Are you for real? Using the gospels as strong historical sources should automatically make the article worthless.
But the premises at the very beginning are so terrible that one doesn’t even need that.
Look at these:
“First of all, if one is convinced that God exists, they should think there are decent odds that one of the religions would be right. If God exists, it’s decently likely that he’d intervene in the world in some way, to some degree. If he wants to guide humanity, he’d be likely to set up a religion. Thus, as long as Christianity beats the other religions in plausibility, one should think it’s decently likely to be right.”
If one is convinced that God exists, there is no way to know whether the odds that one of the religions would be right is likely decent or not, since there is no necessary relationship that ties a God existing to him founding any religion.
Why would anyone assume that if God wanted to guide humanity by communicating with us, he would choose the stupid and inefficient method of only speaking to one individual and telling him to go and convince other humans that he had spoken with God? If God exists and he created smart humans, why should one then assume that there are decent odds he would be an idiot? The premise is ridiculous. If God exists, he’s superior to man and smarter than him, then it’s more likely that he wouldn’t choose the dumbest and most inefficient means of communication. Therefore, the premise isn’t convincing at all.
“ Second, Christianity is unique in claiming that God becomes incarnate. But it’s decently likely that God would become incarnate. A God who stays aloof in the clouds, not experiencing the suffering on Earth seems in some way deficient. This is particularly because God’s experience as an incarnate being would help strengthen our relationship with him, just as two people who have undergone the same experience might bond over that. The prior probability that God would become incarnate can’t be too low—and so the prior probability of Christianity, the only reasonable view on which God becomes incarnate, is also not too low.”
This is a really ridiculous premise. It is based on viewpoint epistemology, and that God is a parochial and limited entity who needs empathy in order to achieve full understanding of the conscious creatures he created. And God not being limited and deficient in this way would actually make him deficient! WTF.
Even worse, it implies that all those times before the incarnation of Christ, God was deficient in important respects and in his relationships with his prophets and messengers. How does that make sense?
This is another terrible argument. I can’t see how it’s in any way convincing.
“Third, God would be expected, if he became incarnate, to establish a major institution of some sort. If he wants to influence the course of history, he’d set up something like a Church. Given this, the Christian explanation is decently probable for it makes sense of why the guy claiming to be God set up a Church.”
God, who can create an entire universe, if he existed and wanted to influence the course of history would be expected to JUST INFLUENCE it. It would be puzzling and ridiculous to have him try the most convoluted, inefficient, and unreliable ways of influencing it. This is a laughably bad premise. It’s a worthless argument.
So, the philosophical grounds on which he’s selling Christianity as more plausible than others are in total shambles. How implausible then would the resurrection story that requires this foundation have to be?
“If God exists, X is more likely” even when X would make no sense if God actually exists and had the power to create a universe and control the laws of physics is really comedic.
If this is one of the most convincing arguments for Christianity, it’s probably because all the arguments for Christianity are terrible and coming up with a good one is impossible.
Yeah, I got here via Astral Codex Ten and was expecting something ... else. Though, maybe all this hand-waving is the best steelman possible for Christianity and it just doesn't hold up without strongly motivated reasoning?
Also, afaik, claiming god/gods incarnate is not at all unique to Christianity. Unless that is defined in a special way to cut out the other cases. Off the top of my head, we've got: the greek/roman pantheon with all their earthly adventures, the Incan founding gods, Shintoism, any religion that saw the king as a god (like ancient Egypt), etc.
Are you, by any chance, the Joshua Greene of of the dual process theory?
Idk, I don't think the case is that bad. Seems like a very weird series of coincidences happened in early Christianity and there are some weirdly well-evidenced miracles.
You refer to Mark and Matthew as "early". My understanding is that non-religious historians tend to put Mark earliest, at ~65-70, with Matthew about 15 or so years after. I've seen Christian sources put Mark a good deal earlier, in the 40s or early 50s. I'm not a historian and I'm sure both sides have axes to grind. But I do think it's highly tendentious to treat the evidence of the Gospels as a whole bunch of independent reports about what people said they saw at the time, rather than a smaller bunch of non-independent reports, possibly three or more decades after the fact, about what people are reported to have said they saw at the time. It can look like you're making the same methodological assumption Timothy and Lydia McGrew make in their case for the resurrection: "Our argument will proceed on the assumption that we have a substantially accurate text of the four Gospels...and that the narratives, at least where not explicitly asserting the occurrence of a miracle, deserve as much credence as similarly attested documents would be accorded if they reported strictly secular matters." (p. 597 of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology) They then go on to basically treat as certain all the claims in the Gospels about who said they saw what, and to argue that, given all those claims, it's highly likely the resurrection occurred.
But this looks to me like an approach that nobody who comes at the issue from an initially skeptical perspective should grant. If you have a bunch of contemperaneous eyewitness reports of supernatural stuff, that's suprising! By contrast, if you have a much later narrative that *claims* that people made a bunch of contemperaneous eyewitness reports of supernatural stuff, there are more ways to explain that naturalistically. If you start out leaning towards naturalistic explanations, and the historical evidence about timing of the Gospels is far from conclusive, it makes sense to then favor accounts on which they were written later, so as to make it easier to explain all the reports of stuff you think probably didn't actually happen.
I think it's easy to forget just how different the context is. Today, if I say you said you claimed to see something that you didn't actually claim to see, it's easy for you to contradict me. You have a blog. You can quickly write a post saying: "I never said I saw that!" and lots of people can read it. 2k years ago, almost everybody was illiterate. The barriers to false attributions of eyewitness reports--saying somebody said they saw something that they never claimed to see--are much much weaker. If I write a book saying you said something 30 years ago, the chance you even find out about it is slim. Maybe you're already dead. If you're alive and you hear about it, what are you gonna do--write your own book saying you didn't say that? You're probably illiterate. You spend all your time working in the fields, and aren't interested in books. And it doesn't have to involve intentional deception. How much distortion can be introduced in 30 years of oral tradition before stuff gets written down? Ever play a game of telephone?
There's lots of other stuff I'd take issue with here, but this is a main one.
I think it's worth mentioning the main arguments that lead various scholars these conclusions. The main reason why Mark is conventionally dated near AD 70 is that, in it, Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple (which was in fact destroyed in 70, though the Jewish-Roman war started 3.5 years earlier). So for scholars who believe that predictive prophesy is impossible, they feel the need to put it close to that time. Then, since Matthew and Luke are believed to have used Mark as sources, they are pushed later (though the 15 year interval is not as far as I know well motivated at all). But this seems circular for those who are trying to decide if Jesus actually was supernatural. Even leaving aside the possibility that even somebody with human-level wisdom might have been able to predict this in AD 33.
To me, a far more convincing argument is that Acts never says anything about the martyrdom of St. Paul, despite the fact that the author is clearly very interested in both martyrdom and the ministry of Paul. Instead the book ends on a total anti-climax, with Paul preaching to people in Rome. So it makes the most sense to suppose this book was written before Paul was beheaded in the early 60s. But then (on the standard assumptions that Acts is a sequel to Luke and that Luke uses Mark as a source) at least 2 of the Gospels end up being pushed to the 50s at the latest. Completely demonstrative? No, but it seems more convincing than anything else I've heard.
Needless to say, if you're trying to construct the most plausible scenario in which Christianity is false, this will (ceteris paribus) push you towards later and more mythological gospel scenarios, than what you might otherwise accept on a theologically neutral analysis. But that's not the same as saying it is the most antecedently probable view, i.e. that there is no Bayes factor price to pay in going there.
Also, I completely disagree that this post is using anything close to the methodological assumptions of the McGrews. It is far closer in spirit to the "minimal facts" approach of Habermas. For example it only accepts the empty tomb, because it is referred to in a variety of early sources, and because it can be bolstered with auxiliary plausibility arguments. To require this level of support before accepting a historical claim, is very far away from just saying anything written in the Gospels is for that reason probable. (Although, I am personally convinced that if the Gospel writers had not recorded miracles and claims of divinity, they would have been regarded as reliable historical sources by almost everyone, judged by the usual standards of ancient literature.)
For what it's worth, there are secular historians who assign a very early date to Mark. For example, James Crossley (a fairly militant atheist who's debated William Lane Craig on the resurrection) dates Mark to the late-30s or early-40s CE, as did his (agnostic) teacher Maurice Casey: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/date-of-marks-gospel-9780567081957/
There are also Christian historians who assign a late date to Mark. More importantly, I think the later date is closer to being consensus. And even more importantly than that, you don't even need an extremely high probability of a late date for this to serve as a defeater; you just need a not-tiny probability.
To illustrate the idea a bit fantastically, imagine if hundreds of credible, trustworthy, intellectually sober eyewitnesses independently told you they all saw a werewolf steal your shoes. That's a powerful reason to believe. But if you later found out there was a 10% chance they had all been laced beforehand with a drug that makes people hallucinate shoe-stealing werewolves, then your credence on werewolves should barely budge. (Your odds on werewolves should only go up by a factor of about 10, which is not very much considering the low prior.) This is so even though 10% isn't very high.
(1) Of course, I'm not claiming that the early date for Mark is a consensus, or that advocacy of this view by non-religious historians proves it to be correct. I'm simply pointing out that there *are* prominent secular scholars who promote the early dating, which I think is often neglected (people often seem to have the impression that it's only apologetic fervor that could possibly lead somebody to assign an early date to the gospels).
(2) Which bit of testimony is the late date meant to be defeating, precisely? The fact that a number of people claimed to see Jesus after his death is not historically contentious (though of course the veridicality of their experiences is), while the empty tomb is *generally* accepted by NT scholars (including those, such as Dale Allison, who accept the mainstream dating of the gospels). The early date for the gospels doesn't actually matter much for the resurrection argument: the two most important pieces of date (the tomb and the appearances) are typically accepted anyway.
