberately push them aside and choose the supernatural explanation instead?

    Incidentally, it's perhaps worth remarking that if the Disciples did hallucinate seeing Jesus, the more natural reaction would surely be "Whoa, a ghost!", not "Whoa, Jesus is alive again!" Ghosts were, after all, already believed in by plenty of ancient people, unlike individuals being resurrected a few days after death. There's a reason why in the Bible Jesus makes a point of eating in front of the Disciples and making them touch his wounds.

    Tactile hallucinations can also occur.

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  39. Vaal,

    It is comments like this which hint you are not really much of a sceptic and are in fact just a scientistic naturalist:

    That's why I said that regular old "misdiagnosis" type explanations are more practical.

    In the case of Jesus we have several accounts written reasonably close to his death and circulated amongst those who would have been close to him or who would have known those who were close to him. These accounts are quite similar and not disordered. They depict a man who was publically crucified and stabbed under orders of a Roman prefect and disappeared from his tomb, revealing himself alive to many of his followers.

    Is this certain proof of these miracles? No. Can we think of other explanations? Yes. But it is still clearly a case that leaves many unanswered questions. One which someone with no overt metaphysical axe to grind should suspend their judgment over. But you are clearly not doing this. You clearly wish to conclude it was unlikely (in this specific instance and not in a general sense) the resurrection happened.

    At all turns your comments imply a metaphysics that rejects miracles on the face of it as impossible or so unlikely to be true as to be instantly dismissed. This is not the more sceptical and impartial approach.

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  40. Dguller writes:

    Also, bereavement hallucinations are actually quite common. One study found that 80% of elderly people who had lost a loved one experienced a hallucination of the deceased, even up to a month later, and sometimes would actually have conversations while awake with the hallucination.

    How do you know these were hallucinations? Whatever hallucinations really are.


    No, I would need some people having such hallucinations, and other people who heard about these experiences convincing themselves that they themselves had the same hallucinations by origin amnesia, for example. All of which is much more likely, given that it rests upon well-attested psychological phenomena, than that Jesus was a God-man who sacrificed himself to die on the cross, and then resurrected himself to save mankind, and presented himself to various followers to communicate this supernatural truth.

    How do you quantify likelihood in these circumstances?

    Let us take Christ and his revelation into its broadest context, ranging from his life to the Christian faith, that has produced many, many Saints, mystics, and sages, not to mention bringing myriads to God.

    On the one hand, in terms of Christ's resurrection we do have quite clear accounts of many seeing Christ after he died. It could be hallucination, but it would be a rather complex and unlikely case. It is certainly not apparent that it was simply hallucination.

    On the other hand, we have a faith that has produced great piety and holiness and wisdom.

    It seems to me, how one views these occurences will have a lot to do with one's metaphysical position.

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  41. Scott,

    So are you saying, then, that we have more warrant TODAY for disbelieving that perpetual motion is possible even by miracle than anyone had two thousand years ago? And likewise with regard to a claim of resurrection?

    As I mentioned before about the resurrection: people 2,000 years ago doubtless knew enough about people dying to think that someone rising from the dead was extraordinary.

    Yes we know more today about the impossibility of perpetual motion machines. It was an open question at one point whether they were possible, for instance back in the middle ages when people started more seriously trying to build one (and claimed they had been successful). But modern theories of thermodynamics has ruled it out. We therefore do not take seriously any claim one was built.

    The problem of granting credence to miracle claims is obviously problematic:

    "Hey everyone, I needed really badly to catch a bus and I hit 200 miles per hour running for it and caught it!

    Sorry, no, I'm going to have to reject that as too improbable to believe based on human physiology and past experience.

    "Wait, didn't I mention? It was a MIRACLE. God intervened to give me that power!"

    Oh…well why didn't you say so!!?? I guess I have to rescind my skepticism then. Sorry about that.

    The can of worms it opens is ridiculous for vetting wild claims past and present. This, as I keep saying, is one reason why the supernatural and God do not form part of our scientific theories or historical method. If someone can always claim "miracle" how does this affect our ability to infer probabilities? How do we decide, scientifically, when God is interfering in what we are studying or not? That we are even understanding the nature of the thing being examined, vs God's interference with it?

    Now, no doubt you will want to say "your skepticism goes to far." But on what basis? That God would want to leave us with a more law-like, intelligible world to understand, so when He intervenes we'll notice something miraculous? Well then if you are STILL going to say God intervenes to do any miracles, you have to have some good way of knowing when it's happening or not, and what counts as a "miracle."

    I suggest that any such attempt to move from the God of metaphysics to vetting all the extraordinary supernatural claims that have been made, and can be made, "God would do THIS miracle but not THAT miracle" will show extreme selection bias on the part of the Christian. (In fact…it does, whenever I see Christians attempt this, the Resurrection being one such example). (Not to mention

    Vaal

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  42. Ok, Vaal, so you're telling me that you claiming that 5000 people told you that they saw a UFO is like the biblical claim that a number of people saw Jesus at the same time and after his death?

    If you claimed that 5000 people told you that they beheld a UFO over the local McD's, why at all should I not believe you about that? And, if I did believe you that so many people made this claim, I would furthermore be I justified in believing that something strange did happen (even if I was skeptical about it being aliens).

    It fails as a reductio.

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  43. Vaal,

    I suggest that any such attempt to move from the God of metaphysics to vetting all the extraordinary supernatural claims that have been made, and can be made, "God would do THIS miracle but not THAT miracle" will show extreme selection bias on the part of the Christian. (In fact…it does, whenever I see Christians attempt this, the Resurrection being one such example)

    To concede the God of metaphysics is to concede a personal, loving God who has created man in his image (ie. qua rational), and to have done so (to all appearances) uniquely.

    You are saying that it is a manifestation of selection bias on the part of Christians to regard the single most significant event in human history (an extraordinary sacrifice by an extraordinary teacher, if nothing else) as a miracle, but not to regard the alien claim as a miracle?

    I would echo those who have said that your analogies are far too broad.

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  44. Jeremy Taylor,

    In the case of Jesus we have several accounts written reasonably close to his death and circulated amongst those who would have been close to him or who would have known those who were close to him.

    That doesn't matter. We are talking about claims so far into the past that we simply can't check their reliability on the level we should require, given the extraordinary claim being hung on such a "fact." If a group of people today went camping and SWORE one of their friends was injured, died and resurrected, that wouldn't be remotely good enough evidence for it having happened. Nor would their adding "but…it was a miracle!" to the claim.
    There could have been various ways they could have misdiagnosed the scenario, which can not be ruled out without more direct access to the event.

    We do not know for sure who examined Jesus to conclude he was dead, and how competent the examination was. "People close to him" isn't an argument for competency or being free of error.

    Modern medical doctors have been known to misdiagnose death. Yet another example - a woman diagnosed dead by a hospital spends 3 nights in the morgue and revives shortly before the autopsy:

    http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/features/a-dead-siberian-woman-speaks-of-miracle-on-coming-back-to-life-after-three-nights-in-morgue/

    QUOTE: "A hospital spokeswoman said: 'The checks were carried out and she was dead - or so it seemed. The papers could not have been signed unless this is what the doctors establish. We are still trying to understand what went wrong in Lyudmila's case'."

    People can look very dead, and not be dead. Other people can mistake them for being dead. Even people who are supposed to be PARTICULARLY skilled at diagnosing such things can make this mistake.

    When we know these are possibilities, you can't rule them out as a possibility in the case of Jesus. And if you can't rule them out, you can't reasonably say "We need The Creator Of The Universe" to solve this one.

    The only reason this isn't obvious is that Christians arguing from the apostolic claims need to get Supernatural Christianity out of the story because they are already committed to it. They can't stick with such skeptical caution "look, we just don't know here" because ambiguity doesn't make for good foundational dogma. People want at least SOME sure thing to dogmatize, to get Nicene Creeds. It's hard to make any claim as an Church "authority" on "Jesus might...or might not have died for our sins and...MAYBE rose from the dead..."

    Vaal

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  45. "The only reason this isn't obvious is that Christians arguing from the apostolic claims need to get Supernatural Christianity out of the story because they are already committed to it."

    Or y'know, the only reason it's not obvious is that skeptics arguing from a presumption of naturalism need to get that mechanistic picture of reality out of the story because they are already committed to it.

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  46. Matt,

    Ok, Vaal, so you're telling me that you claiming that 5000 people told you that they saw a UFO is like the biblical claim that a number of people saw Jesus at the same time and after his death?

    Yes. I've already explained the relevance. I'm not sure what you are missing here.

    It's that starting with an extraordinary claim that is already under debate, and adding more unsubstantiated claims does not increase the burden of proof on a skeptic.

    If I said I saw an Alien walking into Mcdonald's that is already a claim warranting some skepticism. You could say: "Sorry, I can't believe that just on your say so, you could be lying, mistaken or could have been hallucinating at the time."

    I could then just add to the story: Oh yeah, well then it wasn't just me. 5,000 people saw the alien as well! Now you have to explain how not just one person could have been mistaken, but how 5,000 people at once could have been mistaken!"

    You CAN see the obvious problem there can't you? You don't "have" to take on the additional burden of explaining 5,000 people claiming to see an alien.
    You don't have their testimony, you have only MINE that anyone else experienced it. And adding the 5,000 people saw the Alien claim only adds to MY burden to establish such facts, not YOURS to disprove them.

    Right?

    Same with msgrx adducing the biblical claim that 500 people saw Jesus risen.
    We don't have THEIR testimony, we just have someone in the Bible claiming 500 people saw Jesus after death, in part of an already dubious-sounding narrative. Adding the 500 people claim doesn't add to the skeptic's burden of proof, it just adds to the claimant's burden of proof to establish that claim as well!

    Agree, disagree?

    If you agree, then my rhetorical point to msgrx was sound.

    Cheers,

    Vaal

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  47. Greg

    You are saying that it is a manifestation of selection bias on the part of Christians to regard the single most significant event in human history (an extraordinary sacrifice by an extraordinary teacher, if nothing else) as a miracle, but not to regard the alien claim as a miracle?

    Perhaps you did not see my earlier post (6:08 pm) to Matt?

    I don't believe one has to appeal to Aliens any more than to a God in the case of the resurrection claims. Notice all my arguments, with examples, regarding the possibility of misdiagnosing Jesus as dead.

    (And that is only one of any number of non-supernatural possibilities for the Jesus story).

    Vaal

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  48. Matt,

    Or y'know, the only reason it's not obvious is that skeptics arguing from a presumption of naturalism need to get that mechanistic picture of reality out of the story because they are already committed to it.

    Except of course I'm doing no such thing.

    I have argued all along that even from the presumption of classical theism you still have all these problems. I have produce all manner of argument, with examples.

    Can I presume you did not really miss this, and are only being cheeky I hope?

    (Sorry, I have to ask since you never know for sure on the internet).

    Vaal

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  49. Vaal,

    As you have done many times in this thread, you have neglected details, such as the fact Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities and stabbed. It seems quite unlikely that, not only would someone survive this, but the Romans would not notice.

    But yes there could be other explanations. But the gospel stories are certainly, to me, an instance of a reported supernatural occurence that cannot be simply dismissed. The evidence is not conclusive (and I think this causes some problems for an exclusivist Christianity, even one starting with Classical Theist metaphysics, based largely on the miracles of Christ) but it leaves unasnwered questions that cannot be satisfyingly brushed aside by transparently desparate attempts at naturalistic explanation. We should at least suspend judgment.

    However, you clearly are not. You clearly do wish to definitively dismiss this and all other miracles and it is hard to see how this can be based on anything but hidden naturalistic assumptions.

    I have produce all manner of argument, with examples.

    This is not true. You have produced somewhat vague and shifting claims about the superiority of science. You have been unable to respond properly to many obvious objections. At this point I think we are all taking it as written that your attempt to construct a convincing epistemology has collapsed.

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  50. Vaal writes,


    (And that is only one of any number of non-supernatural possibilities for the Jesus story).

    This highlights my first point above. It is quite clear from comments like this that you think extraordinary naturalistic explanations should essentially always (though you admit that miracles are strictly impossible - the logical sense)be preferred over the supernatural, prior to any serious investigation of specific cases. It is hard to see, from your own comments though, why this should be so, without question begging.

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  51. - that should be not strictly impossible.

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  52. "You only have mine"

    Are you a liar? Do I know, from our history together that you like to make up stories in order to amuse yourself.

    why can't you see where I am disagreeing with you, Vaal? What do you not understand about your analogies being too broad to be applicable?

    "Except of course I'm doing no such thing"

    Is it in accord with what science tells us of the world that a person could be engaged in a behavior while at the same time adamantly denying it?

    You still need a good argument for why the arguments given for the reality of the resurrection,, given the data in question, should result in epistemic chaos. That seems to me to be what your whole case hinges on so far, but until you focus your critique and hone your analogies, we can all sail through the gaps in leisurely fashion.

    I am not being cheeky. I admire your persistence and your patience.

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  53. Also,

    Just so's I can get this outta my system

    Extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence. They just require the sort of evidence to be expected if they were true.

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  54. Vaal,

    Perhaps you did not see my earlier post (6:08 pm) to Matt?

    I don't believe one has to appeal to Aliens any more than to a God in the case of the resurrection claims. Notice all my arguments, with examples, regarding the possibility of misdiagnosing Jesus as dead.

    (And that is only one of any number of non-supernatural possibilities for the Jesus story).


    I was responding to your claim that to allow the resurrection as a miracle would make it impossible to vet miracle claims such as "aliens appeared to 5000 at McDonald's" or "a man ran 200 mph to catch a bus." That argument seems to be based on exceedingly weak analogies.

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  55. It also seems to be based on the use black or white choices. For this part of his argument Vaal seems to be suggesting that if we allowed miracle claims any creedence (not to be accepted but just investigated, that is) we would have to accept any extraordinary claim. This is clearly false. There is nothing that prevents us from giving greater weight to different claims, investigating claims according to their specific contents, suspending judgment if we cannot come to anything like a certain conclusion, and so on.

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  56. Jeremy:

    How do you know these were hallucinations? Whatever hallucinations really are.

    First, a hallucination is a perceptual experience in the absence of a stimulus. For example, seeing a cat that is not really there.

    Second, I don’t know that they were hallucinations. However, given what we know about human psychology, it is more likely that they were experiencing bereavement hallucinations and using subconscious coping mechanisms to minimize the massive cognitive dissonance of witnessing their messiah tortured and crucified when they expected him to initiate a kingdom of God on earth. Both of these psychological phenomena are well attested to in psychological literature, and thus there would have to be compelling evidence to rule them out.

    Given the nature of the evidence -- i.e. a few texts written decades after the events in question, no evidence of any preserved chain of transmission of the information, no access to the actual eyewitnesses, fragmentary information about what the witnesses actually perceived, and so on – it is simply impossible to override the default explanation, i.e. an traumatic incident led to hallucinatory experiences and multiple subconscious coping mechanisms to minimize their cognitive dissonance.

    How do you quantify likelihood in these circumstances?

    Things that happen more often are more likely. Bereavement hallucinations? Common. Subconscious coping mechanisms to minimize cognitive dissonance? Common. A God-man killing himself, then resurrecting himself, then appearing to his followers to communicate this truth? Very uncommon, by Christians’ own account. Remember, one argument that Christians offer in favor of this account is that it is radically unique, and unprecedented. And that is true, but it also works against them, especially if other more garden-variety explanations are available.

    On the other hand, we have a faith that has produced great piety and holiness and wisdom.

    First, there are many religious traditions that can claim the same thing. Are you arguing that the Prophet Muhammad actually heard the angel Gabriel communicate the word of God to him? Is Islam true? Are you arguing that Joseph Smith actually spoke to the angel Moroni? Is Mormonism true? Both of these traditions have produced pious and holy individuals.

    Second, you are assuming that much good cannot come from a falsehood. Even Plato endorsed the possibility of a Noble Lie. This is even more effective, though, when its supporters do not even recognize it as a lie at all, but rather as a deep truth.

    It seems to me, how one views these occurences will have a lot to do with one's metaphysical position.

    That is true, but as Vaal has been saying, even under A-T, it is still more likely that the naturalistic account is true. For example, the scientists who claimed to have discovered cold fusion in 1989 could have said that cold fusion actually worked, but only that one time, and only by the power of Jesus Christ. That is consistent with A-T, but not proponent of A-T would buy it, because it is much more likely that they were either committing fraud, misinterpreted their experiments, and so on, all of which are common enough events to put them in a position of higher likelihood than the Christ interpretation above. So, in this case, metaphysics will not save you, other than allowing your interpretation to be possible, but that does not make it more likely.

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  57. dguller:

    "But that is a difference of degree, and not a difference in kind."

    Sure it is, but degrees matter. If one witness can be mistaken, so can two, or three, etc. But the more witnesses you have agreeing on an event, the more reliable their testimony is generally considered. Similarly, the more people claim to see something, the less likely it is that they're hallucinating.

    "And then in order to reduce cognitive dissonance, they would have a number of options. For example, they would be able to claim that some of them were lying, and reject their accounts as false, possibly by prioritizing the experiences of those who were closer to Jesus. Also, they could subconsciously revise their memories to be consistent with one another, forgetting any relevant differences between their accounts in order to preserve the veracity of their claims. Again, all of these are well-documented psychological phenomena that do not require any supernatural explanation."

    OK, so Jesus appears to Peter and Andrew. Peter thinks he says "Peter, it was very naughty of you to deny me like that, but I forgive you," and replies "O Lord, I do not deserve your forgiveness!" Andrew thinks Jesus says "So, have you been following the football recently? Are Caesarea still in the relegation zone?", and says "Yes, they really need to do better in their match next week against Ascalon." It's going to require quite a lot of forgetting to maintain the illusion that they're both talking to a real person.

    "Also, bereavement hallucinations are actually quite common. One study found that 80% of elderly people who had lost a loved one experienced a hallucination of the deceased, even up to a month later, and sometimes would actually have conversations while awake with the hallucination."

    How many of those hallucinations had involved the deceased appearing to a roomful of people, all of whose hallucinations were apparently similar enough that they didn't realise they were all just separately imagining it?

    "And this all assumes that the accounts in the New Testamant are historically accurate to begin with."

    The New Testament accounts were written within living memory of the events in question, by people who were prepared to suffer an agonising death rather than recant their beliefs. That's more than you can say for most ancient histories.

    "Tactile hallucinations can also occur."

    Sure they do, although I'm not sure about hallucinations involving the deceased manipulating physical objects. The point, though, was that the idea of bodily resurrection was novel enough that Jesus had to convince the Disciples that he was actually present in the flesh. If the disciples had just seen hallucinations, it would be far more likely for them to jump to the conclusion that they'd seen a ghost, not that a dead guy had physically come back from the dead.

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  58. "Given the nature of the evidence -- i.e. a few texts written decades after the events in question, no evidence of any preserved chain of transmission of the information,"

    A few decades after the events is still within living memory, and still closer than most surviving ancient histories are to the events they describe.

    Also, I'm not sure where you get the idea that there's "no evidence of any preserved chain of transmission of the information"? Didn't Paul and a lot of the early Church Fathers say things like "I received this teaching from X, who received it from Y, who received it from the Apostle John, who received it from Jesus Christ"?

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  59. Incidentally, there have been a lot of failed Messiahs and religious leaders, both in first-century Palestine and around the world more generally. How many of those people's followers have claimed that they came back physically from the dead and were the Son of God? Other than the Christians, I can't think of any.

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  60. dguller,

    First, a hallucination is a perceptual experience in the absence of a stimulus.

    Two questions:

    1. Why would a medical doctor trained in psychiatry assert, in effect, that hallucinations "just happen"?

    2. How does your claim that a physical phenomenon can occur in the absence of a physical cause serve to support an argument against miracles (or against just one particular miracle)?

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  61. (s/b "claims of miracles", and "claim of a miracle".)

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  62. Sorry, the talk fails on many levels.

    http://www.skepticink.com/atheistintermarried/2014/04/20/edward-fesers-imaginary-knockout-of-new-atheism

    "In the end, however, [Feser's] arguments and ideas remain impotent and actually shy away from the fight he seems to want. To put a finer point on it, to the extent that Feser himself gets in the ring, he is already over-matched and gets fatally clobbered."

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  63. I like the way Larry Tanner seems to think that Feser's never considered the idea that atheism might be better than Catholicism, when, as a convert from Catholicism to atheism to Catholicism again, it would seem that he's not only considered the idea, but accepted it as correct for a large portion of his life.

    As an addendum, I just live the author's complaint about Feser using the term "ghetto" because the first ghettoes were used to keep Jews at arm's length from everybody else. Guilt by association, much?

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  64. Jeremy Taylor,
    As you have done many times in this thread, you have neglected details,

    I believe you have this reversed. I'm the one who has continually taken details, looked at the problem, given empirical examples in support of my argument…none of which I've seen offered from your side.

    I see the theists here waving away details.

    such as the fact Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities and stabbed.

    But we are so far removed from this event that we can not have the level of confidence you wish to have on even that.

    Yes, if someone reports another person was stabbed and killed, this is a common enough occurrence in our experience and we can provisionally accept it. But if that detail were being used in a claim that the person ALSO RESSURECTED then the rational person says "Hold on here, if you are asking me to accept THAT, then I have to go back to your claim about the stabbing. How do we know whether it was fatal? Because we ALSO know that people can be stabbed and survive. We ALSO know people can look dead and not be dead. Without more access to the actual events and evidence, there is no way we can just take this on face value.
    It wouldn't fly TODAY let alone simply accepting this combination of claims happening thousands of years ago, reported by authors we can never even cross examine, let alone get access to evidence.

    I'm trying to make you see just how you allow all these things to just slide by just in the case of your Christian beliefs, which would not fly when thinking carefully anywhere else.


    It seems quite unlikely that, not only would someone survive this, but the Romans would not notice.


    And here, again, you dismiss the "details" I have brought up. We know people can appear completely dead to observers. I presented several examples. The physicians at a Hospital, skilled in such diagnoses and following protocol for exactly those situations, thought a woman was dead and sent her to the morgue. On what grounds then do you claim "the Roman's would notice" if someone can look dead enough to fool doctors using modern medical protocol? You offer no actual reasons. And how would you know? Can you say "well, the body was next examined by so-and -so, and then "so-and-so"? Not that I know of. Again, you have nothing like the access to such facts as one ought to require.

    This is how you are brushing past the details, making assumptions, not me.

    Also, note your characterization: "It seems quite unlikely that…"
    Is THAT your criteria for when we have to adduce a miracle?
    All the instances of people being misdiagnosed dead are "unlikely."
    Do we now have to appeal to divine intervention instead?
    It's unlikely that I will win the lottery next week. But if I do, is it time
    to appeal to divine intervention? Tons of deeply unlikely events happen every day, it's the nature of statistics. Do we appeal to the divine for "unlikely" events? Certainly, Christians tend to actually do this. Everyone dies in a plane crash and a kid survives "miracle!" But this is a very mushy epistemology.

    I'd assume you don't really want to go that route. But then it's left hanging
    - what type of force is your appeal to the "unlikelihood" of Jesus being misdiagnosed dead supposed to have?

    Vaal

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  65. Msgrx:

    Sure it is, but degrees matter. If one witness can be mistaken, so can two, or three, etc. But the more witnesses you have agreeing on an event, the more reliable their testimony is generally considered. Similarly, the more people claim to see something, the less likely it is that they're hallucinating.

    But if the only people you interview are those who have had the hallucination, and you do not include anyone else who was there that did not have the same perceptual experience, then your account is fundamentally biased. There is no such process of inquiry described in the New Testament, i.e. where a group of researchers interviewed in a thorough and scientific fashion the people who were present at those miraculous events, recorded what they observed and did not observe, compared the observations for consistency, and so on.

    All we have is a vague and general summary that even you agree includes rhetorical exaggeration. In other words, there is simply insufficient precision to validate your position, and since your position is the more remarkable one from a probability standpoint, as Christians themselves agree, the burden falls upon your position as the improbable one. In other words, if you and I both hear a woman’s voice in the next room, and I say it is a human’s voice, and you say it is an alien’s voice, then the burden of proof actually falls upon you, having provided the more unlikely interpretation. If you lack the evidence for your position, then it should be dismissed for the more likely one, i.e. mine.

    OK, so Jesus appears to Peter and Andrew. Peter thinks he says "Peter, it was very naughty of you to deny me like that, but I forgive you," and replies "O Lord, I do not deserve your forgiveness!" Andrew thinks Jesus says "So, have you been following the football recently? Are Caesarea still in the relegation zone?", and says "Yes, they really need to do better in their match next week against Ascalon." It's going to require quite a lot of forgetting to maintain the illusion that they're both talking to a real person.

    Yes, it would. And yet such a level of subconscious self-deception is certainly more common that a God-man killing himself and then resurrecting himself to save mankind.

    How many of those hallucinations had involved the deceased appearing to a roomful of people, all of whose hallucinations were apparently similar enough that they didn't realise they were all just separately imagining it?

    I do not know. But you do not know in any sufficient detail what occurred in that room. All you have is a vague record that was written decades after the events in question, which gives plenty of time to revise one’s memories, especially when a certain story is told and retold, and belonging to the group becomes more conditional upon accepting that particular narrative.

    Also, a hallucination is not an imaginary event. It is not one’s faculty of imagination, but rather one’s faculty of perception being inappropriately activated to create a subjectively vivid perceptual experience. There is a difference between seeing an apple and imagining an apple. The former is much more vivid and salient than the latter, for example. So, saying that some of them were hallucinating does not mean that they were imagining it.

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  66. The New Testament accounts were written within living memory of the events in question, by people who were prepared to suffer an agonising death rather than recant their beliefs. That's more than you can say for most ancient histories.

    First, what was the exact investigational process by which the writers used to determine what actually occurred? Who did they interview? What did their interview subjects say? What were the differences in their accounts? How were the differences resolved? Were some accounts preferred over others? If so, then which ones, and why? It seems that there are no answers to the above questions, and the accounts themselves are simply the final product of whatever investigation the authors conducted, the rigorousness of which we are simply in the dark about. And without knowing how they arrived at their narratives, we simply cannot trust them as a default.

    Second, the fact that people are willing to take great risks for the sake of their beliefs does not mean that those beliefs are true. I have treated paranoid patients who refuse to eat food, because they are convinced that they are being poisoned by staff. Should I just believe them, because of how firmly they belief their delusions?

    Sure they do, although I'm not sure about hallucinations involving the deceased manipulating physical objects. The point, though, was that the idea of bodily resurrection was novel enough that Jesus had to convince the Disciples that he was actually present in the flesh.

    Again, we do not know enough about how that narrative was constructed to believe it.

    If the disciples had just seen hallucinations, it would be far more likely for them to jump to the conclusion that they'd seen a ghost, not that a dead guy had physically come back from the dead.

    Why? I can see reasons why believing they saw a ghost would be appealing, but I can also see reasons why believing they saw a risen Christ would be appealing, too. As far as I’m concerned, humans are sufficiently versatile and flexible that any number of interpretations would have been satisfying to them, as long as the interpretation allowed them to claim some kind of victory for their savior.

