On the nine points posited by Christians (apologies for the lengthy comment):
- If one thinks that there are good independent reasons to be a theist, then (1) and (2) will not add anything to the intellectual price tag of the Christian theory.
- I'm not sure why (3) is surprising. If one thinks that God became incarnate partially to suffer alongside us, then a poor, subjugated region of an oppressive empire might be precisely the sort of place we'd expect him to appear. Also, the washing that Jesus condemns is a form of ritual purification, which was performed before the eating of bread. Jesus' point is that one should not prioritize external ritual observance over internal sanctity: as he says, "you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness" (Luke 11:39). This is part of a general pattern in the gospels, where Jesus stresses the subordinate role of formal rituals as compared with genuine righteousness (see e.g. his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath). He isn't just generically saying it's pretentious to wash your hands (though perhaps the mere possibility of misinterpretation on these matters is some evidence against Christianity).
- Point (4) seems to assume that self-revelation is a primary motive for the Incarnation. But while this is certainly *one* of the goods that the Incarnation achieves, it doesn't seem to be the *primary* good: Christ's mission was to bring about reconciliation between God and humanity, and (on all of the plausible theories of the Atonement) one does not have to believe in Jesus (or even have heard of him) in order to benefit from this. Also, perhaps one could employ here one's preferred response to divine hiddenness: for instance, maybe Jesus' refrains from appearing to everyone in order to give us the opportunity to help one another seek him out, to give evangelists the opportunity to help others find Christ, etc.
- Point (5) seems mistaken. You write that Jesus appeared "only... to his believers, such that they only began writing of this nearly a lifetime after it allegedly occurred." But this just seems wrong: our first source concerning Jesus is St. Paul, who wrote in the 50s (not "nearly a lifetime" after Jesus), and who was not a believer when his appearance occurred. St. James was also not a believer when Jesus appeared to him, assuming we think Paul is correct in claiming that this happened (though the evidence of his case is less weighty, since he was presumably grieving for his dead brother, and could therefore have had a grief vision). And of course, many people today claim to see Jesus, including a surprising number of non-Christians (see e.g. Wiebe's "Visions of Jesus" book).
- On (6), it's not entirely true that the objectionable OT stories were "not known to be metaphorical until the modern age." Many ancient Jewish and Christian thinkers (e.g. Philo, Origen, Gregory, etc.) allegorized large parts of scripture, and they were perfectly aware of the morally objectionable nature of literal readings (see Gregory's condemnation of slavery, or his reading of the killing of the Egyptian firstborns). Of course, one could still say that the relative predominance of literalistic readings is evidence against Christianity, and that's probably true.
- On (8), *most* of Jesus' apocalyptic teachings don't seem to pose any difficulty for the idea that he was God Incarnate (though the famous "some standing here shall not taste death" is certainly a difficulty).
- One doesn't *have* to accept (9) in order to think that Jesus rose from the dead (though of course I think one *should* accept it). It's also worth noting that if a low credence in the Trinity gives one reason to doubt Jesus, then if one thinks that the Trinity is independently plausible (e.g. if one happens to like Swinburne's or Sijuwade's arguments for it), then this would constitute evidence *for* Jesus being God Incarnate.
1) yes this will depend on your views on whether God exists, but I'm agnostic, so I think that 1 is far from an established fact.
2) is hard to believe because it vaporizes the only good theodicy.
3) it's not that this is an especially unlikely region, it's that in any specific case, the odds of God becoming incarnate are low.
4) Even if it's only one motivation, it's weird he didn't provide better evidence. A view according to which Christianity is false naturally predicts the data being okay but not overwhelming.
5) Sorry I shouldn't have said exclusively. But it's weird he appeared almost exclusively to previous believers, with literally one exception.
6) Maybe a few of especially great moral vision saw that they weren't literal, but it's still odd that the old testament has such barbarism which is hard to see to be metaphorical.
8) Yeah that's the thing I was referring to.
9) If you accept that Christianity predicts the trinity, then if the trinity is improbable that will make Christianity improbable.
