Suppose I told you that the ghost of Sargon of Akkad visited me last night, informed me that his favorite number is 4,781,872,348,761,586,178,345,871,334,578 and then disappeared. This is intrinsically improbable, but on the other hand the probability that I'd lie and make up *that specific number* is also intrinsically improbable. So is it a wash? If you object that your prior on a ghost existing is much lower than this number (say, 10^-100), then imagine I used an example with a longer random-seeming number that was vastly more improbable than even that (say, 10^-1000).
Even if I present some limited amount of physical evidence that a ghost visited me, it should still strike you as pretty dubious that "appearing just to name a number he claims is his favorite, with no coherent explanation" is the sort of thing that Sargon of Akkad's ghost would do.
My point is that it's true that the prior improbability of a piece of evidence compensates to some extent for the prior improbability of a hypothesis it's evidence for, but not necessarily enough to end up mattering much. Yes, it's low probability that someone would testify to God incarnating in first-century Palestine, but it seems vastly lower probability that God actually incarnates there and only there when he supposedly wants a relationship with all of humanity. Whereas "Bob randomly generates number X" and "Bob testifies that he randomly generated number X" seem to have a roughly similar prior probabilities.
By contrast, I'd argue that the trinity is something that it's pretty reasonable for a religion to have, historically. Some forms of Hinduism have the trimurti of three major deities, as well as a tridevi for their consorts. There's also a whole bunch of groups of three goddesses, especially, in Greco-Roman mythology, that would inspire the later Neopagan Triple Goddess. Plotinus, one of the Neoplatonists, also posits a grouping of three: the One, the Soul, and the Intellect (he postdates Jesus, but predates the councils where a definite Trinitarian doctrine was agreed upon).
Yeah, the accepted meanings of the Trinity and the Incarnation were not really nailed down until the 4th and 5th centuries. And even within the accepted definitions, people still debate exactly what they mean in metaphysical terms.
Also, yes, there are comparable ideas about multiple aspects of one transcendent, ultimately unified God in other religions, as well as some precedent in the Judaism of the day.
A few things: Most importantly, the idea that God is a composite object comprised of three persons is a heretical understanding of the Trinity - it even has a fancy name, partialism, because Christians throughout history have been very clear that it *isn't* the orthodox view. So the Trinity can't be defended on those grounds, only a sort of unorthodox quasi-Trinity that the entire church has rejected for more than 1500 years at least. The actual view of the Trinity held by all orthodox Christians is way, way more bizarre metaphysically.
(It's also very clear why early Christians developed a concept of the Trinity - because it's the only way to reconcile plainly incompatible claims made in the scriptures. It would be one thing if the concept just emerged randomly in a way that had no naturalistic explanation, but if someone sat you down in front of the texts and asked you to come up with a theory that made them all work, you would probably *have* to come up with something like the Trinity.)
I'm also not sure the logic about Jesus' incarnation works out - any particular incarnation would be unlikely, and any particular false belief about the incarnation would be unlikely, but that doesn't mean they're equally unlikely. If that were automatically the case, then almost any claim would be a wash like that. There are good philosophical reasons, imo, to think any specific incarnation is extremely unlikely, whereas people come to believe false theological views all the time.
Finally, ancient Buddhist texts were compiled so long after the Buddha's life primarily because the social relationship with literacy was very different. Same goes with Alexander the Great and figures from that general period of time. Whereas, by the classical era when Jesus lived, it wasn't uncommon at all for historical accounts to be written within a few decades to a century of a particular event. I mean, Caesar wrote his account of the Gallic wars within a decade of them actually ending. So I don't understand why, in that particular context, it would be unlikely?
Partialism is definitely, unambiguously a heresy - while it hasn't been a historically popular or important one, it requires denying several things that ecumenical councils, the Catholic catechism, and all major Protestant confessions affirm. No one who claims that Jesus is not himself God is an orthodox Christian. It also causes problems with the text of the Bible, like for example when Jesus and God the father are both referred to as "God" without qualification.