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  67. Jeremy Taylor,

    It is quite clear from comments like this that you think extraordinary naturalistic explanations should essentially always (though you admit that miracles are strictly impossible -

    You've introduced an equivocation there that confuses what I've been arguing.

    I apply the term "extraordinary" to claims about something that seems outside our current empirical experience - e.g. super powers, supernatural events, Aliens landing, people resurrecting from truly being dead, etc.

    A statistically unlikely natural event is not "extraordinary" in this way - it is a current feature in our experience, even though rare (e.g. winning lotteries, coincidences, amazing stories of survival, etc).

    So there is not an equivalent type of begging the question on my part where on one hand you are adducing the extraordinary but so am I.
    No, I'm adducing phenomena that we KNOW to occur in our experience, and which are therefore possible and plausible, whereas you are adducing
    miraculous intervention - of which we have no reliable experience.

    That's one strike for preferring the natural explanation over yours.

    Another is an inductive case that humans are prone to making dubious claims about supernatural interventions - that every time we have good access to the witnesses and evidence at hand, the stories to not hold up to scrutiny and tend to have more prosaic, natural explanations.
    This is part of a wider inductive case about the unreliability of extraordinary claims in general (e.g. just how ready humans are to attribute
    false extraordinary causes due to their own errors in judging situations…add in here UFO abductions, dowsing, new age channeling, people who fall for phsycics, the list is massive).

    We therefore have an inductive case against supernatural claims in general, which warrants a higher level of skepticism for such claims to begin with.

    Now, you may want to say "but at least some of that inductive case is based on judging cases "natural" where they may indeed have been miracles."

    First of all, there are just too many unequivocal cases to downplay the warranted skepticism about supernatural claims. But if you'd want to say that maybe some were really divine intervention or real miracles, then it just comes back to the problem you've been having here: I keep asking for
    some consistent, dependable heuristic you are going to offer for how one judges on "unlikely" event divine intervention vs another…and you seem to just keep going in this circular "because it's unlikely" pattern. I see
    no such method being offered.

    Vaal

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  68. Also, I'm not sure where you get the idea that there's "no evidence of any preserved chain of transmission of the information"? Didn't Paul and a lot of the early Church Fathers say things like "I received this teaching from X, who received it from Y, who received it from the Apostle John, who received it from Jesus Christ"?

    I’m comparing what the early Christians did to what the early Muslims did.

    The latter engaged in a painstaking investigation into claims regarding what the Prophet Muhammad said and did. If there was a saying (i.e. hadith) of what the Prophet Muhammad said or did, then the scholars would proceed to determine the chain of transmission (i.e. isnad) leading from the Prophet Muhammad to the contemporary person making the claim, and then they would determine if the chain of transmission was sound by investigating whether the people in the chain could have actually met (i.e. at the same place and time), were trustworthy, and so on. And if there were a number of independent chains of transmission of the same hadith, then it would be considered more sound than a hadith with only one chain of transmission, and thus a number of criteria were utilized to rate the soundness of the hadiths.

    The reason why the early Muslim scholars did this was because preserving the truth of Prophetic sayings and doings was so important to their religious practices that they wanted to minimize the chances of following the wrong practices. They took historical truth seriously, and diligently followed their historical procedures to the best of their ability. The fact that early Christians seem to have been so haphazard in their investigations of the sayings and doings of Christ’s life does not speak well of their determination to record the truth of what occurred. It actually looks like a joke compared to the early Muslims.

    Furthermore, the fact that there were so many forgeries and apocrypha in early Christian texts shows that early Christians were not averse to inventing false narratives to serve their purposes, irrespective of whether their falsehood was conscious or unconscious. So, given the fact that early Christians were not averse to inventing false narratives to serve theological ends, that there is no consistent and thorough methodology that was used to determine the historical validity of the events in question, and the events in question could well be explained by facts about human psychology, the truth of the resurrection narrative is simply untrustworthy.

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  69. Matt Sheean,

    I can see the point you are missing in your replies, so I'll state it again as clearly as I can:

    Are you a liar? Do I know, from our history together that you like to make up stories in order to amuse yourself.

    The point of the example is to assume one is skeptical of the claim to begin with: that one is saying "That seems a dubious claim, I'd like to see why I ought to believe it."

    When the Christian is presenting a case to the atheist, it's already established the atheist is skeptical. And hence adding more extravagance to the theistic claims (500 people saw Christ risen) is no way to move the theistic case forward, or put more burden on the atheist to justify his skepticism.

    This is why your talking about "well…what if I find you trustworthy" is to miss the point. It's an argument that starts with "Well if I ALREADY find your claim dubious, and ask why I ought to believe it, then adding MORE dubious claims does not help your case, or put the burden back on me to explain it."

    Is my point now clear enough now, I hope?

    "Extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence. They just require the sort of evidence to be expected if they were true."

    That's a common rejoinder to the "extraordinary claims/evidence" heuristic.
    But it misses the point.

    If I say I bought a new car, that is not "extraordinary" it's a common part of our shared experience. Hence the type of "evidence" most of us are willing to accept would simply be our say-so. Because it is such a common occurrence in our experience, there is no prima facie motivation for doubting it.

    On the other hand, if I said I had an Alien spaceship in my backyard that I used to fly to work, and occasionally zip around the moon, you know very well this would be an "extraordinary claim," outside our regular experience. Then my mere say-so would not constitute a good enough reason to accept the claim.
    I would have taken on a much larger burden of evidence - e.g. show you the spaceship, show you it can do as I say, maybe introduce you to the aliens, etc.
    (All of which, in itself, would be extraordinary and outside our normal experience).

    "Extraordinary claims require Extraordinary Evidence" is simply a shorthand way of describing this very real difference in the type of claims we can accept with little skepticism and those that step outside the bounds of experience, and for which we would require MUCH stronger lines of evidence.

    (And, as it happens, in most cases an extraordinary claim - one outside our normal experience - would tend to have extraordinary evidence - outside our normal experience. E.g. if I claimed to be able to guess the flip of any random coin every time, that would be an extraordinary claim. The type of evidence I would produce for it, actually guessing the flip every time, would also be outside our everyday experience).

    Cheers,

    Happy Easter,

    Vaal

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  70. Glenn:

    Two questions:



    1. Why would a medical doctor trained in psychiatry assert, in effect, that hallucinations "just happen"?


    I didn’t. Hallucinations can occur in response to trauma, bereavement, organic illnesses that affect the brain, psychotropic drugs, and/or mental illness. None of which would count as saying that they “just happen”. There is always a reason why they happen, and that reason ultimately involves some misactivation of the person’s neurobiological perceptual processes.

    2. 

2. How does your claim that a physical phenomenon can occur in the absence of a physical cause serve to support an argument against miracles (or against just one particular miracle)?

    If the alleged miracle involves someone perceiving something material, then the possibility of a hallucination would have to be ruled out, I think.

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  71. dguller,

    Hallucinations can occur in response to trauma, bereavement, organic illnesses that affect the brain, psychotropic drugs, and/or mental illness. None of which would count as saying that they “just happen”. There is always a reason why they happen, and that reason ultimately involves some misactivation of the person’s neurobiological perceptual processes.

    Someone had said, [A] hallucination is a perceptual experience in the absence of a stimulus," and I thought it was you who said it. My mistake; sorry.

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  72. To all my theistic friends, I think we are reaching the point of diminishing returns from engaging Vaal and dguller. Although, I must say that dguller has at least attempted to stick with his swoon theory and tried to the best of his ability to defend its absurd hypothesis as best he can. Vaal, on the other hand, is all over the place and his best arguments simply echo dguller's.

    So what are those best arguments?

    It all comes down to this:

    "How many of those hallucinations had involved the deceased appearing to a roomful of people, all of whose hallucinations were apparently similar enough that they didn't realise they were all just separately imagining it?

    I do not know. But you do not know in any sufficient detail what occurred in that room. All you have is a vague record that was written decades after the events in question, which gives plenty of time to revise one’s memories, especially when a certain story is told and retold, and belonging to the group becomes more conditional upon accepting that particular narrative.

    Also, a hallucination is not an imaginary event. It is not one’s faculty of imagination, but rather one’s faculty of perception being inappropriately activated to create a subjectively vivid perceptual experience. There is a difference between seeing an apple and imagining an apple. The former is much more vivid and salient than the latter, for example. So, saying that some of them were hallucinating does not mean that they were imagining it."

    First of all, this business about writing down the events "decades" after they occurred -- as I mentioned before, we are lucky to have such vivid accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Not a lot of history was done in written form back then AT ALL. This was an oral culture and stories and poems and songs were transmitted orally. Lots of work has been done by modern ancient historians on this fact and to dismiss the apostles as confused or to dismiss them as sharing the same hallucination (while they all tell such a detailed story) beggars belief (well, not dguller's belief* or Vall's belief, but most normal people's belief about what the heck a hallucination is). It also ignores the empty tomb, the women who met Jesus and reported this to the disciples (and they kept this detail in their account -- which is a big no-no if you want to convince people of the times that you are being truthful -- women are not considered reliable witnesses).

    For more on the details of the Gospel writers and their consistency, see these series of posts by Dr. McGrew:

    http://www.thinkingchristian.net/posts/2013/11/undesigned-coincidences-series-tim-mcgrew-apologetics-315/

    And for an excellent historical overview of the oral culture of the times, see The Jesus Legend by Boyd and Eddy.

    *I like the way dguller keeps analogizing between the apostles and the other witnesses (and Paul) and the crazy people he treats today. I mean, preaching the Good News and being willing to die as martyrs for Jesus' message is just like "paranoid patients who refuse to eat food, because they are convinced that they are being poisoned by staff"?!!!

    Finally, as for Muslim scholars, they may carefully make sure Muhammad said X, Y, or Z but we have no evidence that he did anything miraculous other than his own (obviously self-interested) testimony. Unlike Christianity, Islam spread at the other end of the sword.

    P.S. Vaal, you can go on thinking that it is perfectly normal for people to survive a Roman crucifixion, along with your aliens at McDonald's. I'm a big fan of the Big Mac myself, so it is perfectly reasonable that the aliens will come to the Golden Arches for a snack.

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  73. From the Tanner article linked above:

    "Contra Feser, metaphysics is not a foundation but rather more like a flexible set of connections that help clarify and define the full picture afforded by our knowledge of reality. Furthermore, Feser’s attitude is all wrong: one should not aim to “defend” presuppositions but should instead seek to examine and update them in light of new evidence from the physical world."

    This is more or less the only philosophical point of the article. Though it might be a strawman, since we don't know if this claim really addresses Feser's arguments for metaphysics.

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  74. dguller:

    “But if the only people you interview are those who have had the hallucination, and you do not include anyone else who was there that did not have the same perceptual experience, then your account is fundamentally biased.”

    How do you know that there actually *were* such people for the Resurrection, though? If Jesus physically came back from the dead and appeared to a room full of people, you’d expect everybody to be able to see and hear him. You seem to be setting up a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation: if there were people there who didn’t have the same perceptual experience, that’s evidence that the early Christians were hallucinating, and their reports can’t be trusted; if there weren’t any people who didn’t share the perceptual experience, that’s evidence that the early Christians were being sloppy investigators, and their reports can’t be trusted. What, exactly, would you expect if there *weren’t* any people present who didn’t have the same perceptual experience?

    “There is no such process of inquiry described in the New Testament, i.e. where a group of researchers interviewed in a thorough and scientific fashion the people who were present at those miraculous events, recorded what they observed and did not observe, compared the observations for consistency, and so on.”

    What about Luke 1.1-4:

    “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

    Or are you just criticising the Gospels for not being an entry in a modern psychiatry journal?

    “Yes, it would. And yet such a level of subconscious self-deception is certainly more common that a God-man killing himself and then resurrecting himself to save mankind.”

    Really? So how many failed Messiahs (both literally and figuratively) have there been? How many political or religious causes whose followers would just love to believe that their dead and failed leader had somehow won after all? What about ordinary people who’ve lost family members? And how many of them have actually sincerely believed that the dead person had come back to life – not just “hallucinated seeing the dead person”, but actually believed that he had been physically resurrected – and have conversations with them?

    On the other hand, we know from philosophy that God exists, that He is capable of bringing the dead back to life, and – insofar as He desires us to know Him more perfectly in the afterlife – that He has a motive for both revealing Himself to us miraculously and for taking on Himself the punishment for our sins. Given this, the Passion and Resurrection is, if not something we could guess would happen before it did, at least not contrary to what we know already.

    So, in short, you’re asking us to reject something which, in fact, gels pretty well with what we know already, in favour of a form of hallucination so uncommon that it only ever seems to get invoked for explaining away the Resurrection. (Yes, yes, I know that people sometimes hallucinate seeing loved ones, but that’s not really the same, for reasons which I’ve already indicated.)

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  75. “I do not know.”

    Then how can you say that such a thing is more likely than the idea of Jesus’ Resurrection? Or are you just operating on faith that naturalistic explanations must always be preferred to supernatural ones, no matter how implausible they might be?

    “First, what was the exact investigational process by which the writers used to determine what actually occurred? Who did they interview? What did their interview subjects say? What were the differences in their accounts? How were the differences resolved? Were some accounts preferred over others? If so, then which ones, and why?”

    Well, Papias of Hierapolis gives a rough impression of the sort of investigation involved:

    “But I shall not be unwilling to put down, along with my interpretations, whatsoever instructions I received with care at any time from the elders, and stored up with care in my memory, assuring you at the same time of their truth. For I did not, like the multitude, take pleasure in those who spoke much, but in those who taught the truth; nor in those who related strange commandments, but in those who rehearsed the commandments given by the Lord to faith, and proceeding from truth itself. If, then, anyone who had attended on the elders came, I asked minutely after their sayings,--what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the Lord's disciples: which things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I imagined that what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice.”

    Bear in mind that Papias was writing in the time of Trajan, when the Twelve would have all died off and no longer be available for questioning. Nevertheless he attempts to get his information at as few degrees of separation as possible, by speaking to people who were themselves personally acquainted with the Twelve. Unless you want to claim that Papias was more rigorous than the rest of the early Church – and given that Eusebius seems to consider him something of a dullard, I don’t think that particularly likely – it’s probably safe to say that the Evangelists would have done much the same thing.

    “Second, the fact that people are willing to take great risks for the sake of their beliefs does not mean that those beliefs are true.”

    No, but it does indicate that they’re very concerned with the truth, which in turn suggests that they’re not the sort of people to go around preserving and reporting their beliefs sloppily.

    “Why? I can see reasons why believing they saw a ghost would be appealing, but I can also see reasons why believing they saw a risen Christ would be appealing, too.”

    From what we know of the ancient Jews’ religious beliefs, a risen Christ just wouldn’t be something they’d consider. There’s no reason they’d interpret their hallucinations in this way, especially when there was the – well-accepted by comparison – belief in ghosts to point to instead.

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  76. “The fact that early Christians seem to have been so haphazard in their investigations of the sayings and doings of Christ’s life does not speak well of their determination to record the truth of what occurred. It actually looks like a joke compared to the early Muslims.”

    Wait, you just said that we don’t know how the early Christians conducted their research. Now you’re saying that their methods were a haphazard joke. Which is to be? We can’t both not know their methods and know that their methods were bad.

    Also, what evidence do you actually have that they were haphazard in their investigations? Papias’ quoted section above shows that the sort of investigations they conducted – using methods which would still be considered best practice nowadays – and there are plenty of examples of Church Fathers listing the pedigree of their teachings (“Jesus taught John, who taught Polycarp, who taught Papias, who taught me”). Why are the early Islamic attempts to follow chains of transmission sound, but the early Christian ones so bad?

    “Furthermore, the fact that there were so many forgeries and apocrypha in early Christian texts shows that early Christians were not averse to inventing false narratives to serve their purposes, irrespective of whether their falsehood was conscious or unconscious.”

    Oh, please. Whilst there were spurious texts,* these were by no means given the same authority as the actual canonical Gospels. Heck, the whole purpose of having a “canon” of Biblical books was to make sure that everybody knew which books were trustworthy and which weren’t. And following chains of transmission back to Jesus was given such emphasis precisely in order to stop people slipping in false narratives.


    * Incidentally, these texts (all later than the canonical Gospels, BTW, and most of them not actually Gospels in the sense of orderly narratives of Jesus’ life) actually look more like rationalisations than the traditional Four do, insofar as they generally downplay the whole “God takes human form” angle of the Incarnation – so, for example, you have the Gnostic “gospels” portraying Jesus’ human form as just an illusion, which would be less surprising to a pagan audience used to seeing the physical world as evil and corrupt than the idea of God actually taking physical form would be.

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  77. Vaal:

    "Yes, if someone reports another person was stabbed and killed, this is a common enough occurrence in our experience and we can provisionally accept it. But if that detail were being used in a claim that the person ALSO RESSURECTED then the rational person says "Hold on here, if you are asking me to accept THAT, then I have to go back to your claim about the stabbing. How do we know whether it was fatal? Because we ALSO know that people can be stabbed and survive. We ALSO know people can look dead and not be dead. Without more access to the actual events and evidence, there is no way we can just take this on face value."

    So Jesus was scourged, crucified, stabbed, and buried. Having somehow survived all this, plus going three days without food or water, he wakes up in the tomb, manages to disentangle himself from the grave-clothes, puts them in a nice neat pile, somehow manages to roll away the bajillion-ton rock at the entrance, and leaves. He then staggers across Jerusalem, goes to the house where the disciples are staying, and drags himself into the room where they are, half-dead with shock, blood loss, and lack of food and water -- whereupon the disciples immediately greet this bloody, emaciated mess as their Risen Lord and Saviour, miraculously returned to new life after his glorious conquest of death.

    Sorry, no. There's no way that happened.

    "I would have taken on a much larger burden of evidence - e.g. show you the spaceship, show you it can do as I say, maybe introduce you to the aliens, etc.
    (All of which, in itself, would be extraordinary and outside our normal experience)."


    Showing someone something you've got, whilst more effort than just telling them, isn't actually all that extraordinary -- unless you define, as you seem to be doing, "extraordinary evidence" as just "any evidence that points to a surprising conclusion".

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  78. I am wondering: has the Church proposed and defended the motives of credibility in the way it is being done here? There is not one mention of Tradition nor apostolic succession, nor is there any mention of the saints and their many post-apostolic miracles.

    Feser has the praembula fidei down. Now we need a Feser for the motiva credibilitatis.

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  79. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  80. If you claimed to be able to guess the side a coin would land on every flip, I'd expect you to do just that (with a coin from my wallet, mind you, and more than once) in order to prove it.

    Maybe an analogy presents itself here, though. On the face of it, someone who claims to be able to guess the results of a series of tosses to the toss is claiming to have a power of some sort. They are claiming to have some clairvoyance that is coin toss specific. This isn't just an extraordinary claim, it is completely arbitrary.

    If, on the other hand, we are talking, and I recount a story of a time when I did guess the results of a long series of coin tosses, every last one, and I am telling you this precisely because it was a weird story and I have the testimony of several other mutual and trusted friends that it occurred...

    This is it for me tho, man. I'll leave the last word in our conversation to you.

    Christos Anesti everybody!

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  81. @Vaal:

    "Yes we know more today about the impossibility of perpetual motion machines. It was an open question at one point whether they were possible, for instance back in the middle ages when people started more seriously trying to build one (and claimed they had been successful). But modern theories of thermodynamics has ruled it out. We therefore do not take seriously any claim one was built."

    Perhaps you overlooked the words "even by miracle" in my question. How do "modern theories of thermodynamics" rule them out?

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  82. dguller

    Both of these psychological phenomena are well attested to in psychological literature

    I think you'll find that the psychological literature assumes that they are hallucinations from the beginning, and that halluicinations have a simple, naturalistic explanation. But this is not particularly important to the present discussion.


    Things that happen more often are more likely.

    You now seem to be copying Vaal in talking too abstractly and ignoring the specific nature of claims. It is not what is more likely in the abstract (which is unknowable) but what, given a very close study of the specific fact of Christ's life and his religion, what we think most likely in this instance. It will also, I think, depend on our metaphysics and philosophy. I expect God to show himself in religious traditions, and therefore Christianity fits into what I would expect. Even though you are Classical Theist, you strangely seem to rule out miracles completely

    Anyway from as impartial a metaphysical perspective as possible, I will say that I do not think the hallucination explanation you bring up fits that neatly. It does seem quite unlikely that the kind of ordered experiences that the gospels contain are the product of hallucinations. That you are stretching your analogies is shown by the use of the Salem witchtrials, where people saw feverish apparations and not what is reported by the gospel. Same with the bereavement experiences. I doubt they are so common as 80% - I have never heard of anyone experiencing one, although I have heard of dopplegangers being experienced right at the time someone is supposed to have died - and I doubt they come with the same sort of message and clarity as Christ in the gospels. At the very least one should suspend judgment. You are altogether too certain that it can all be dismissed as hallucinations.

    On Islam and Mormonism, I am Platonist and something of a universalist and I would certainly say much the same of Islam as I would of Christianity. Mormonism is metaphysically absurd and, to me, bears too many of the signs of a modern cobbling together and so I wouldn't endorse it.

    On a noble lie, I actually agree that there is artistic, symbolic, and mythic truth whose literal or historic truth is unimportant, although I do not think the term lie, even a noble one, is a good one for this kind of truth. Personally, I do not think it important if Christ historically existed as he his revelation depicts him. But I do object to the idea we should rule out miracles like his resurrection a priori.


    For example, the scientists who claimed to have discovered cold fusion in 1989 could have said that cold fusion actually worked, but only that one time, and only by the power of Jesus Christ. That is consistent with A-T, but not proponent of A-T would buy it, because it is much more likely that they were either committing fraud, misinterpreted their experiments, and so on, all of which are common enough events to put them in a position of higher likelihood than the Christ interpretation above. So, in this case, metaphysics will not save you, other than allowing your interpretation to be possible, but that does not make it more likely.
    Firstly, I am not a A-T but a Platonist. And even more than A-T my perspective expects God to reveal himself to mankind, and man to seek him, and their to be lots of traffic between the different levels of being.

    Secondly, I don't think the example works. Like Vaal again you are neglecting details. One may investigate a specific incident and get knowledge of all the events and individuals involved and come to a better conclusion. Also, this example is scientific research - not an area where supernatural intervention would seem likely, even to us believers. Finally, from a scientific viewpoint, if these researchers claimed a miracle it wouldn't matter much either way. If they couldn't repeat it then scientifically their research would have still come to a dead end.

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  83. Msgrx:

    How do you know that there actually *were* such people for the Resurrection, though? If Jesus physically came back from the dead and appeared to a room full of people, you’d expect everybody to be able to see and hear him.

    The point is that we do not know enough of what actually happened in that room.

    Did Jesus suddenly appear to all of them at once? Did only one, or two, of them see him first, and then point the others in his direction? What did he say or do first? How long was he there? Did all eleven people tell the same person after Jesus left? Did they all tell a group of people? Did they scatter, and each tell different people individually? What exactly did they tell that first group of people? Who were they? What did that first group of people tell a second group of people? Were the messages between the disciples consistent? Were the messages of the different waves of people to hear their story consistent?

    Again, you have an incomplete story full of vagueness that was recorded after decades of oral transmission by individuals who themselves were not even present at the time of the events, and without making reference to any kind of thorough methodology by which they arrived at their narrative.

    What about Luke 1.1-4:



    “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”


    So, Luke’s methodology was to investigate everything carefully? That’s great. What exactly did his investigation consist of? How careful was he? Did he interview people individually to avoid any cross-contamination of narratives? Did he interview only people who immediately witnessed the events in question, or did he also interview those who knew the stories second hand? What proportion was the former and the latter? Did he meet with people in person, or did he collaborate with them via letters? Did he know enough of the native language to understand what was communicated with him, or did he require a translator? Did he encounter any inconsistencies between the subjects he interviewed? And so on.

    Or are you just criticising the Gospels for not being an entry in a modern psychiatry journal?

    Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

    So how many failed Messiahs (both literally and figuratively) have there been?

    Probably quite a bit.

    How many political or religious causes whose followers would just love to believe that their dead and failed leader had somehow won after all?

    Probably quite a bit.

    What about ordinary people who’ve lost family members?

    Probably quite a bit.

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  84. And how many of them have actually sincerely believed that the dead person had come back to life – not just “hallucinated seeing the dead person”, but actually believed that he had been physically resurrected – and have conversations with them?

    I don’t know. But even if the early Christians were the first to hold such beliefs, it would still be more likely than the claim that a God-man killed himself, then brought himself back to life, in order to save mankind.

    We know that hallucinations happen. We know that people are capable of a tremendous amount of self-deception to minimize cognitive dissonance. We know that people are capable of distorting their perceptions, interpretations, and memories of events when motivated to do so. Putting that all together, you have an account that is rooted in psychological phenomena that are quite common.

    I asked you earlier whether you believed that the people executed at Salem were actual witches. According to your criteria, you have a number of eyewitnesses that testified to witchcraft, as discovered by a methodical investigation and legal proceedings. There are volumes of documents, and the details are much better recorded than those in early Christianity. Therefore, those poor individuals were real witches that consorted with the devil. Right?

    On the other hand, we know from philosophy that God exists, that He is capable of bringing the dead back to life, and – insofar as He desires us to know Him more perfectly in the afterlife – that He has a motive for both revealing Himself to us miraculously and for taking on Himself the punishment for our sins.

    I agree that God exists and he is all-powerful, which includes the power to bring the dead to life. However, I disagree that we know that he desires us to know him in an afterlife, which is something communicated by revelation and not philosophy. Same goes with the claim that he is motivated to be punished for our sins, which is something that no non-Christian theology accepts, because it is an idea that is derived from a particular revelation, and not philosophical reasoning.

    Then how can you say that such a thing is more likely than the idea of Jesus’ Resurrection? Or are you just operating on faith that naturalistic explanations must always be preferred to supernatural ones, no matter how implausible they might be?

    Because the different pieces of the account are all empirically possible, and do not require an appeal to miracles. Unless you want to say that a combination of empirically possible factors was more unlikely than a divine intervention that violated a law of nature? Why would you make that move?

    Say that there was a group of people who claimed to see a perpetual motion machine operate for a few hours, and were unable to detect any loss of energy whatsoever. They then showed the machine to a few other groups of people. There were no recordings taken during those presentations. Afterwards, they dismantled and threw out the equipment, and proceeded to tell the world – fervently! – that the laws of thermodynamics are false. After a few decades of oral testimony, someone proceeds to speak with a variety of people who had first-hand and second-hand knowledge of those presentations, and then record what they were told into a narrative text.

    Do you believe that the laws of thermodynamics were falsified?

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  85. Bear in mind that Papias was writing in the time of Trajan, when the Twelve would have all died off and no longer be available for questioning. Nevertheless he attempts to get his information at as few degrees of separation as possible, by speaking to people who were themselves personally acquainted with the Twelve. Unless you want to claim that Papias was more rigorous than the rest of the early Church – and given that Eusebius seems to consider him something of a dullard, I don’t think that particularly likely – it’s probably safe to say that the Evangelists would have done much the same thing.