The primary evidence for the empty tomb goes through the Gospels plus Acts, and the specifically supernatural character of the appearances does, too - because the phrasing in Corinthians is completely vague and on its own is compatible with, for example, ecstatic religious experiences with no perceptual content, which all agree would be substantially worse/less miraculous evidence for Christianity if that’s all that happened. So if you think that the late dating of the Gospels makes embellishment substantially more likely, which I do, that’s important. That said, I agree it wouldn’t matter ultimately, as I think the evidence would be unpersuasive even on a relatively early dating.
But like I said, most scholars accept both the consensus Gospel dating *and* the empty tomb. The arguments for its historicity (e.g. the attribution of the discovery to women, the lack of theological embellishment in Mark's account, etc.) go through even on the mainstream dating. I also don't agree that 1 Cor. 15 is consistent with experiences that had "no perceptual content"; at the very least, I think one has to say that these people believed they had really *seen* Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1). But I won't argue that here :)
> But like I said, most scholars accept both the consensus Gospel dating *and* the empty tomb.
The original post is appealing to the eyewitness testimonies of 500+ witnesses to miraculous post-Crucifixion Jesus sightings. If the late dating of the Gospels is enough to make it plausible (above a certain not-high threshold) that these are embellished, then this is enough to undermine that argument. And though I realize you said you're not arguing this specific point, 1 Corinthians 9:1 is referring specifically to Paul rather than the 500, and the phrasing there is also extraordinarily vague and compatible with a non-physical kind of sighting. To be clear, I'm not really faulting Paul for this (he had other concerns), just noting his epistles don't provide much solid evidence for miraculous events apologists want to argue for.
Now, regarding the empty tomb, I appeal again to my original main point that you only need a small but not extraordinarily small probability of embellishment to undercut the argument for Christianity. Even if scholars accept that the tomb was truly found empty, that's compatible with them only accepting it with fairly limited historical certainty - even 99.9% certainty might be low enough, and that seems like a massive overestimate. And the later the Gospels' dating, the easier it will be to argue that the correct level of certainty in the empty tomb falls short of the undercutting threshold.
The whole thing is indeed a kind of circular reasoning. It reminds me of Pascal's wager, where granting the premises of his argument is impossible unless you are already a Christian similar to Pascal himself. (Tellingly, Pascal briefly mentions other faiths, but merely dismisses them as obviously absurd before moving on.)
As a Christian myself, I don't find arguments for Christ's resurrection particularly compelling. It feels like, in any other circumstance, I'd need more than what we have in the New Testament to conclude somebody rose from the dead (I agree that it seems like something weird happened, but that feels like a far cry from the resurrection). I also found the guy who's irregular heartbeat was cured by prayer pretty underwhelming. I've heard dozens of these stories from friends and family members, and they always seem to begin as odd coincidences which are attributed to God, and over the years they grow more extravagent.
I agree with a lot of the rest of what you wrote, though, especially the first part. The evidence that Joseph of Cupertino flew sounds shockingly compelling, I'll have to buy the book you linked about it.
I think the arguments I give establish that God becoming incarnate has a decently high prior in someone like Jesus, and so the bar is lower than in a normal circumstance. Like, if you found out that someone had been resurrected, Jesus would obviously be the best candidate.
Unless you already believe Christian theology I'm not sure why you'd think God was more likely to resurrect were he incarnated.
But maybe the relevant probability is instead something like "God's performing an extravagent miracle to demonstrate he had incarnated," and that seems reasonable. And Jesus probably is a better candidate for that than anybody else.
I assume our host only picked that example because he personally heard the guy speak. I agree this particular example is underwhelming. The Keener book has many examples which seem a lot more medically inexplicable. For those who didn't want to watch the long youtube video that was linked (I certainly didn't) there are some examples mentioned in this interview:
Yes indeed. This is far from the most significant example. The basic point is just that it's weird that so many people seem to be walking around claiming to have been subject to clear miracles. Maybe they misremembered, but it's still odd.
I don’t think Paul’s conversion is as incredible as you say. The Jewish leaders at the time must have wondered to themselves whether Jesus was the Messiah at least a little bit — it’s not so incredible that some of them had rapid changes in belief about this.
Opposing something passionately and then suddenly shifting to supporting it is something that happens to people sometimes.
I have difficulty with ideas like “God became incarnate to strengthen his relationship with us” because it seems to me that an omnipotent being would have infinitely many ways to achieve any goal. So we can’t evaluate whether it makes sense (or is probable) for God to do anything by any particular means.
I don't find this convincing in the least. I'll leave the historicity of Christ to the experts, since this is well-trodden ground, and look at one of the miracles.
The evidence for Our Lady of Zeitoun seems on a par with that for flying saucers (or the Loch Ness monster, for that matter). People saw some strange lights, interpreted them in the cultural terms available to them and took some blurry photos (possibly with subsequent editing).
Leaving aside the probabilities, if Our Lady of Zeitoun were really Jesus' mother, what possible purpose was she serving in making a brief and silent appearance in Egypt? At least Our Lady of Fatima offered some prophecies.
The "evidence" for the Loch Ness Monster consists (more or less) of one photo (which is a proven hoax), and a few people saying they saw some strange ripples in a lake that they visited for the express purpose of finding a monster. The evidence for Our Lady of Zeitoun consists of tens or hundreds of thousands of witnesses (many of whom left written testimony), as well a large-scale investigation by the Egyptian police specifically intended to find a naturalistic explanation for the lights (Egypt is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and the lights were at a Coptic church, so one can hardly claim a religious bias on the part of the investigators). Whether or not one accepts Our Lady of Zeitoun, claiming that it's "on a par with the Loch Ness Monster" is Reddit-tier bluster, nothing more.
Give it a break. The Loch Ness monster reference was a parenthetical aside. The real parallel is with flying saucers/UFOs. 5% of Americans claim to have seen one, which amounts to around 15 million people in the US alone. Plenty of written accounts, inconclusive photos etc.
On what basis do you claim that Egyptian police " specifically intended to find a naturalistic explanation"? I doubt that many Egyptian police are, or were, dedicated sceptics of the supernatural. And, as you may not be aware, Mary/Maryam is a revered figure in Islam.
Right, but UFOs are undeniably a real phenomenon (consider e.g. the videos released by the Pentagon a few years ago). Whether they're extraterrestrial in origin is a separate question, of course; one has to consider the various possible explanations, and see which one best fits the data. The same goes for Our Lady of Zeitoun: the lights were undeniably a real phenomenon, beheld as they were by tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Whether they were miraculous is another question; the reason to believe *that* is the complete failure of alternative explanations. (Compare: if all non-ET explanations for UFOs were shown to completely fail, it would be perfectly reasonable to conclude that they are probably extraterrestrial in origin. It's only because that *hasn't happened* that we aren't rationally compelled to accept that UFOs are extraterrestrial.)
I'm perfectly aware that Islam assigns a high status to Mary. But there is no substantial tradition of Marian apparitions in Islam, and in any case, Our Lady of Zeitoun appeared at a Coptic church. For comparison: if Jesus allegedly appeared at a mosque in the view of thousands of witnesses, I don't think Christians would be rushing to verify the miracle, despite their obvious belief in the relevant figure.
I'm happy to agree that our credence in an extra-terrestrial/supernatural origin for the observed lights should be the same in both cases. I guess it then comes down to a question of priors.
Anyone familiar with Christian standards of epistemology will be less impressed. Reputedly, tens of thousands of worshipers witnessed the Sun Miracle at Fatima, and later even the pope himself, but historians found evidence for hardly more than a dozen of them testifying to a priest.
I think I would probably disagree with every single point here, haha, but a few major issues that stick out to me:
When it comes to the incarnation, I would say the question of probability shouldn't even enter into the question until someone can actually provide a coherent account of how the traditional Christian conception of incarnation is even possible at all. I don't think that's ever been done - I don't think it can be done either, because the concept of incarnation is incoherent in the first place. But even if you did think it was coherent, it seems extremely unlikely *unless you first fix in place all the other theoretical constraints Christianity already comes with.* Without those specific theological commitments - which relate to a complex set of prior theological beliefs held by ancient Israelites - the idea of a God who dies as a sacrifice for the sins of the world wouldn't even occur to you.
Secondly, you're right that it's plausible for God to establish some sort of guiding institution. But this is a fallacy of "understated priors," if you will - it's not at all plausible that God would establish a guiding institution like the ones we have in Christianity! I don't see how anyone could look at the Christian church - constantly splitting, constantly making serious errors, constantly engaging in hideous and bizarre actions that cause immense harm - and think that's the sort of thing specifically God would create. In fact, if you do think God would be likely to establish some sort of guiding institution, the reality of the institutions Christians have founded should *lower* your credence in it.
Otherwise, I just think you're radically overestimating the reliability of early records for the resurrection and for miracles, but that's been discussed elsewhere. Overall, I think the case really falls apart before you even get to that point, because you're not factoring in things like: The probability that the ancient Israelite sacrificial system was morally appropriate, the probability that the Old Testament is generally historically accurate and Adam was a real person, the probability that God would permit serious errors and contradictions in his sacred texts, the probability that God would communicate his will for humanity so poorly as the Bible does, and so on. When you tally those up, I think it becomes close to impossible to argue that a naturalistic explanation doesn't explain the data better (or, if you're a theist, that God wasn't directly involved in this specific situation).
I'm not sure what's supposed to be incoherent about the incarnation. God takes on a body and goes to Earth!