I also think the question of whether the location of the incarnation impacts its probability is complex. If you accept the Judeo-Christian framework specifically, then Jesus being born in Palestine was basically guaranteed. But if you just think about theism more generally, then that seems like a particular bad time and place for getting a message out. But either way, I don't think most people are mentioning Palestine here because that's uniquely unlikely - it's just a way of driving home how bizarre the notion of God incarnating in any particular time or place seems.
Well but P(he becomes incarnate at some time or place)=P (he becomes incarnate).
Which things affirmed by all major Protestant denominations must it deny? Jesus is God in the predicative sense, but not the nominative sense. God is the name of the composite of the three, beings are Gods in the predicative sense if they are omni omni beings.
The Westminster Confession, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, etc all say explicitly that God is a singular, indivisible being without parts. I'm not aware of any mainline Protestant branch that would tolerate saying God is a composite (at least among those that require any sort of theological coherence at all - there are some PCUSA churches out there that don't even require you believe in God in the first place, lol). It gets weirder in evangelical circles but that's just because it's a theological free-for-all there.
I mean, that's fine, but in that case you're stepping outside more than 1500 years of orthodoxy. I get why people want to do it - the actual theology is absolutely absurd, so doing a Build Your Own Christianity instead is pretty much the only way to make it philosophically respectable - but I think at some point people should defend Christianity as it actually exists and not a hypothetical version designed to avoid secular critiques.
1st century Palestine seems like an excellent time and place for getting the message out. The evidence of that is that not only did the message get out, but it led to a world where one out of every three humans is a Christian only a very small percentage of humanity (one that is getting smaller over time) has never heard of Jesus.
Part of the problem is that the existence of Christianity changed history, so you can't really look at a place or time after the 1st century and say "This would have been a much better time to do it" because (and this gets more likely the farther you get from the 1st century) the time you choose may not have the same aspects it does in our history compared to a counterfactual history without Christianity. For example, if you say that today would be a better time to incarnate because we have cell phones and the internet and it's easier to spread a message across the globe, that assumes that in a counterfactual world without Christianity we would still end up in a position where the internet and cell phones exist. That's not at all certain: the Scientific Revolution occurred in the Christian nations, how can we be sure that it would have happened without Christianity?
For time before the 1st century, they all seem worse: 1st century Palestine was part of the Roman empire near the height of the Pax Romana. There were well developed transportation networks connecting the entire Mediterranean, there was a shared written language used by all literate individuals across the Mediterranean region (Greek), and there weren't a lot of wars going on that would prevent disciples from traveling all over the place and spreading the good news. It isn't unreasonable to posit that the Roman empire during the Pax Romana was the earliest time you could incarnate and ensure that Christianity would spread and become successful. Which it clearly has.
When I was an atheist I assumed that if the Christian God existed then its primary objective would be to make its existence overwhelmingly obvious to everyone. I observed a world where I could not find anything to make me believe it existed. Therefore I felt quite confident in concluding that it did not exist.
(Some people claimed that I couldn't prove a negative, but that is simply not true. You *can* prove a negative if the evidence for the positive that *should* be there is absent. In fact the law of non-contradiction, one of the foundations of logic, is itself a negative.)
I felt quite smug that I could demolish the claims of every Christian I encountered. Until I met a different kind of Christian who was able to point out flaws in all my arguments. For example my assumption that his God wanted its existance to be overwhelmingly obvious turned out not to be as obvious as I had thought.
Eventually I concluded that given his starting assumptions his belief system was just as internally consistent as my Atheism. I still thought he was *wrong*, but he was the first Christian to gain my respect, and in the end I settled for agreeing to disagree.
Not everyone who disagrees with us is automatically a liar or a fool.
Using three cherry-picked examples to claim that “it’s common for the first texts about some event to be compiled hundreds of years after the event” is pretty weak. Ancient history spans a great deal of time and you’re using three events from hundreds or thousands of years before Jesus of Nazareth supposedly performed miracles. There are plenty of events from closer to his time where the texts are compiled immediately after an event: Pompey’s campaigns, Caesar’s campaigns, the Catiline Conspiracy, etc. It’s also misleading to claim that the first texts attesting to Alexander’s existence were compiled hundreds of years afterward when we know that there were texts and inscriptions attesting to his existence compiled by contemporaries or near-contemporaries (including Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions and tablets, plus we have plenty of archeological evidence in the form of coins and so on).