    The point is that we simply do not know what the Evangelists did to investigate the historical truth, other than speak to people and try really hard to be objective. Without the relevant details, we just do not know how reliable their methodology was. Just look at what Luke wrote above. All he says is that he investigated the matter very carefully. I’m afraid that nobody would find that description of his investigative methodology sufficient.

    No, but it does indicate that they’re very concerned with the truth, which in turn suggests that they’re not the sort of people to go around preserving and reporting their beliefs sloppily.

    Not at all. Otherwise, anyone who was passionate about any belief at all would, by definition, according to you, be a passionate investigator of the truth who took great pains to have a reliable methodology to determine the truth of the matter. Look at parents who do not vaccinate their children. They are pretty passionate, and yet you won’t find a group that is more disinterested in finding out what the actual scientific truth of the matter is. In fact, often passion distorts one’s ability to discover objective truth by increasing the bias to preserve what one is passionate about.

    From what we know of the ancient Jews’ religious beliefs, a risen Christ just wouldn’t be something they’d consider. There’s no reason they’d interpret their hallucinations in this way, especially when there was the – well-accepted by comparison – belief in ghosts to point to instead.

    The idea of resurrection was certainly not something outside of what Jews at the time would consider. Resurrection is specifically mentioned at Isaiah 26:19, Ezekial 37:12-14, and Daniel 12:1-3.

    Wait, you just said that we don’t know how the early Christians conducted their research. Now you’re saying that their methods were a haphazard joke. Which is to be? We can’t both not know their methods and know that their methods were bad.

    I should have spoken more clearly. I apologize.

    I meant to say that we simply do not know enough about the methodology of historical investigation of the early Christians to make any determination about the veracity of their narratives. There is no recording of any kind that delineates the lines of transmission of the accounts in question. There is no way to know if the lines are continuous, reliable, consistent, or independent. There is just the final product, recorded decades later, and some vague reassurances that they tried really, really hard to get at the truth. As I said above, that just isn’t good enough to establish something as remarkable as Jesus’ resurrection.

    So, not only is there another possible account of the experiences of the early Christians regarding Jesus’ appearing to them, but in addition, the actual narrative itself is suspect. In order for the narrative to be considered true and reliable requires that a number of assumptions be made, none of which can be confirmed in any way, because of the paucity of evidence at hand.

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  86. there are plenty of examples of Church Fathers listing the pedigree of their teachings (“Jesus taught John, who taught Polycarp, who taught Papias, who taught me”). Why are the early Islamic attempts to follow chains of transmission sound, but the early Christian ones so bad?

    Great. So, tell me which of Christ’s disciples communicated which stories to which Gospel writer. It’s not enough to say that Christ taught John who taught X who taught Y. You have to specify what John taught X. Furthermore, you have to look at other versions of what John taught X, compare the different versions to variations, and determine how to reconcile them, if you can. None of this is described.

    Again, the issue is that the resurrection is supposed to be a profound miracle that violates a fundamental law of nature, one that required a supernatural intervention to occur at all. In order to demonstrate that such an event occurred, one must make strenuous attempts to control for biases, distortions and other factors that could result in a deviation from the truth, including ruling out alternative explanations. At the very least, one must demonstrate that such an event actually occurred, as described in the texts in question, which demands a fairly detailed accounting of the methodology by which the facts were determined, one that could be checked for biases and distortions. There is no such level of required detail in the Gospel accounts, and thus they do not meet the required degree of certainty to serve as the basis to argue for a miraculous event demanding supernatural intervention.

    Compare the above to the effort to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson. Demonstrating the Higgs boson would demonstrate a profound truth of nature, and in order to do so, safeguards and mechanisms were implemented to minimize the risk that the results of the experiments would be false. It took a tremendous amount of effort to do so, and so when the results came in, one could trust in their reliability. And that was just to demonstrate a fundamental physical phenomenon. They didn’t just say, “I talked to X, who heard from Y that the Higgs boson is real”. It took a great deal more to confirm the truth of that claim. Imagine what it would take to demonstrate that something supernatural occurred. It would certainly take more than a text that was recorded after decades of oral transmission of an event that occurred decades in the past without any detailed and strict methodology to ensure the reliability of the transmission itself.

    Oh, please. Whilst there were spurious texts,* these were by no means given the same authority as the actual canonical Gospels. Heck, the whole purpose of having a “canon” of Biblical books was to make sure that everybody knew which books were trustworthy and which weren’t. And following chains of transmission back to Jesus was given such emphasis precisely in order to stop people slipping in false narratives.

    You want to point to later Christian scholars’ behavior as evidence of early Christian behavior in terms of scholarly rigor. If you think that is a valid inference, then I should be able to make the same inference from later Christians ability to create false narratives for theological purposes to early Christians doing the same. You can’t have it both ways. If such an inference is invalid, then you cannot point to later Christian scholarship as evidence for early Christian scholarship. If such an inference is valid, then early Christians also engaged in propaganda for theological ends.

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  87. Vaal,

    You seem to ignore half of my arguments. This borders on the disingenuous when you make counter claims that I have addressed in these ignored arguments.

    Anyway, yes it is you who are ignoring the details. I read the cases you brought up, but none of these was killed in anything like the same way as Christ. You ignore details like this routinely.

    Your comments on what is unlikely highlight question begging nature of your position. My point was not that this misdiagnosis was somehow less likely than Christ' actual resurrection in the abstract. My points were, one, when we investigate the specific events misdiagnosis seems even more unlikely than normal and, two, my conclusion to the whole affair is we should at least suspend judgment - it is not a miraculous claim that can be easily dismissed. You call yourself a sceptic but you seem to be sceptical only of what conflicts with naturalist, like most professional sceptics.

    You've introduced an equivocation there that confuses what I've been arguing.

    I apply the term "extraordinary" to claims about something that seems outside our current empirical experience - e.g. super powers, supernatural events, Aliens landing, people resurrecting from truly being dead, etc.

    A statistically unlikely natural event is not "extraordinary" in this way - it is a current feature in our experience, even though rare (e.g. winning lotteries, coincidences, amazing stories of survival, etc).

    So there is not an equivalent type of begging the question on my part where on one hand you are adducing the extraordinary but so am I.
    No, I'm adducing phenomena that we KNOW to occur in our experience, and which are therefore possible and plausible, whereas you are adducing
    miraculous intervention - of which we have no reliable experience.

    That's one strike for preferring the natural explanation over yours.

    I did not equivocate. I did not know you were using the terms in this way.

    Anyway, the above is question begging.It assumes our experience completely conforms to scientistic naturalist. I have been over the flaws in equating everyday experience with scientistic naturalism before. You did not respond.

    And as many of unlikely events are very different to everyday life, then it is hard to see why one kind would be more extraordinary than another. If you wish to argue that unlikely naturalistic events are more likely than all unlikely non-naturalistic events - without begging the question - you will need a better argument for why all naturalistic events are a more likely extension of common experience.


    Another is an inductive case that humans are prone to making dubious claims about supernatural interventions - that every time we have good access to the witnesses and evidence at hand, the stories to not hold up to scrutiny and tend to have more prosaic, natural explanations.

    Well, this is not true on all points. Firstly, as I pointed out previously - though you didn't respond - it is simply not true that all claims of the supernatural do not hold up to scrutiny. I have a great interest in reading these accounts. There are quite a few claims that somehow seem dubious. There are not an insigificant claims where there is good evidence, though not necessarily conclusive. And then there are most claims where, although we have no special reason to doubt the witness(es), we have nothing but there accounts and can only suspend judgment.

    I would like to see some evidence for this very strong claim of near universal, transparent error or for you to stop making this dubious claim of your own.

    Also, many claims about naturalistic events are dubious. I see no grounds to make such general claims that all supernatural claims are more likely to be dubious than all naturalistic ones (again you seem to have a tendency to lump examples together with no care for the details), so your point is question begging.

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  88. Sorry for not proof-reading, again.

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  89. Jeremy:

    I think you'll find that the psychological literature assumes that they are hallucinations from the beginning, and that halluicinations have a simple, naturalistic explanation. But this is not particularly important to the present discussion.

    First, that is because hallucinations do have naturalistic explanations. They are caused by any abnormal firing of the brain’s perceptual mechanisms, whether caused by drugs, tumors, electrolyte imbalance, psychiatric disorders, and so on.

    Second, what am I supposed to do in my profession when a family brings me a patient who claims to be communicating with Jesus who appears to him during the day? Should I send him home and congratulate them on having such a special child who is blessed to have been chosen by Jesus to appear to? Should I tell them that their son possesses a special spiritual faculty that allows them to interact with the spiritual realm?

    You now seem to be copying Vaal in talking too abstractly and ignoring the specific nature of claims. It is not what is more likely in the abstract (which is unknowable) but what, given a very close study of the specific fact of Christ's life and his religion, what we think most likely in this instance.

    I have provided specifics to inform the likelihood issue.

    First, given the well-known psychological phenomena of (a) hallucinations, especially in bereavement, and (b) human beings distorting their perceptions and memories to reduce cognitive dissonance, it is at the very least consistent with the laws of human psychology, and the laws of nature, that the individuals that were the basis for the resurrection story could have hallucinated the experience, and/or revised their memories of the events in question over the decades of oral discussion and communication of them. After all, we do not know what the disciples told people immediately after the experience of the resurrected Jesus, and then compared it to what the Gospel writers recorded.

    Second, given (c) the decades of oral transmission prior to any written record, (d) the lack of verification of the integrity of the chains of transmission themselves, (e) the lack of information about what specific claims were transmitted from person X to person Y, and (f) the absence of detailed information about the precise methodology by which the Gospel writers collected, analyzed and synthesized their historical data, the Gospel narratives themselves cannot be taken to be the gospel truth, so to speak. There are too many unknown variables that we lack any data about to be able to treat them as reliable to the degree that they could support a miraculous event, such as the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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  90. It will also, I think, depend on our metaphysics and philosophy. I expect God to show himself in religious traditions, and therefore Christianity fits into what I would expect. Even though you are Classical Theist, you strangely seem to rule out miracles completely

    I don’t see why God has to reveal himself in miracles, according to classical theism. Miracles are certainly consistent with classical theism, but they do not necessarily follow from classical theism. If a miracle is an event that we simply do not currently understand, then I believe in miracles. If a miracle is an event that has been demonstrated to require a supernatural explanation that transcends the natural order, then I remain skeptical.

    It does seem quite unlikely that the kind of ordered experiences that the gospels contain are the product of hallucinations.

    You assume that hallucinations are grossly disorganized and incoherent messes. I can assure you from personal experience that they can be very well ordered and organized.

    That you are stretching your analogies is shown by the use of the Salem witchtrials, where people saw feverish apparations and not what is reported by the gospel.

    That is no stretch at all. The documentation of the Salem witch trials is much more extensive and reliable than that of the Gospels. Thus, you should believe its witnesses even more than you should the Gospel witnesses. The fact that you are not openly embracing the reality of witches in Salem tells me that you do not believe that there were actual witches, and that the experiences that resulted in the accusations and deaths of twenty people were better explained mundanely by individual and social psychological factors. Why the double standard?

    Same with the bereavement experiences. I doubt they are so common as 80% - I have never heard of anyone experiencing one

    I cited only one study on elderly grief, and thus its conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. The only point was that it is not beyond the pale to consider bereavement hallucinations are a possible explanation, because it is a well-documented psychological phenomena, even if you personally were never told about them by anyone that you know.

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  91. I doubt they come with the same sort of message and clarity as Christ in the gospels. At the very least one should suspend judgment. You are altogether too certain that it can all be dismissed as hallucinations.

    Again, your personal doubts are not the issue. This is not about personal incredulity, but rather about well-documented psychological phenomena that could account for the experiences of the early Christians regarding Jesus’ resurrection. This doesn’t mean that the early Christians were wild, disheveled lunatics who were grossly disorganized and foaming at the mouth in hysterical agitation, by the way.

    Mormonism is metaphysically absurd and, to me, bears too many of the signs of a modern cobbling together and so I wouldn't endorse it.

    But remember, one of the evidences for the resurrection is that there are so many implausible aspects of it, i.e. the female witnesses, the way it casts the apostles in such a negative light, and so on. The fact that Mormonism is so ludicrous should increase its likelihood on this model. I mean, who would make up such a ridiculous story?

    Personally, I do not think it important if Christ historically existed as he his revelation depicts him. But I do object to the idea we should rule out miracles like his resurrection a priori.

    Fair enough. My position is similar to Vaal’s, i.e. the more distant an event is from our everyday experience, the higher the threshold of evidence it must cross. Sure, that places a high burden of proof upon the person making the extraordinary claim, but so be it. And regarding the resurrection, I just don’t think that standard of evidence has been met. That’s not to say that it couldn’t possibly be met, by the way.

    Finally, from a scientific viewpoint, if these researchers claimed a miracle it wouldn't matter much either way. If they couldn't repeat it then scientifically their research would have still come to a dead end.

    Fine. Scientifically, their claim would be worthless, but from the standpoint of a believer in miracles, then could you so easily dismiss their claim? Why be so close minded?

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  92. Glenn:

    Someone had said, [A] hallucination is a perceptual experience in the absence of a stimulus," and I thought it was you who said it. My mistake; sorry.

    I did say that, and you are correct that it could be misinterpreted to mean that a hallucination occurs without any antecedent causes or conditions. My apologies for the confusion, and thanks for allowing me the opportunity to clarify myself.

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  93. Dguller,

    Your response to me is too long for me to respond to in full, without having the conversation increase exponentially in length every time one of us replies.

    I will very quickly address hallucinations in general. Your use of the term caused is somewhat curious. It seems almost identical to those who suggest that because the brain clearly has an effect on the mind, the mind and brain must be identical. That hallucinations may often have the efficient, naturalistic causes you mention is in no sense a proof they are simply naturalistic phenomena. It is my understanding not all psychologists belief this. Did not Jung think not?

    When it comes to our opinions on hallucinations, I admit I'm just extrapolating from what I know of hallucinations. But I do not think you have a peculiarly detailed or close argument here. Your analogies seemed stretched and your argument vague and tendentious. Maybe we shouldn't expect more in a setting like this, but I do not think you have satisfactorily shown that the hallucinations you speak of neatly fit the example of the gospel.

    Like Vaal your claims are far too strong, ironically, it seems to me. Instead of suspending judgment, as the more impartial and indeed sceptical individual should, you seem quite desperate to suggest there must be a naturalistic explanation for miracles that we should always (or almost so) accept over a non-naturalistic one. I don't think this is correct. I think there are plenty of claims of the supernatural where we can investigate and at least conclude that we should suspend our judgment. And this is before one gets into metaphysics. The gospel story is one such event.

    When it comes to your example, it would entirely depend upon a close investigation of the research. I would think though that such research is a particularly unlikely place for a miracle. These are not the places one usually encounters them or the paranormal in general.

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  94. Now, on the question of Classical Theism and revelation.

    From my perspective it is not primarily miracles through which God reveals himself, but religious tradition, revelation, and inspiration. It is the end of man to know, love, and be at one with God. This is the same as to say it is the end of man to be rational. This is not achieved in a simply rationalistic sense, however. It is achieved through a transformative process that brings our whole being closer to God - spiritualising us.

    This process requires the support of not just discursive reason but symbolism and the imaginal, rites, sacraments, doctrines, and so forth. Different spiritual aptitudes will make use of these elements in slightly different ways and progress faster or slower, of course. This to me is where religion comes from. God wishes to guide man to himself and man, through his faculties (including Nous and the Creative Imagination) seeks God, individually and collectively.

    I also hold to the traditional view, that Platonists and Aristotelians held and so did (in slightly different ways, all traditional civilisations I know of), that creation is made up of many levels of being. At the summit of creation are the ideal realms, then there are imaginal realms, then the subtle or psychic realms, then the corporeal realms (our own). Each lower realm descends from and is partly held within that above it. Our realm is, cosmically speaking, small. It is not cut off from the psychic realms and there are many overlaps - indeed, the human psyche is a partly subtle entity itself.

    Miracles, and revelations in general, can be God bypassing the usual laws of nature as particularly efficacious way of bringing to our attention the centrality of the spiritual and himself to all creation. A bolt of lightening out of a blue sky. Revelations, originating in higher realms than the corporeal, and ultimately in God himself, will certainly often bypass the laws of nature. It would strange if they did not. Besides, the corporeal is not sealed off and self-contained - there is much overlap between it and the subtle realms, which is why the widespread reports of the paranormal are not surprising to me.

    If your perspective were true, it would mean that the corporeal were somehow sealed off from higher realms of being and that the divine was always veiled behind a naturalistic view of the natural world, never revealing himself more immediately. Despite the fact he has given us the divine spark of Nous to know him and see him.

    It is not my argument that the uniqueness and unlikeliness of the gospel is central to its truth. Besides, I think there are different kinds of likeliness being talked of. The examples you use of the gospel are not extrinsic but intrinsic to a particular cultural perspective. Mormonism is metaphysically absurd. It bears many of the hallmarks of modern, and therefore profane, construction. It is a faith that has not produced much in the way of spiritual vision or wisdom or beauty or Saints, sages, and mystics.

    It is not that important, actually, if I do or do not accept Mormonism as containing divine truth. It would just mean my Platonic universalism included Mormonism, but I think I am correct in my judgment on Mormonism. More interesting and uncertain cases, from my point of view, are Manichaeism and those movements later called Gnosticism (although these latter were clearly not full, universal faiths like Christianity or Islam, but more like wisdom traditions). I am not sure how to view them.

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  95. You assume that hallucinations are grossly disorganized and incoherent messes. I can assure you from personal experience that they can be very well ordered and organized.


    Of this I am sceptical. I do not deny there is often method in madness. Jung, I believe, thought that many mental illnesses were due to the person not being able to shut off erratic infiltration of the archetypal. He clearly understood a lot of hallucinations as being both erratic and yet not entirely without some sense. I may be wrong and many may be less chaotic and disordered still, but I do think the ones associated with the gospel are more orderly than those Jung was referring to, and those I have read or heard of.

    This says nothing, of course, about the validity of the gospel accounts per se. It just says to me that the dismissal of hallucinations doesn't necessarily fit as neatly as you are implying.

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  96. Let me just thank dguller, Vaal, Jeremy, Glenn, and the others in this conversation. I'm probably not the only one (relatively) silent reader profiting from it.

    My position is about the same of dguller. I've been convinced of classical theism (thanks, Prof. Feser!), but I've so far been unable to bridge the gulf to accepting any specific revelation, because of the credibility of ancient testimony issues that have been touched upon.

    "Brian" above said that Feser has the praembula fidei down. Now we need a Feser for the motiva credibilitatis.. Indeed.

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  97. JBO (re: 4/20 @ 10:02PM),

    Yeah. I think dguller and Vaal are missing the mark in their comments, but I also think the discussion from team Christianity is not drawing on the fullness of Catholic teaching on this topic. Like Feser said in the talk, I think we are just beginning to get our mojo back after being complacent for so long.

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  98. "But remember, one of the evidences for the resurrection is that there are so many implausible aspects of it, i.e. the female witnesses, the way it casts the apostles in such a negative light, and so on. The fact that Mormonism is so ludicrous should increase its likelihood on this model. I mean, who would make up such a ridiculous story?"

    Dguller,

    That is fightin dirty. This is big time apples and oranges. Certain "translations" of Smith's have been falsified (the book of Abraham, to be specific). To any person without pride to protect due to prior commitments to Mormonism, it has been all but settled that Smith was a con man par excellence who prayed on revivalist trends of his time for his own material gain. Jeremy said as well, it is worth noting, that Mormonism is absurd metaphysically. Christianity, on the other hand, has produced robust contributions to philosophy.

    Additionally, the implausible aspects of the resurrection story you cite are made implausible on the notion that the story was a first century fabrication. It is not that the story is just so wild, but that, for instance, certain prejudices against women as witnesses in that era cannot be ignored by the individual putting forward the theory that the story was fabricated (given our experience with other fabrications, like Mormonism!) If, for instance, the resurrection was a poetic embellishment, then the implausibility of women witnesses would not be at issue. The implausibility of the Mormon story, I hope, is clearly of a different kind. That Mormonism is a revelation is made implausible by the fabrications that we know about, a strange metaphysical scheme, and the clear material benefits to its founders (what we are used to among cult leaders and con men) among other things.

    We have positive evidence against Mormonism's particular claims to revelation, but so far only alternative explanations for elements of the resurrection story have been offered. Any reasonable alternative explanation can be proffered for this or that bit of evidence taken alone, but may not suffice for the whole body of data. I'm not sure that this is apparent to you, though. That's to say, your alternatives are less plausible when put up against the whole story. Surely it is obvious that one explanation for the appearances, another for the absence of the body, another for the embarrassing aspects of the story, and so on is not parsimonious?

    With that I beg your pardon, and I shall not interrupt you and Jeremy further.

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  99. Prayed = preyed in that first paragraph

    Bless this iPad

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  100. dguller (just replying to the most salient points, to keep this reply somewhat manageable):

    “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

    Oh, I see. So basically you’re dismissing the Resurrection a priori because it wasn’t recorded in a genre that wouldn’t exist for another nineteen hundred years or so. Well, I suppose if that’s your standard you’ll never be convinced, any more than the positivist who demands some kind of replicable experiment to prove God’s existence will ever be dissuaded from his atheism. Still, there are a few misconceptions in your posts that I’d like to clear up:

    “We know that hallucinations happen. We know that people are capable of a tremendous amount of self-deception to minimize cognitive dissonance. We know that people are capable of distorting their perceptions, interpretations, and memories of events when motivated to do so. Putting that all together, you have an account that is rooted in psychological phenomena that are quite common.”

    As Jeremy said, you’re being too vague and general here. The main issue here isn’t whether hallucinations are a priori more likely than people coming back from the dead, but whether, *in this specific case*, hallucination is more likely than resurrection. Given that all the cases of hallucination or mass delusion you’ve brought up have differed in important ways from the disciples’ testimony, your arguments for this view are indecisive, to say the least.

    “I asked you earlier whether you believed that the people executed at Salem were actual witches. According to your criteria, you have a number of eyewitnesses that testified to witchcraft, as discovered by a methodical investigation and legal proceedings. There are volumes of documents, and the details are much better recorded than those in early Christianity. Therefore, those poor individuals were real witches that consorted with the devil. Right?”

    How many of the apparitions associated with the trials appeared to several people at once?

    “I agree that God exists and he is all-powerful, which includes the power to bring the dead to life. However, I disagree that we know that he desires us to know him in an afterlife, which is something communicated by revelation and not philosophy. Same goes with the claim that he is motivated to be punished for our sins, which is something that no non-Christian theology accepts, because it is an idea that is derived from a particular revelation, and not philosophical reasoning.”

    This isn’t really the place to get dragged off into a theological discussion, but just to summarise, I’d say that, as to the first, God, being all-good, wills what is good for His creation; and, since it is good for us to know God, it follows that God wills us to know Him. As for the second, God has a motivation for miraculous revelation, because this enables us to know Him better; and, as the consequence of sin is separation from God, in which state we cannot know Him, God also has a motivation for taking away the consequences of said sins. Nevertheless He is also just, and hence cannot simply ignore them; whence the necessity of the Passion.

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  101. “Because the different pieces of the account are all empirically possible, and do not require an appeal to miracles. Unless you want to say that a combination of empirically possible factors was more unlikely than a divine intervention that violated a law of nature? Why would you make that move?”

    A combination of empirically possible events isn’t always plausible, even if in isolation they might be more common than the alternative explanation. It’s more common for people to lie and for governments to seek to influence events behind the scenes than it is for people to walk on the Moon, but that doesn’t mean that the Moon-landing conspiracy theories are at all plausible.

    Also, see above about general vs. specific. Hallucinations in general might be common, but how common are hallucinations in which everybody in a room seems to see somebody who isn’t there, and all think that he’s doing and saying the same things (at least to the degree that they don’t realise they’re hallucinating)? You’ve already said that you don’t know, in which case how do you know that *this kind of* hallucination is actually possible? The extreme coincidence required, and the fact that such a hallucination has apparently never been securely recorded, would suggest that it isn’t actually possible. In fact, the only reason I can think of for preferring this as an explanation to pretty much anything is that you’ve ruled out miracles from the get-go and are scrabbling around for an alternative explanation – which would be inconsistent with your claim that you’re merely sceptical about miracles, not outright dismissive of them per se.

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  102. “The point is that we simply do not know what the Evangelists did to investigate the historical truth, other than speak to people and try really hard to be objective.”

    Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.39.14-16:

    “We must now add to [Papias’] statements quoted above a tradition about the Mark who wrote the Gospel, which has been set forth in these words: ‘The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory, although not in an ordered form, of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, [he heard and accompanied] Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of individual stories, but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the teachings of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or falsify anything.’ This, then, is the account given by Papias about Mark. But about Matthew the following was said: ‘Therefore Matthew put the teachings into an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language [or dialect, i.e., in Koine Greek as it was spoken in ancient Palestine], but each person translated [or interpreted] them as best he could.’”

    The Muratorian Canon:

    “The third book of the Gospel is that according to Luke. Luke the physician, when Paul had taken him with him after the ascension of Christ, as one skilled in writing, wrote from report in his own name, though he did not himself see the Lord in the flesh and on that account he set down events as he was able to ascertain them. So he began his story from the birth of John. The fourth of the Gospels is of John, one of the disciples. To his fellow-disciples and bishops, who were encouraging him, he said, ‘Fast with me today for three days, and whatever will be revealed to each of us, let us tell it to one another.’ That same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the Apostles, that all should certify what John wrote in his own name.”

    So, it would seem that Mark got his information from Peter, who was of course personally present for most of the events described in the Gospel. Matthew seems from what Eusebius says to have relied mostly on Mark, although unless we want to suppose he just made up the order out of his head he must have had some other source to help with his chronology. Luke travelled with Paul, and so would have been able to get information from Paul, who was personally acquainted with the Apostles, and most probably to speak to them himself. John had been a disciple himself, and so would have presumably written from his own recollections.

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  103. “Not at all. Otherwise, anyone who was passionate about any belief at all would, by definition, according to you, be a passionate investigator of the truth who took great pains to have a reliable methodology to determine the truth of the matter. Look at parents who do not vaccinate their children. They are pretty passionate, and yet you won’t find a group that is more disinterested in finding out what the actual scientific truth of the matter is. In fact, often passion distorts one’s ability to discover objective truth by increasing the bias to preserve what one is passionate about.”

    They might be passionate, but they don’t really have as much riding on their beliefs as the Apostles did. If they were ordered to recant their views on vaccination on pain of death, do you not think that they would, at the least, want to make damn sure that their views on vaccination were actually correct?

    “The idea of resurrection was certainly not something outside of what Jews at the time would consider. Resurrection is specifically mentioned at Isaiah 26:19, Ezekial 37:12-14, and Daniel 12:1-3.”

    Sure, but that was a general resurrection at the end of time, not a specific individual being brought back in a historical period.