Christianity has been a pretty major force for good if Holland is right. Maybe saying the weird things for historically contingent reasons were needed for it to catch on.
I don't think you have to accept a super literalistic reading of much of the Old Testament or the system of sacrifice.
But God is supposed to be timeless, formless, and omnipresent, right? So how does a timeless, formless, and omnipresent being "take on" a body in the first place? How could God be located in one specific place and time, but also all times and all places, and also no places or times at all? And that doesn't even get into the additional complexity added by the Trinity - how can you argue that the three persons of God are completely unified when one exists in Palestine at a certain time with a physical body and the other two don't?
I agree that Christianity has been a major force for good throughout history, but we're talking about an institution God established - you shouldn't get points for being just a little better than the pagans around you. When a perfect being is involved, a few serious errors (which would be a massive understatement) is discrediting, and amending the hypothesis in an ad hoc way doesn't salvage it.
It seems obvious to me that Jesus, Paul, and others *did* have a very literalistic reading of the OT, and that Jesus' theology relied heavily on it. So you'd either have to think that 1) Jesus was mistaken about major theological and historical issues, or 2) that he was deliberately misleading people when he could have been honest with them. Both of those, imo, are devastating options - if Jesus was seriously in error, or was lying about the entire structure of his own purpose on earth, why trust anything he says about anything?
I think the default is that God is timeless formless and omnipresent (only omnipresent because he's omniscience), but he can stop being those things temporarily. I, unlike a lot of people, think God could probably stop existing.
For what it's worth, this is not the explanation of the Incarnation that the Church eventually settled on. The Chalcedonian explanation is that the Son of God added to himself a complete human nature (including both body and soul/mind/emotions) without in any way modifying or changing his (eternal, timeless) divine nature. Hence: one person, with two natures.
Is this logically incoherent? It's pretty hard to show this, actually. Certainly this Chalcedonian terminology defeats any naive attempt to directly deduce that 1=2, because as the language indicates, the thing Christ is 1 of, is different from the thing Christ has 2 of. Any attempt to show a contradiction, would have to somehow be based on a substantive conceptual analysis of what we mean by "nature", or "person"; and how these terms interact; otherwise it can't get off the ground. (Very similar comments would apply to the Trinity.)
That being said, my position on the epistemology is actually somewhere in between the two of you. It is very far from obvious to me, just from the tenets of classical theism, that Incarnation is something that is metaphysically possible for God, or to be expected even if it is possible. I think arguments about solidarity etc are a good way to understand why it might be fitting after it occurs, but aren't something that philosophers living in BC times should have been led to in the abstract. (Leaving aside BC prophets who had access to more information.)
Yes, God can do "anything", but that surely means anything that is metaphysically possible, like moving matter around in arbitrary ways. In my view changing his own essential being is an example of something that is not possible, since God exists necessarily. The explanation above exploits a loophole in the above reasoning, but does depend on a particular view of how metaphysics works.
So for me, the primary reason I believe that Incarnation is metaphysically possible, is simply that it seems to have happened. But, I don't think humans can prove it to be contradictory either.
"Before I became a Christian one of my objections was as follows. The Christians said that the eternal God who is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once became a human being. Well then, said I, how did the whole universe keep going while He was a baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the same time be God who knows everything and also a man asking his disciples "Who touched me?" You will notice that the sting lay in the time words: "While He was a baby" — "How could He at the same time?" In other words I was assuming that Christ's life as God was in time, and that His life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time — just as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total life. And that is how most of us perhaps tend to think about it. We picture God living through a period when His human life was still in the future: then coming to a period when it was present: then going on to a period when He could look back on it as something in the past. But probably these ideas correspond to nothing in the actual facts. You cannot fit Christ's earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time. It is really, I suggest, a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the human experience of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in His whole divine life. This human life in God is from our point of view a particular period in the history of our world (from the year A.D. one till the Crucifixion). We therefore imagine it is also a period in the history of God's own existence. But God has no history. He is too completely and utterly real to have one. For, of course, to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it had already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it. God forbid we should think God was like that. Even we may hope not to be always rationed in that way"
Perhaps this just pushes the problem back a step. But conditional on a story in which God's own chosen people Israel end up crucifying the Messiah: I don't think we should be too surprised if God's plan allows the Church to mess up pretty badly as well. (This is one of the reasons why I am a Protestant rather than a Catholic.)
I think also you should support your claim that Jesus and Paul had a very literalistic reading of the OT, because that's not how I see it at all. They are both constantly reinterpreting OT stories and commands in an allegorical or metaphorical way, in order to apply them to talk about the present. This rabbinic-style method of interpretation is actually quite different from the "historical-literal" way that 20th century fundamentalists read the text.
American fundamentalists like to talk as if the mere mention of an OT character in the NT is implicitly endorsing the literal historicity of the text, but I don't think that's true at all! Only certain kinds of uses would seem to do so. (To give some contrasting examples on both sides, Jesus' proof of the Resurrection from God being "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" seems to me to require these patriarchs to have actually existed historically in some way. But his use of the Jonah story as a way to illustrate the Son of Man dying and rising again, hardly seems to require taking the Jonah story as historical, since the point is to use it as an illustration.)
To be sure, Jesus did believe that all scriptures were divinely inspired (as do I) but I don't think that commits one to e.g. the fundie version of Adam and Eve, nor do I believe that ancient theologians invariably interpreted the text in that way. (For goodness sakes, their names mean "Human" and "Life", and there is a talking snake and some magical fruit! How many clues do you need, that the text might be operating more at the level of myth than being an attempt at literal history? I don't actually believe that everyone before Darwin was too dense to realize this.)
I agree that we shouldn't assume Jesus believed every single OT story was literally true in exactly the way fundamentalists do today, but I do think he's committed to believing at least some things, like the existence of a historical Adam and Moses. Paul also clearly frames Adam as a real historical person and quite a bit of his theology becomes incoherent without it. In general, while ancient Jewish communities at the time didn't always have "literal" interpretations of these events, they didn't have "metaphorical" interpretations either in the sense liberal Christians discuss today; most ancient sources depict the events in question as being a sort of mythical history, in which real events in the past had typological weight in terms of some secondary spiritual reality. I just don't think there's any reason to assume Jesus did not share the general framework of most Jews in his day when it comes to these sorts of things.
I would also say that I don't see anything in the NT that suggests in any way that God will allow for serious error. In fact, it seems just the opposite; there are tons of promises that the Holy Spirit will guide the community and ensure the continuity of Christ's message, sometimes even directly contrasted with the confusion of the OT. It's hard to see how someone could read, say, Hebrews or Acts or 1 Peter and think God is totally cool with 95%+ of all Christians throughout history being totally wrong about basic concepts. And of course those books themselves could be the mistaken ones - but at that point, it just seems like you shouldn't trust *anything* in the text.
You don't have to believe that God is timeless. I'm a Christian who believes that God has existed for eternity in time (I think creating time is impossible).
Well, I'm not saying incarnation is an option, but just "too difficult" for God to pull off - it's that I don't even understand how it's possible in the first place. God is formless, without parts, omnipresent, and timeless, right? But Jesus as a human individual had a form, and parts, and existed in one particular time and place. Isn't that just a straightforward contradiction? Of course, Christians have tried to give various different accounts for exactly how you get around this, but I don't think any succeed. They either require bare assertions that are (imo) devoid of meaning, or they require extremely complicated, ad hoc explanations that are technically possible but undercut the entire meaning of the incarnation itself. If you disagree, what would you say is the most coherent account of the incarnation that comports with the Biblical data while also maintaining basic facts about God's eternal, unchanging nature?
Oh, okay, you're coming at this from a very different perspective than BB is. I guess I would say I just think this view is incoherent for other reasons - I think the laws of logic and other related sorts of things are necessary truths, and it's not even possible for there to be a being who is not "subject" to them. If Christianity can only be made coherent by accepting that God's actions make no sense and are nakedly contradictory, then that's good enough reason to reject it anyway.
I think there are religions that don't depend on any supernatural claims (thinking of Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Taoism here), so lack of miracles in them doesn't tell you much as to validity. In a way, it's pretty easy to just see for yourself that the Ashtavakra Gita is right.
Hindus believe that Vishnu incarnates periodically in Avatars. Vishnu isn't "God" I guess, but he's one of the ultimate Trinity. You could say he's the Divine in his world-preserving Aspect. I've heard some Hindus say Jesus is himself one of Vishnu's avatars! They can be pretty ecumenical.
My impression of the Subcontinent is it's replete with miracle accounts thru its religious history, though those acts are often conceived as "siddhis", as expression of yogic powers - so not, strictly, as violation of Natural Law. The Sai Baba movement is full of miracle stories, to take a contemporary example. I'm not sure they've been convincingly debunked.
re the Lewis trilemma, I wonder about a fourth option, that Jesus had a justified false belief about his own status. If something like Monism is true, then as we approach Enlightenment we begin to self-identify with the Supreme reality. It would be easy to misinterpret this experience egoically, as evidence that I, Yeshua, am the One. I think this kind of thing happens frequently, like it seems to have with Adi Da, recently. Bernadette Roberts talks about a version of this "tempting" self-interpretation in her spiritual autobiography.
I don't think the Hindu miracle claims are generally as impressive and Christianity can accommodate some of them being done.
That's an interesting point re Lewis's trilemma. To be clear, I don't think it's anything like a knockdown argument, it's just like, someone making Jesus's claims probably would have been crazy or evil, but he wasn't, so that's some evidence that he was divine.