The Qur’an and the Book of Mormon, I suppose? But I don’t believe in those religions either. And there’s plenty to be skeptical of in ancient history more generally.
The Book of Mormon (which was published in 1830) claims to be describing a period from approximately 600 BC to 400 AD, while the narrative portions of the Quran are mostly modifications of Biblical stories, which would have taken place anywhere from several centuries to well over a millennium before Muhammad dictated them. (The rest of the Quran is mostly made up of religious rules and descriptions of the fate awaiting believers and non-believers in the afterlife.)
By contrast, the earliest book of the NT (either Galatians or 1 Thessalonians, depending on who you ask) was written anywhere from the late-40s to the early-50s AD, approximately ten-to-fifteen years after Jesus' death. The first gospel (Mark) is typically dated to approximately 70 AD, though there are scholars (including both Christians like Jonathan Bernier and strident atheists like James Crossley) who argue that it might date all the way back to the early-40s AD.
The Quran mentions Muhammad and also refers to him as a Messenger. And the point is more that Muhammad and Joseph Smith appear to have been far proactive in immediately spreading the word than Jesus of Nazareth.
Well yeah, Muhammad was the one dictating the Quran, so it isn't surprising that it mentions him (which it does either in passing, or in the context of an instruction, such as when Quran 33:53 tells Muslims to stop bothering him before and after lunch). But the actual *narratives* in the Quran concern events which allegedly took place centuries before the Quran was dictated.
Also, I thought the point was about when the documents were written relative to the events they describe, not how "proactive in immediately spreading the word" the relevant religious figures were.
I took Matthew’s point to be about how proactive a divine entity would have been in spreading the word, but I could be wrong. Getting a Messenger to literally dictate a book, the Quran (which does affirm Muhammad’s prophetic mission), seems a more efficient way for such an entity to spread the word. There is a separate point about how much we should believe in events that were written about years, decades or centuries after they supposedly took place. But this is a reason to apply a great deal of skepticism to the “Sinai events” and to aspects of the Buddha’s life, for instance (evidence for Alexander’s existence from contemporary and non-contemporary sources is overwhelming, but some claims about his life are still rightly doubted).
Agree that some sections of the New Testament were written earlier than the Gospels and that, generally, the evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is strong. But plenty of religious people (including Muhammad and Joseph Smith) have written about events or attested to miracles shortly afterward, and I don’t take their word for it. Go to India today and you’ll find plenty who will tell you that they’ve seen miracles being performed. Their testimony might even be given on the day!
Notice that your examples are all of exuberantly rich men with institutional power? Notice how you also ignore earlier references to Jesus that are lost like the lost letters of Paul or the proposed Q document? Matthew used good and non-cherry picked examples. If you can show that the early church had thousands of dollars in todays money of disposable income to fund and distribute Bioi of Jesus’s life in the first few years after his death, then I will rescind. Otherwise, cherry pick better examples.
Sure, but aren’t we talking about a divine entity who supposedly created the world, performed mind-blowing miracles, and is much more powerful than all of those exuberantly rich men? I am not doubting the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth — Tacitus is sufficient for me there — just pointing out that there are plenty of events in the early Roman Empire and late Roman Republic that were written about almost immediately afterward.
Isn’t claiming that the random result of sequential coin flips was all heads or all tails a much, much more likely lie than claiming some other random result of sequential coin flips?
Suppose I told you that the ghost of Sargon of Akkad visited me last night, informed me that his favorite number is 4,781,872,348,761,586,178,345,871,334,578 and then disappeared. This is intrinsically improbable, but on the other hand the probability that I'd lie and make up *that specific number* is also intrinsically improbable. So is it a wash? If you object that your prior on a ghost existing is much lower than this number (say, 10^-100), then imagine I used an example with a longer random-seeming number that was vastly more improbable than even that (say, 10^-1000).