    “I meant to say that we simply do not know enough about the methodology of historical investigation of the early Christians to make any determination about the veracity of their narratives. There is no recording of any kind that delineates the lines of transmission of the accounts in question.”

    Sure there is; I’ve just quoted a couple of text above. What more do you want, the Evangelists’ interview notes?

    “You want to point to later Christian scholars’ behavior as evidence of early Christian behavior in terms of scholarly rigor. If you think that is a valid inference, then I should be able to make the same inference from later Christians ability to create false narratives for theological purposes to early Christians doing the same. You can’t have it both ways. If such an inference is invalid, then you cannot point to later Christian scholarship as evidence for early Christian scholarship. If such an inference is valid, then early Christians also engaged in propaganda for theological ends.”

    Whilst the Church might not have decided on a formalised, universal canon until later, the early Christians did distinguish between (what would become) the four canonical Gospels and other texts. That’s why, for example, the Didache was never treated with as much authority, even though there was never any suggestion that it was heretical or wrong: it wasn’t written by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry, therefore it wasn’t on the same level as the Gospels themselves.

    As for the forged texts, these weren’t actually produced by the Church, but by heretical splinter groups. Plus of course the whole fact of their trying to attribute their documents to the original disciples indicates that the early Christians did in fact treat the sources of their theology seriously. Why bother ascribing something to Peter unless Peter’s status as an eyewitness to Jesus’ life would boost his credibility?

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  104. Msgrx:

    So basically you’re dismissing the Resurrection a priori because it wasn’t recorded in a genre that wouldn’t exist for another nineteen hundred years or so. Well, I suppose if that’s your standard you’ll never be convinced, any more than the positivist who demands some kind of replicable experiment to prove God’s existence will ever be dissuaded from his atheism.

    And the reason why that subsequent genre developed was to avoid the biases and distortions that were present in earlier genres. Obviously, the ancient historians made some attempt to control for biases. That is why they preferred to speak to direct eyewitnesses rather than rely on hearsay, and the reason for that is that they understood the human psychological tendency to distort information when that information is received second-hand. They were simply unaware of all the other ways that information could be distorted by human psychological mechanisms, and thus they simply could not control for them. That just means that, given their methods and resources, they could not possibly attain the requisite level of evidential support for the extraordinary claim that they were communicating.

    I mean, if an ancient scientist claimed to have empirically discovered an atom, then we would be highly skeptical of their claim, because they simply lacked the tools to make such an empirical discovery. It would make no sense to say, “Well, it just isn’t fair that he lacked the resources that we currently possess, and so I’m just going to believe him anyway.” So, if you are going to make an extraordinary claim, and Christ’s resurrection is certainly extraordinary, then it must be supported by adequate evidence, which would include ruling out alternative natural explanations. Since we simply lack the information to determine whether such natural explanations, one of which I have provided, were ruled out, we cannot simply rule them out. And given that natural explanations are more likely, because they occur more often in our experience, they should be the default, unless there are extraordinary reasons to reject them. Since such extraordinary reasons are unavailable, I think it is more reasonable to stick with the natural explanation.

    As Jeremy said, you’re being too vague and general here. The main issue here isn’t whether hallucinations are a priori more likely than people coming back from the dead, but whether, *in this specific case*, hallucination is more likely than resurrection. Given that all the cases of hallucination or mass delusion you’ve brought up have differed in important ways from the disciples’ testimony, your arguments for this view are indecisive, to say the least.

    First, we simply do not know enough to know whether the Gospel account is true. We do know that early Christians produced false narratives to serve ideological ends, engaged in rhetorical exaggeration, and modified their narratives to include references to earlier passages in the Old Testament to create the impression of narrative continuity. That in itself should raise our suspicions of their narrative.

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  105. Second, there is simply a paucity of evidence in the texts that we currently possess to warrant the preference of their extraordinary events over more mundane events. As I have said above, we do not know what the disciples experienced in any level of sufficient detail, and we do not know what they directly communicated to other people in an oral fashion soon after their experiences. All we have is the written recording after decades of oral transmission, which would provide numerous opportunities for distortion and revision, not all of which would have been conscious and intentional. We have no way of comparing what the disciples communicated right after their experiences with what was told to the Gospel writers, and thus have no way of knowing if their accounts were consistent, not only with each other, but also with past narratives. Like I said, there are simply too many unknowns to warrant believing their extraordinary account as accurate, and given how extraordinary their account purports to be, the bar is set quite high from an evidentiary standpoint.

    Third, even granted that a number of them, whatever that precise number was, actually experienced a risen Christ, it is still true that there are natural explanations available. Sure, they are unlikely, but so what? Unlikely events happen all the time. It is unlikely that I will have a royal flush of hearts in poker, and yet if it happens, nobody would say that it is a miracle warranting divine intervention. And I would say that an unlikely natural explanation is far more likely than an explanation that involves a God-man killing himself, and then raising himself from the dead, in order to save mankind. This is especially true, given that there is empirical evidence of bereavement hallucinations and subconscious distortions of perception, interpretation and memory to decrease cognitive dissonance, both of which were likely operative in the disciples.

    Fourth, it is highly ironic that you make the following contradictory claims. One, that the resurrection is so radically unique and unlikely that it must have been the product of a supernatural intervention that suspended the laws of nature, and thus must be accepted as true, because there are aspects of it that to too unlikely to be invented. Two, that a natural explanation must be rejected, because it is too unlikely that the well-supported psychological phenomena in question could have occurred in the precise way that they did, and that is only because many people shared the same experience.

    How many of the apparitions associated with the trials appeared to several people at once?

    Here’s one example, but note that there are many others. On April 19, 1692, Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Putnam, Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott were all present during the cross examination of an accused woman, Bridget Bishop. All of them fell into fits and convulsions when Bishop entered the courtroom, and all claimed that she was sending apparitions to torment them, and all affirmed that Bishop had attempted to seduce them to follow the Devil. So, here you have an instance of five women presenting with visible fits and convulsions, and all claiming that those fits and convulsions were caused by the Bishop sending devilish apparitions to torture them. And remember, such events were not uncommon during the Salem witch trials. So, was Bishop a witch? It seems that according to your standards of evidence, she should be considered one, and was rightfully hung by the magistrate in Salem.

    God, being all-good, wills what is good for His creation; and, since it is good for us to know God, it follows that God wills us to know Him.

    But the way God wills to be known cannot be known by philosophical reasoning. He could have chosen to be known only in the afterlife, which would be the case for the millions of humans that lived prior to Christ. There are a number of possibilities here, none of which can be logically inferred to the exclusion of all others, simply by philosophical reasoning.

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  106. A combination of empirically possible events isn’t always plausible, even if in isolation they might be more common than the alternative explanation. It’s more common for people to lie and for governments to seek to influence events behind the scenes than it is for people to walk on the Moon, but that doesn’t mean that the Moon-landing conspiracy theories are at all plausible.

    Note that both possibilities that you mentioned are natural possibilities. It is just a matter of deciding which natural possibility is the more likely. Given the number of individuals involved, and the years of time that the project was ongoing, as well as the material evidence available, it is much more likely that a Moon landing occurred than a massive conspiracy. And the Moon landing itself was not miraculous, i.e. involving the suspension of natural laws. So, you are comparing apples and oranges here.

    Hallucinations in general might be common, but how common are hallucinations in which everybody in a room seems to see somebody who isn’t there, and all think that he’s doing and saying the same things (at least to the degree that they don’t realise they’re hallucinating)?

    You are assuming that such an event actually happened, and your only evidence is a written record produced after decades of oral transmission with no independent means of corroborating whether the record itself is accurate. Given what we know about human psychology, it is more likely that the narrative was modified and revised over time into the form that the Gospel writers recorded than that they accurately described a miraculous event. And even if the record was accurate in its broad outlines -- i.e. not the exact number of people, but that there were a number of people – a natural explanation would still be more likely than the claim that a God-man killed himself, brought himself back to life, in order to save mankind.

    You’ve already said that you don’t know, in which case how do you know that *this kind of* hallucination is actually possible? The extreme coincidence required, and the fact that such a hallucination has apparently never been securely recorded, would suggest that it isn’t actually possible.

    But it is possible. There is something called a shared psychotic disorder in which multiple individuals can share the same psychotic symptoms. The individuals are quite close, usually in a family, and there is typically a more dominant individual who is the primary source of the psychosis who has a powerful influence upon the other individual(s). It is a very rare condition, and thus is not well studied, but it is certainly possible that a small number of disciples experienced a bereavement hallucination, and through their powerful influence upon the rest, convinced them that they, too, were experiencing the same thing, thus creating a delusional belief. Is it unlikely? Sure. But is it more unlikely than God assuming human form, allowing himself to be killed, then resurrecting himself from the dead, appearing to a number of disciples over several weeks, and then ascending to heaven until the day of judgment?

    Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.39.14-16

    First, this is still too vague, which is so ironic, given your demands for a high degree of specificity regarding my psychological explanation. It seems that your standards noticeably decline when it comes to supernatural explanations. Which stories about Jesus did Peter tell Mark? How long from the telling of the story and the recording of the story? Did Mark also speak to other disciples, other than Peter?

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  107. Second, look at the dates involved. Mark probably became Peter’s interpreter and travel companion around 41 CE. Mark then founded the church of Alexandria in 49 CE. The Gospel of Mark is supposed to have been recorded around 65 CE. Assuming that Mark was no longer Peter’s companion after 49 CE, that would mean that he recorded his memories of Peter’s stories about Jesus after 16 years or so. Again, it still seems like there was plenty of time for memory revision and alteration.

    They might be passionate, but they don’t really have as much riding on their beliefs as the Apostles did. If they were ordered to recant their views on vaccination on pain of death, do you not think that they would, at the least, want to make damn sure that their views on vaccination were actually correct?

    Not as much riding on their beliefs? I suppose the lives of their children are just an afterthought?

    Sure, but that was a general resurrection at the end of time, not a specific individual being brought back in a historical period.

    And yet the basic idea was there, only when it would occur was different. Once an event is established as possible, the time in which it occurs is not a radical revision of the core idea.

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  108. msgrx,


    So Jesus was scourged, crucified, stabbed, and buried. Having somehow survived all this,

    Sorry, no. There's no way that happened.

    The way you are writing implies you no idea how many catastrophic injuries and situations people have survived, including people left for dead.
    This page could be flooded with examples. How about a guy who survived a FIRING SQUAD.

    "Mexican revolutionary ­Wenseslao Moguel was captured by the enemy on 18 March 1915 and sentenced to death by firing squad.
    He was shot eight times by the squad, then once more – an intended coup de grace – at close range through his head."

    And he ended up ESCAPING to his village and lived a long life!

    If you saw him standing in front of an 8 man firing squad would you be saying "Yeah, it's likely he'll live through this." Of course not.

    More recently,

    "Iranian man to be hanged a second time after surviving execution attempt :
    "Certified dead and taken to the morgue after his hanging, his family was stunned when, while going to collect his body the next day, they found he was still breathing."
    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/iranian-man-hanged-surviving-execution-article-1.1487111

    Survives HANGING. CERTIFIED DEAD, BY THE EXECUTIONERS. But survived nonetheless.

    There are just countless examples of human being surviving horrendous injury. Stabbing? Try these:
    http://www.oddee.com/item_98009.aspx

    People have survived 16 story falls to concrete. Have been sole survivors of massive plane crashes. People have survived falling FROM AIRPLANES to the ground.

    There are tons of amazing survival stories from 9/11 alone. Looking at footage of the trade centres collapse, knowing someone was on the 22nd floor when it collapsed, would you have said before hand "yeah, he would have survived!" Of course not. And yet a guy DID survive, "surfing" along the falling concrete!
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/september-11-attacks/9530013/911-survivor-tells-how-he-surfed-15-floors-down-the-collapsing-tower.html

    Accounts of people being cut in half by trains and surviving, a guy surviving being shot 19 times!
    You want to talk being stabbed, how about a giant pole right through the head, as in the famous Phineas Gage case? An amusing list here:

    http://www.cracked.com/article_17573_7-fatal-injuries-that-people-somehow-survived.html

    More crazy survival stories:

    http://listverse.com/2013/04/25/10-people-who-survived-your-worst-nightmares/

    It goes on and on. There are astounding tales of surviving situations that ought have killed people, and horrific injury, every single year. Including incredible escapes WHILE being horribly injured. Every war is filled with such accounts.

    To wave all these away and maintain the idea that we have to make some exception for Jesus surviving an execution attempt is the most biased, special pleading. "No way, you aren't taking MY miracle away from me!"

    Vaal

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  109. Matt Sheean,

    It's been a pleasure, thanks for your civility.

    Cheers,

    Vaal

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  110. @Vaal:

    "The way you are writing implies you no idea how many catastrophic injuries and situations people have survived, including people left for dead."

    It seems that way only because you've left out the entire middle bit of what msgrx wrote. Here's the whole thing, with the part you omitted in bold:

    So Jesus was scourged, crucified, stabbed, and buried. Having somehow survived all this, plus going three days without food or water, he wakes up in the tomb, manages to disentangle himself from the grave-clothes, puts them in a nice neat pile, somehow manages to roll away the bajillion-ton rock at the entrance, and leaves. He then staggers across Jerusalem, goes to the house where the disciples are staying, and drags himself into the room where they are, half-dead with shock, blood loss, and lack of food and water -- whereupon the disciples immediately greet this bloody, emaciated mess as their Risen Lord and Saviour, miraculously returned to new life after his glorious conquest of death.

    Sorry, no. There's no way that happened.


    You shouldn't have any trouble spotting the disanalogies between that description and your own illustrations of supposedly similar phenomena. That some people have amazingly survived things that would ordinarily have killed them just isn't enough to make the comparisons significant.

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  111. msgrx,

    I told you it was hopeless:


    "So Jesus was scourged, crucified, stabbed, and buried. Having somehow survived all this,

    Sorry, no. There's no way that happened.


    The way you are writing implies you no idea how many catastrophic injuries and situations people have survived, including people left for dead."

    Skeptics will cling to any little shred of hope that there just had to be a naturalistic explanation for the resurrection -- there just had to be! -- all evidence be damned. Why is that when we know God is quite capable of miracles and, something no one has mentioned here yet at all, has already revealed Himself to the Jewish people for years. It's not like Jesus learned torah from the Romans!

    dguller,

    One point about Salem -- there are various problems with the way in which those trials were conducted which is why they became famous later (the Puritans felt they made some mistakes and regretted their mistakes). BUT, just so you know I'm quite happy to bite the bullet and assume that throughout history and even at Salem there were real live witches at work. I believe in demons and witchcraft and all the rest. Indeed, even demons believe in God -- and they tremble in fear at Him.

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  112. dguller:

    “We do know that early Christians produced false narratives to serve ideological ends,”

    Erm, no. We know that there were false narrative produced, but we *also* know that these were never accepted by the early Church as being on a par with the canonical Gospels. You’re just twisting history to suit your ideological ends here.

    “and modified their narratives to include references to earlier passages in the Old Testament to create the impression of narrative continuity.”

    What, you mean the bits where it says “This was done to fulfil the prophecy that X”? But how does that prove that the passage was modified? People are naturally good at finding similarities between things, and it’s not at all implausible that somebody would notice parallels between what Jesus did and what the Old Testament said. Plus, of course, it’s entirely possible that Jesus himself deliberately acted in such a way as to parallel the OT prophecies, kind of like how mediaeval court ceremonial deliberately echoed that of ancient Rome and Israel.

    “One, that the resurrection is so radically unique and unlikely that it must have been the product of a supernatural intervention that suspended the laws of nature, and thus must be accepted as true, because there are aspects of it that to too unlikely to be invented.”

    Where did I say that?

    “Here’s one example, but note that there are many others. On April 19, 1692, Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Putnam, Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and Mary Walcott were all present during the cross examination of an accused woman, Bridget Bishop. All of them fell into fits and convulsions when Bishop entered the courtroom, and all claimed that she was sending apparitions to torment them, and all affirmed that Bishop had attempted to seduce them to follow the Devil. So, here you have an instance of five women presenting with visible fits and convulsions, and all claiming that those fits and convulsions were caused by the Bishop sending devilish apparitions to torture them. And remember, such events were not uncommon during the Salem witch trials. So, was Bishop a witch? It seems that according to your standards of evidence, she should be considered one, and was rightfully hung by the magistrate in Salem.”

    I asked for multiple people sharing a hallucination, not having a fit.

    “But the way God wills to be known cannot be known by philosophical reasoning.”

    No it can’t, but so what? I never said that philosophical reasoning alone could prove that God would reveal Himself through miracles, just that miracles are *the sort of thing one might expect* God to do.

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  113. “decades of oral transmission”

    The general consensus was that they were written between approximately AD 70 and AD 100, or about 40 to 70 years after the events they describe. By way of contrast, our major sources of information about the Punic Wars are the writings of Livy (c. 200 years after the events) and Plutarch (300 years). The fall of the Roman Republic is covered by Plutarch again (200-100 years after the events), as well as Dio Cassius (300-200 years). The earliest source for the life of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) is Diodorus Siculus’ history, which was written between about 60 and 30 BC. Nobody suggests that these sources should be junked because they were written long after the events they describe.

    As for the “oral” part, bear in mind that the story would have been told from the beginning of the Church, and in such circumstances stories tend to become fixed very early, rather than changing continuously. So whilst the story may have been told for several decades, it’s nevertheless likely to have been told in a stable form.

    “First, this is still too vague, which is so ironic, given your demands for a high degree of specificity regarding my psychological explanation. It seems that your standards noticeably decline when it comes to supernatural explanations. Which stories about Jesus did Peter tell Mark? How long from the telling of the story and the recording of the story? Did Mark also speak to other disciples, other than Peter?”

    Oh, FFS. The answers to your questions are perfectly obvious from the bit I quoted. Which stories did Peter tell Mark? The ones in the bloody Gospel, of course. How long from the telling to the recording? Well they were originally written down when Mark was acting “in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter”, even if he didn’t put them together and publish them until later (which blows your theory in the next post out of the water). Did Mark speak to other disciples? Well, presumably, but as Papias doesn’t mention their testimony being included in the Gospel, it would seem that it was just Peter’s anecdotes that made it into the Gospel according to Mark.

    Also, what’s all this about noticeably declining standards? Mark’s Gospel was written by a long-time companion of a man who was intimately involved in the events in question. How many other ancient histories can say as much? What more do you want me to do, produce St. Mark’s interview notes for your perusal?

    It’s becoming increasingly obvious that this isn’t really about the evidence or lack thereof for the Resurrection, but because you’ve decided, for whatever reason, that any supernatural explanation must be rejected in favour of a naturalistic one, no matter how unlikely or unparalleled this latter explanation might be. I’ve no idea why this is, because you’ve already said that you believe in a God with the power to do miracles, and because actually performing miracles isn’t exactly surprising given the classical conception of God. Perhaps you could actually give an argument for this proposition, because so far it just seems to rest on deistic prejudice.

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  114. Here is a good example from msgrx that can serve to highlight the gap between metaphysical arguments and arguments to Christ's Resurrection.
    God, being all-good, wills what is good for His creation; and, since it is good for us to know God, it follows that God wills us to know Him.
    (Note that msgrx added in the claims about the consequences of "sin" and "separation from God" and God's desire to mend those consequences. But that
    assumes Christian theology, which would beg the question, so you can only start from the God you get from metaphysics).
    What is your hypothesis, what does it predict and how?

    To help predict, you'd have to define your terms. Since the predictive quality of the hypothesis seems to turn on the "Goodness" of God, we have to know what you would mean by "Good." It appears (as is usually the case) "Good" in this case would entail the type of virtues most of us associate with the term - e.g. compassion, love, care for the well-being of those you love, etc.

    So now we have to ask, what would "God being Good" predict? Well, in terms of revelation, it's pretty clear it doesn't directly predict The Resurrection specifically. One could come up with innumerable ways in which God could reveal Himself, and all manner of different times and places at which it could have occurred, all of which would be compatible with God revealing Himself.

    So does the hypothesis have ANY predictive power? When we check the world of our experience, is it the one predicted by the hypothesis that a Good God who cares about "what is good for us," our well-being etc? It sure doesn't seem that way. How does this "Good God" who would will what is good for us predict
    all the horror and suffering, and the seemingly random nature of this suffering and death? Does it predict a creation with rabies? Ebola? Plagues? Famine? Earthquakes? Cancer? Apparently random suffering of innocent people? That such a God would have random asteroids strafing the universe, leading us to sit on earth quaking at the possibility of being struck by one, having to monitor them? All the other threats to our welfare?

    How in the world does all this type of data fall from the hypothesis of a Good God who would do what is Good for us?

    You have to be consistent here and not allow yourself sloppy, biased inferences where you just get to count the hits "Look at this Good thing about creation" and ignore the misses "examples of all the phenomena that cause us such suffering and death." That would be like the example I gave of saying the spirit you are in touch with will flip heads on a coin, and in your method of justifying this you don't account for all the times you flip tails.

    It's not that the hypothesis would have to predict every single detail, what who will say to whom or whatever. We can have general principles to apply to general observations - e.g. gravity will tell you that rocks will slide downwards during a rock slide, not up the hill. You don't have to predict or describe the trajectory of every rock you find at the bottom of a hill to conclude they fell downward via gravity. And we can have general reasons to dismiss, or accept, many types of claims. For instance inductively derived conclusions - "this has usually been the case with X, so the next X will likely be of the same nature" etc.

    But this God hypothesis of interacting with humankind from his Goodness isn't even in the ballpark. It doesn't come close to any sort of precision in predicting the Resurrection in particular, and hence doesn't raise it's probabilities in any way substantial to the case. But the hypothesis also seems to suffer in any general prediction, suffering all manner of "misses" - all the bad that we experience - that are not predicted by, or accounted for in the hypothesis.

    Vaal

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  115. The above gets at a problem I have with the metaphysical certainty so many theists rely on. You can't escape these basic problems in your metaphysics as well. For instance, in constructing a metaphysical argument to God being the greatest degree of "Good," it is of no use unless you know what "Good" is. If you don't START with knowing what "Good" is, you don't know what you've even proved. But if you have this knowledge of what "Good" is prior to your metaphysical argument, then you already have a knowledge of "Good" to apply to the world, recognizing when you see "Good" or not. It already becomes subject to testability.

    Hence even if you accept the other metaphysical concussions about a necessary and sufficient Cause you call "God," you can still look to the world in support of the hypothesis that the Godly cause of reality possesses or exhibits this "Good" quality. And it's rather clear that the universe does not suggest it's cause has concern for our well-being. It seems at best a-moral in respect to our typical understanding of "Goodness."

    Vaal.

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  116. Vaal,

    I was using my terms as they are used in the A-T tradition (well, trying to -- I can't rule out sloppiness on my part :p), which both dguller and I accept. My point wasn't that someone with access only to the philosophical arguments would be able to predict that the Resurrection would happen, but that the Resurrection is in line with what we know of God's nature. Hence, contrary to what dguller says, the Resurrection, whilst certainly surprising and extraordinary, isn't in the end as surprising and extraordinary as the kind of mass hallucination dguller's arguing for.

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  117. If I may chime in here briefly..

    Mass hallucinations have been disproven by science.
    Psychology experiments have shown that hallucinations are a totally subjective experience. So it's not really probable that a bunch of people would have the exact same hallucination.



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  118. >The above gets at a problem I have with the metaphysical certainty so many theists rely on. You can't escape these basic problems in your metaphysics as well. For instance, in constructing a metaphysical argument to God being the greatest degree of "Good," it is of no use unless you know what "Good" is.

    What is "good" is synonymous with being, existence and being in Act?

    That is Thomism 101? How can you claim we don't
    know what "good" is when we argue for the existence of God when we already have a starting view of Being as goodness?

    Are you sure you have been doing the background reading? Because this is a major mistake.

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  119. In addition to Positivism I think Vaal believes God's Goodness consists of some type of "Moral Agency" like your average Theistic Personlist "deity" which must be justified by Theodicy as opposed to the correct Classic View that God is metaphysically good and ontologically good but apply moral goodness to him unequivocally as we would a morally good human or angel is a category mistake?

    Vaal before you come back and talk about goodness and God. You need to have read Brian Davies' REALITY OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. Not to mention THINKING ABOUT GOD by Davies.

    Otherwise your A) just talking past us and B) you will be wasting our time trying to get us to defend a Theodicy when the Classic Theistic God needs a Theodicy like a fish needs a Bicycle.

    Cheers.

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  120. Scott,

    "It seems that way only because you've left out the entire middle bit of what msgrx wrote. Here's the whole thing, with the part you omitted in bold"

    "plus going three days without food or water,"

    I already gave examples of people being "dead" for days before being discovered alive. People have survived many weeks without food. As for survival without any sustenance - no food or water - even people in severely weakened physical states are known to remain alive for quite a while without sustenance. For instance in this scientific american article:

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-a-person-sur/

    It states that ill people (e.g vegetative state) who are removed from all life support "death typically occurs after 10 to 14 days." (And that voluntary refusal of sustenance result in a similar time span to death).

    Jesus making it to the disciples? I gave an example of a man shot by firing squad 8 times, including right in the head, who nonetheless escaped and made his way back to his village. (Note even in the Christ story, the Romans didn't break his legs). There are many accounts of people in horrible condition surviving long treks to safety and treatment.

    As for getting out of his burial wrappings, the bible is very sparse with the description. We can't know with great confidence precisely how he was wrapped and thus that it was some insurmountable problem. It's not like they were thinking 'Let's make SURE these dead people can't get outta this!" (If they had such a conception of the dead rising again, Jesus' resurrection would hardly be surprising to anyone). The Christian protestations come across as rather exaggerated.

    As to Jesus rolling the stone, who says Jesus would have to have done that? Even the biblical narrative depicts other people GOING to Jesus' tomb. Mary Magdalene and her pals went there to anoint Jesus' body, which presumes they could have opened the tomb. Thus they could have opened the tomb to discover the "risen Jesus."

    That enough could have confirmed to the relevant believer's Jesus' divinity (hell, even to Jesus himself). After all, even to today Christians cry "Miracle!" at the drop of a hat.
    One doesn't have to take every single claim in the description as "fact" as we weren't there and can't confirm them, and all sorts of embellishing could have gone on. (It may even have been the case Mary didn't see Jesus immediately - who knows when he might have woken up while in the tomb and where he may have been situated in a dark tomb - Mary naturally assuming if Jesus weren't exactly where he'd been placed then he was gone, until Jesus speaks up from another direction). What are you going to say, that embellishing a claim is "improbable?"
    It's the most common thing in the world, and it's exactly what Christians think OTHER religions do in their claims.

    This is a possible explanation for the general belief that Jesus had been crucified, died and risen again, that you can not rule out. "improbable" won't do, because then as I keep showing "improbable" is a sloppy heuristic for deciding when to insert a miracle. NO ONE HERE HAS SUPPLIED any such cogent method of when to decide something was God intervening vs natural but improbable. All the cries of "that's IMPROBABLE" are worthless until this challenge is answered.