The last option misses that Jesus did not hold himself to be “God” on par with everyone else being “one with the supremes foundation of reality” or something like that, but that he was specifically the predicted jewish messiah in the prophets that all the world would worship and establish an eternal kingdom by his eternal priesthood, him being descended from heaven and having eternally preexisted. You cannot seriously believe that and be a sane person. (Unless of course it is true)
As one approaches mystical union, one feels an expansion of personal value, scope, et cet. Someone steeped in a theistic, Messianic culture may mistake that expansion as evidence that "I am the prophesied Messiah", "I am the Son of God", et cet. If Monism is true, it's actually true of *each* of us that "I am the one whom all the world worships" and "I eternally pre-existed", and so on. Monism is a weird truth, if it's true, and might be hard to accurately conceptualize/recognize even as one mystically approaches it. We interpret it via locally available categories.
Also, even if monism is true, not everyone can be the messiah. There were some very specific prophecies he had to fullfill, as be davidic, born in bethlehem, come before fall of the temple, come at a specific time (dated to be 32AD by pre-christian jews in BC by decoding the prophecies of Daniel), suffer and be killed, forgive all our sins, make all nations of the world believe in him, be called a king, be the son of God, be divine, have a dominion that never ends etc. many more that Jesus himself believed to fulfill, but certainly not everyone.
Any contemporary of Jesus could believe themself to fulfill some of those Messianic prophecies: e.g. coming before the fall of Temple, or being around 32 AD. And before one dies, one might think it likely they'll be killed, have a bit of a persecution complex. If you're out there preaching and ruffling feathers, it's not a terrible inference. A prophecied messianic profile with multiple attributes, some of them debatable, some of them vague - some individuals are bound to fulfill some of that profile, by chance or by self-fulfilling. So that somewhat justifies their false belief.
Yes, could be he has a JTB about his exalted status. Could also be a JFB. . . . my only point here is there's this fourth option beyond the Lewis Trilemma. Which option is most likely, I don't know.
Actually, most saints agree that as one approaches mystical union, self-value goes down and great humility and feelings of unworthiness grow. In general it is also said to be a marker of a genuine mystical experience that it increases humility, while a marker of illusory “progress” if it causes pride.
My impression from the cross-cultural record of mysticism isn't so simple. The approach to Union has a paradoxical quality: one's ego diminishes, because one is now identifying more with the Divine; but that identification entails an increased self, a newer bigger Self. Lots of accounts of mystics making outrageous claims of self divinity, because of this latter expansion. If we call that "false" or "illusory" mysticism, then we might be committing the No True Scotsman fallacy. e.g. "Any mystics who make claims of self divinity are false mystics." But I agree that a mystic who thinks themself ontologically special is probably mistaken, confused by their self-identification encounter with the Divine.
It isn’t really a “self” though. It is everything but the self. The self is the separation from God itself. If that’s what’s growing, you’re cannot be getting closer. And calling yourself God is probably the epitome of pride, as the divine is typically seen to be perfect, and the creator of everything, and also the people I generally see claiming it are generally not doing well at all. (here’s an example: https://youtu.be/uZvuk0fQKQg?si=X9kC1A2CjX_yiheU)
If monism is true, it's true that I'm god! Proud or not:) And God would be a self in that God is a conscious Person. Even the more impersonal Brahman of Indian monism is characterized by Sat/Chit/Ananda - a blissful consciousness. That sounds pretty Selfy to me! i.e. it's experiential, and might speak in the First Person without undue distortion. And as the smaller ego makes approach of that Divine Self, things might confusingly mix. i.e. the small self identifies with that boundless divine Self, and comes down from that mountain with the belief that "I am special."
Eric, we might be talking past each other somewhat. I should better distinguish between "genuine mystic" and "mystic with true mystical beliefs". By "genuine" I just mean anyone who's made experiential contact with the Divine. But they might infer an incorrect Ontology, based on that contact. I'm hypothesizing [I really don't have a strong belief in it] that Jesus had genuine contact with the Monistic ground of reality, then inferred incorrect beliefs from that. But his inference might be justified, given the local Metaphysics of his culture [i.e. non-Monistic theism], given that the ground of reality is a Mysterium [so that it's easy to infer false beliefs from one's experience of it], and given that Jesus may have coincidentally and through self-fulfillment fulfilled some of the prophecies about the Messiah.
Perhaps our duality of sane/insane doesn't map easily onto mystics. The mystical experience is powerfully disruptive enough that it may, at least temporarily, cause some dysfunction in the experiencer. Gopi Krishna recounts some of this struggle in his classic Living With Kundalini.
"Christianity is unique in claiming God becomes incarnate." Well, no. Hinduism claims that God incarnates over and over again ("avatar") to lead ever-straying humanity back to the path of truth. Just sayin'.
Your carefree dismissal of all other supernatural beliefs which are not Christian is damning.
I was previously unsure whether you merely aimed to describe a kind of debate between Christian apologists and their atheist critics. Usually, Christians think that all other religions are not worth considering, lumping them into the wastebasket category of paganism. New Atheists also often assume that their criticisms of Christianity extend to all the other religions they are unfamiliar with.
The belief in supernatural events is a human universal, so much that without a modern secular education you should assume that most people you know would report having witnessed a few of them in their lives. But you seem to ignore this, as though members of other faiths could not similarly point to inexplicable events as proof for their beliefs being true. The multitude of non-Christian miracles reported by ancient writers of Greek and Latin should at the very least be considered, since it casts doubt on Jesus being such an exceptional figure.
Excellent! I've been praying for you regularly since we talked Matthew. I hope and pray that you will soon become a Christian. God uses different people for good in different ways. I can easily see Him using you to help others believe. Grace and Peace.
"In fact, this scenario is historically unparalleled in world history, to the best of my knowledge."
Dale Allison makes a similar point: "Early Christianity offers us a missing body plus visions to several individuals plus collective apparitions plus the sense of a dead man’s presence plus the conversion vision of at least one hostile outsider. Taken as a whole, this is, on any account, a remarkable, even extraordinary confluence of events and claims. If there is a good, substantial parallel to the entire series, I have yet to run across it" (The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History, 346).
I don't really find any of the arguments here that convincing. You can make the prior probability of Christianity sound high by only mentioning the things about it that aren't extremely implausible, but in reality, you have to contend with the fact that Christian doctrine implies a lot of extremely unlikely things, like the co-existence of an all-good God with Hell. Sure, you can go for universalism and say there's really no such thing as Hell, but then you have to explain why Christians have nearly unanimously considered the existence of Hell to be a central part of their religion, just as certain as any other belief, for their entire history, why universalists are considered heretical by the major Christian denominations, why Christianity's holy book talks about Hell a lot, etc. At the very least, this undermines the argument that it's likely that God would set up a church to spread his true religion - why would he set up such a church, only for it to teach doctrines that are monumentally out-of-step with the truth as being just as certain as the true ones?
Utilitarianism is also explicitly against the doctrines of almost all Christian denominations, or at least all the ones with a sophisticated enough theology to have systematic moral doctrines. Why would the true religion set up by God himself teach the wrong moral theory?
Another problem arises when you start talking about the evidence for the resurrection. As you note, the prior probability that any given person would rise from the dead is extremely low, but if you believe in God, the prior probability that someone would rise at some point in history is maybe not all that low. But this doesn't imply that the prior probability of *Jesus* rising from the dead is high. Maybe you could say that it's a little higher than average given his exemplary behavior, but it's still much closer to the prior probability of some random guy rising from the dead than it is to the prior probability of God ever incarnating and then rising from the dead. Jesus, after all, is still just one specific person, and the only reason we have to suspect that he might be the incarnation of God is from the fact that he allegedly resurrected. Using the fact that Jesus is already suspected to be the incarnation of God as a reason to increase the prior probability of his resurrection is therefore double-counting the evidence. All the evidence you point to in your section on the resurrection is *the reason* why people believe Jesus is God in the first place - a major world religion claiming that he's God would never have arisen if that stuff hadn't happened. So you can't use the latter fact to raise your prior in Jesus's resurrection and then also use the evidence for the resurrection to raise the posterior even further - you can only update on the same evidence once.
As for the evidence of Jesus's resurrection, sure there is some, but it's not nearly as strong as you seem to think. The main argument is that many people have to have seen Jesus alive to explain the historical data. But in reality, we know that Paul had an experience that converted him, and some of Jesus's disciples believed they had seen him risen from the dead. But that's about it. It's not true (or at least, we don't know that it's true) that all of Jesus's disciples saw him risen from the dead. We don't even know whether they all became Christians or not. And there's no evidence of group appearances except for accounts that came years after the supposed experience and weren't written by the people who were supposedly involved. The example from 1 Corinthians is at least third-hand, if not even further removed.
So all the skeptics really need to explain is why a few close followers of an apocalyptic preacher became convinced that he wasn't really dead after his execution, managed to convince others and start a movement around it, and eventually managed to get an early critic who had persecuted them to join. It's pretty easy to imagine how this could happen: One of his followers has a private experience (or perhaps a few independently have such experiences), likely a post-bereavement hallucination, that they interpret as seeing the physically risen Jesus. They tell his other followers the good news that he's still alive. This manages to convince some of them - perhaps it even primes them to have their own PBHs. Because they're sincerely convinced, it's not hard to explain why they'd be willing to be martyred if they in fact were (though many martyrdom accounts are apocryphal, so we don't even know how many of Jesus's disciples were really martyred, nor do we know if they were martyred for their beliefs or just political reasons or if they could've saved themselves by recanting their beliefs). As far as I can tell, this fully accounts for why early followers came to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. I don't know what's supposed to be so surprising about James converting - why would Jesus's brother, of all people, be less likely to believe that he was really alive? If anything, I'd expect a grieving brother to be more receptive to claims like that.
The only person whose belief in the resurrection is really surprising is Paul. But is it really so surprising that we have to posit a genuine miracle to explain it? I don't think so. Critics of a movement become believers all the time. This is not a particularly wild phenomenon.