Even if I present some limited amount of physical evidence that a ghost visited me, it should still strike you as pretty dubious that "appearing just to name a number he claims is his favorite, with no coherent explanation" is the sort of thing that Sargon of Akkad's ghost would do.
Sure, but I'm struggling to see the relevance to the case of Christianity.
My point is that it's true that the prior improbability of a piece of evidence compensates to some extent for the prior improbability of a hypothesis it's evidence for, but not necessarily enough to end up mattering much. Yes, it's low probability that someone would testify to God incarnating in first-century Palestine, but it seems vastly lower probability that God actually incarnates there and only there when he supposedly wants a relationship with all of humanity. Whereas "Bob randomly generates number X" and "Bob testifies that he randomly generated number X" seem to have a roughly similar prior probabilities.
By contrast, I'd argue that the trinity is something that it's pretty reasonable for a religion to have, historically. Some forms of Hinduism have the trimurti of three major deities, as well as a tridevi for their consorts. There's also a whole bunch of groups of three goddesses, especially, in Greco-Roman mythology, that would inspire the later Neopagan Triple Goddess. Plotinus, one of the Neoplatonists, also posits a grouping of three: the One, the Soul, and the Intellect (he postdates Jesus, but predates the councils where a definite Trinitarian doctrine was agreed upon).
Furthermore, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Trinity (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity/trinity-history.html) argues that it only really came about as a doctrine a few centuries after Jesus's life.
Yeah, the accepted meanings of the Trinity and the Incarnation were not really nailed down until the 4th and 5th centuries. And even within the accepted definitions, people still debate exactly what they mean in metaphysical terms.
Also, yes, there are comparable ideas about multiple aspects of one transcendent, ultimately unified God in other religions, as well as some precedent in the Judaism of the day.
A few things: Most importantly, the idea that God is a composite object comprised of three persons is a heretical understanding of the Trinity - it even has a fancy name, partialism, because Christians throughout history have been very clear that it *isn't* the orthodox view. So the Trinity can't be defended on those grounds, only a sort of unorthodox quasi-Trinity that the entire church has rejected for more than 1500 years at least. The actual view of the Trinity held by all orthodox Christians is way, way more bizarre metaphysically.
(It's also very clear why early Christians developed a concept of the Trinity - because it's the only way to reconcile plainly incompatible claims made in the scriptures. It would be one thing if the concept just emerged randomly in a way that had no naturalistic explanation, but if someone sat you down in front of the texts and asked you to come up with a theory that made them all work, you would probably *have* to come up with something like the Trinity.)
I'm also not sure the logic about Jesus' incarnation works out - any particular incarnation would be unlikely, and any particular false belief about the incarnation would be unlikely, but that doesn't mean they're equally unlikely. If that were automatically the case, then almost any claim would be a wash like that. There are good philosophical reasons, imo, to think any specific incarnation is extremely unlikely, whereas people come to believe false theological views all the time.
Finally, ancient Buddhist texts were compiled so long after the Buddha's life primarily because the social relationship with literacy was very different. Same goes with Alexander the Great and figures from that general period of time. Whereas, by the classical era when Jesus lived, it wasn't uncommon at all for historical accounts to be written within a few decades to a century of a particular event. I mean, Caesar wrote his account of the Gallic wars within a decade of them actually ending. So I don't understand why, in that particular context, it would be unlikely?
My understanding was that partialism wasn't a heresy https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/17893/is-partialism-a-real-heresy.
It's true that an incarnation has a low prior. But the fact that the incarnation was in first century Roman Palestine doesn't low its prior.
Partialism is definitely, unambiguously a heresy - while it hasn't been a historically popular or important one, it requires denying several things that ecumenical councils, the Catholic catechism, and all major Protestant confessions affirm. No one who claims that Jesus is not himself God is an orthodox Christian. It also causes problems with the text of the Bible, like for example when Jesus and God the father are both referred to as "God" without qualification.