    And the deeper point is that we don't have to take ANY of the Jesus crucifixion/burial/empty tomb, post appearances account as "facts" so solid that one can only explain them via God.
    Because we just don't have the access we need to establish them that firmly.

    Vaal

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  121. Well to be fair, the guy who was cut in half and the guy who was shot multiple time got very quick access to modern medical/surgical assistance.

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  122. Msgrx:

    I asked for multiple people sharing a hallucination, not having a fit.

    First, the girls having the fits claimed to experience apparitions tormenting them. As the witness moved her head, the girls were further tormented. Why not assume that she was a witch? How could they all experience the same apparitions tormenting their bodies at the same time, if not by supernatural forces?

    Second, let’s clarify the argument further. Let’s say that we agree that the disciples believe that they perceived a risen Jesus Christ in a group setting on several occasions. The only question is whether they did, in fact, perceive a risen Jesus Christ upon those occasions. We have each both provided possible explanations of their experiences. You claim that on each occasion, an actually risen Jesus Christ was present to the group. On a simplified version, say that I have been claiming that on each occasion, the group hallucinated a risen Jesus Christ. Say that this occurred a grand total of five separate occasions, and only five separate occasions in the history of mankind, and thus the number of occasions is also identical in our two accounts.

    So, your account is that a risen Jesus Christ appeared to the group of disciples on five separate occasions, and my account is that the group of disciplines experienced a group bereavement hallucination on five separate occasions. In this case, the number of occurrences is irrelevant, because the number is identical in both accounts. The only salient difference is that your account violates the laws of nature and requires a supernatural intervention, and my account does not. You cannot say that my account is less likely than yours, because of the unique nature of the experiences in question, because your account presupposes the exact same number of experiences as mine, and thus is just as unique with respect to the number of instances. Again, the only salient difference is that my explanation is natural, and your explanation is supernatural.

    Now, if the default is that the laws of nature hold constant, and any miraculous event would require the suspension and violation of the laws of nature, then wouldn’t it be fair to say that unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary, then the natural explanation should be preferred? This seems to be the actual practice of the Catholic Church, which does not immediately embrace alleged miracles, but rather pursues a rigorous investigation to rule out any natural explanation of the phenomenon in question. I don’t think that the default is that a miracle occurred, because the majority of investigations turn up empty, after all.

    Applying the above to the situation we are in, we have two accounts, each with the exact same frequency of occurrences, and each explaining the exact same phenomena, and yet mine does not violate the laws of nature and yours does violate the laws of nature. Under this situation, why prefer the supernatural explanation over the natural one?

    Third, even if you are correct that there was no group hallucination of the same experience, then other options present themselves. For example, perhaps several disciples experience different bereavement hallucinations of Jesus, and proceed to describe to one another what they are seeing. In the course of their discussion, the details of their initially different hallucinations start to appear similar. The other disciples are persuaded by the hallucinating disciples that Jesus is actually present with them, probably by virtue of their need to minimize cognitive bias. After they separate from one another and preach what happened, they began to subconsciously edit and revise their memories, which led to origin amnesia, and believe that they had the experience, in addition to the others, thus leading to the belief that all of them shared the same experience.

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  123. Fourth, you should not belittle the power of motivated reasoning in those who believe in a failed messiah. For example, Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed himself the Jewish messiah in 1648. Even after he converted to Islam in 1666, many of his followers continued to believe that he was still the messiah, and trying to convert Muslims to Islam by faking his conversion. Another example is fairly contemporary with Rabbi Schneersohn, whose followers believed he was the Jewish messiah. After he died in 1994, without bringing about salvation for the Jewish people, there were still many of his followers who continued to believe that he was working towards their salvation in the afterlife.

    Nobody suggests that these sources should be junked because they were written long after the events they describe.

    Nobody says to junk them, but rather to approach them with a significant amount of caution and skepticism, especially when those records describe miraculous events. Certainly, nobody says that one should stake one’s afterlife on those records.

    As for the “oral” part, bear in mind that the story would have been told from the beginning of the Church, and in such circumstances stories tend to become fixed very early, rather than changing continuously. So whilst the story may have been told for several decades, it’s nevertheless likely to have been told in a stable form.

    But we don’t have access to the original story, but only to the story as recorded after decades of oral transmission. Without the original, there is simply no way to know if any deviations occurred. The fact is that some deviation would be inevitable, and the only question is how much deviation occurred. And this same situation would apply to a person recounting a certain event in the past on several occasions over time, there would likely be some deviation over time, as is well attested in psychological literature on human memory.

    Which stories did Peter tell Mark? The ones in the bloody Gospel, of course.

    Oh, so Mark did not include any stories from any other sources? How do you know? Did Mark ever speak to any of the other disciples?

    How long from the telling to the recording? Well they were originally written down when Mark was acting “in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter”, even if he didn’t put them together and publish them until later (which blows your theory in the next post out of the water)

    First, according to Wikipedia: “The vast majority of contemporary New Testament textual critics … have concluded that neither the longer nor shorter endings were originally part of Mark's Gospel.” In other words, the Gospel of Mark probably ended at 16:8, which makes no mention of Christ’s resurrection, and only the empty tomb. That means that the Gospel of Mark is unlikely to be helpful for your case regarding the resurrection.

    Second, you have cited Bishop Papias of Hierapolis, whose writings date around 100 CE, as supporting your position, but Papias’ account makes no mention of when Mark wrote down Peter’s stories, but only that he “wrote accurately all that he remembered” and was “writing down single points as he remembered them”.

    Third, Clement of Alexandria wrote around 200 CE, and he reports that those who heard Peter speak wanted a written record, and they beseeched Mark to provide one, which he proceeded to do. Unfortunately, Clement’s text is lost, and the passage in question is cited in Eusebius’ church history, which was written around 325 CE. Neither makes any specific reference to their source of this claim. So, the only record Mark recording Peter’s saying quite soon after hearing them is not only unsourced, but also is dated about 300 years after Mark was with Peter.

    Given the above, I consider it an open question whether Mark actually wrote down what Peter preached. And that affects the reliability of his text, which reintroduces all my concerns about its validity.

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  124. Also, what’s all this about noticeably declining standards? Mark’s Gospel was written by a long-time companion of a man who was intimately involved in the events in question. How many other ancient histories can say as much? What more do you want me to do, produce St. Mark’s interview notes for your perusal?

    To substantiate the claim of an ancient miracle, that would be most helpful.

    It’s becoming increasingly obvious that this isn’t really about the evidence or lack thereof for the Resurrection, but because you’ve decided, for whatever reason, that any supernatural explanation must be rejected in favour of a naturalistic one, no matter how unlikely or unparalleled this latter explanation might be.

    Not at all. I’m open to the possibility of a miracle occurring, but given the extraordinary nature of the claim, there must be a corresponding extraordinary quality to the evidence, which should take special pains to rule out every other natural possibility that does not require supernatural intervention. Certainly, this places an impossibly high burden of proof upon ancient miracles, because of the inherently fragmentary nature of the evidence, but just because a miracle is claimed in antiquity and is believed by billions of people today should not require us to lower our standards of evidence. The bottom line is that a claim that an event has violated the laws of nature, which requires a supernatural explanation to account for it, must provide the most rigorous and thorough evidence. If a claim lacks such evidence, then it cannot be accepted at face value.

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  125. @Vaal:

    "This is a possible explanation for the general belief that Jesus had been crucified, died and risen again, that you can not rule out."

    I don't think anyone has claimed that they can be absolutely ruled out; at any rate, I haven't.

    I was speaking of disanalogies between msgrx's description of the Resurrection and your illustrations. The former doesn't include, for example, Jesus calling 911, receiving modern medical aid, or spending any great length of time in recovery; the latter don't include, for example, any of the survivors appearing magically restored to health and well-being (let alone having a glorified body) or anyone taking them to be the Messiah in the absence of such restoration.

    "NO ONE HERE HAS SUPPLIED any such cogent method of when to decide something was God intervening vs natural but improbable."

    Oh, I didn't realize that was all you wanted. Well, I suppose the most salient point is that the accounts we have of the event all say that Jesus predicted it in advance—which, in context and if true, would seem to tell heavily in favor of its divine-interventioniness. I'll leave you to join dguller in sturdy battle against the historicity of those accounts, but it seems an important point and one that at least provides a rough version of the criterion you say you want.

    "All the cries of 'that's IMPROBABLE' are worthless until this challenge is answered."

    "Worthless"? That's an exaggeration, surely. In fact most of your own examples (and most real-world ones) of purely naturalistic explanation would fail that test. Mathematical certainty and utter ignorance are not the only alternatives.

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  126. @dguller:

    "The bottom line is that a claim that an event has violated the laws of nature, which requires a supernatural explanation to account for it, must provide the most rigorous and thorough evidence."

    For the record, there's no claim on the table here that divine intervention and miracles "violate the laws of nature."

    Probably no A-T philosopher would claim, and at any rate no one here has claimed, that some "law of nature" would be "violated" by God's making a rock hover in mid-air above the surface of the Earth. Even if you insist on talking about "laws of nature" in this context, the "laws" would be of the form Do X until/unless prevented by some outside factor.

    To put it another way, direct primary causation doesn't "violate the laws of nature" any more than do interfering/intervening forms of secondary causation. And once we know that primary causation is possible and that there are reasons to regard its occurrence somewhere in human history as likely overall, your evidentiary demands start to look a little over-restrictive.

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  127. dguller:

    "On a simplified version, say that I have been claiming that on each occasion, the group hallucinated a risen Jesus Christ. Say that this occurred a grand total of five separate occasions, and only five separate occasions in the history of mankind, and thus the number of occasions is also identical in our two accounts."

    So why has this phenomenon only occurred on this occasion? That's not a problem for the Resurrection theory, because miracles are by their nature one-off suspensions of physical laws, and so there's no reason to expect them to occur often. But if wishful thinking can lead to group hallucinations like this -- and you've already agreed that there are plenty of people who were in similar circumstances to the Disciples -- why have none of them reported similar symptoms?

    "You cannot say that my account is less likely than yours, because of the unique nature of the experiences in question, because your account presupposes the exact same number of experiences as mine, and thus is just as unique with respect to the number of instances."

    Again, miracles are *supposed* to be one-off events. Natural phenomena aren't.

    "Fourth, you should not belittle the power of motivated reasoning in those who believe in a failed messiah. For example, Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed himself the Jewish messiah in 1648. Even after he converted to Islam in 1666, many of his followers continued to believe that he was still the messiah, and trying to convert Muslims to Islam by faking his conversion. Another example is fairly contemporary with Rabbi Schneersohn, whose followers believed he was the Jewish messiah. After he died in 1994, without bringing about salvation for the Jewish people, there were still many of his followers who continued to believe that he was working towards their salvation in the afterlife."

    Those are relevantly disanalogous as well, since there wouldn't seem to be any evidential difference if there were true or untrue. The Resurrection, on the other hand, would lead us to expect an evidential difference -- namely, that if Jesus rose from the dead, we'd expect not to find a body in the tomb, to see him walking around, and so forth. Again, it's going to be easier to convince yourself that your Messiah's conversion is false or that he's working on your behalf in Heaven than that he's risen from the dead and is currently having a conversation with you and roomful of your friends.

    "But we don’t have access to the original story, but only to the story as recorded after decades of oral transmission. Without the original, there is simply no way to know if any deviations occurred. The fact is that some deviation would be inevitable, and the only question is how much deviation occurred. And this same situation would apply to a person recounting a certain event in the past on several occasions over time, there would likely be some deviation over time, as is well attested in psychological literature on human memory."

    Paul's letters agree with the Gospel accounts when they mention details of Jesus' ministry, and furthermore imply that these details were well-known to the early Church, which would make distortion less likely.

    Also, whilst memories do change, inventing your Saviour resurrecting is quite a big change. Wait, let me guess -- this is one of those special psychological phenomena which only ever showed up on this one occasion and is never heard of again.

    "Not at all. I’m open to the possibility of a miracle occurring,"

    No offence, but you seem to be "open to the possibility of a miracle occurring" in the same way that a new atheist is "open to the possibility of naturalism being wrong". That is, you pay lip-service to the idea, but in practice you set the bar of proof so high (as in, "As long as I can invent some naturalistic just-so story to explain this away, I'm right") that nothing will ever be able to clear it.

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  128. Arguing against the historicity of the written record is a better move then the hallucination route.

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  129. @BenYachov:

    "Arguing against the historicity of the written record is a better move then the hallucinationk route."

    Especially since it's not as though we have a well-established naturalistic account of hallucinations. (We don't even have one of consciousness.)

    I don't think arguing against the historicity of the written record is exactly a strategy for success, but it compares favorably to arguments like This event was of some weird kind that we can't explain and therefore probably isn't miraculous.

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  130. msgrx,

    My point wasn't that someone with access only to the philosophical arguments would be able to predict that the Resurrection would happen, but that the Resurrection is in line with what we know of God's nature. Hence, contrary to what dguller says, the Resurrection, whilst certainly surprising and extraordinary, isn't in the end as surprising and extraordinary as the kind of mass hallucination dguller's arguing for.

    But the issue is that the metaphysical God doesn't help you conclude that at all. It offers no such prediction such that you can put any "surprising" or "not surprising" probabilities to the Jesus story.

    Much of what we observe in the world would seem greatly surprising GIVEN the hypothesis of a Good God, which would seem to contradict the hypothesis in the first place. But if you are to say that everything we see in the world is compatible with God's goodness - every vicious and apparently callous situation and act as well as every beneficial situation to us - then what in the world can we predict God would do? If God's goodness is not outlined and constrained and is compatible with all we see, then every horror and every instance of non-belief in God every state of affairs seems compatible with it, INCLUDING God not even letting us know He exists. Making the Jesus story just as "surprising" as anything else, and not giving the God-hypothesis for the story any more leverage over the natural explanation.

    Cheers,

    Vaal

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  131. BenYachov,

    Ha, I got metaphysical there for a moment and dragged you in :-)

    Two issues here that I was getting at:

    1. The problem of moving from the God of metaphysics to significantly raising probabilities
    that favour the hypothesis that God manifested specifically as described in the Christ story.
    Tackling the "God is Good therefore would want us to know Him" claim by msgrx.

    As I argue, in order to hypothesis probabilities of this sort, you have to define your terms in a way that makes some sort of prediction of what we might see. msgrx's attempt at inference clearly implied "good" as having features most associate with "good" (e.g. interest in sharing good with others).

    Can you supply a definition of God's "Goodness" such that it can be used for such prediction?
    (Such that it would raise probabilities for a Resurrection story?).

    Or: If you can not do this, would you admit my point is valid? That the A-T metaphysics concerning God do not help the Christian in moving to any specific empirical case, such as for The Resurrection?

    (I know you say you don't do Resurrection stuff, but if you have a good enough grasp of your own metaphysics, you should be able to answer that question).

    2. The issue I brought up with knowing "The Good" before metaphysical arguments to God's goodness, and it's implications. I believe pretty much any attempt to ground goodness in God
    hits a Euthyphro-Type problem, whether it's Divine Command theory, A-T theory, or otherwise.
    (Not to mention other fallacies).

    For instance it seems to me Aquinas' Fourth Proof of God's Goodness, where God is the ultimate degree of Goodness, doesn't tell you anything about God's goodness, unless you already know what "good" is. But of course in defining the good as something's end or final cause, and positing God as the ultimate end of all things, then everything - every "real thing that exists" that you observe is compatible with God's goodness, and you are left no wiser as to what a Good God would or would not do in the world. Which is one reason why Aquinas ends up taking a stance such as the knowledge of the essence of God is unknowable to philosophy, and starts saying "we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not." And this problem is one reason why Aquinas
    has to start appealing to Revelation as another way of gaining knowledge of God.

    But this seems a problem. Because you've put yourself into an epistemologically vulnerable state with the original philosophical argument. If you can't really pin down or know the essence of God, such that it is predictive of empirical experience of a God…HOW DO YOU RECOGNIZE GOD if he ever shows up, or intervenes in nature, etc? Why wouldn't God show up as a rock on a beach? Or a cat? Or as Charles Manson or even Herb Velasquez? Unless you can say "Well, God would NEVER do that or WOULD do this" appealing to something confident you know about God, you can't use this metaphysical God to give any credence to a guy like Jesus showing up. So you can't appeal to Revelation as giving you more knowledge about God, his goodness or otherwise, without just begging the question.

    Thus far, every attempt I've seen by Christians of any stripe, A-Tists or otherwise, start smuggling in subjectivity and value judgements. Suddenly God somehow is "love" and other niceties when He needs to be explanatory, but becomes unknowable when counter evidence is adduced against these qualities.

    Vaal

    (Yes, I know there is a lot more to A-T than the Five Ways, but nonetheless even when I read Aquinas these issues start popping out and whenever I've asked A-Tists to start elucidating theses metaphysics it just becomes obvious to me they are smuggling in a posteriori knowledge into their premises, as well as assuming previously held subjective categories and value judgements into their claims of Objective Final Causes and the like).

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  132. "Yes, I know there is a lot more to A-T than the Five Ways, but nonetheless even when I read Aquinas these issues start popping out and whenever I've asked A-Tists to start elucidating theses metaphysics it just becomes obvious to me they are smuggling in a posteriori knowledge into their premises, as well as assuming previously held subjective categories and value judgements into their claims of Objective Final Causes and the like"

    If you haven't already done so, you should check out some of other philosophy related posts on this blog, and post questions on relevant, active topics. Where have you discussed Thomism in the past?

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  133. So Vaal has gone from butchering epistemology to butchering metaphysics. Making sure all points are covered I suppose.

    There is no Euthyphro problem, by the way. Plato was raising not some stultifying dilemma or fallacy for the theist, but using Elenchus, via the dialogues, to give an insight into the unity of the divine and the good.

    Divine simplicity is the doctrine of the unity of God's qualities.

    I'm not sure, at all, what problem for theism you think you are raising here. I do not see what the problem is in making use of our experience to understand concepts.

    The world is a reflection of God in classical theism. In Platonism the world contains in a relative fashion, capable of privation, the qualities, such as goodness, that are in (or more properly, are) God in an absolute fashion. Why we cannot combine our different faculties - Nous, discursive reason, sense experience, and so on - to apprehend goodness (in itself, in the world, in particular acts and beings) I'm not sure.

    As you have some idea what is meant by goodness, a good man, and a good action, it cannot be so mysterious as you suggest. Now you may argue that your knowledge is just based on subjective and cultural causes, but I see no reason why we may not take these notions of goodness and analysis them using the framework of classical theism and decide whether or not they are indeed subjective or social or not.

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  134. @Vaal:

    "Ha, I got metaphysical there for a moment and dragged you in :-)"

    The moment was all too short. :-)

    "The problem of moving from the God of metaphysics to significantly raising probabilities
    that favour the hypothesis that God manifested specifically as described in the Christ story."

    Would you agree that if God doesn't exist, the probability of divine revelation, miracles, and so forth is zero?

    Would you agree that if God can be shown to exist by a compelling metaphysical argument, that raises the probability of such revelation, miracles, etc., from zero to some positive number, however small?

    If so, then your objection has just been dealt with. The difference between zero probability and any positive probability, however small, is not only significant, it's a sea change.

    "The issue I brought up with knowing 'The Good' before metaphysical arguments to God's goodness, and it's implications. I believe pretty much any attempt to ground goodness in God
    hits a Euthyphro-Type problem, whether it's Divine Command theory, A-T theory, or otherwise."

    Here you've not only ignored what Ben has said on this point already but made clear that you're not even familiar with what classical theism and specifically Ed have to say on the subject. I second Ben's recommendation that you read Brian Davies's The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil.

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  135. Vaal you really have to do the background reading because you are talking nonsense. dguller has done the reading. You clearly haven’t.

    >Can you supply a definition of God's "Goodness" such that it can be used for such prediction?

    Your question is a category mistake on the level of asking if I can supply the atomic weight of natural selection. No I can’t and given the nature of God in the Classic sense it is an absurd question. God’s goodness is not linked to predictable behavior. Rather God is good because He is being itself and is actual. God is good because he is the metaphysical source of all created goodness and God is good because he is desirable. God must will his own good by necessity but he wills our goodness & those of his other creatures gratuitously. No good he does for us he is obligated to do.

    For some more info check here:
    http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06636b.htm

    >(Such that it would raise probabilities for a Resurrection story?).

    God isn’t the sort of thing whose actions can be predicted by probabilities. I think what you need Vaal is a bunch of theistic personalist followers of Swimburne and militant proponents of Theodicy and Intelligent Design Theory to contend with. Here the bulk of your objections are non-starters let me assure you.

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  136. >Or: If you can not do this, would you admit my point is valid? That the A-T metaphysics concerning God do not help the Christian in moving to any specific empirical case, such as for The Resurrection?

    If I where to admit such a thing it would be about as meaningful as admitting Stephen Hawking’s no boundary proposal for the origin of the universe does not help the evolutionist in moving to any specific case such as preferring the neo-darwinism of Dawkins vs punctuated equilibrium of Gould. It’s a trivial point IMHO.

    >2. The issue I brought up with knowing "The Good" before metaphysical arguments to God's goodness, and it's implications. I believe pretty much any attempt to ground goodness in God
    hits a Euthyphro-Type problem, whether it's Divine Command theory, A-T theory, or otherwise.
    (Not to mention other fallacies).

    This is irrational. How can you know the good before making a philosophical investigation into the question?

    At least this is something I can work with and know something about. The solution to the Euthyphro dilemma is found in the argument itself. Either God is not All Powerful(in a certain sense) or not All Good (in a certain sense). Let’s take the first horn of the dilemma. What do we mean by All Powerful? Do we mean as taught by Descartes who claimed God had unlimited freedom & he could create mountains without valleys or make 2+2=5 or Rock so heavy etc…. he could make himself cease to exist then pop back into existence etc?. In short his omnipotence was envisioned to be able to make contradictions true.
    Of course then the alleged contradiction raised by the Euthyprhro dilemma has no meaning because God could make is so He an all Good and all powerful being and evil could exist at the same time because God can make contradictions true. Of course I reject Descartes. Aquinas correctly understands God being All powerful to mean God has all powers but there is no “power” to make a contradiction true. Rather then say something can be done and God can’t do it we say the thing cannot be done. To solve the Euthyphro dilemma this way it is to envision God has some good he wishes to share with us and he can’t do so without evil being a logical consequence of it’s existence in some cases(like allowing free will which can choose evil etc). So we have to put forth various Theodicies as to why God allows the evil to bring about a greater good. But I reject Theodicy because I grab the other horn of the dilemma on God’s Goodness. I with Davies and the rest of Christian tradition don’t define All Good as including the goodness of moral agency and obligation to creatures. God given his classic nature this is incoherent For more info I insist you read Brian Davies.

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  137. >For instance it seems to me Aquinas' Fourth Proof of God's Goodness, where God is the ultimate degree of Goodness, doesn't tell you anything about God's goodness, unless you already know what "good" is.

    I think You mean the Fourth Way? Well Vaal I don’t understand why you can’t read Summa Contra Gentiles BK1 chapters 37-41? Or the relevant sections of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA starting with Question 6 to get Aquinas definition of goodness? Aquinas simply follows Aristotle and Plato in defining Goodness & assumes his readers have read that part? Why are you adverse to learning the basics? Aristotle and Plato start with reason not divine revelation and so does Aquinas.

    >But of course in defining the good as something's end or final cause, and positing God as the ultimate end of all things, then everything - every "real thing that exists" that you observe is compatible with God's goodness, and you are left no wiser as to what a Good God would or would not do in the world.

    Yes and knowing if Hawking was right in his no boundary proposal or Roger Penrose was right in his theories on the mechanisms of Big Bang don’t settle the issues that divide Dawkins and Gould on Evolution. Trivial.

    Treating God like some monkey you can experiment on to predict his behavior is not merely blasphemous(which I absolutely forgive. I am sure you meant no offense) but logically absurd given Classic Theistic premises.

    What you need here Vaal is a Theistic Personalist God who is a moral agent so you can use some warmed over Evil God argument from Stephen Law.

    But as per usual many of what look to me like your surface arguments are non-starters and some are category mistakes.

    I think you need to do some more background reading because well I don’t see it.

    Cheers.

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  138. Jeremy Taylor,

    So Vaal has gone from butchering epistemology to butchering metaphysics.

    Jeremy, good sir, that kind of characterization should be earned.

    If you had actually shown any inconsistency, or falsehoods, etc in the epistemological principles I have raised that characterization could have been taken more seriously.

    I've given real world examples of how we reason empirically and the rational for the strategies we adopt. You have not, that I have seen, actually shown any of it to be inconsistent or in error.

    You have sometimes implied there might be inconsistency, or question-begging. What you haven't done is shown it. For instance your previous comment included this:

    "Anyway, the above is question begging.It assumes our experience completely conforms to scientistic naturalist."

    Which is false, and I've explained why it is false so many times I felt it was time to move on to some other folks.

    I haven't ASSUMED anything. I have from the first post onward ARGUED for my position. I have said "If we are in the empirical realm,

    1. Here are some examples of every day reasoning - e.g. why we check our variables, hypothesis test etc, when looking for explanations. I did not see you dispute these examples.

    2. WHY do we use such strategies in the first place? HERE are the explanations I offer (insert epistemic problems of variables in uncovering cause and effect, and in the problem of selecting possible explanations from the vast space of the logically possible). I did not see you undermine this anywhere.

    3. IF you can't dispute the above, then you recognize those principles as valid, so you must be consistent with these principles, and not let yourself be sloppy when making an empirical case for miracles and Jesus' Resurrection etc, - that is showing how you would account for variables in cause/effect, your explanations. What empirical support you can offer for the plausibility of your claims, do they offer in principle testable ideas, etc?

    Over and over I've shown a consistent application of my principles, always with appeals to more real-world examples to maintain plausibility. I've never assumed anything epistemologically, always spelled out the argument and implications for "why take this route instead of that route epistemologically." Your side of the ledger has been pretty much empty in comparison, except for "but that would be IMPROBABLE." And every time I point out the problem with such responses - why that is problematic UNLESS you have some way of assigning higher probability to God in any particular "improbable" situation…you haven't made your case.

    Since it was not moving beyond that, I moved on at least for now.

    Vaal

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  139. Jeremy,

    BTW, every single representative of a Christian denomination will say "There IS NO Euthyphro Dliemma for us, silly boy." Even though there are all sorts of different theistic attempts to answer, I always find this claim to be false. You just start nudging any theistic moral theory and the dilemma pops out.

    "I'm not sure, at all, what problem for theism you think you are raising here."

    Well, I guess I'll just state it again, then. There seems to be a problem bridging the gulf between the God concluded by metaphysical argument and the God of revelation. If the metaphysical God is "unknowable" in terms of specific positive attributes that would predict and con scribe what you should and shouldn't see from such a God, then you have no standard by which to judge something a real encounter with God. You can't use God's "goodness" to predict God would want to have a covenant with humans or reveal Himself. You can't say of anyone's claim "X is a miracle or X is a manifestation of God" "no, God wouldn't do that!" Because you have no such knowledge. So you couldn't judge Jesus divine either by his claims, or anything He does, including Resurrect. If God is simply "every real thing that exists/happens" then someone resurrecting is no different than toast popping up in your toaster - both are "divine" and hence there is no special way to recognize God's revelation.