The one piece of resurrection-related evidence that isn't just about people coming to believe in the resurrection or reports of people seeing the risen Jesus is the empty tomb. But the case for it is far from solid. We don't even know that Jesus was buried in a tomb in the first place (crucifixion victims were often buried in unmarked graves), so it's not true that enemies of Christianity would've been able to dig up Jesus's body as proof that he was still dead. Even if he was buried in a tomb, they would have to know where it is, be willing to suffer the social and legal consequences of digging up someone's grave, and do all of this very shortly after his death, when the body was still identifiable. Even if Jesus's followers really did start claiming that he had risen very shorty after his death, and formed a mass movement very quickly, it's unlikely that they would amass enemies motivated and capable of doing this so quickly.
We also don't have early reports of the empty tomb. The Gospels were all written at least a generation after the fact (the earliest Gospel, Mark, is generally dated to around 70 AD, or the 60s at the earliest). 1 Corinthians was written around 53-54 AD, two decades after the fact, and it doesn't even explicitly mention the empty tomb. That's just inferred as the logical implication of Jesus being buried and then rising, but of course, the fact that Paul claimed things that logically imply the empty tomb is no evidence for there actually being one - the evidence is supposed to be that people actually saw the empty tomb, which Paul does not mention.
The reports of Jews saying the disciples stole the body are also very bad evidence for the empty tomb. As you mention, this could just have been developed as a counterargument by Jews who believed the empty tomb was real due to Christians claiming it, and, "Yeah, but it's also plausible that the belief was made to explain the actual empty tomb," isn't a refutation of this. In order for this to actually be good evidence for the empty tomb, you need to show that alternative explanations are unlikely, not just that they aren't the only possible explanation! The fact that the Gospels didn't also mention Jews denying the empty tomb is maybe slightly notable, but it's not very strong evidence - it's not like the Gospel writers were meticulously recording all the counterarguments against their religion. They were trying to make the best rhetorical case for their beliefs, which likely included strawmanning the opposition. so it makes perfect sense that they would only record the weaker arguments of their opponents, that could be used to implicitly justify the empty tomb.
The lord, liar, or lunatic point is also pretty weak. The details of Jesus's life are not very well-attested (sources written decades later that are second-hand at best and likely much worse are not enough for me to call something "well-attested"). So we don't really know if he claimed to be God. Nor do we know if he was really as morally exemplary as the Gospels portray him - even if he was some immoral huckster, we would expect his followers and the movement they started to portray him as morally outstanding afterwards. And likewise, he could've been much crazier than the Gospels portray him as, with the crazy parts being edited out of the stories people tell about him over time to portray him in a better light. So all three of the alternative possibilities - Liar, Lunatic, and Never Claimed to be Lord in the First Place - are plausible. I also don't find it all that implausible that Jesus was a morally good person with a lot of good teachings who nevertheless thought he had some sort of grandiose religious destiny. Given the historical context he lived in, I really don't think it's so implausible that he was just sincerely mistaken about his own cosmic importance without being otherwise crazy.
The miracles of Joseph Of Cupertino are pretty surprising if all the things you mentioned are true. I admittedly haven't investigated all of these claims in detail, so I won't say that they're definitely all BS, but in my experience, claims of supposedly extraordinarily-well-evidenced miracles usually fall apart when you start looking into the actual evidence and find that it's all been exaggerated by motivated Christian sources. So I'm not that strongly inclined to trust this info, given that you got it all from one book written by someone who could very well be credulous or motivated to reach a certain conclusion.
The other two miracles you mention are far less convincing. The photos from Our Lady of Zeitoun don't show anything clearly distinct as the Virgin Mary. I can see why people would think it looks like Mary given that it appeared above a Church, priming people to interpret it as a religious figure, and especially after being told by others that Mary was appearing above the church. But it's far from obvious that the bright spots are actually Mary - it seems like a clear case of pareidolia to me.
Of course, there's still the unexplained phenomenon of strange lights appearing above the church, but is there any reason to think this is a miracle? We know that unexplained natural phenomena happen all the time, and many supposed miracles that remain unexplained for a long time are later found to have a natural cause that just hadn't been identified at the time. Would anyone interpret this as a miracle if it hadn't happened above a church?
As for people claiming they were healed after someone prayed for them, I mean, come on. You should know better than to take that at face value. Religious people always pray for their loved ones when they get sick or injured, so any time a religious person (or someone with religious loved ones, i.e., almost everyone in the world) recovers from an illness, someone was praying for them. I know you don't like logical fallacies, but this is a very clear example of a fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, as well as a spurious correlation (you only see recoveries attributed to prayer, but never hear about all the times religious people prayed for their loved ones and they didn't get better).
The final calculation you do is a horrendous butchering of Bayesianism. The specific numbers you give all seem like wild overestimates to me. Even if I was much more convinced by your arguments than I actually was, there's no way I would update by a factor of 1000 just on the basis of the supposed eyewitnesses willing to be martyred, and I don't see how any reasonable person would perform such a drastic update. It seems like this is another case of overcounting the evidence - you use the fact that less than 1/1000 people today have lots of people claim they were resurrected after they died, but that's not the relevant comparison to make. Of course it's very unlikely than any particular person would have tons of followers who claim they rose from the dead after they died and started a world religion - that's why there's only one such person in history. But there's also nowhere near a 1/1000 chance that any particular person is really the incarnation of God - there's not even a 1/(8 billion) chance of that. So if you're starting out with a 1/1000 chance that Christianity is true, you already got there by considering facts that make Jesus more likely than just some random person to have risen from the dead. Facts like, "His followers claimed he rose from the dead and started the biggest religion in history, which many smart people believe, around this claim." You can't count this evidence a second time to raise your 1/1000 probability even higher!
If you really want to do a proper Bayesian analysis of naturalism vs. Christianity based on the evidence for the resurrection, you can't start by assuming that this particular case is already really likely (and 1/1000 is really likely given what we're discussing) and then look at what happened only in this case. The proper Bayesian analysis would say, "What's the probability that a case like this would appear somewhere in history given naturalism, and what's the probability given (theism+God's incarnation+whatever other claims of Christianity you think are intrinsically likely enough not to bring the prior probability super low)?" And the probability that there would be *one* case like this in all of history given naturalism is... not that low. In fact, it's quite high. Even if there's only, say, a 1 in 500 billion chance that something like this happens to any individual person (the Bayes factor you came up with), well, there have been 100 billion people throughout history. So that would only provide a Bayes factor of about 5, even if we assume that the events are 100% likely given the proto-Christian hypothesis. And in reality, the situation for naturalism is even better than this. The Bayes factor you came up with is based on the improbability of this very specific sequence of events occurring, given naturalism. But there are plenty of other sequences of events that would have led to similarly compelling miracle claims, even ones that would comport with the proto-Christian hypothesis of God becoming incarnate. So the chance of some alleged miracle with similarly compelling evidence seeming to confirm a religion similar to Christianity (about as intrinsically plausible as it), given naturalism, is very high.
And that's before we get into the counterevidence, like the problem of Hell or the immoral prescriptions in the Bible that supposedly come from God. A proper Bayesian analysis has to consider these things too - if you only count the pieces of evidence that favor Christianity, of course you're going to end up wildly overestimating the probability of Christianity!
There is one more point to make here, which is that in Bayesian analysis, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If you try to do a Bayesian analysis of naturalism against some supernatural hypothesis, you can't just take every event that's better explained by the supernatural hypothesis and add a Bayes factor based on that event to your equation for the posterior. Otherwise, you'll predictably update towards supernaturalism regardless of whether it's true or not, in violation of the conservation of expected evidence. This is related to the point I made when criticizing your double-counting of the evidence for the resurrection, but it applies to all the other miracles as well. Under naturalism, we would expect seemingly compelling, unexplainable miracles to happen sometimes, but be very rare. Every case of such a miracle provides evidence against naturalism (but not decisive evidence), but every case where no such miracle occurs must, by the same token, provide evidence for naturalism (Denying this violates the law of total expectation). So even if we have a few compelling miracle claims that provide huge boosts to the probability of Christianity, every single instance of a non-miracle provides a small boost to the probability of naturalism. Which wins out, the few huge boosts or the many small boosts? That depends on how rare you think compelling miracles would be, given naturalism or Christianity. I think they would be rare given naturalism, but not so rare that we wouldn't expect to see a single one in human history. So the fact that there are a few fits with my expectations. On the other hand, I would expect them to be fairly common if Christianity were true. Maybe you can come up with reasons why they'd be less common, but those are post-hoc excuses, not my initial expectation, so I'd say the situation we find ourselves in is unlikely given Christianity. There are also some further epistemological problems that come up if you try to use miracles as evidence for theism while also claiming God has a reason not to reveal himself through miracles:
(I don't agree with the full conclusion of this post, as I mentioned in my comment on it, but the main point that there's a conflict between positing miracles as evidence for theism and answering divine hiddenness still stands).
Whatever way you slice it, there's no way a reasonable person is going to go from 1:1000 odds to 500,000,000:1 odds based on the relatively weak arguments in this post, and putting some arbitrary numbers on things to make it come out to such a crazy value doesn't make he arguments more credible - it only makes Bayesian analysis look ridiculous. (I've actually seen plenty of people dismiss Bayesianism because people use it to come to crazy conclusions like this. IMO, they're wrong to dismiss it, since such arguments are just misusing Bayesian updating, but they might have a point in that Bayesianism makes one particularly likely to make such mistakes if they don't take the right precautions). Of course, I know you don't actually think someone should become so ridiculously overconfident, since this is just your steelman case, but I don't really see the point of making an argument with numbers you know are silly.