I also think the question of whether the location of the incarnation impacts its probability is complex. If you accept the Judeo-Christian framework specifically, then Jesus being born in Palestine was basically guaranteed. But if you just think about theism more generally, then that seems like a particular bad time and place for getting a message out. But either way, I don't think most people are mentioning Palestine here because that's uniquely unlikely - it's just a way of driving home how bizarre the notion of God incarnating in any particular time or place seems.
Well but P(he becomes incarnate at some time or place)=P (he becomes incarnate).
Which things affirmed by all major Protestant denominations must it deny? Jesus is God in the predicative sense, but not the nominative sense. God is the name of the composite of the three, beings are Gods in the predicative sense if they are omni omni beings.
The Westminster Confession, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, etc all say explicitly that God is a singular, indivisible being without parts. I'm not aware of any mainline Protestant branch that would tolerate saying God is a composite (at least among those that require any sort of theological coherence at all - there are some PCUSA churches out there that don't even require you believe in God in the first place, lol). It gets weirder in evangelical circles but that's just because it's a theological free-for-all there.
Well, what if one doesn't affirm those confessions as significantly authoritative?
I mean, that's fine, but in that case you're stepping outside more than 1500 years of orthodoxy. I get why people want to do it - the actual theology is absolutely absurd, so doing a Build Your Own Christianity instead is pretty much the only way to make it philosophically respectable - but I think at some point people should defend Christianity as it actually exists and not a hypothetical version designed to avoid secular critiques.
1st century Palestine seems like an excellent time and place for getting the message out. The evidence of that is that not only did the message get out, but it led to a world where one out of every three humans is a Christian only a very small percentage of humanity (one that is getting smaller over time) has never heard of Jesus.
Part of the problem is that the existence of Christianity changed history, so you can't really look at a place or time after the 1st century and say "This would have been a much better time to do it" because (and this gets more likely the farther you get from the 1st century) the time you choose may not have the same aspects it does in our history compared to a counterfactual history without Christianity. For example, if you say that today would be a better time to incarnate because we have cell phones and the internet and it's easier to spread a message across the globe, that assumes that in a counterfactual world without Christianity we would still end up in a position where the internet and cell phones exist. That's not at all certain: the Scientific Revolution occurred in the Christian nations, how can we be sure that it would have happened without Christianity?
For time before the 1st century, they all seem worse: 1st century Palestine was part of the Roman empire near the height of the Pax Romana. There were well developed transportation networks connecting the entire Mediterranean, there was a shared written language used by all literate individuals across the Mediterranean region (Greek), and there weren't a lot of wars going on that would prevent disciples from traveling all over the place and spreading the good news. It isn't unreasonable to posit that the Roman empire during the Pax Romana was the earliest time you could incarnate and ensure that Christianity would spread and become successful. Which it clearly has.
When I was an atheist I assumed that if the Christian God existed then its primary objective would be to make its existence overwhelmingly obvious to everyone. I observed a world where I could not find anything to make me believe it existed. Therefore I felt quite confident in concluding that it did not exist.
(Some people claimed that I couldn't prove a negative, but that is simply not true. You *can* prove a negative if the evidence for the positive that *should* be there is absent. In fact the law of non-contradiction, one of the foundations of logic, is itself a negative.)
I felt quite smug that I could demolish the claims of every Christian I encountered. Until I met a different kind of Christian who was able to point out flaws in all my arguments. For example my assumption that his God wanted its existance to be overwhelmingly obvious turned out not to be as obvious as I had thought.
Eventually I concluded that given his starting assumptions his belief system was just as internally consistent as my Atheism. I still thought he was *wrong*, but he was the first Christian to gain my respect, and in the end I settled for agreeing to disagree.
Not everyone who disagrees with us is automatically a liar or a fool.
Using three cherry-picked examples to claim that “it’s common for the first texts about some event to be compiled hundreds of years after the event” is pretty weak. Ancient history spans a great deal of time and you’re using three events from hundreds or thousands of years before Jesus of Nazareth supposedly performed miracles. There are plenty of events from closer to his time where the texts are compiled immediately after an event: Pompey’s campaigns, Caesar’s campaigns, the Catiline Conspiracy, etc. It’s also misleading to claim that the first texts attesting to Alexander’s existence were compiled hundreds of years afterward when we know that there were texts and inscriptions attesting to his existence compiled by contemporaries or near-contemporaries (including Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions and tablets, plus we have plenty of archeological evidence in the form of coins and so on).