    And you can't say "Well, we can know the character of God's Goodness because it was revealed in Jesus" because that is just begging the question unless you answer the above problem for how you know God would manifest Jesus in the first place.

    The Euthyphro Dilemma is an investigation into the nature of Divine Morality.
    That is, once you place God as the locus of morality, what are the implications and are you ready to accept them? For Divine Command theory you get the two horns of God's commands being arbitrary, or not in fact based on God, neither of which most theists want to accept. And the move to "based on God's nature" only moves the question to "why is God's nature good? What if it were different?" Each reply that follows ends up raising another Euthyphro-type dilemma, either moral or logical.

    It arises even in the A-T system as well. If God is "good" and directs all things that exist to their natural ends, then what have we learned about the nature of God's "Goodness?" It appears his nature is as apt to direct rabies and ebola to ravage human well being as much as direct the sun to shine light. What limit is there in any moral terms we understand in normal use, except sheer arbitrariness of the ends? And yet clearly classical theists want to speak rapt about God's love and goodness whenever they want.

    And if the classical theist wants to say "God wouldn't do X or Y" and is Loving, Benevolent, etc, then how has he decided this except by imposing his own standard on an otherwise chaotic God? If God is loving etc, God HAS to meet the standards we hold for loving persons. To attribute to God any characteristic that we understand among ourselves, including the "love" inherent in "goodness," is to establish LIMITATIONS. It's a standard of LIMITATIONS - as in God CAN'T be responsible for horrible suffering or He is not loving. Hence it's a standard imposed from us on to Him.

    So which is it? Replies that attempt to have one's cake and eat it to will be noted and highlighted with bright orange marker :-)

    (Your reply about me being able to recognize some standard of "good man" seemed to suggest, to me, taking the latter horn of the dilemma).

    Vaal

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  140. Scott,

    Would you agree that if God can be shown to exist by a compelling metaphysical argument, that raises the probability of such revelation, miracles, etc., from zero to some positive number, however small?

    If so, then your objection has just been dealt with. The difference between zero probability and any positive probability, however small, is not only significant, it's a sea change.


    I have addressed this several times so far.

    You seem to be operating under the assumption that my position would be "miracles or divine resurrections are IMPOSSIBLE" and that therefore any move to "possible" is in contrast a "sea change."

    I've stated numerous times that is not the case. I've said I do not deny the possibility of a miracle or a divine resurrection, or any revelation from God. It remains a possibility.
    Although I do not see any reason to BELIEVE a miracle has happened, I could always be wrong hence I have to keep open to the possibility.

    In this way I am already standing with the theist saying "Ok, it's a possibility."

    My argument has been very consistent: Even if we grant some divine revelation or miracle is possible, WHAT TYPE OF STANDARDS or criteria will have to be met before we ought to believe it. Because we can hardly go from "Miracles are possible" to believing every single miracle claim anyone ever makes. And my suggestion is that once we are in the realm of reasoning-from-experience, the empirical realm, we ALREADY use and accept some standards of vetting claims. Hence it doesn't matter whether one is starting from A-T or an atheistic philosophy like my own, you end up with the same problem either way.

    No sea change.

    And..no Ben didn't really answer the issue. As I will get to.

    Cheers,

    Vaal

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  141. BenYachov


    First,

    "Why are you adverse to learning the basics?"

    You have not shown how I have the "basics" wrong. Is the "good" predicated on the concept of things having "final" or "natural ends" or not? And that such ends are "good" and that which directs them to their natural end/final cause is "good." And "evil' is defined negatively - a privation - e.g. of form, of something that would have meant the entity in question would have reached it's natural end. So something is "bad" insofar as it is suffering this privation of what would have it reach it's final end. By defining evil privatively, Aquinas avoids the substance-dualist problem of evil, where evil would be another "thing" that God would "cause" and thus be responsible for as it were. But God is "good" because he is the cause of all things toward their ends (and it's recognizing that things have natural ends, that ends require cause, that leads to positing God as the necessary cause in the first place). And Natural Law will apply to us, insofar as it will be "good" that we fulfil our natural ends, our "human nature," and "bad" insofar as we suffer some privation that thwarts our fulfilling our natural ends.

    My argument invoked these concepts of good being natural ends and God being the ultimate cause of all natural ends and hence the ultimate degree of "good." Am I incorrect on these "basics"? If not…then all my points stand.

    Vaal

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  142. BenYachov,

    Hookay...

    "Your question is a category mistake on the level of asking if I can supply the atomic weight of natural selection. No I can’t and given the nature of God in the Classic sense it is an absurd question. God’s goodness is not linked to predictable behavior."

    But Ben, didn't you notice? That's exactly what I have been arguing: that the A-T metaphysics for God do not act as any sort of predictor.
    That's why my question to you assumed you weren't going to agree the A-T metaphysics CAN do such prediction, and I ended with:

    If you can not do this, would you admit my point is valid? That the A-T metaphysics concerning God do not help the Christian in moving to any specific empirical case, such as for The Resurrection?

    'God isn’t the sort of thing whose actions can be predicted by probabilities."

    Exactly the point I was arguing against msgrx all along. I only got into this because he tried to appeal to the metaphysics to raise
    probabilities of a resurrection story. (And also because one sees various Christians trying to do this. In fact, I remember even Dr. Feser saying HE would do it as well, that in building a case for Christianity he would build it from metaphysics and bridge that to building a case for Revelatinon).

    I haven't made a "category mistake," rather I have correctly argued that someone else was making a category mistake. (But I knew that…thanks).

    Cheers,

    Vaa

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  143. BenYachov,

    Your replies strike me as not understanding what I'm arguing. The above being the first example. I then argued one has to know the meaning of one's terms before any philosophical argument makes sense. So in an argument that concludes God is "Good" you have to first know what your term "good" means, and thus what it will tell us about God. You replied:

    This is irrational. How can you know the good before making a philosophical investigation into the question?

    Ben…how can you do a philosophical investigation without first knowing what you mean by the words you are using in your premises?
    I was referring to the argument for God's being the Greatest Good (e.g. argument from degrees/gradation). It relies on having a concept of "Good" to begin with.

    "For there is found a greater and a less degree of goodness,….Therefore there exists something that is the cause of the existence of all things and of the goodness and of every perfection whatsoever—and this we call God."

    You can't be philosophically sophisticated and deny that the fourth way makes no sense unless
    "good" actually already means something, right? So what are you actually trying to deny in what I wrote?

    Yes, A-T first establishes what "good" is before getting to establishing God would be the ultimate exemplar of Good, causing all the "goodness" and '"perfection." And A-T does this by first establishing a final cause teleological notion of "good." THEN you get to explain why God, being the cause of all such goodness would be the ultimate "good."

    But this raises the problems I've been arguing, and which it seems Aquinas recognized too: the "good" you get out of this is utterly vague in terms of what it tells you specifically about God's goodness. You've basically said the same thing.

    And your explication of the Euthyphro dilemma (ED), with it's talk of lifting rocks and theodocies, is odd and a red herring as it seems to get the ED mixed up with the Problem Of Evil and the problem of God's Omni-attributes. The ED isn't about either. It's the nature of "goodness/morality" if you place God as the locus of The Good - what are the implications for the nature of good/morality?

    If God is the cause-toward-the-ends of all things that actually exist, then given all the different things that have existed, do exist, and might exist tomorrow…it tells you NOTHING about what God's "goodness" is. It's compatible with earthquakes, dying babies, loving, diseases the make you throw up, McDonald's shakes, and Seinfeld, ad infinitum. If you say "Yeah, ok, that's basically right, we we can't say anything that can exist is incompatible with God's goodness since God will be the cause towards' it's end" then you ARE on one of the horn's - the arbitrary one. You've already intimated that God is not "moral" in the way we are. But it's not only that, it still has implications not just for God's goodness, but for ours and Natural Law morality. What is stopping God from changing our nature tomorrow? To rapacious, selfish creatures or whatever? He's caused plenty of horrible things in the world, so why not? Hence there seems to be nothing secure to hang "natural law" on in any persistent manner if God changes it tomorrow. If you say "No, God wouldn't do X" then you jump to the other horn where you say God is restricted somehow. You can be on one of the horns and own it, but don't say it doesn't apply.

    As I have always found, there is quite a difference between claiming the Euthyphro doesn't apply (which every theist does) and actually producing the argument that it doesn't apply.

    Vaal

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  144. Apologies for jumping in again, but between Vaal and Ben something has come up that I find interesting, and I hope I might elaborate on what Ben has been saying, if only to help myself understand it:

    what is good for this creature or that is to realize its natural ends, and any creature's desire to fulfill its nature is in some sense a desire for its own perfection as the kind of thing it is.

    I'm fuzzier beyond this, and hopefully Scott or some other more knowledgeable commenter will say something to amend my errors, but here goes...

    Insofar as a thing desires its own perfection it desires God, and this would have something to do with, I think, the fact that the perfection of one thing is different from the perfection of another but that they might be perfected is what they share in common. Of course, things realize their natures to one degree or another, that is, they are perfected in varying degrees but no finite thing perfectly instantiates those qualities that make it what it is. It would be necessary at least to conceive of something that was perfectly itself if all this talk about the goodness of that or the goodness of this thing is to be taken seriously (goodness being however well a thing realizes its ends). Otherwise, to say that this dog over here is healthy, while the one over there with the mange is not, would be to make a judgement between the two that is not warranted by the bare facts. Now, this thing that is perfectly what it is cannot be 'the perfect dog' or 'the perfect man', since the perfection of the dog is not the same as the perfection of the man, but must be in some sense perfection itself.

    Suppose Stephen Law comes around here and says, "well, it could be perfectly evil!" This won't work, though, since as far as 'good' and 'perfect' have been worked out above, they are positive attributes, whereas evil would be a defect in some attribute. That which is perfect in this sense could not lack anything.

    How this conception of perfection would allow us to predict behavior in particular circumstances is beyond me, since, necessarily, our finitude and corruption should make us poor predictors of what exactly that Supreme Goodness would look like in action. We can only look at the story of Christ, for example, and see what it is said that He did for us and say, "that is a good thing, and if it is not true, it would have been a good thing all the same."

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  145. >Your replies strike me as not understanding what I'm arguing.

    I don't think anyone here knows what you are arguing. You are all over the map equivocating like a madman & you keep moving the goal posts.
    I can't figure out what your argument is?

    >If you can not do this, would you admit my point is valid?

    No I think you are equivocating.

    >That the A-T metaphysics concerning God do not help the Christian in moving to any specific empirical case, such as for The Resurrection?

    A-T metaphysics are for natural theology. The resurrection is revealed theology. Two different disciplines & categories.

    God's supernatural interventions in the world can't be predicted by tools of natural theology nor probability science. But using probability to predict that the explanation that Christ rose from the dead is the more probable one is something else.

    I doubt msgrx is arguing God's actions can be predicted via probability.

    >'God isn’t the sort of thing whose actions can be predicted by probabilities."

    Meaning I can't really tell outside of divine revelation what God might do next nor do I have anyway of predicting if he will intervene in the world in some extra-ordinary way sometime in the future.

    Like I said you are all over the map & I can figure out what you are arguing.

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  146. First Vaal said "For instance it seems to me Aquinas' Fourth Proof of God's Goodness, where God is the ultimate degree of Goodness, doesn't tell you anything about God's goodness, unless you already know what "good" is."

    Then he writes:"You have not shown how I have the "basics" wrong. Is the "good" predicated on the concept of things having "final" or "natural ends" or not?”

    I don’t get it? Aquinas following Aristotle’s thinking argues what constitutes “the good”. I gave a brief summer of that view & we would assume that is the goodness predicated in the fourth way. So what is the problem?

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  147. Vaal,

    I'm not going to go back and forth about who is winning. Let it just be said that, although you are polite and a good sport, I do not think anyone is especially impressed (in the sense of being stretched to answer them, even to themselves) by your arguments. There is a reason most of us switched most of our attention to dguller: because his arguments were stronger.

    Anyway, you write:

    1. Here are some examples of every day reasoning - e.g. why we check our variables, hypothesis test etc, when looking for explanations. I did not see you dispute these examples.

    I'm not sure this proves anything, as I have said several times, even if we grant your exact characterisation of our knowledge. What your position requires is that scientific knowledge is the epitome of human knowledge, the singular endpoint of our basic ways of knowing. I do not think you have established this or disproven the alternative position - that natural science is a particular kind of human knowledge adapted to the investigation of the quantifiably measurable and testable aspects of external phenomena.

    Our everyday experience makes use of knowledge. Logic and reason, for example, are used essential to make distinctions and judgments about things. We make use of practical knowledge to perform tasks. We make use of intuition to come to certain judgments of likelhood. And so on. I do not see why the fact that we use what could be described as testing or hypotheses means our everyday knowledge is proto-scientific and not proto-philosophical, for example, as your approach seems to imply.


    2. WHY do we use such strategies in the first place? HERE are the explanations I offer (insert epistemic problems of variables in uncovering cause and effect, and in the problem of selecting possible explanations from the vast space of the logically possible). I did not see you undermine this anywhere.

    Perhaps this is because you kept missing out at least half of what I wrote. I pointed out that you beg the question in that you do not provide a satisfactory answer to why we cannot make use of multiple different kinds of knowledge in a cautious and careful way and make a distinction between the naturalistic and supernatural that you do not support. Your position also seems to rely on an unwarranted assumption that we must treat all claims equally, if one doesn't accept naturalism, and cannot treat some as less certain and more in doubt than others.

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  148. >My argument invoked these concepts of good being natural ends and God being the ultimate cause of all natural ends and hence the ultimate degree of "good." Am I incorrect on these "basics"? If not…then all my points stand.

    But what about “Being”,”Existence” and “being in Act” or being desirable? Those are part of goodness too via Aquinas & Aristotle?

    >Ben…how can you do a philosophical investigation without first knowing what you mean by the words you are using in your premises?

    I already read Feser, Davies and Aquinas so I already know what “Good” means in A-T metaphysics and I read their arguments for what constitutes goodness. The question is have you done any of this?

    >I was referring to the argument for God's being the Greatest Good (e.g. argument from degrees/gradation). It relies on having a concept of "Good" to begin with.

    Which we get too following Aristotle’s reasoning and philosophy too a lesser extent Plato.


    >You can't be philosophically sophisticated and deny that the fourth way makes no sense unless
    "good" actually already means something, right? So what are you actually trying to deny in what I wrote?

    I am responding to your denial that goodness has any meaning in the fourth way or that the 4th way is suppose to tell us something about God's goodness.

    >But this raises the problems I've been arguing, and which it seems Aquinas recognized too: the "good" you get out of this is utterly vague in terms of what it tells you specifically about God's goodness. You've basically said the same thing.

    Other then being Being Itself, Substantial Existence Itself and being desirable I don’t know it is we are suppose to get from natural theology on God’s goodness that you think we need & is lacking here?

    >And your explication of the Euthyphro dilemma (ED), with it's talk of lifting rocks and theodocies, is odd and a red herring as it seems to get the ED mixed up with the Problem Of Evil and the problem of God's Omni-attributes.

    Yes I believe you are correct there but at this point I kind of lost what your point is suppose to be?

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  149. >If God is the cause-toward-the-ends of all things that actually exist, then given all the different things that have existed, do exist, and might exist tomorrow…it tells you NOTHING about what God's "goodness" is.

    God is incomprehensible otherwise he is a useless tit & I want nothing to do with him.

    >It's compatible with earthquakes, dying babies, loving, diseases the make you throw up, McDonald's shakes, and Seinfeld, ad infinitum. If you say "Yeah, ok, that's basically right, we we can't say anything that can exist is incompatible with God's goodness since God will be the cause towards' it's end" then you ARE on one of the horn's - the arbitrary one. You've already intimated that God is not "moral" in the way we are.

    God is not a moral agent. Thank God!

    >But it's not only that, it still has implications not just for God's goodness, but for ours and Natural Law morality. What is stopping God from changing our nature tomorrow?

    God is immutable and he has already established our nature from all eternity. He cannot change our nature because he cannot change his nature.

    >To rapacious, selfish creatures or whatever? He's caused plenty of horrible things in the world, so why not? Hence there seems to be nothing secure to hang "natural law" on in any persistent manner if God changes it tomorrow.

    You really have to read Brian Davies. I am too lazy to explain here right now.

    >If you say "No, God wouldn't do X" then you jump to the other horn where you say God is restricted somehow. You can be on one of the horns and own it, but don't say it doesn't apply.

    Well I brought up Descartes view on omnipotence which you seem to be channeling right now.

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  150. Vaal writes,


    Well, I guess I'll just state it again, then. There seems to be a problem bridging the gulf between the God concluded by metaphysical argument and the God of revelation. If the metaphysical God is "unknowable" in terms of specific positive attributes that would predict and con scribe what you should and shouldn't see from such a God, then you have no standard by which to judge something a real encounter with God. You can't use God's "goodness" to predict God would want to have a covenant with humans or reveal Himself. You can't say of anyone's claim "X is a miracle or X is a manifestation of God" "no, God wouldn't do that!" Because you have no such knowledge. So you couldn't judge Jesus divine either by his claims, or anything He does, including Resurrect. If God is simply "every real thing that exists/happens" then someone resurrecting is no different than toast popping up in your toaster - both are "divine" and hence there is no special way to recognize God's revelation.

    Well, there are questions of an apophatic versus cathartic approach, but God is not unknownable in the sense we can say nothing about him. We can say he exists, he is absolute, infinite, the supreme good, and so on. As classical theism says such things about God, and specifies the way in which creation reflects and relates to him, I still struggle to see your point. It just seems you know little about the classical theist position.

    And the move to "based on God's nature" only moves the question to "why is God's nature good? What if it were different?" Each reply that follows ends up raising another Euthyphro-type dilemma, either moral or logical.

    Well, at some point we have to accept that no discursive explanation can be given of God's nature. We can say much about him, but not explain him completely in discursive terms. But this doesn't affect the resolution of this dilemma, because the classical theist position still shows how what we understand as good is a reflection of God's absolute goodness and perfection and that it makes no sense to say God is otherwise.


    It arises even in the A-T system as well. If God is "good" and directs all things that exist to their natural ends, then what have we learned about the nature of God's "Goodness?" It appears his nature is as apt to direct rabies and ebola to ravage human well being as much as direct the sun to shine light. What limit is there in any moral terms we understand in normal use, except sheer arbitrariness of the ends? And yet clearly classical theists want to speak rapt about God's love and goodness whenever they want.

    This is to just neglect completely the classical theist explanation for evil, which is it is privation. That understood, I'm not sure why the existence of evil should cut the connection between God's goodness and our ordinary understanding of goodness.

    Besides, if God is good, as classical theism argues, then your position makes no sense. You are appealing from absolute goodness to another idea of goodness and asking why absolute goodness is not good enough.

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  151. Suppose Stephen Law comes around here

    Please no. Stephen Law is an absolute sophist who, at least in his combox, is not beyond stooping to the most sophistic and even dishonest tactics, like blatant and deliberate misrepresentation and quoting out of context, to score cheap points against critics.

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  152. I will say something nice about him, though. His errors are so clear and so predictable that I have learned much from observing him about how not to think.

    Otherwise, I have nothing to say about him worth repeating!

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  154. Msgrx:

    So why has this phenomenon only occurred on this occasion?

    First, there have been bizarre events in human history that have only occurred once, and yet are still more likely to be psychological phenomena than a supernatural intervention. For example, look at the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962. The laughing attacks lasted anywhere from a few hours to two weeks. It lasted from six to eighteen months, and affected over a thousand people, led to the closing of fourteen schools. Now, the odds are highly improbably that a group of over a thousand young people would spontaneously begin laughing for hours at a time over the course of several months, because ordinary examples of laughter do not involve this many people laughing over such a great period of time. Such an event has only been recorded on this single occasion. According to your logic, this must have been some supernatural intervention of some kind.

    And yes, I know that this is not an example of a mass hallucination, but the point is that prior to Tanganyika, it would have been considered impossible for such a phenomena to occur, because it violates too many of our ordinary experience of laughter. And yet, it did happen, and it was more likely due to mass hysteria than supernatural intervention. Or do you disagree?

    Second, perhaps given more failed messiahs, a similar string of events would repeat, but given that failed messiahs are not very common, it’s not unexpected that this particular manifestation of the coping strategies of a failed messiah’s followers would only have occurred once. And interestingly enough, this same logic would bolster the case that the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was supernatural, because laughter happens all the time, and so we should see many more laughter epidemics in history. But we don’t, and yet we still do not ascribe supernatural intervention to it.

    Third, I cannot say for certain that it only occurred on this occasion. We do not have detailed records of every failed messiah, and thus we do not know exactly how each member of their group coped with their grief and loss. Furthermore, we do not know what the future holds. It is not only possible that there were other group hallucinations in the past, but it is equally possible that there will be group hallucinations in the future. The bottom line is that this account, especially one in which the hallucination is contagious is certainly within the realm of empirical possibility, however unlikely, and thus does not necessarily require the posit of a supernatural intervention.

    That's not a problem for the Resurrection theory, because miracles are by their nature one-off suspensions of physical laws, and so there's no reason to expect them to occur often.

    It’s also not a problem for my theory. One would expect unlikely events to, you know, be unlikely.

    Again, miracles are *supposed* to be one-off events. Natural phenomena aren't.

    My birth was a one-off event. Does that make it unnatural?

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  155. Those are relevantly disanalogous as well, since there wouldn't seem to be any evidential difference if there were true or untrue. The Resurrection, on the other hand, would lead us to expect an evidential difference -- namely, that if Jesus rose from the dead, we'd expect not to find a body in the tomb, to see him walking around, and so forth. Again, it's going to be easier to convince yourself that your Messiah's conversion is false or that he's working on your behalf in Heaven than that he's risen from the dead and is currently having a conversation with you and roomful of your friends.

    The point is that the human capacity for self-deception is almost limitless. The manner of that self-deception may vary from situation to situation, but we both agree that bereavement hallucinations are not uncommon, and that followers of a failed messiah are capable of coming up with sophisticated rationalizations to continue to believe in their messiah. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the two occurred to the followers of Jesus, which explains their belief in his resurrection. No natural laws are violated in this explanation, and however unlikely a natural explanation, it is always to be preferred to a supernatural one.

    Paul's letters agree with the Gospel accounts when they mention details of Jesus' ministry, and furthermore imply that these details were well-known to the early Church, which would make distortion less likely.

    Paul’s letters report hearsay, as do the Gospels. We have no records from the original eyewitnesses, in their own words.

    Also, whilst memories do change, inventing your Saviour resurrecting is quite a big change.

    Big changes in memory are well within the realm of human psychology.

    No offence, but you seem to be "open to the possibility of a miracle occurring" in the same way that a new atheist is "open to the possibility of naturalism being wrong". That is, you pay lip-service to the idea, but in practice you set the bar of proof so high (as in, "As long as I can invent some naturalistic just-so story to explain this away, I'm right") that nothing will ever be able to clear it.

    So, help me out here. Vaal has been arguing at length that some criteria must be established to determine when a miracle has occurred, and that a miracle was caused by a specific deity. I would presume that part of that methodology would have to include the ruling out of natural explanations. After all, you wouldn’t just believe anyone who claimed that a miracle would occur, but rather would first have to determine if it was more likely caused by natural phenomena, thus precluding the need to postulate a supernatural intervention. That is what the Catholic Church does, after all, and so this procedure cannot be that objectionable.

    How far should one go to rule out natural explanations? Should one only rule out common natural explanations? What about rare natural explanations? How rare would a natural explanation have to be before you decide that supernatural intervention is more likely to have occurred? And what about natural explanations that are highly unlikely, but are based upon fairly common natural phenomena that have never been combined into one event in particular, such as the laughter epidemic I described above? What if given a long enough stretch of time, it would be likely that a similar event would occur again?

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  156. Scott:

    Probably no A-T philosopher would claim, and at any rate no one here has claimed, that some "law of nature" would be "violated" by God's making a rock hover in mid-air above the surface of the Earth. Even if you insist on talking about "laws of nature" in this context, the "laws" would be of the form Do X until/unless prevented by some outside factor.

    Fair enough. To be more precise, a miracle occurs when a thing’s nature is prevented from actualization by God’s primary causality, and not by any other thing’s secondary causality. So, if that thing’s behavior can be primarily accounted for by secondary causality (its own or that of other entities), then a miracle has not occurred.

    To put it another way, direct primary causation doesn't "violate the laws of nature" any more than do interfering/intervening forms of secondary causation. And once we know that primary causation is possible and that there are reasons to regard its occurrence somewhere in human history as likely overall, your evidentiary demands start to look a little over-restrictive.

    Perhaps providing some evidentiary criteria of your own would be helpful? My criteria is that as long as there are still natural explanations (i.e. those solely confined to secondary causality) available to account for the phenomena, then however unlikely they happen to be, they are still more likely to be true than a supernatural intervention. I agree that if there were no secondary causes that could account for a phenomena, then a miracle would be much more likely to have occurred. After all, it wouldn’t be fair to say, “Well, I have no idea what could have caused it, but there must be a natural explanation.” But that is not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, “Well, there are a number of possible natural explanations, none of which is particularly likely, but that’s what you’d expect, given the rarity of the event in question.”

    Especially since it's not as though we have a well-established naturalistic account of hallucinations. (We don't even have one of consciousness.)

    Well, we don’t have a mechanistic account of consciousness, and probably never will, but I think that we certainly have a naturalistic account of consciousness, if by “naturalistic”, we include formal and final causes as part of a thing’s “nature”.

    I don't think arguing against the historicity of the written record is exactly a strategy for success

    Well, I’m working on it … ;)

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  157. dguller,

    Have you ever read C.S Lewis's Miracles?

    I think he does rather effectively deal with the idea that naturalistic explanations are always more likely than non-naturalistic ones.

    But, succinctly, what are your grounds for the claim?

    Many events are very unlikely. Why are supernatural claims always more unlikely than natural ones?

    I know you may have been over this before. But I think it is the heart of the matter.

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  158. Not dguller, but I'll bite this one.

    Why are supernatural claims always more unlikely than natural ones?

    Because, if not, we'd be awash in supernatural claims. If we set the bar of proof lower, yes, we'll get the resurrection of Jesus, together with Muhammad's conversations with the Archangel Gabriel, Lord Krishna's long speech at the beginning of the battle of Kurukshetra, etc.

    If supernatural claims were consistent with each other, this wouldn't be a problem. If each supernatural claim came with a disclaimer, "this is only a part of the divine revelation, there are other equally valid paths, and all all inconsistencies are resolved from the Divine point of view, which you do not have", this also wouldn't be a problem. But that's not what revelations usually teach.

    So, since we have to choose one revelation, we'd better be sure which miracles are acceptable and which aren't. That makes a low bar unworkable in practice.

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  159. @Vaal:

    "I have addressed this several times so far.