On (1), (2), and (3): I think Swinburne is basically correct that the argument for Christ's resurrection depends largely on how confident we are that there is a God, and that this God would become incarnate to live the sort of life that Jesus lived. Now, I think both of these things are quite probable: the arguments for theism strike me as very strong, and I think that a morally perfect God would have very good (possibly decisive) reasons to become incarnate. But I agree that if one doubts these things, then the empty tomb and appearances probably shouldn't be enough on their own to convince one that Jesus rose.
On (5), I still don't think that's correct. St. Paul and St. James were both non-believers when Jesus appeared to them (assuming, as seems plausible, that James' conversion was occasioned by his experience of the risen Christ). So that isn't "literally one exception; indeed, that means that of the well-established individual appearances of Jesus (those to Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, and James), fully half were to non-believers. I also think one should take account of the many post-apostolic instances of people claiming to see Jesus, which continue to the present day, and many of which involve non-Christians (see Wiebe's book for a useful discussion). The frequency and vividness of these experiences don't seem to be well-paralleled in other religious traditions (e.g. one never really hears of non-Muslims having visions of Muhammad, or non-Hindus having visions of Krishna).
On (9): I think that's correct. My point was just that it goes both ways: if (like me) one thinks that the philosophical arguments for the Trinity are at least plausible, then one should increase one's credence that Jesus was God incarnate. I think people often don't take account of this: the Trinity is presented as a difficulty for Christianity, and never really as a potential support for it.
"There are decent odds that at least one religion is correct."
I would love to hear you elaborate on that, because I don't think this is true at all even if I were to accept your overwhelmingly strong case for theism fully.
Once you start considering religion in terms of its sociological functions, the importance of their veracity regarding a theistic foundation vanishes quickly, especially during those long stretches of human history when religion formed both the most important functional and moral institution at the same time.
Apologies for breaking that internet taboo of commenting on an old post. But if Jesus can supposedly rise from the dead, so can this comment section. :)
I was struck by an argument that *wasn't* made in connection with:
"6. There are decent odds that one religion would be correct."
Why would this logically follow? The sheer number of religions does not imply the truth of one religion - it's not the March Madness basketball tournament where 1 team *must* win at the end.
There are multiple theories about ghosts - that is not evidence that ghosts are likely real. The prevalence of religion can instead be explained as being a manifestation of something intrinsic about human nature - much like the belief in ghosts, or multiple isolated cultures believing in dragons, etc. Arguably, religion exists because it is downstream from human nature. Therefore, the prevalence of religions does not suggest that one is likely to be true - its simply evidence of a universal need of human beings, writ large.
Whether a believer wants to argue that "need" is a feature of our divinely-directed creation or reflects our one-ness with god, etc. - to me, those are more coherent arguments to both explain the proliferation of religions and the relation, if any, to that fact and the divine. To rebut these (better, IMO) arguments, one could simply point out that although it's near-universal across humanity to desire explanations to deep mysteries, to feel part of something, and to understand the purpose of our existence - the fact that there are multiple, not one, answers (aka religions) competing for our souls, suggests a very human origin of religion (but perhaps not spirituality more broadly).
I tend to think this whole method of approach grants far too much to Christians. These usual talking points are presented as historical claims by Christians, but they’re really theological claims.
An alternative approach is a reductio, we grant the usual Christian theological interpretation of all these historical facts, and then ask, how coherent is the resulting theology?
How plausible is the idea God creates from nothing, with the aim of achieving a loving relationship with humans, and what we see around us is the result?
The most glaring problem is an omnipotent God who (apparently) has lost control of his creation. We also have a loving God who allows some of his children to be lost and not achieve eternal life.
God’s relationship with humans makes perfect sense if you assume humans are not God’s robots and have free will. There are plenty of fairly obvious reasons why a loving God would want to give his creation free will - indeed, arguably only an evil God would deny that too us.