Yeah I guess some of them are. But I doubt most religious texts are. Are there any major religions with texts compiled sooner after the events?
The Qur’an and the Book of Mormon, I suppose? But I don’t believe in those religions either. And there’s plenty to be skeptical of in ancient history more generally.
The Book of Mormon (which was published in 1830) claims to be describing a period from approximately 600 BC to 400 AD, while the narrative portions of the Quran are mostly modifications of Biblical stories, which would have taken place anywhere from several centuries to well over a millennium before Muhammad dictated them. (The rest of the Quran is mostly made up of religious rules and descriptions of the fate awaiting believers and non-believers in the afterlife.)
By contrast, the earliest book of the NT (either Galatians or 1 Thessalonians, depending on who you ask) was written anywhere from the late-40s to the early-50s AD, approximately ten-to-fifteen years after Jesus' death. The first gospel (Mark) is typically dated to approximately 70 AD, though there are scholars (including both Christians like Jonathan Bernier and strident atheists like James Crossley) who argue that it might date all the way back to the early-40s AD.
The Quran mentions Muhammad and also refers to him as a Messenger. And the point is more that Muhammad and Joseph Smith appear to have been far proactive in immediately spreading the word than Jesus of Nazareth.
Well yeah, Muhammad was the one dictating the Quran, so it isn't surprising that it mentions him (which it does either in passing, or in the context of an instruction, such as when Quran 33:53 tells Muslims to stop bothering him before and after lunch). But the actual *narratives* in the Quran concern events which allegedly took place centuries before the Quran was dictated.
Also, I thought the point was about when the documents were written relative to the events they describe, not how "proactive in immediately spreading the word" the relevant religious figures were.
I took Matthew’s point to be about how proactive a divine entity would have been in spreading the word, but I could be wrong. Getting a Messenger to literally dictate a book, the Quran (which does affirm Muhammad’s prophetic mission), seems a more efficient way for such an entity to spread the word. There is a separate point about how much we should believe in events that were written about years, decades or centuries after they supposedly took place. But this is a reason to apply a great deal of skepticism to the “Sinai events” and to aspects of the Buddha’s life, for instance (evidence for Alexander’s existence from contemporary and non-contemporary sources is overwhelming, but some claims about his life are still rightly doubted).
Agree that some sections of the New Testament were written earlier than the Gospels and that, generally, the evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is strong. But plenty of religious people (including Muhammad and Joseph Smith) have written about events or attested to miracles shortly afterward, and I don’t take their word for it. Go to India today and you’ll find plenty who will tell you that they’ve seen miracles being performed. Their testimony might even be given on the day!
Notice that your examples are all of exuberantly rich men with institutional power? Notice how you also ignore earlier references to Jesus that are lost like the lost letters of Paul or the proposed Q document? Matthew used good and non-cherry picked examples. If you can show that the early church had thousands of dollars in todays money of disposable income to fund and distribute Bioi of Jesus’s life in the first few years after his death, then I will rescind. Otherwise, cherry pick better examples.
Sure, but aren’t we talking about a divine entity who supposedly created the world, performed mind-blowing miracles, and is much more powerful than all of those exuberantly rich men? I am not doubting the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth — Tacitus is sufficient for me there — just pointing out that there are plenty of events in the early Roman Empire and late Roman Republic that were written about almost immediately afterward.
Looks like we’re still on track for Evangelicalism by Summer
Still haven’t gotten what Jesus was talking about with regard to hand washing, huh?
Isn’t claiming that the random result of sequential coin flips was all heads or all tails a much, much more likely lie than claiming some other random result of sequential coin flips?
Yes. That's why if someone tells you they flipped a fair coin and got 100 heads you should think they're lying or mistaken.