“Fourth, the Gospel of Mark reports that women were the earliest people to see the tomb. If the story were made up by Mark, he’d have had men discover it given the sexism and patriarchy of early Jewish society“
This point is so weak that I would have scraped it from the article.
Christianity is the least likely religion to correspond to metaphysical truth. It claims the world is a snow globe, Noah saved the animals from the flood by putting two of each animals on a boat, metaphysical teachings that violate the law of non contradiction, the world was created by a Jewish foreskin deity that loves you infinitely but will burn you in eternal fire if you don't follow a long list of dogmas from a Jewish storybook. It's nonsensical.
The book makes no sense if you're not a "fundementalist", pretty much all of it is written like it's to be taken literally. The story of Noah's specifically give the size of the boat, what kind of metaphorical story does that? There is no obvious distinction between what is supposed to be fairy tale content and what isn't. What would be the metaphorical value of writing an entire book like you think the earth is flat with a dome?
This is an extraordinary article and one of the most convincing arguments I’ve read for Christianity.
Thank you sir!
Are you for real? Using the gospels as strong historical sources should automatically make the article worthless.
But the premises at the very beginning are so terrible that one doesn’t even need that.
Look at these:
“First of all, if one is convinced that God exists, they should think there are decent odds that one of the religions would be right. If God exists, it’s decently likely that he’d intervene in the world in some way, to some degree. If he wants to guide humanity, he’d be likely to set up a religion. Thus, as long as Christianity beats the other religions in plausibility, one should think it’s decently likely to be right.”
If one is convinced that God exists, there is no way to know whether the odds that one of the religions would be right is likely decent or not, since there is no necessary relationship that ties a God existing to him founding any religion.
Why would anyone assume that if God wanted to guide humanity by communicating with us, he would choose the stupid and inefficient method of only speaking to one individual and telling him to go and convince other humans that he had spoken with God? If God exists and he created smart humans, why should one then assume that there are decent odds he would be an idiot? The premise is ridiculous. If God exists, he’s superior to man and smarter than him, then it’s more likely that he wouldn’t choose the dumbest and most inefficient means of communication. Therefore, the premise isn’t convincing at all.
“ Second, Christianity is unique in claiming that God becomes incarnate. But it’s decently likely that God would become incarnate. A God who stays aloof in the clouds, not experiencing the suffering on Earth seems in some way deficient. This is particularly because God’s experience as an incarnate being would help strengthen our relationship with him, just as two people who have undergone the same experience might bond over that. The prior probability that God would become incarnate can’t be too low—and so the prior probability of Christianity, the only reasonable view on which God becomes incarnate, is also not too low.”
This is a really ridiculous premise. It is based on viewpoint epistemology, and that God is a parochial and limited entity who needs empathy in order to achieve full understanding of the conscious creatures he created. And God not being limited and deficient in this way would actually make him deficient! WTF.
Even worse, it implies that all those times before the incarnation of Christ, God was deficient in important respects and in his relationships with his prophets and messengers. How does that make sense?
This is another terrible argument. I can’t see how it’s in any way convincing.
“Third, God would be expected, if he became incarnate, to establish a major institution of some sort. If he wants to influence the course of history, he’d set up something like a Church. Given this, the Christian explanation is decently probable for it makes sense of why the guy claiming to be God set up a Church.”
God, who can create an entire universe, if he existed and wanted to influence the course of history would be expected to JUST INFLUENCE it. It would be puzzling and ridiculous to have him try the most convoluted, inefficient, and unreliable ways of influencing it. This is a laughably bad premise. It’s a worthless argument.
So, the philosophical grounds on which he’s selling Christianity as more plausible than others are in total shambles. How implausible then would the resurrection story that requires this foundation have to be?
“If God exists, X is more likely” even when X would make no sense if God actually exists and had the power to create a universe and control the laws of physics is really comedic.
If this is one of the most convincing arguments for Christianity, it’s probably because all the arguments for Christianity are terrible and coming up with a good one is impossible.
Yeah, I got here via Astral Codex Ten and was expecting something ... else. Though, maybe all this hand-waving is the best steelman possible for Christianity and it just doesn't hold up without strongly motivated reasoning?
Also, afaik, claiming god/gods incarnate is not at all unique to Christianity. Unless that is defined in a special way to cut out the other cases. Off the top of my head, we've got: the greek/roman pantheon with all their earthly adventures, the Incan founding gods, Shintoism, any religion that saw the king as a god (like ancient Egypt), etc.
Are you, by any chance, the Joshua Greene of of the dual process theory?
Idk, I don't think the case is that bad. Seems like a very weird series of coincidences happened in early Christianity and there are some weirdly well-evidenced miracles.
No. There are a bunch of Joshua Greene's running around and we're all brilliant (except for the ones like this guy, and notice how the article comes back to christianity at the end... https://www.newsandsentinel.com/news/local-news/2022/07/greene-receives-30-year-prison-sentence-in-parkersburg-murder/)
You refer to Mark and Matthew as "early". My understanding is that non-religious historians tend to put Mark earliest, at ~65-70, with Matthew about 15 or so years after. I've seen Christian sources put Mark a good deal earlier, in the 40s or early 50s. I'm not a historian and I'm sure both sides have axes to grind. But I do think it's highly tendentious to treat the evidence of the Gospels as a whole bunch of independent reports about what people said they saw at the time, rather than a smaller bunch of non-independent reports, possibly three or more decades after the fact, about what people are reported to have said they saw at the time. It can look like you're making the same methodological assumption Timothy and Lydia McGrew make in their case for the resurrection: "Our argument will proceed on the assumption that we have a substantially accurate text of the four Gospels...and that the narratives, at least where not explicitly asserting the occurrence of a miracle, deserve as much credence as similarly attested documents would be accorded if they reported strictly secular matters." (p. 597 of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology) They then go on to basically treat as certain all the claims in the Gospels about who said they saw what, and to argue that, given all those claims, it's highly likely the resurrection occurred.
But this looks to me like an approach that nobody who comes at the issue from an initially skeptical perspective should grant. If you have a bunch of contemperaneous eyewitness reports of supernatural stuff, that's suprising! By contrast, if you have a much later narrative that *claims* that people made a bunch of contemperaneous eyewitness reports of supernatural stuff, there are more ways to explain that naturalistically. If you start out leaning towards naturalistic explanations, and the historical evidence about timing of the Gospels is far from conclusive, it makes sense to then favor accounts on which they were written later, so as to make it easier to explain all the reports of stuff you think probably didn't actually happen.
I think it's easy to forget just how different the context is. Today, if I say you said you claimed to see something that you didn't actually claim to see, it's easy for you to contradict me. You have a blog. You can quickly write a post saying: "I never said I saw that!" and lots of people can read it. 2k years ago, almost everybody was illiterate. The barriers to false attributions of eyewitness reports--saying somebody said they saw something that they never claimed to see--are much much weaker. If I write a book saying you said something 30 years ago, the chance you even find out about it is slim. Maybe you're already dead. If you're alive and you hear about it, what are you gonna do--write your own book saying you didn't say that? You're probably illiterate. You spend all your time working in the fields, and aren't interested in books. And it doesn't have to involve intentional deception. How much distortion can be introduced in 30 years of oral tradition before stuff gets written down? Ever play a game of telephone?
There's lots of other stuff I'd take issue with here, but this is a main one.
I think it's worth mentioning the main arguments that lead various scholars these conclusions. The main reason why Mark is conventionally dated near AD 70 is that, in it, Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple (which was in fact destroyed in 70, though the Jewish-Roman war started 3.5 years earlier). So for scholars who believe that predictive prophesy is impossible, they feel the need to put it close to that time. Then, since Matthew and Luke are believed to have used Mark as sources, they are pushed later (though the 15 year interval is not as far as I know well motivated at all). But this seems circular for those who are trying to decide if Jesus actually was supernatural. Even leaving aside the possibility that even somebody with human-level wisdom might have been able to predict this in AD 33.
To me, a far more convincing argument is that Acts never says anything about the martyrdom of St. Paul, despite the fact that the author is clearly very interested in both martyrdom and the ministry of Paul. Instead the book ends on a total anti-climax, with Paul preaching to people in Rome. So it makes the most sense to suppose this book was written before Paul was beheaded in the early 60s. But then (on the standard assumptions that Acts is a sequel to Luke and that Luke uses Mark as a source) at least 2 of the Gospels end up being pushed to the 50s at the latest. Completely demonstrative? No, but it seems more convincing than anything else I've heard.
Needless to say, if you're trying to construct the most plausible scenario in which Christianity is false, this will (ceteris paribus) push you towards later and more mythological gospel scenarios, than what you might otherwise accept on a theologically neutral analysis. But that's not the same as saying it is the most antecedently probable view, i.e. that there is no Bayes factor price to pay in going there.
Also, I completely disagree that this post is using anything close to the methodological assumptions of the McGrews. It is far closer in spirit to the "minimal facts" approach of Habermas. For example it only accepts the empty tomb, because it is referred to in a variety of early sources, and because it can be bolstered with auxiliary plausibility arguments. To require this level of support before accepting a historical claim, is very far away from just saying anything written in the Gospels is for that reason probable. (Although, I am personally convinced that if the Gospel writers had not recorded miracles and claims of divinity, they would have been regarded as reliable historical sources by almost everyone, judged by the usual standards of ancient literature.)
For what it's worth, there are secular historians who assign a very early date to Mark. For example, James Crossley (a fairly militant atheist who's debated William Lane Craig on the resurrection) dates Mark to the late-30s or early-40s CE, as did his (agnostic) teacher Maurice Casey: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/date-of-marks-gospel-9780567081957/
Make of that what you will.