    You seem to be operating under the assumption that my position would be 'miracles or divine resurrections are IMPOSSIBLE' and that therefore any move to 'possible' is in contrast a 'sea change.'

    I've stated numerous times that is not the case. I've said I do not deny the possibility of a miracle or a divine resurrection, or any revelation from God. It remains a possibility."

    Perhaps you misread/misunderstood what I wrote. You have most certainly not "stated numerous times" that you think miracles, divine interventions, and revelations from God could happen if there were no God. As I said, without God, the probabilities of those events would be zero, so establishing His existence would "significantly" increase them.

    But never mind.

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  160. @dguller:

    "Fair enough. To be more precise, a miracle occurs when a thing’s nature is prevented from actualization by God’s primary causality, and not by any other thing’s secondary causality. So, if that thing’s behavior can be primarily accounted for by secondary causality (its own or that of other entities), then a miracle has not occurred."

    Personally, I wouldn't go even that far. See below.

    "Perhaps providing some evidentiary criteria of your own would be helpful?"

    I think a more fundamental question is whether we need any in the first place.

    Suppose a scientist invents a device that allows him to observe physical events in the past. He uses it to view and record the Resurrection. He finds that it takes place on schedule and consistently with the New Testament accounts. He reports, though, and his records bear out, that at no point in the entire process does anything take place that is inconsistent with current physics.

    Why would that have even a slight tendency to show that the event didn't have the significance the Church ascribes to it?

    Now, as to whether it does have that significance, there are of course all sorts of considerations that could be brought to bear on the question. One is that (as Fake Herzog has mentioned) the event didn't take place in splendid isolation; it's part of, and continuous with, Jewish history, which lays its own claims to revelation. Another is that (as I've mentioned) the historical accounts that we have say that Jesus himself predicted the event. Another is the ongoing existence of the Church itself. But I don't have a single absolute criterion by which I would evaluate the claim at issue, and more importantly I don't see that it depends on my or anyone else's being able to rule out any and all operation of secondary causes.

    A miracle is characterized by the fact that it goes beyond natural law, not that it violates it—nor, I would say, even necessarily suspends it. Certainly there are records of miracles that do seem to suspend natural law, but their purpose generally seems to be to communicate or corroborate something, and they seem capable of doing so even if close inspection would reveal no actual disconformity to the laws we (think we) know. Suppose it turned out, for example, that Jesus's healing powers could be accounted for by modern biology/psychology and therefore could be argued to flow entirely from his human nature. Would that explain why he, apparently uniquely, possessed those powers at just those times and used them in just those ways?

    [continued]

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  161. [continued]

    Even if someone still wants to insist on a criterion specifically for identifying supernatural interventions just as such, there are still some possible problems with yours:

    "My criteri[on] is that as long as there are still natural explanations (i.e. those solely confined to secondary causality) available to account for the phenomena, then however unlikely they happen to be, they are still more likely to be true than a supernatural intervention."

    Here's one of them. Suppose we toss an icosahedral (twenty-sided) die a few million times. We can be very confident that side 20 came up at least once (in somewhat the way we can be fairly sure that some divine intervention has occurred in human history if classical theism is true). But if we apply (the analogue of) your criterion to each individual toss, we'll conclude that it never did: on each toss, it's always much more likely that one of the other sides came up. And of course the same reasoning would rule out any other number's ever coming up either! (Similar reasoning would lead us to conclude that no one ever wins a lottery.) So we can be sure that, applied in this manner, your criterion must be giving us false negatives somewhere, even if we don't know where.

    Here's another. If classical theism is true and God is the sustaining cause of everything that exists, then there is no phenomenon that can be fully and absolutely explained solely by secondary causation. So if we applied your criterion with that in mind, we'd conclude that every event is miraculous.

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  162. Jeremy:

    Have you ever read C.S Lewis's Miracles?

    No, I have not.

    But, succinctly, what are your grounds for the claim?

    First, a supernatural event is one that is, in principle, impossible to explain on the sole basis of secondary causality in the natural world. If an event could possibly be explained by solely appealing to secondary causes, then it cannot be considered to be a miracle, even if the conjunction of those secondary causes is highly unlikely.

    Compare the following:

    (1) “I cannot point to any secondary causes to explain this event, but there must be some secondary cause that could explain it, even if I have absolutely no idea what it could be.”

    (2) “I can point to secondary causes to explain this event, even though the conjunction of these secondary causes is highly unlikely.”

    I would be more inclined in (1) to consider the possibility of a miracle having occurred, i.e. an event that could not be explained by the secondary causality of the laws of nature, and would consider it bad faith and a sign of significant bias to simply dismiss the possibility of a miracle and insist upon a natural explanation, even though one is utterly lacking. However, with (2), there are well-understood secondary causes available to explain the event in question, and the only issue is the unlikelihood of their conjunction. However, unlikely is not impossible, and something would have to be impossible, given our current understanding, to be considered a miracle.

    An objection to the above with respect to (1) could be that current knowledge may simply be inadequate to determine the secondary causality of the event in question. For example, the QM formalism makes no mention of underlying causes for the various quantum phenomena it describes, and yet no-one would say that they are due to supernatural intervention. Rather than say that they have no secondary causes at all, they would say that there are likely underlying secondary causes that simply aren’t captured by the formalism, which is simply a quantitative abstraction from concrete natural entities. Perhaps future study will discover what these underlying secondary causes are, but no-one would jump to “God did it”, I think. However, if it was sufficient to invoke supernatural intervention whenever an event occurs that lacks any natural explanation, then quantum effects should all be a supernatural intervention.

    Now, if you are unwilling to make such an inference, then not only would you be quite reasonable, but you would also undermine your original claim that the absence of an account involving known secondary causes for an event is sufficient to invoke a supernatural explanation. But perhaps the salient difference between quantum phenomena, for example, and miraculous events is that the former are common, and the latter are uncommon. So, the event in question, in order to be miraculous, would have to be rare, and ideally unique.

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  163. But an objection to that is that there are bizarre instances in human history that would have been considered impossible until they actually happened, and yet they likely had a natural explanation. For example, I described to msgrx the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, where thousands of young people were laughing for hours to weeks over the course of a year or so to the point that several schools had to be closed. An individual laughing is common. A group of people laughing is also common. Even a large group of people laughing is common. But thousands of people, some laughing for weeks, and this occurring in several locations over the course of a year or so? I think that would meet anyone’s criteria of a unique and highly unlikely event that was completely unprecedented. And yet, no-one would claim that it was due to demons or other supernatural causes. Rather, it was an unlikely manifestation of mass hysteria, which is a well-known psychological phenomena. Sure, the precise manner of its expression was unique, but as a category, it is not so unprecedented as to be considered miraculous.

    Ultimately, the issue is how strict to set the bar for the evidence for a miracle. If you set the bar too low, then you will inevitably have false positives where ordinary natural phenomena are considered miraculous, and if you set the bar too high, then you will inevitably have false negatives where miraculous phenomena are considered merely natural. For me, I would set the bar quite high, because determining that an event is miraculous automatically removes it from scientific study, and thus we would have missed an opportunity to learn something unusual about the natural world. And part of the high standard of evidence is the determination that there simply are no possible natural explanations for the alleged miracle. If there are natural explanations, even if their conjunction is highly unlikely, then the burden of proof has not been met, and we cannot declare that a miracle has occurred.

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  164. Scott:

    Why would that have even a slight tendency to show that the event didn't have the significance the Church ascribes to it?

    It wouldn’t. If the scientist’s machine has demonstrated accuracy in its perception of past events, then that would be good enough for me. Otherwise, we would be like people who disbelieved what was shown via the telescope, because it contradicted their expectations.

    One is that (as Fake Herzog has mentioned) the event didn't take place in splendid isolation; it's part of, and continuous with, Jewish history, which lays its own claims to revelation.

    Except that it wasn’t consistent with Jewish history. In fact, Christians here have taken great pains to show that no Jew in their right mind could possibly anticipate such an event, thus making it fundamentally unique and unprecedented.

    Certainly there are records of miracles that do seem to suspend natural law, but their purpose generally seems to be to communicate or corroborate something, and they seem capable of doing so even if close inspection would reveal no actual disconformity to the laws we (think we) know.

    If you want to say that the suspension or violation of natural law is neither necessary nor sufficient for a miracle, and only a purpose to communicate something is necessary and sufficient, then I’m afraid that you will have opened the floodgates for miracles. Jesus appearing in a piece of toast, for example, would have to be considered a miracle, because it communicates the truth of Christianity.

    Suppose it turned out, for example, that Jesus's healing powers could be accounted for by modern biology/psychology and therefore could be argued to flow entirely from his human nature. Would that explain why he, apparently uniquely, possessed those powers at just those times and used them in just those ways?

    The possession of healing powers is not unique for Jesus. But say that there were a tiny minority of legitimate healers in human history, and their powers derived from their human nature. How would that differ from the tiny minority of scientific geniuses in human history? Should we now ascribe scientific genius, or any other exceptional development of a power solely derived from human nature, to supernatural intervention?

    Suppose we toss an icosahedral (twenty-sided) die a few million times. We can be very confident that side 20 came up at least once (in somewhat the way we can be fairly sure that some divine intervention has occurred in human history if classical theism is true).

    Why would you make that inference? Although classical theism is consistent with the possibility of miracles, it does not follow that they actually occur. God could have chosen not to suspend the laws of nature at all, and simply allowed the cosmos to operate according to its nature. Since God’s forgiveness of all sins without restitution is also consistent with classical theism, because God could choose to suspend his judgment altogether, God could have done so in the afterlife, for example, and thus not interfered with natural law at all.

    But anyway …

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  165. But if we apply (the analogue of) your criterion to each individual toss, we'll conclude that it never did: on each toss, it's always much more likely that one of the other sides came up. And of course the same reasoning would rule out any other number's ever coming up either! (Similar reasoning would lead us to conclude that no one ever wins a lottery.) So we can be sure that, applied in this manner, your criterion must be giving us false negatives somewhere, even if we don't know where.

    For your position to be true, the following principle would have to be true:

    (P) If event E is possible for X, then E will inevitably occur.

    And there are a few problems with that.

    First, when (P) is applied to God, you get absurd consequences. It is possible that (1) God always intervenes miraculously in creation, (2) God sometimes intervenes miraculously in creation, and (3) God never intervenes miraculously in creation. If (P) is true, then it is inevitable that God will always, sometimes and never intervene in creation, which is incoherent.

    Second, you are assuming that there has been enough time for a miracle to have occurred by now. Perhaps miracles only occur once every 10 billion years? How do you know what the precise timeline of miracles is, from the divine standpoint? I think that there are simply too many unknown variables in this matter to make any firm determination about the frequency of miracles, solely on the basis of the principles of classical theism.

    Here's another. If classical theism is true and God is the sustaining cause of everything that exists, then there is no phenomenon that can be fully and absolutely explained solely by secondary causation. So if we applied your criterion with that in mind, we'd conclude that every event is miraculous.

    That’s true. Under the construal, either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle. A comfortable middle ground would simply exclude the necessary primary causation that sustains every created being in existence as present in all events, and thus unable to be a principle of distinction at all between mundane and miraculous events.

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  166. dguller,

    1. You to Scott (April 22, 2014 at 3:47 AM above):

    ...if that thing’s behavior can be primarily accounted for by secondary causality (its own or that of other entities), then a miracle has not occurred.

    2. You to Jeremy (April 22, 2014 at 8:55 AM):

    ...part of the high standard of evidence is the determination that there simply are no possible natural explanations for the alleged miracle.

    3. Aquinas (in Summa Contra Gentiles (here)):

    [1] Things that are at times divinely accomplished, apart from the generally established order in things, are customarily called miracles... Therefore, those things must properly be called miraculous which are done by divine power apart from the order generally followed in things.

    [2] Now, there are various degrees and orders of these miracles. Indeed, the highest rank among miracles is held by those events in which something is done by God which nature never could do...

    [4] Now, the third degree of miracles occurs when God does what is usually done by the working of nature, but without the operation of the principles of nature[.]

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  167. dguller:

    "If an event could possibly be explained by solely appealing to secondary causes, then it cannot be considered to be a miracle, even if the conjunction of those secondary causes is highly unlikely."

    Aye, but there's the rub: how do you know when an explanation in terms to secondary causes is actually possible? Earlier your bring up the possibility that the post-Resurrection appearances were actually the result of a form of mass hallucination which has only ever occurred on that one occasion, never before or since. Well, maybe, but what reason do we have for thinking that such a mass hallucination is even possible in the first place? Given that hallucinations are inherently a subjective thing dependent on the sufferer's own mind, what makes us think that several people could share the same hallucination?

    (And I don't think that the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic is a valid counter-example, because, whilst there haven't been any other reported cases of laughter-specific mass hysteria, mass hysteria itself is a known psychological phenomenon. On the other hand, you haven't been able to pull up any other examples of mass hallucinations, whether about resurrected saviours or anything else.)

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  168. dguller:

    "My birth was a one-off event. Does that make it unnatural?"

    Very funny. Your birth only happened once, but births happen all the time.

    "The point is that the human capacity for self-deception is almost limitless. The manner of that self-deception may vary from situation to situation, but we both agree that bereavement hallucinations are not uncommon, and that followers of a failed messiah are capable of coming up with sophisticated rationalizations to continue to believe in their messiah. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the two occurred to the followers of Jesus, which explains their belief in his resurrection."

    Given that you can produce no other examples of mass hallucinations, and their existence would seem to contract what we do know about hallucinations, how do you know that a mass hallucination actually *is* within the realm of possibility? Sure you can imagine it, but that doesn't imply it's actually possible (cf. Hume's argument vs. causation).

    "No natural laws are violated in this explanation, and however unlikely a natural explanation, it is always to be preferred to a supernatural one."

    Why? You've said so yourself that miracles are at least theoretically possible given classical theism, so why should we always prefer naturalistic explanations, however implausible they might be?

    "Paul’s letters report hearsay, as do the Gospels. We have no records from the original eyewitnesses, in their own words."

    Gospel according to John? And Papias says that Mark's Gospel was just Mark writing down what Peter had told him (unless you want to claim that if I dictated my memoirs to a professional typist, they somehow wouldn't count as memoirs because I didn't write them in my own hand?). As for Paul and the other Gospels, getting information at one remove is still better than we have for the vast majority of ancient history.

    "Big changes in memory are well within the realm of human psychology."

    Sure, but the magnitude of the change we're talking about isn't. It would be like Julius Caesar somehow imagining a wholly fictitious campaign against an invented nation and putting it in his memoirs.

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  169. "How far should one go to rule out natural explanations? Should one only rule out common natural explanations? What about rare natural explanations? How rare would a natural explanation have to be before you decide that supernatural intervention is more likely to have occurred? And what about natural explanations that are highly unlikely, but are based upon fairly common natural phenomena that have never been combined into one event in particular, such as the laughter epidemic I described above? What if given a long enough stretch of time, it would be likely that a similar event would occur again?"

    Well, as I see it, there are three main criteria we have to consider:

    (1) Does the claimed miracle fit with what we already know about God? If it doesn't -- if, say, the "miracle" consists of God appearing to somebody and commanding them to torture their neighbours' new-born child to death -- then that lowers the possibility of its genuineness quite dramatically. (Note that the miracle can go beyond what we know and reveal new information about God, just as long as this information doesn't contradict what we know already.)

    (2) Is the proposed natural explanation attested elsewhere? If it is, then we already have independent reason to believe that such an explanation is possible, which increases the chance of it being correct in this case. If, on the other hand, you find yourself essentially inventing a phenomenon to explain away this one event, that seems significantly more dubious.

    (3) Sort of like (1), does the proposed natural explanation fit in with what we already know about the natural world?



    Now with the Resurrection specifically, we find that (1) God cleansing us of our sins doesn't at all contradict what we know from natural theology, (2) there are no other known examples of mass hallucination, and (3) hallucinations are inherently subjective, and so the possibility of multiple people all sharing the same hallucination would seem to contradict what we already know about hallucinations. So in the case of the Resurrection, I conclude that we are justified in preferring the miraculous explanation to the hallucination theory.

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  170. @dguller:

    "It wouldn't. If the scientist's machine has demonstrated accuracy in its perception of past events, then that would be good enough for me."

    Do you mean that it would be sufficient to persuade you that the event occurred, or that the event means what the Church says it means? I ask because it sounds like you mean the first, whereas the second is what I was asking.

    "Christians here have taken great pains to show that no Jew in their right mind could possibly anticipate such an event, thus making it fundamentally unique and unprecedented."

    On the other hand, for whatever it's worth, (Orthodox) Rabbi Pinchas Lapide devoted a fascinating little book to the exposition of his view that Jesus's Resurrection was a real historical event entirely consonant with Judaism and somewhat analogous to Elijah's ascension to heaven. It's true that he doesn't ascribe the same significance to the event that Christians do, but that's another issue.

    "If you want to say that the suspension or violation of natural law is neither necessary nor sufficient for a miracle, and only a purpose to communicate something is necessary and sufficient, then I'm afraid that you will have opened the floodgates for miracles."

    And indeed I wouldn't say that. What I have said is that I don't think a suspension of natural law is necessary for a miracle (and that miracles aren't "violations" of natural law anyway). I suppose such a suspension would have to be sufficient.

    And my only point about communication/corroboration was that I don't see why a miracle can't fulfill that purpose even if there was nothing about it that on close examination looked like an actual suspension of natural law. Such a miracle would seem to correspond to Aquinas's "third degree" as reported by Glenn.

    "The possession of healing powers is not unique for Jesus. But say that there were a tiny minority of legitimate healers in human history, and their powers derived from their human nature. How would that differ from the tiny minority of scientific geniuses in human history? Should we now ascribe scientific genius, or any other exceptional development of a power solely derived from human nature, to supernatural intervention?"

    Not necessarily. My point is just that it's possible to make an argument for supernatural intervention on the basis of the precise circumstances of each case. In Jesus's case, for example, he gave reasons why he performed his healings and explanations of their significance, and they fit into an overall pattern the merits of which can also be considered independently. (And it's the overall pattern that I meant was unique.)

    "Why would you make that inference? Although classical theism is consistent with the possibility of miracles, it does not follow that they actually occur."

    Perhaps not with mathematical necessity. But as has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it can be argued that there's good reason to expect the God of classical theism to have revealed Himself to us.

    [continued]

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  171. [continued]

    "For your position to be true, the following principle would have to be true:

    (P) If event E is possible for X, then E will inevitably occur."

    Not at all. A reasonable certainty that something has occurred on at least one of many possible occasions doesn't imply or require inevitability. Nor . . .

    "First, when (P) is applied to God, you get absurd consequences. It is possible that (1) God always intervenes miraculously in creation, (2) God sometimes intervenes miraculously in creation, and (3) God never intervenes miraculously in creation. If (P) is true, then it is inevitable that God will always, sometimes and never intervene in creation, which is incoherent."

    . . . does it imply that contradictory possibilities must all be realized at the same time. The die rolls in the analogy were meant to correspond to the occasions in human history on which God might or might not have intervened. At each moment in history, God either intervened or didn't.

    "Second, you are assuming that there has been enough time for a miracle to have occurred by now."

    I don't think that's an assumption; I think it's a plausible inference from the aforementioned argument that the God of classical theism could reasonably be expected to reveal Himself to us. Indeed, if the Scriptural account is sound, then the process of revelation pretty much began when humans did, and miracles weren't far behind.

    "That's true. Under the construal, either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle. A comfortable middle ground would simply exclude the necessary primary causation that sustains every created being in existence as present in all events, and thus unable to be a principle of distinction at all between mundane and miraculous events."

    That seems plausible.

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  172. [Hmm, blogger seems to have eaten my comment so forgive me if this is a repeat. I'll keep it short:]

    dguller, your analogy to Tanganyika fails because in that case mass hysteria is proposed as an explanation of the event itself, the reality of which is not in dispute.

    With the Gospels it is the event itself that's in dispute -- meanwhile you are proposing mass hysteria/hallucination as an explanation of the accounts of the event.

    This would be like saying that the journalists who chronicled the Tanganyika event were actually suffering from delusions, and that there was in fact no mass laughter at all.

    Besides being, pardon the pun, a laughably improbable claim, this would also be a kind of question-begging.

    If the Resurrection occurred as traditionally understood, then it is in principle a supernatural event. Mass hysteria is not even a possible explanation of the Resurrection -- although it is a logically possible explanation of the accounts of the event. But only if we assume that the event itself did not actually occur.

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  173. By the way, another problem for the "hallucination" theory is that in the accounts of three of Jesus's appearances (two in Luke and one in John), those to whom he appeared initially failed to recognize him.

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  174. msgrx writes:

    "As for Paul and the other Gospels, getting information at one remove is still better than we have for the vast majority of ancient history."

    It certainly is. Let's also not forget that not all of Paul's information is even at one remove: he claimed that the risen Christ had appeared to him too.

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  175. This might be marginally relevant to parts of the current discussion.

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  176. Msgrx:

    Aye, but there's the rub: how do you know when an explanation in terms to secondary causes is actually possible? Earlier your bring up the possibility that the post-Resurrection appearances were actually the result of a form of mass hallucination which has only ever occurred on that one occasion, never before or since. Well, maybe, but what reason do we have for thinking that such a mass hallucination is even possible in the first place? Given that hallucinations are inherently a subjective thing dependent on the sufferer's own mind, what makes us think that several people could share the same hallucination?

    You are assuming that each individual who hallucinated Jesus had the same hallucination at the time. Perhaps a few disciples had different hallucinations of Jesus Christ, and after communicating their experiences with each other, subtly influenced one another to arrive at an agreed-upon narrative. And as for the other disciples, after hearing the experiences of the few who had hallucinated Jesus, they experienced source amnesia, and misremembered the event such that they had the experience, and not the others.

    Or maybe only one disciple had a bereavement hallucination, and described it vividly to the other disciples. Again, in their subsequent recollection of that date, they experienced source amnesia and falsely remembered themselves as the source of the experience itself.

    So, you have an event E that can be explained solely on the basis of natural causes. A supernatural cause would have to be postulated iff E could not possibly be explained by natural causes. Since an unlikely series of natural causes are still a possible series of natural causes, it follows that there is no need to invoke supernatural causes, which would be appropriate if a natural causal account were impossible.

    And I don't think that the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic is a valid counter-example, because, whilst there haven't been any other reported cases of laughter-specific mass hysteria, mass hysteria itself is a known psychological phenomenon. On the other hand, you haven't been able to pull up any other examples of mass hallucinations, whether about resurrected saviours or anything else.

    Remember my argument. You agree that (1) bereavement hallucinations can occur, (2) individuals can engage in self-deception to minimize cognitive dissonance, and (3) that source amnesia can occur. You do not object to (1), (2) or (3) in isolation. Your formidable objection is that the combination of (1), (2) and (3) in Jesus’ disciples is extraordinarily unlikely. Furthermore, you are arguing that if the combination of (1), (2), and (3) only occurred with Jesus’ disciples, then this simply adds to the case for a supernatural explanation, because the laws of probability would dictate that one would expect more than just Jesus’ disciples experiencing the conjunction of (1), (2) and (3).

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  177. I brought up the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic as a counter-example to your argument, because it is an event in history that is not only extraordinary unlikely, given the psychological phenomena involved, but is also unique in the sense of only occurring on that one occasion. So, you have an event made up of perfectly natural ingredients, i.e. individuals laughing, but when combined into a particular sequence becomes extraordinarily unlikely, as well as absolutely singular. And since no-one argues that the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic has a supernatural explanation, it follows that the principle that states that if an event E is due to an extremely unlikely series of natural causes that is unique in human history, then E must be caused by a supernatural intervention is false.

    The fact that the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic is an example of mass hysteria is irrelevant. It is a singular example of laughing mass hysteria, much like the disciples are a singular example of group hallucinations. In other words, just as mass hysteria is a bona fide phenomena, so are bereavement hallucinations. We are each simply providing species of these genera, and placing only one particular instantiation in the species in question.

    Given that you can produce no other examples of mass hallucinations, and their existence would seem to contract what we do know about hallucinations, how do you know that a mass hallucination actually *is* within the realm of possibility? Sure you can imagine it, but that doesn't imply it's actually possible (cf. Hume's argument vs. causation).

    Consider the following scenario. Two people, A and B, each hallucinate that X is before them, but how X appears is different for each person. A and B then communicate what they see to one another, which can then alter how X appears to them until there is sufficient similarity in their hallucinations of X that A and B begin to describe X in similar ways. During their later recollections of the event, they misremember the fact that X appeared differently to each of them, and believe that X appeared in the same way to both.

    I do not see how the above is beyond the realm of possibility. More than one person can experience a bereavement hallucination of the deceased, and if two people do so at the same time, then their communications can subconsciously alter the hallucination itself in keeping with their subconscious needs. Once they have achieved a level of harmony in their experiences, and proceed to tell others what they experienced, they could quite easily have forgotten that the original bereavement hallucinations were different.

    Is the above likely or common? Of course not. I openly admit that it is highly unlikely, which is probably why it does not occur often (and possibly only to the disciples 2,000 years ago). But I do contend that the above unlikely account is still more likely than a dead man was resurrected back to life, and conversed with his disciples. I simply do not understand why you so easily embrace this natural impossibility over a natural unlikelihood. By definition, if a natural account is possible, then a supernatural account is unnecessary.

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  178. Sure, but the magnitude of the change we're talking about isn't. It would be like Julius Caesar somehow imagining a wholly fictitious campaign against an invented nation and putting it in his memoirs.

    Yes, kind of like people sincerely remembering that they were molested, when no such event ever occurred. Which happens.

    (1) Does the claimed miracle fit with what we already know about God? If it doesn't -- if, say, the "miracle" consists of God appearing to somebody and commanding them to torture their neighbours' new-born child to death -- then that lowers the possibility of its genuineness quite dramatically. (Note that the miracle can go beyond what we know and reveal new information about God, just as long as this information doesn't contradict what we know already.)

    The Old Testament is full of instances where God intervenes to encourage the harm of children. For example, God performed the miracle of sending the angel of death to murder the firstborn sons of Egypt, including newborns at Exodus 11:4-6. Also, Elisha performed a miracle in which he summoned two bears to maul 42 boys at 2 Kings 2:23-4. I could add to these examples, but it seems pretty clear that God uses miracles to commit atrocities, and thus I don’t see how your criteria can be valid here.

    (2) Is the proposed natural explanation attested elsewhere? If it is, then we already have independent reason to believe that such an explanation is possible, which increases the chance of it being correct in this case. If, on the other hand, you find yourself essentially inventing a phenomenon to explain away this one event, that seems significantly more dubious.

    See my above argument that the singularity of a series of natural causes is not a reason to prefer a supernatural explanation.

    (3) Sort of like (1), does the proposed natural explanation fit in with what we already know about the natural world?

    Agreed.

    Take care.

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  179. Scott:

    I'll try to get around to responding to your points tomorrow.

    Take care.