In terms of naturalistic explanations for the empty tomb I didn’t see you consider the case that Jesus didn’t die on the cross but instead used yogi-type tricks to appear dead (hence why he died so quickly on the cross compared with expectations). This makes the empty tomb and several of the appearances eminently explicable. Admittedly his motives would be curious but not beyond imagining. For instance perhaps he wanted to cover his tracks on his escape to India so appearing as if reborn would inspire followers without inspiring pursuit
On another point, the idea that Christianity inspired a moral reform in that western society now values charity and decency over strength and power appears to me to be laughable
Are you gonna keep digging into other religions? I suppose the atheistic Buddhism is out for you, but you know, there's some pretty interesting stuff in the Upanishads, in Advaita Vedanta, and in Taoism, that is more palatable for the philosophical sorts. No miracles required! Or perhaps you would enjoy something even more in the intersection of philosophy and spirituality, like the Enneads or some of the pre-Socratics (Parmenides in particular).
I agree with the majority of this post. I personally think the "initial collective euphoric religious experience that doesn't involve miracles, but which gets progressively embellished over time, with relatively little interest in collecting Michael Shermer-esque skeptical investigations about the embellishments, or perhaps low expected survival rates of any such investigations' negative findings over two thousand years" theory is pretty good. (Sorry, that sentence was a mouthful.)
However, I wanted to also touch on something that's related to the weakness of the Christian explanation of the theory. It's of course the standard apologetic move to argue that the testimonies to the resurrection are overwhelmingly probable conditional on the resurrection actually happening as described (and thus we have Bayesian confirmation of the resurrection). That of course seems plausible. But the real question that needs to be asked is if the testimonies are overwhelmingly probably given most of Christian theology! I realize this sounds like a trivially minor variant, but I think it's worth discussing, as you partially do in your point number 5.
The obvious answer to the aforementioned question is something like, "Of course Christ would appear to his disciples after his resurrection - he wanted to birth Christianity, and we know from history that this was a highly successful way to do it." But if you defend skeptical theism or invoke something like it in facing the problem of evil, it's no longer immediately clear that you can trust *any* merely human intuitions about what God would or wouldn't do, even given knowledge of his ultimate values. I realize that some skeptical theism defenders - and you - can attempt to sidestep this issue in the problem of evil case by shifting talk to expected values rather than probabilities. And maybe that defense works! In this instance, though, we're only asking about probabilities of events, not what actions we should or shouldn't be taking, so that's not going to work.
(Actually, a few people realized they can try generalizing this objection to "skeptical theism implies global skepticism," but I'd rather not go there in this comment.)
As I said in my last sentence, I wasn't trying to argue here that skeptical theism entails global skepticism (though I am, in fact, somewhat sympathetic to that position). Rather, it was skepticism about the more limited claim that we can reliably intuit the overwhelmingly likelihood of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances (and thus the Biblical testimony thereto), given his desire for humans to worship him.
So the analogy wouldn't be "I can't predict anything at all about Magnus Carlsen's next move (even if it's to say he won't sacrifice his queen on turn 5);" rather, it would be "given a specific next move, I can't say with confidence that it's overwhelmingly likely he'd make that move." I suppose that's false - you can just see sometimes that he has a mate in one move no matter what, and it's likely he's also going to spot that. But that's explicable because the rules of chess are so tightly circumscribed, and because the space of possibilities is frequently so narrow. If I were constantly, every single day, confronted with a situation where it seemed like Magnus Carlsen could checkmate in his very next move - or at least capture the opponent's queen for free on turn 10 - but then I'm surprised to discover that there's some extra rule of chess I didn't know about that would forbid or discourage it, then I would, in fact, be analogously skeptical. In this case, I would never say "Carlsen is overwhelmingly likely to play X" at all.
I agree: it seems to make sense that if one of God's goals is to make people Christian, he'd send a resurrected Jesus to inaugurate Christianity. But it also seems to make sense that if God loves every human being the way humans love their children (only moreso) and thus has a goal of ensuring they're happy, and he has infinite power and infinite imagination and infinite foreknowledge, that he'd stop all sorts of evils - from many minor inconveniences to perhaps all excruciating atrocities - the way that you would for your own child, were you so equipped. The entire point of skeptical theism is that we can't go from this seeming to the temptingly obvious conclusion that God *would* stop these evils if he exists (but he doesn't, hence he probably doesn't exist). So if we aren't similarly blocked from the conclusion that, given the religious goals you enumerate, God *would* send Jesus to inaugurate Christianity, then you have to spell out the disanalogy or abandon skeptical theism.