There are also Christian historians who assign a late date to Mark. More importantly, I think the later date is closer to being consensus. And even more importantly than that, you don't even need an extremely high probability of a late date for this to serve as a defeater; you just need a not-tiny probability.
To illustrate the idea a bit fantastically, imagine if hundreds of credible, trustworthy, intellectually sober eyewitnesses independently told you they all saw a werewolf steal your shoes. That's a powerful reason to believe. But if you later found out there was a 10% chance they had all been laced beforehand with a drug that makes people hallucinate shoe-stealing werewolves, then your credence on werewolves should barely budge. (Your odds on werewolves should only go up by a factor of about 10, which is not very much considering the low prior.) This is so even though 10% isn't very high.
(1) Of course, I'm not claiming that the early date for Mark is a consensus, or that advocacy of this view by non-religious historians proves it to be correct. I'm simply pointing out that there *are* prominent secular scholars who promote the early dating, which I think is often neglected (people often seem to have the impression that it's only apologetic fervor that could possibly lead somebody to assign an early date to the gospels).
(2) Which bit of testimony is the late date meant to be defeating, precisely? The fact that a number of people claimed to see Jesus after his death is not historically contentious (though of course the veridicality of their experiences is), while the empty tomb is *generally* accepted by NT scholars (including those, such as Dale Allison, who accept the mainstream dating of the gospels). The early date for the gospels doesn't actually matter much for the resurrection argument: the two most important pieces of date (the tomb and the appearances) are typically accepted anyway.
The primary evidence for the empty tomb goes through the Gospels plus Acts, and the specifically supernatural character of the appearances does, too - because the phrasing in Corinthians is completely vague and on its own is compatible with, for example, ecstatic religious experiences with no perceptual content, which all agree would be substantially worse/less miraculous evidence for Christianity if that’s all that happened. So if you think that the late dating of the Gospels makes embellishment substantially more likely, which I do, that’s important. That said, I agree it wouldn’t matter ultimately, as I think the evidence would be unpersuasive even on a relatively early dating.
But like I said, most scholars accept both the consensus Gospel dating *and* the empty tomb. The arguments for its historicity (e.g. the attribution of the discovery to women, the lack of theological embellishment in Mark's account, etc.) go through even on the mainstream dating. I also don't agree that 1 Cor. 15 is consistent with experiences that had "no perceptual content"; at the very least, I think one has to say that these people believed they had really *seen* Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1). But I won't argue that here :)
> But like I said, most scholars accept both the consensus Gospel dating *and* the empty tomb.
The original post is appealing to the eyewitness testimonies of 500+ witnesses to miraculous post-Crucifixion Jesus sightings. If the late dating of the Gospels is enough to make it plausible (above a certain not-high threshold) that these are embellished, then this is enough to undermine that argument. And though I realize you said you're not arguing this specific point, 1 Corinthians 9:1 is referring specifically to Paul rather than the 500, and the phrasing there is also extraordinarily vague and compatible with a non-physical kind of sighting. To be clear, I'm not really faulting Paul for this (he had other concerns), just noting his epistles don't provide much solid evidence for miraculous events apologists want to argue for.
Now, regarding the empty tomb, I appeal again to my original main point that you only need a small but not extraordinarily small probability of embellishment to undercut the argument for Christianity. Even if scholars accept that the tomb was truly found empty, that's compatible with them only accepting it with fairly limited historical certainty - even 99.9% certainty might be low enough, and that seems like a massive overestimate. And the later the Gospels' dating, the easier it will be to argue that the correct level of certainty in the empty tomb falls short of the undercutting threshold.
The whole thing is indeed a kind of circular reasoning. It reminds me of Pascal's wager, where granting the premises of his argument is impossible unless you are already a Christian similar to Pascal himself. (Tellingly, Pascal briefly mentions other faiths, but merely dismisses them as obviously absurd before moving on.)
As a Christian myself, I don't find arguments for Christ's resurrection particularly compelling. It feels like, in any other circumstance, I'd need more than what we have in the New Testament to conclude somebody rose from the dead (I agree that it seems like something weird happened, but that feels like a far cry from the resurrection). I also found the guy who's irregular heartbeat was cured by prayer pretty underwhelming. I've heard dozens of these stories from friends and family members, and they always seem to begin as odd coincidences which are attributed to God, and over the years they grow more extravagent.
I agree with a lot of the rest of what you wrote, though, especially the first part. The evidence that Joseph of Cupertino flew sounds shockingly compelling, I'll have to buy the book you linked about it.
I think the arguments I give establish that God becoming incarnate has a decently high prior in someone like Jesus, and so the bar is lower than in a normal circumstance. Like, if you found out that someone had been resurrected, Jesus would obviously be the best candidate.
Unless you already believe Christian theology I'm not sure why you'd think God was more likely to resurrect were he incarnated.
But maybe the relevant probability is instead something like "God's performing an extravagent miracle to demonstrate he had incarnated," and that seems reasonable. And Jesus probably is a better candidate for that than anybody else.
I assume our host only picked that example because he personally heard the guy speak. I agree this particular example is underwhelming. The Keener book has many examples which seem a lot more medically inexplicable. For those who didn't want to watch the long youtube video that was linked (I certainly didn't) there are some examples mentioned in this interview:
https://thrive.asburyseminary.edu/dr-craig-keener-miracles-today/
Yes indeed. This is far from the most significant example. The basic point is just that it's weird that so many people seem to be walking around claiming to have been subject to clear miracles. Maybe they misremembered, but it's still odd.
Interesting, I'll be sure to read the article later.
I don’t think Paul’s conversion is as incredible as you say. The Jewish leaders at the time must have wondered to themselves whether Jesus was the Messiah at least a little bit — it’s not so incredible that some of them had rapid changes in belief about this.
Opposing something passionately and then suddenly shifting to supporting it is something that happens to people sometimes.
I have difficulty with ideas like “God became incarnate to strengthen his relationship with us” because it seems to me that an omnipotent being would have infinitely many ways to achieve any goal. So we can’t evaluate whether it makes sense (or is probable) for God to do anything by any particular means.
I don't find this convincing in the least. I'll leave the historicity of Christ to the experts, since this is well-trodden ground, and look at one of the miracles.
The evidence for Our Lady of Zeitoun seems on a par with that for flying saucers (or the Loch Ness monster, for that matter). People saw some strange lights, interpreted them in the cultural terms available to them and took some blurry photos (possibly with subsequent editing).
Leaving aside the probabilities, if Our Lady of Zeitoun were really Jesus' mother, what possible purpose was she serving in making a brief and silent appearance in Egypt? At least Our Lady of Fatima offered some prophecies.
The "evidence" for the Loch Ness Monster consists (more or less) of one photo (which is a proven hoax), and a few people saying they saw some strange ripples in a lake that they visited for the express purpose of finding a monster. The evidence for Our Lady of Zeitoun consists of tens or hundreds of thousands of witnesses (many of whom left written testimony), as well a large-scale investigation by the Egyptian police specifically intended to find a naturalistic explanation for the lights (Egypt is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and the lights were at a Coptic church, so one can hardly claim a religious bias on the part of the investigators). Whether or not one accepts Our Lady of Zeitoun, claiming that it's "on a par with the Loch Ness Monster" is Reddit-tier bluster, nothing more.
Give it a break. The Loch Ness monster reference was a parenthetical aside. The real parallel is with flying saucers/UFOs. 5% of Americans claim to have seen one, which amounts to around 15 million people in the US alone. Plenty of written accounts, inconclusive photos etc.
On what basis do you claim that Egyptian police " specifically intended to find a naturalistic explanation"? I doubt that many Egyptian police are, or were, dedicated sceptics of the supernatural. And, as you may not be aware, Mary/Maryam is a revered figure in Islam.
Right, but UFOs are undeniably a real phenomenon (consider e.g. the videos released by the Pentagon a few years ago). Whether they're extraterrestrial in origin is a separate question, of course; one has to consider the various possible explanations, and see which one best fits the data. The same goes for Our Lady of Zeitoun: the lights were undeniably a real phenomenon, beheld as they were by tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Whether they were miraculous is another question; the reason to believe *that* is the complete failure of alternative explanations. (Compare: if all non-ET explanations for UFOs were shown to completely fail, it would be perfectly reasonable to conclude that they are probably extraterrestrial in origin. It's only because that *hasn't happened* that we aren't rationally compelled to accept that UFOs are extraterrestrial.)
I'm perfectly aware that Islam assigns a high status to Mary. But there is no substantial tradition of Marian apparitions in Islam, and in any case, Our Lady of Zeitoun appeared at a Coptic church. For comparison: if Jesus allegedly appeared at a mosque in the view of thousands of witnesses, I don't think Christians would be rushing to verify the miracle, despite their obvious belief in the relevant figure.
I'm happy to agree that our credence in an extra-terrestrial/supernatural origin for the observed lights should be the same in both cases. I guess it then comes down to a question of priors.
Right, but I didn't say that, did I? So you aren't actually agreeing with me.
This source says 10 per cent
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/many-americans-believe-supernatural-ufos
Anyone familiar with Christian standards of epistemology will be less impressed. Reputedly, tens of thousands of worshipers witnessed the Sun Miracle at Fatima, and later even the pope himself, but historians found evidence for hardly more than a dozen of them testifying to a priest.
IIRC, the ones who did testify gave contradictory accounts of what exactly the witnessed miracle was as well.
Except they did not interpret them in the cultural terms available to them, this is in Muslim Egypt.