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  180. dguller writes:

    First, a supernatural event is one that is, in principle, impossible to explain on the sole basis of secondary causality in the natural world. If an event could possibly be explained by solely appealing to secondary causes, then it cannot be considered to be a miracle, even if the conjunction of those secondary causes is highly unlikely.

    Compare the following:

    (1) “I cannot point to any secondary causes to explain this event, but there must be some secondary cause that could explain it, even if I have absolutely no idea what it could be.”

    (2) “I can point to secondary causes to explain this event, even though the conjunction of these secondary causes is highly unlikely.”


    I think the first thing to ask is whether all paranormal incidents are not incidents of secondary causes. Many, like ghosts, have a significant amount of vertical causation, in the sense they have their primary causes in levels of being above our own, but these still are secondary causes. I'm not sure you deal at all with this kind of paranormal event.

    I'm not sure about miracles but let us say none have secondary causes. I'm not sure you give much much of a reason why we must exhaust secondary causes before looking for a miraculous explanation.

    You give, it is true, a pragmatic or psychological reason: that we would hamper natural science if we accepted miralces that might have other causes, no matter how unlikely. This, though, tells us little about what is and isn't a miracle in itself.

    However, I still think this pragmatic reason is flawed. You say that you set the bar quite high, so that we must exhaust all natural causes before thinking of the miraculous. But is this not question begging? Are you not supporting your claim that miracles are unlikely and shouldn't be generally countenanced by assuming miracles are unlikely and not generally countenancing them? Yes, you do mention accepting miracles would retard natural science, but I do not think this is necessarily correct. After all, miracles by their nature are very rare, meaning that it is only in the investigation of the miraculous itself where natural science might be stalled. But, when it comes to the miraculous, are you not just begging the question by suggesting that accepting miracles would stop us locating a naturalistic explanation: it is in dispute whether there must be a naturalistic explanation. And I don't necessarily think being open to miracles means one cannot investigate the possible naturalistic explanations of a miracle. It doesn't even mean that one has to be certain about most miracles one does accept.

    C.S Lewis, in Miracles, suggests the best ultimate guide to whether we accept a miracle or not is an innate sense of fitness about the details and context of claims. This sense depends, to some degree, on our metaphysics, but it also depends on careful scrutiny of the evidence of each specific claim. Lewis makes the rather wry point that some explanations, like mass hallucinations, seem to almost only be invoked when trying to explain away paranormal phenomena.

    George Orwell, for example, saw a ghost but, being a convinved materialist, he dismissed it as an hallucination. But, seeing as Orwell was otherwise quite sane and this hallucination was both orderly and completely removed from any other signs of disturbance in his psyche, my sense of fitness would suggest it was morely likely he did see a ghost than had an astoundingly self-contained hallucination.

    My qualifications are in history (and political science) and I can tell you this sort of fitness is very important to the historian, even in terms of completely non-supernatural events. I don't see why one cannot investigate claims of the paranormal carefully, perhaps coming to no definite conclusion, but still allow the possibility that they likely have a non-naturalistic explanation.

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  181. Continued.

    Besides, I'm not sure we necessarily gain more knowledge by always looking for scientific explanations. I personally think scientific knowledge is rather of a low priority. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your science. By always dismissing the paranormal we ignore the existence of the non-corporeal. And true miracles would presumably have the greatest meaning, which we are cutting ourselves off from if we rule them out completely. That is not to say the paranormal and miracles exist, but simply that we cannot say beforehand we do not gain knowledge by accepting their possibility.

    Finally, I'm not sure the whole argument about secondary causes is not question begging, without metaphysical support. After all, what you mean by secondary causes seems to be the regular laws of nature but miracles are outside these, so you can't appeal to them alone to rule out miracles. So aren't you just saying we should rule out miracles because we should rule out miracles? You do, I suppose, give the pragmatic reason I just critiqued, but really you need a metaphysics that can show why it is more unlikely that miracles occur than any unlikely naturalistic event occur.

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  182. Also, I'm sure you'll reply by suggesting that one can quite readily have a one-off hallucination that involves no other disturbance to their psyche. Like Orwell's experience, where a sane individual saw a man walk through a churchyard and then a closed door. This was an isolated case in the sense it was, as far as I know, his only such sighting of a ghost and that at the time of the incident nothing else was out of place.

    But I wonder doesn't this create at least as many problems for our knowledge as openness to the paranormal. I don't even mean in a radical sceptical sense exactly, more just in a mundane sense, the suggestion we can readily have hallucinations and other related disturbances like false memories, that so seamless and ordered and isolated from other psychological problems (often being one-off experiences) seems to more endanger our knowledge than accepting the possibility of the paranormal.

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  183. dguller, I still don't see how you are not conflating the Resurrection event with the accounts of that event.

    The two parallel weird events are not "lots of people laughed in Tanganyika" and "lots of people said that a man rose from the dead in such a way as to be no longer subject to death".

    As you and others have carefully pointed out here, it's not at all historically weird for lots of people to make the same extravagant claim, particularly in the domain of religion.

    So the truly parallel weird events are "lots of people laughed in Tanganyika" and "a man [allegedly] rose from the dead etc.".

    Of course no one calls the first supernatural, but that's not because of some modern facility with Occam's Razor that the ancients did not enjoy, but rather the simple fact that "lots of people laughed in Tanganyika" displays no supernatural characteristics whatsoever, despite being weird as hell.

    Whereas the Resurrection as traditionally understood is a per se supernatural event.

    You have not shown that the Resurrection could have happened without direct divine agency. Instead you've only posited that one possible explanation of "lots of people said that a man rose from the dead" is that nothing whatsoever actually happened but they all imagined it.

    And yes, logically speaking this is one possible explanation. But it's vanishingly unlikely -- enormously less likely than that the Resurrection was faked, or that Christ swooned, or that the accounts were not given at all but simply invented decades later by the evangelists, etc.

    For the record I don't think any of these theories ends up holding much water either but they're all radically less implausible than the mass hallucination theory. And I think that becomes clear pretty quickly if you reflect on how it would sound if someone posited a similar explanation of the contemporary journalism describing the Tanganyika event.

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  184. "Of course no one calls the first supernatural, but that's not because of some modern facility with Occam's Razor that the ancients did not enjoy, but rather the simple fact that "lots of people laughed in Tanganyika" displays no supernatural characteristics whatsoever, despite being weird as hell.

    Whereas the Resurrection as traditionally understood is a per se supernatural event."


    To this I'd like to add that conflating really-weird-but-natural events with supernatural events is to make *exactly* the same mistake that Gnu's and theistic personalists make when they think about God.

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  185. dguller:

    "You are assuming that each individual who hallucinated Jesus had the same hallucination at the time. Perhaps a few disciples had different hallucinations of Jesus Christ, and after communicating their experiences with each other, subtly influenced one another to arrive at an agreed-upon narrative. And as for the other disciples, after hearing the experiences of the few who had hallucinated Jesus, they experienced source amnesia, and misremembered the event such that they had the experience, and not the others.

    Or maybe only one disciple had a bereavement hallucination, and described it vividly to the other disciples. Again, in their subsequent recollection of that date, they experienced source amnesia and falsely remembered themselves as the source of the experience itself."


    A few thoughts:

    (1) There is, needless to say, no evidence that the events were as you described, other than the question-begging "But my account doesn't include miracles!"

    (2) If you choose to dismiss the actual accounts and invent chains of hallucinatory transmission to explain them, you can prove pretty much anything about anything.

    (3) The NT doesn't just claim that Jesus appeared to the Twelve, but that he appeared to hundreds of people and over a period of forty days. Yes, yes, rhetorical exaggeration, not counting exactly, etc., etc. But at the end of the day if you're trying to prove your claim by pointing to the large number of witnesses and it turns out that these witnesses are made up, that's going to seriously undermine your credibility. So whilst the 500 claim might not be on-the-dot accurate, it's unlikely that Paul would have made it if there wasn't actually a large number of witnesses -- which, of course, makes your chain of delusion theory exponentially less likely.

    (4) How does your theory account for the fact that in several of the post-Resurrection appearances Jesus wasn't even recognised at first? Are we to assume that the Disciples were deluded enough to hallucinate that their Messiah had come back from the dead, but not deluded enough to recognise the subject of their hallucinations? If so, that's a very specific level of deluded.

    (5) The Gospels also report that Jesus interacted with physical objects, by e.g. eating bread with the disciples, eating a fish, etc. So how do you explain this? Was the fish a hallucination too? Did their subconscious minds plan ahead by creating the illusion of a fish, so that when they later created the illusion of Jesus he could prove his genuineness by appearing to eat the first illusion? Did the disciples not notice that the fish Jesus ate was actually still there on the table after he left?

    (6) Given that the idea of Jesus as a spirit working for their salvation in Heaven would be similarly comforting and would seem more likely given Jewish religious beliefs, why did the Disciples assume that Jesus had been bodily raised, rather than assuming that he was come back as a ghost?

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  186. “The fact that the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic is an example of mass hysteria is irrelevant. It is a singular example of laughing mass hysteria, much like the disciples are a singular example of group hallucinations. In other words, just as mass hysteria is a bona fide phenomena, so are bereavement hallucinations. We are each simply providing species of these genera, and placing only one particular instantiation in the species in question.”

    Once you’ve established that mass hysteria is possible, it’s not that big of a leap to say that mass hysteria involving laughter specifically is possible. On the other hand, the fact that personal, individual hallucinations occur is no reason to think that collective, group hallucinations are possible.

    “The Old Testament is full of instances where God intervenes to encourage the harm of children. For example, God performed the miracle of sending the angel of death to murder the firstborn sons of Egypt, including newborns at Exodus 11:4-6. Also, Elisha performed a miracle in which he summoned two bears to maul 42 boys at 2 Kings 2:23-4. I could add to these examples, but it seems pretty clear that God uses miracles to commit atrocities, and thus I don’t see how your criteria can be valid here.”

    I’d argue that those are false analogies, but given that this was just an illustration, this would be no more necessary than it would be necessary to defend Aristotle’s arguments by defending the outmoded physical theories he uses as illustrations of his metaphysical ideas. Just substitute your own example of something which would be contrary to God’s nature.

    “See my above argument that the singularity of a series of natural causes is not a reason to prefer a supernatural explanation.”

    In addition to what Jeremy said on this topic, I’d like to point out that your pragmatic argument – that accepting miracle claims would retard the advance of natural science – is, given the number of great scientists who were also Christians, at best dubious, at worst demonstrably false. Moreover, it’s easy to flip it against you, and point out that hyper-scepticism about miracle claims is likely to make us discount true miracles, and so to hinder our growth in knowledge and love of God.

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  188. so to hinder our growth in knowledge and love of God.

    I think this is worth underscoring, and it is also worth asking if dguller's position on this issue doesn't presuppose a certain naturalistic and, especially, scientistic viewpoint - despite his A-T - in it seems to imply a, at least in those areas outside philosophy, a very high place and urgency for the knowledge of natural science and its field of investigation.

    Those of us who see natural science as one specific and not especially important kind of human knowledge into lower priority aspects reality (for the most part) will find dguller's very zealous endeavours to protect its entreprises rather strange.

    Even someone who is neither a scientistic naturalist nor reactionary like myself might some sort of explanation about why the entreprise of natural science is quite so important as dguller suggests - at least if we remember it very unlikely natural science will collapse (I don't dguller himself is or could suggest that) if the sort cautious and careful acceptance of the possibility of miracles and the paranormal is allowed.

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  189. Msgrx:

    (1) There is, needless to say, no evidence that the events were as you described, other than the question-begging "But my account doesn't include miracles!"

    It is not question begging. A miracle can be said to occur if the event in question could not possibly be explained by purely natural causes. If there is a possible sequence of natural causes, however unlikely, then it follows that a miracle cannot be said to occur. And note that I am not appealing to alien technology causing Jesus to rise from the dead, or demons making it an illusion that Jesus died on the cross, or anything so farfetched and beyond our experience. What I am appealing to is a sequence of well-attested natural psychological phenomena, such as bereavement hallucinations, and people distorting their perception, interpretation and recollection of events (including source amnesia) to minimize cognitive distortion, especially in the context of social pressure.

    Your only objection is that this particular sequence of natural causes seems never to have never occurred prior or since the month after Christ’s death. My response is that we simply do not have a sufficiently detailed record of human activities to know that for sure, and thus, for all we know, my account has occurred with other failed messiahs’ followers, but never made it into the history books, or will occur in the future. Again, human events not being recorded by historians is also a fairly common natural event. Furthermore, even if this particular sequence of natural causes only occurred on that single occasion, then it does not follow that its very uniqueness is a mark of the supernatural, because there are many unique combinations of natural causes that do not require supernatural intervention (e.g. the laughing epidemic). So, I don’t think your objection is compelling.

    (2) If you choose to dismiss the actual accounts and invent chains of hallucinatory transmission to explain them, you can prove pretty much anything about anything.

    Except that I’m not dismissing the accounts at all. The full event that we are trying to explain is that someone recorded a hearsay story about a group of Jesus’ dejected followers who claimed to have interacted with Jesus Christ days after his death, and this story was recorded decades after the event in question. That is what we all agree upon as present in the historical record, and that is what requires an explanation.

    Your explanation is that the author in question heard an accurate report of the events from decades ago that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and appeared to his followers some time after his death.

    My explanation is that the actual event is too shrouded in mystery for any firm conclusions, because there is a sufficiently long stretch of time from the actual event to its written recording decades later that a number of well-known and natural psychological factors could have affected the recollection of the original event and modified it into the form that found its way into the Christian texts. And I’ve provided a few accounts of how this may have occurred.

    The one that is most likely to me is that one (or a few) of the disciples had similar bereavement hallucinations, and through their subsequent communication and discussion subtly influenced one another’s experience to harmonize in certain key features. They then communicated their visions to the rest of the group who proceeded to retell the story to the point that origin amnesia kicked in, and they misattributed the source of the memory to their own experience. After the story was told and retold over the next decades, at some point the Gospel writers recorded them.

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  190. But at the end of the day if you're trying to prove your claim by pointing to the large number of witnesses and it turns out that these witnesses are made up, that's going to seriously undermine your credibility.

    First, Paul never mentioned who any of the witnesses were. Furthermore, even if he did mention who they were, how many people in Corinth would have had the resources and time to make the trip to Palestine to actually interrogate those witnesses? And if the Corinthians that he wrote the letter to were devout Christians, then how many of them would even want to? Would Paul have known all of this? If he did, then perhaps he was simply making an exaggerated and vague indication that his claims were well-substantiated by objective witnesses, while knowing that no-one would ever check his sources.

    Second, there are simply insufficient details for that evidence to be convincing. What exactly did the large group see? Did they see a Jesus-like figure in the distance? Did they see him all at once? Or did a few people see Jesus on one day, a few more on another, and so on? Did they only catch a glimpse of him? Did he say anything to them, or did he simply appear in silence? Again, we simply lack sufficient details to warrant any firm conclusions about Paul’s claim here.

    (4) How does your theory account for the fact that in several of the post-Resurrection appearances Jesus wasn't even recognised at first? Are we to assume that the Disciples were deluded enough to hallucinate that their Messiah had come back from the dead, but not deluded enough to recognise the subject of their hallucinations? If so, that's a very specific level of deluded.

    You assume that people who hallucinate fully recognize their hallucinations. Remember that hallucinations are simply perceptions in the absence of a sensory stimulus. Just as you can be confused about an ordinary perception, you can be confused about a hallucination. And it has nothing to do with being delusional.

    (5) The Gospels also report that Jesus interacted with physical objects, by e.g. eating bread with the disciples, eating a fish, etc. So how do you explain this? Was the fish a hallucination too? Did their subconscious minds plan ahead by creating the illusion of a fish, so that when they later created the illusion of Jesus he could prove his genuineness by appearing to eat the first illusion? Did the disciples not notice that the fish Jesus ate was actually still there on the table after he left?

    No, they just distorted their memories to exaggerate their claims by making them more remarkable. Again, we have no records of what the individual disciples told people immediately after their resurrection experience, and thus we simply have no way to compare their initial narratives with later narratives for consistency.

    Remember that the earliest recording of details of what the disciples observed of the risen Christ were not recorded until the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, each of which was written around 80 CE. I won’t count the Gospel of Mark, because the earliest completed manuscripts of it in the fourth century CE all end at Mark 16:8. So, it cannot be used as a reliable record of the resurrection at all. The remaining Gospels were not recorded in textual form until about 50 years after the events in question, which would leave plenty of opportunity for subconscious memory revision and distortion as the narrative is communicated and discussed by the early Christian community, in which case we simply do not know what the precise events at the time even were, but only have the version of events as it existed around the time that the narrative was recorded.

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  191. (6) Given that the idea of Jesus as a spirit working for their salvation in Heaven would be similarly comforting and would seem more likely given Jewish religious beliefs, why did the Disciples assume that Jesus had been bodily raised, rather than assuming that he was come back as a ghost?

    Who knows? Perhaps they felt that a bodily resurrection would be more remarkable. Perhaps they thought that his bodily resurrection would provide evidence of their future bodily resurrection. Or perhaps some other reason.

    Once you’ve established that mass hysteria is possible, it’s not that big of a leap to say that mass hysteria involving laughter specifically is possible. On the other hand, the fact that personal, individual hallucinations occur is no reason to think that collective, group hallucinations are possible.

    If by “group hallucination”, you mean “more than one person experience the exact same hallucination”, then I agree that such a phenomenon has never been recorded, at least to the best of my knowledge. But if by “group hallucination”, you mean “more than one person experience a similar hallucination”, then such a thing has happened before. At the Salem witch trials, for example, the girls reported seeing the alleged witch’s spirit tormenting them, as they were having their fits and convulsions. And remember that this is while they were standing as a group in a courtroom with witnesses present, and not isolated in a room without public observation. Did they actually see the exact same spirit tormenting them? Probably not, but it stands to reason that they saw something that they all agreed was the witch’s spirit.

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  192. Mark16:6-8

    4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

    6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

    8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.[a]

    I don't see how the above "Doesn't count" even with the longer ending omitted?

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  193. I will just add this little tidbit from the wiki as a drive by and then let the experts continue with their discussion with dguller.

    The earliest clear evidence for Mark 16:9-20 as part of the Gospel of Mark is in Chapter XLV First Apology of Justin Martyr (c. 160). In a passage in which Justin treats Psalm 110 as a Messianic prophecy, he states that Ps. 110:2 was fulfilled when Jesus' disciples, going forth from Jerusalem, preached everywhere. His verbiage is remarkably similar to the wording of Mk. 16:20 and is consistent with Justin's use of a Synoptics-Harmony in which Mark 16:20 was blended with Lk. 24:53. Justin's student Tatian (c. 172), incorporated the "Longer Ending" into his Diatessaron, a blended narrative consisting of material from all four canonical Gospels. And Irenaeus (c. 184), in Against Heresies 3:10.6, explicitly cited Mark 16:19, stating that he was quoting from near the end of Mark's account. This patristic evidence is over a century older than the earliest manuscript of Mark 16. Writers in the 200's such as Hippolytus, Porphyry, and the anonymous author of De Rebaptismate also used the "Longer Ending."

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  194. dguller:

    “It is not question begging. A miracle can be said to occur if the event in question could not possibly be explained by purely natural causes. If there is a possible sequence of natural causes, however unlikely, then it follows that a miracle cannot be said to occur.”

    You keep repeating this like it’s some sort of self-evident axiom, when really it’s not. So you can come up with a naturalistic just-so story or invent a psychological phenomenon which has conveniently only ever occurred this one time, well done you. As far as I see it, though, these explanations point to an active imagination rather than to a serious argument.

    “Except that I’m not dismissing the accounts at all.”

    Sure you are. You dismiss the Gospels’ actual accounts of what the people in question saw, and instead accept some unsupported idea of your own imagining (“Hey, maybe this one disciple had a hallucination, and somehow managed to convince the others instead of being dismissed as a lunatic!”) based, it seems, on nothing more than your antipathy to miracles.

    “First, Paul never mentioned who any of the witnesses were. Furthermore, even if he did mention who they were, how many people in Corinth would have had the resources and time to make the trip to Palestine to actually interrogate those witnesses? And if the Corinthians that he wrote the letter to were devout Christians, then how many of them would even want to? Would Paul have known all of this? If he did, then perhaps he was simply making an exaggerated and vague indication that his claims were well-substantiated by objective witnesses, while knowing that no-one would ever check his sources.”

    Well, the Apostles themselves managed to travel quite a bit, and they were by no means wealthy. Long-distance travel during this period wasn’t as easy as it is now, but it was by no means impossible.

    Also, how exactly do you think these people would have become devout Christians in the first place? They knew as well as you do that people don’t rise from the dead and that accounts of things are often wrong. There would have to be some evidence to make them convert.

    “Second, there are simply insufficient details for that evidence to be convincing. What exactly did the large group see? Did they see a Jesus-like figure in the distance? Did they see him all at once? Or did a few people see Jesus on one day, a few more on another, and so on? Did they only catch a glimpse of him? Did he say anything to them, or did he simply appear in silence? Again, we simply lack sufficient details to warrant any firm conclusions about Paul’s claim here.”

    It was five hundred disciples at once, not just a couple each day. And I don’t think that somebody testifying to “Some guy in the distance, looked a bit like Jesus, you know” would be used as a witness.

    “You assume that people who hallucinate fully recognize their hallucinations. Remember that hallucinations are simply perceptions in the absence of a sensory stimulus. Just as you can be confused about an ordinary perception, you can be confused about a hallucination. And it has nothing to do with being delusional.”

    No, I assume that if you want someone to be alive so much that your subconscious makes you think that they’re present, you’d, y’know, think that they’re present. As opposed to mistaking them for a gardener or just some random guy on the road.

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  195. “Remember that the earliest recording of details of what the disciples observed of the risen Christ were not recorded until the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, each of which was written around 80 CE. I won’t count the Gospel of Mark, because the earliest completed manuscripts of it in the fourth century CE all end at Mark 16:8. So, it cannot be used as a reliable record of the resurrection at all. The remaining Gospels were not recorded in textual form until about 50 years after the events in question, which would leave plenty of opportunity for subconscious memory revision and distortion as the narrative is communicated and discussed by the early Christian community, in which case we simply do not know what the precise events at the time even were, but only have the version of events as it existed around the time that the narrative was recorded.”

    Great, so do you also dismiss the works of Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, and so on? After all, they were all writing more than 50 years after the events in question, and their sources often haven’t survived. Unless you dismiss the NT because it includes miracles, but then you’re back to question-begging “But we can’t accept miracles!” territory.

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  196. Scott:

    Do you mean that it would be sufficient to persuade you that the event occurred, or that the event means what the Church says it means? I ask because it sounds like you mean the first, whereas the second is what I was asking.

    The former.

    On the other hand, for whatever it's worth, (Orthodox) Rabbi Pinchas Lapide devoted a fascinating little book to the exposition of his view that Jesus's Resurrection was a real historical event entirely consonant with Judaism and somewhat analogous to Elijah's ascension to heaven. It's true that he doesn't ascribe the same significance to the event that Christians do, but that's another issue.

    Then the unprecedented aspect of Jesus’ resurrection was not the resurrection per se, but rather the claim that Jesus was the literal Son of God who died for the sins of mankind. I’m not too sure what the resurrection added then, other than giving Jesus an opportunity to directly communicate this truth to his dejected followers.

    And indeed I wouldn't say that. What I have said is that I don't think a suspension of natural law is necessary for a miracle (and that miracles aren't "violations" of natural law anyway). I suppose such a suspension would have to be sufficient.

    I think what you mean is that miracles go beyond the natural powers of created beings. In other words, a created being has a range of activities that are due to its natural powers. If a created being performs an activity that is beyond its natural powers, then something else must have added that extra ability to its natural powers, and that is precisely what a miracle is supposed to be. Thus, it is not so much a suspension of its natural powers, but rather an extension of them by supernatural means. So, the question is whether a particular activity of a created being can be solely accounted for by its natural powers, or not. If the former, then its activity is not miraculous, and if the latter, then it is.

    But as has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it can be argued that there's good reason to expect the God of classical theism to have revealed Himself to us.

    The reasons that justify God’s communication to creation are ultimately derived from the idea that God as Goodness itself overflows outwards into his creation. But the nature of this overflow is open to a number of possible manifestations that are all consistent with classical theism. For example, one could argue that the outward flow of God into creation is itself the communication to creation, i.e. the trace of God’s presence exists within the deepest part of a created being, i.e. in its very essence and esse, both of which are images of the divine. Under that scenario, there is no need for a further supernatural revelation.

    To argue that a specific revelation that is communicated to human beings via miraculous events requires additional assumptions, none of which are exclusively derived from classical theism, even though they are certainly consistent with classical theism. In other words, whatever “good reasons” you have for this claim are primarily derived from elements from outside of classical theism, and would have to assessed independently of classical theism altogether.

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  197. Not at all. A reasonable certainty that something has occurred on at least one of many possible occasions doesn't imply or require inevitability.

    Fair enough. I thought that you were making a much stronger claim.

    Nor does it imply that contradictory possibilities must all be realized at the same time. The die rolls in the analogy were meant to correspond to the occasions in human history on which God might or might not have intervened. At each moment in history, God either intervened or didn't.

    Except that the possibilities in question are mutually exclusive, i.e. God always does X, God sometimes does X, and God never does X. Each possibility is a genuine one for God, because God is free to always do X, sometimes do X, or never do X, but once he does one, he cannot do any of the others. But the point is moot, because it presupposes the truth of (P), which you disagree with. So, no worries.

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  198. Msgrx:

    Great, so do you also dismiss the works of Plutarch, Livy, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, and so on?

    I don’t dismiss them entirely. Why would I? If their works describe events that can be independently corroborated, then the likelihood of the truth of that particular claim goes up. If their works describe magical or supernatural events that occurred, then the likelihood of the truth of that particular claim goes down. Similarly, if a prosecutor at a trial brought a witness against the accused that claims that an angel told them that the accused was guilty, then that claim would be quickly dismissed as highly unlikely to be true, even by religious people, because of the high degree of unreliability of that kind of testimony. The same reasoning applies here.

    Ultimately, it is a matter of probability. The more distance in space and time between an event E and a written record of E, the more uncertainty is introduced into the record of E, because of the numerous distortions and deviations in the narrative in question that are possible between E and the textual recording of E, given the vagaries of human psychology, as I’ve been describing in this thread. The more uncertainty in a narrative, the more likely that there are false positives and false negatives within the text.

    But even if it turned out that the authors that you cited above were wildly off the mark of historical accuracy to the point that their texts would have to be rejected, it wouldn’t matter much to me, because it has no effect upon my life. Sure, it would affect historians, and people who have devoted their lives to studying that particular period of time, and rely upon their texts as authoritative references, but admitting that they know far less about them than they think would not be an unwelcome admission. Perhaps we simply know far less than we think about the past, especially the more distant into the past we try to reach, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence in question. If all we have are broad strokes of information, then so be it. I won’t lose any sleep over it.

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  199. I won’t lose any sleep over it.

    This sounds like a good idea -- especially in light of the fact that sleep deprivation is a known precursor to stimulus-free hallucinations.

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