On the nine points posited by Christians (apologies for the lengthy comment):
- If one thinks that there are good independent reasons to be a theist, then (1) and (2) will not add anything to the intellectual price tag of the Christian theory.
- I'm not sure why (3) is surprising. If one thinks that God became incarnate partially to suffer alongside us, then a poor, subjugated region of an oppressive empire might be precisely the sort of place we'd expect him to appear. Also, the washing that Jesus condemns is a form of ritual purification, which was performed before the eating of bread. Jesus' point is that one should not prioritize external ritual observance over internal sanctity: as he says, "you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness" (Luke 11:39). This is part of a general pattern in the gospels, where Jesus stresses the subordinate role of formal rituals as compared with genuine righteousness (see e.g. his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath). He isn't just generically saying it's pretentious to wash your hands (though perhaps the mere possibility of misinterpretation on these matters is some evidence against Christianity).
- Point (4) seems to assume that self-revelation is a primary motive for the Incarnation. But while this is certainly *one* of the goods that the Incarnation achieves, it doesn't seem to be the *primary* good: Christ's mission was to bring about reconciliation between God and humanity, and (on all of the plausible theories of the Atonement) one does not have to believe in Jesus (or even have heard of him) in order to benefit from this. Also, perhaps one could employ here one's preferred response to divine hiddenness: for instance, maybe Jesus' refrains from appearing to everyone in order to give us the opportunity to help one another seek him out, to give evangelists the opportunity to help others find Christ, etc.
- Point (5) seems mistaken. You write that Jesus appeared "only... to his believers, such that they only began writing of this nearly a lifetime after it allegedly occurred." But this just seems wrong: our first source concerning Jesus is St. Paul, who wrote in the 50s (not "nearly a lifetime" after Jesus), and who was not a believer when his appearance occurred. St. James was also not a believer when Jesus appeared to him, assuming we think Paul is correct in claiming that this happened (though the evidence of his case is less weighty, since he was presumably grieving for his dead brother, and could therefore have had a grief vision). And of course, many people today claim to see Jesus, including a surprising number of non-Christians (see e.g. Wiebe's "Visions of Jesus" book).
- On (6), it's not entirely true that the objectionable OT stories were "not known to be metaphorical until the modern age." Many ancient Jewish and Christian thinkers (e.g. Philo, Origen, Gregory, etc.) allegorized large parts of scripture, and they were perfectly aware of the morally objectionable nature of literal readings (see Gregory's condemnation of slavery, or his reading of the killing of the Egyptian firstborns). Of course, one could still say that the relative predominance of literalistic readings is evidence against Christianity, and that's probably true.
- On (8), *most* of Jesus' apocalyptic teachings don't seem to pose any difficulty for the idea that he was God Incarnate (though the famous "some standing here shall not taste death" is certainly a difficulty).
- One doesn't *have* to accept (9) in order to think that Jesus rose from the dead (though of course I think one *should* accept it). It's also worth noting that if a low credence in the Trinity gives one reason to doubt Jesus, then if one thinks that the Trinity is independently plausible (e.g. if one happens to like Swinburne's or Sijuwade's arguments for it), then this would constitute evidence *for* Jesus being God Incarnate.
1) yes this will depend on your views on whether God exists, but I'm agnostic, so I think that 1 is far from an established fact.
2) is hard to believe because it vaporizes the only good theodicy.
3) it's not that this is an especially unlikely region, it's that in any specific case, the odds of God becoming incarnate are low.
4) Even if it's only one motivation, it's weird he didn't provide better evidence. A view according to which Christianity is false naturally predicts the data being okay but not overwhelming.
5) Sorry I shouldn't have said exclusively. But it's weird he appeared almost exclusively to previous believers, with literally one exception.
6) Maybe a few of especially great moral vision saw that they weren't literal, but it's still odd that the old testament has such barbarism which is hard to see to be metaphorical.
8) Yeah that's the thing I was referring to.
9) If you accept that Christianity predicts the trinity, then if the trinity is improbable that will make Christianity improbable.
On (1), (2), and (3): I think Swinburne is basically correct that the argument for Christ's resurrection depends largely on how confident we are that there is a God, and that this God would become incarnate to live the sort of life that Jesus lived. Now, I think both of these things are quite probable: the arguments for theism strike me as very strong, and I think that a morally perfect God would have very good (possibly decisive) reasons to become incarnate. But I agree that if one doubts these things, then the empty tomb and appearances probably shouldn't be enough on their own to convince one that Jesus rose.
On (5), I still don't think that's correct. St. Paul and St. James were both non-believers when Jesus appeared to them (assuming, as seems plausible, that James' conversion was occasioned by his experience of the risen Christ). So that isn't "literally one exception; indeed, that means that of the well-established individual appearances of Jesus (those to Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, and James), fully half were to non-believers. I also think one should take account of the many post-apostolic instances of people claiming to see Jesus, which continue to the present day, and many of which involve non-Christians (see Wiebe's book for a useful discussion). The frequency and vividness of these experiences don't seem to be well-paralleled in other religious traditions (e.g. one never really hears of non-Muslims having visions of Muhammad, or non-Hindus having visions of Krishna).
On (9): I think that's correct. My point was just that it goes both ways: if (like me) one thinks that the philosophical arguments for the Trinity are at least plausible, then one should increase one's credence that Jesus was God incarnate. I think people often don't take account of this: the Trinity is presented as a difficulty for Christianity, and never really as a potential support for it.
"There are decent odds that at least one religion is correct."
I would love to hear you elaborate on that, because I don't think this is true at all even if I were to accept your overwhelmingly strong case for theism fully.
Once you start considering religion in terms of its sociological functions, the importance of their veracity regarding a theistic foundation vanishes quickly, especially during those long stretches of human history when religion formed both the most important functional and moral institution at the same time.
Apologies for breaking that internet taboo of commenting on an old post. But if Jesus can supposedly rise from the dead, so can this comment section. :)
I was struck by an argument that *wasn't* made in connection with:
"6. There are decent odds that one religion would be correct."
Why would this logically follow? The sheer number of religions does not imply the truth of one religion - it's not the March Madness basketball tournament where 1 team *must* win at the end.
There are multiple theories about ghosts - that is not evidence that ghosts are likely real. The prevalence of religion can instead be explained as being a manifestation of something intrinsic about human nature - much like the belief in ghosts, or multiple isolated cultures believing in dragons, etc. Arguably, religion exists because it is downstream from human nature. Therefore, the prevalence of religions does not suggest that one is likely to be true - its simply evidence of a universal need of human beings, writ large.
Whether a believer wants to argue that "need" is a feature of our divinely-directed creation or reflects our one-ness with god, etc. - to me, those are more coherent arguments to both explain the proliferation of religions and the relation, if any, to that fact and the divine. To rebut these (better, IMO) arguments, one could simply point out that although it's near-universal across humanity to desire explanations to deep mysteries, to feel part of something, and to understand the purpose of our existence - the fact that there are multiple, not one, answers (aka religions) competing for our souls, suggests a very human origin of religion (but perhaps not spirituality more broadly).
I tend to think this whole method of approach grants far too much to Christians. These usual talking points are presented as historical claims by Christians, but they’re really theological claims.
An alternative approach is a reductio, we grant the usual Christian theological interpretation of all these historical facts, and then ask, how coherent is the resulting theology?
How plausible is the idea God creates from nothing, with the aim of achieving a loving relationship with humans, and what we see around us is the result?
The most glaring problem is an omnipotent God who (apparently) has lost control of his creation. We also have a loving God who allows some of his children to be lost and not achieve eternal life.
God’s relationship with humans makes perfect sense if you assume humans are not God’s robots and have free will. There are plenty of fairly obvious reasons why a loving God would want to give his creation free will - indeed, arguably only an evil God would deny that too us.
In terms of naturalistic explanations for the empty tomb I didn’t see you consider the case that Jesus didn’t die on the cross but instead used yogi-type tricks to appear dead (hence why he died so quickly on the cross compared with expectations). This makes the empty tomb and several of the appearances eminently explicable. Admittedly his motives would be curious but not beyond imagining. For instance perhaps he wanted to cover his tracks on his escape to India so appearing as if reborn would inspire followers without inspiring pursuit
On another point, the idea that Christianity inspired a moral reform in that western society now values charity and decency over strength and power appears to me to be laughable
Are you gonna keep digging into other religions? I suppose the atheistic Buddhism is out for you, but you know, there's some pretty interesting stuff in the Upanishads, in Advaita Vedanta, and in Taoism, that is more palatable for the philosophical sorts. No miracles required! Or perhaps you would enjoy something even more in the intersection of philosophy and spirituality, like the Enneads or some of the pre-Socratics (Parmenides in particular).
I agree with the majority of this post. I personally think the "initial collective euphoric religious experience that doesn't involve miracles, but which gets progressively embellished over time, with relatively little interest in collecting Michael Shermer-esque skeptical investigations about the embellishments, or perhaps low expected survival rates of any such investigations' negative findings over two thousand years" theory is pretty good. (Sorry, that sentence was a mouthful.)
However, I wanted to also touch on something that's related to the weakness of the Christian explanation of the theory. It's of course the standard apologetic move to argue that the testimonies to the resurrection are overwhelmingly probable conditional on the resurrection actually happening as described (and thus we have Bayesian confirmation of the resurrection). That of course seems plausible. But the real question that needs to be asked is if the testimonies are overwhelmingly probably given most of Christian theology! I realize this sounds like a trivially minor variant, but I think it's worth discussing, as you partially do in your point number 5.
The obvious answer to the aforementioned question is something like, "Of course Christ would appear to his disciples after his resurrection - he wanted to birth Christianity, and we know from history that this was a highly successful way to do it." But if you defend skeptical theism or invoke something like it in facing the problem of evil, it's no longer immediately clear that you can trust *any* merely human intuitions about what God would or wouldn't do, even given knowledge of his ultimate values. I realize that some skeptical theism defenders - and you - can attempt to sidestep this issue in the problem of evil case by shifting talk to expected values rather than probabilities. And maybe that defense works! In this instance, though, we're only asking about probabilities of events, not what actions we should or shouldn't be taking, so that's not going to work.
(Actually, a few people realized they can try generalizing this objection to "skeptical theism implies global skepticism," but I'd rather not go there in this comment.)
As I said in my last sentence, I wasn't trying to argue here that skeptical theism entails global skepticism (though I am, in fact, somewhat sympathetic to that position). Rather, it was skepticism about the more limited claim that we can reliably intuit the overwhelmingly likelihood of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances (and thus the Biblical testimony thereto), given his desire for humans to worship him.
So the analogy wouldn't be "I can't predict anything at all about Magnus Carlsen's next move (even if it's to say he won't sacrifice his queen on turn 5);" rather, it would be "given a specific next move, I can't say with confidence that it's overwhelmingly likely he'd make that move." I suppose that's false - you can just see sometimes that he has a mate in one move no matter what, and it's likely he's also going to spot that. But that's explicable because the rules of chess are so tightly circumscribed, and because the space of possibilities is frequently so narrow. If I were constantly, every single day, confronted with a situation where it seemed like Magnus Carlsen could checkmate in his very next move - or at least capture the opponent's queen for free on turn 10 - but then I'm surprised to discover that there's some extra rule of chess I didn't know about that would forbid or discourage it, then I would, in fact, be analogously skeptical. In this case, I would never say "Carlsen is overwhelmingly likely to play X" at all.
I agree: it seems to make sense that if one of God's goals is to make people Christian, he'd send a resurrected Jesus to inaugurate Christianity. But it also seems to make sense that if God loves every human being the way humans love their children (only moreso) and thus has a goal of ensuring they're happy, and he has infinite power and infinite imagination and infinite foreknowledge, that he'd stop all sorts of evils - from many minor inconveniences to perhaps all excruciating atrocities - the way that you would for your own child, were you so equipped. The entire point of skeptical theism is that we can't go from this seeming to the temptingly obvious conclusion that God *would* stop these evils if he exists (but he doesn't, hence he probably doesn't exist). So if we aren't similarly blocked from the conclusion that, given the religious goals you enumerate, God *would* send Jesus to inaugurate Christianity, then you have to spell out the disanalogy or abandon skeptical theism.