I think I would probably disagree with every single point here, haha, but a few major issues that stick out to me:
When it comes to the incarnation, I would say the question of probability shouldn't even enter into the question until someone can actually provide a coherent account of how the traditional Christian conception of incarnation is even possible at all. I don't think that's ever been done - I don't think it can be done either, because the concept of incarnation is incoherent in the first place. But even if you did think it was coherent, it seems extremely unlikely *unless you first fix in place all the other theoretical constraints Christianity already comes with.* Without those specific theological commitments - which relate to a complex set of prior theological beliefs held by ancient Israelites - the idea of a God who dies as a sacrifice for the sins of the world wouldn't even occur to you.
Secondly, you're right that it's plausible for God to establish some sort of guiding institution. But this is a fallacy of "understated priors," if you will - it's not at all plausible that God would establish a guiding institution like the ones we have in Christianity! I don't see how anyone could look at the Christian church - constantly splitting, constantly making serious errors, constantly engaging in hideous and bizarre actions that cause immense harm - and think that's the sort of thing specifically God would create. In fact, if you do think God would be likely to establish some sort of guiding institution, the reality of the institutions Christians have founded should *lower* your credence in it.
Otherwise, I just think you're radically overestimating the reliability of early records for the resurrection and for miracles, but that's been discussed elsewhere. Overall, I think the case really falls apart before you even get to that point, because you're not factoring in things like: The probability that the ancient Israelite sacrificial system was morally appropriate, the probability that the Old Testament is generally historically accurate and Adam was a real person, the probability that God would permit serious errors and contradictions in his sacred texts, the probability that God would communicate his will for humanity so poorly as the Bible does, and so on. When you tally those up, I think it becomes close to impossible to argue that a naturalistic explanation doesn't explain the data better (or, if you're a theist, that God wasn't directly involved in this specific situation).
I'm not sure what's supposed to be incoherent about the incarnation. God takes on a body and goes to Earth!
Christianity has been a pretty major force for good if Holland is right. Maybe saying the weird things for historically contingent reasons were needed for it to catch on.
I don't think you have to accept a super literalistic reading of much of the Old Testament or the system of sacrifice.
But God is supposed to be timeless, formless, and omnipresent, right? So how does a timeless, formless, and omnipresent being "take on" a body in the first place? How could God be located in one specific place and time, but also all times and all places, and also no places or times at all? And that doesn't even get into the additional complexity added by the Trinity - how can you argue that the three persons of God are completely unified when one exists in Palestine at a certain time with a physical body and the other two don't?
I agree that Christianity has been a major force for good throughout history, but we're talking about an institution God established - you shouldn't get points for being just a little better than the pagans around you. When a perfect being is involved, a few serious errors (which would be a massive understatement) is discrediting, and amending the hypothesis in an ad hoc way doesn't salvage it.
It seems obvious to me that Jesus, Paul, and others *did* have a very literalistic reading of the OT, and that Jesus' theology relied heavily on it. So you'd either have to think that 1) Jesus was mistaken about major theological and historical issues, or 2) that he was deliberately misleading people when he could have been honest with them. Both of those, imo, are devastating options - if Jesus was seriously in error, or was lying about the entire structure of his own purpose on earth, why trust anything he says about anything?
I think the default is that God is timeless formless and omnipresent (only omnipresent because he's omniscience), but he can stop being those things temporarily. I, unlike a lot of people, think God could probably stop existing.
For what it's worth, this is not the explanation of the Incarnation that the Church eventually settled on. The Chalcedonian explanation is that the Son of God added to himself a complete human nature (including both body and soul/mind/emotions) without in any way modifying or changing his (eternal, timeless) divine nature. Hence: one person, with two natures.
Is this logically incoherent? It's pretty hard to show this, actually. Certainly this Chalcedonian terminology defeats any naive attempt to directly deduce that 1=2, because as the language indicates, the thing Christ is 1 of, is different from the thing Christ has 2 of. Any attempt to show a contradiction, would have to somehow be based on a substantive conceptual analysis of what we mean by "nature", or "person"; and how these terms interact; otherwise it can't get off the ground. (Very similar comments would apply to the Trinity.)
That being said, my position on the epistemology is actually somewhere in between the two of you. It is very far from obvious to me, just from the tenets of classical theism, that Incarnation is something that is metaphysically possible for God, or to be expected even if it is possible. I think arguments about solidarity etc are a good way to understand why it might be fitting after it occurs, but aren't something that philosophers living in BC times should have been led to in the abstract. (Leaving aside BC prophets who had access to more information.)
Yes, God can do "anything", but that surely means anything that is metaphysically possible, like moving matter around in arbitrary ways. In my view changing his own essential being is an example of something that is not possible, since God exists necessarily. The explanation above exploits a loophole in the above reasoning, but does depend on a particular view of how metaphysics works.
So for me, the primary reason I believe that Incarnation is metaphysically possible, is simply that it seems to have happened. But, I don't think humans can prove it to be contradictory either.
God is timeless, and then stops being timeless?
How does a timeless being start or stop doing anything???
C. S. Lewis wrote on this in Mere Christianity:
"Before I became a Christian one of my objections was as follows. The Christians said that the eternal God who is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once became a human being. Well then, said I, how did the whole universe keep going while He was a baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the same time be God who knows everything and also a man asking his disciples "Who touched me?" You will notice that the sting lay in the time words: "While He was a baby" — "How could He at the same time?" In other words I was assuming that Christ's life as God was in time, and that His life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time — just as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total life. And that is how most of us perhaps tend to think about it. We picture God living through a period when His human life was still in the future: then coming to a period when it was present: then going on to a period when He could look back on it as something in the past. But probably these ideas correspond to nothing in the actual facts. You cannot fit Christ's earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time. It is really, I suggest, a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the human experience of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in His whole divine life. This human life in God is from our point of view a particular period in the history of our world (from the year A.D. one till the Crucifixion). We therefore imagine it is also a period in the history of God's own existence. But God has no history. He is too completely and utterly real to have one. For, of course, to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it had already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it. God forbid we should think God was like that. Even we may hope not to be always rationed in that way"
Perhaps this just pushes the problem back a step. But conditional on a story in which God's own chosen people Israel end up crucifying the Messiah: I don't think we should be too surprised if God's plan allows the Church to mess up pretty badly as well. (This is one of the reasons why I am a Protestant rather than a Catholic.)
I think also you should support your claim that Jesus and Paul had a very literalistic reading of the OT, because that's not how I see it at all. They are both constantly reinterpreting OT stories and commands in an allegorical or metaphorical way, in order to apply them to talk about the present. This rabbinic-style method of interpretation is actually quite different from the "historical-literal" way that 20th century fundamentalists read the text.
American fundamentalists like to talk as if the mere mention of an OT character in the NT is implicitly endorsing the literal historicity of the text, but I don't think that's true at all! Only certain kinds of uses would seem to do so. (To give some contrasting examples on both sides, Jesus' proof of the Resurrection from God being "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" seems to me to require these patriarchs to have actually existed historically in some way. But his use of the Jonah story as a way to illustrate the Son of Man dying and rising again, hardly seems to require taking the Jonah story as historical, since the point is to use it as an illustration.)
To be sure, Jesus did believe that all scriptures were divinely inspired (as do I) but I don't think that commits one to e.g. the fundie version of Adam and Eve, nor do I believe that ancient theologians invariably interpreted the text in that way. (For goodness sakes, their names mean "Human" and "Life", and there is a talking snake and some magical fruit! How many clues do you need, that the text might be operating more at the level of myth than being an attempt at literal history? I don't actually believe that everyone before Darwin was too dense to realize this.)
I agree that we shouldn't assume Jesus believed every single OT story was literally true in exactly the way fundamentalists do today, but I do think he's committed to believing at least some things, like the existence of a historical Adam and Moses. Paul also clearly frames Adam as a real historical person and quite a bit of his theology becomes incoherent without it. In general, while ancient Jewish communities at the time didn't always have "literal" interpretations of these events, they didn't have "metaphorical" interpretations either in the sense liberal Christians discuss today; most ancient sources depict the events in question as being a sort of mythical history, in which real events in the past had typological weight in terms of some secondary spiritual reality. I just don't think there's any reason to assume Jesus did not share the general framework of most Jews in his day when it comes to these sorts of things.
I would also say that I don't see anything in the NT that suggests in any way that God will allow for serious error. In fact, it seems just the opposite; there are tons of promises that the Holy Spirit will guide the community and ensure the continuity of Christ's message, sometimes even directly contrasted with the confusion of the OT. It's hard to see how someone could read, say, Hebrews or Acts or 1 Peter and think God is totally cool with 95%+ of all Christians throughout history being totally wrong about basic concepts. And of course those books themselves could be the mistaken ones - but at that point, it just seems like you shouldn't trust *anything* in the text.
You don't have to believe that God is timeless. I'm a Christian who believes that God has existed for eternity in time (I think creating time is impossible).
Well, I'm not saying incarnation is an option, but just "too difficult" for God to pull off - it's that I don't even understand how it's possible in the first place. God is formless, without parts, omnipresent, and timeless, right? But Jesus as a human individual had a form, and parts, and existed in one particular time and place. Isn't that just a straightforward contradiction? Of course, Christians have tried to give various different accounts for exactly how you get around this, but I don't think any succeed. They either require bare assertions that are (imo) devoid of meaning, or they require extremely complicated, ad hoc explanations that are technically possible but undercut the entire meaning of the incarnation itself. If you disagree, what would you say is the most coherent account of the incarnation that comports with the Biblical data while also maintaining basic facts about God's eternal, unchanging nature?
Oh, okay, you're coming at this from a very different perspective than BB is. I guess I would say I just think this view is incoherent for other reasons - I think the laws of logic and other related sorts of things are necessary truths, and it's not even possible for there to be a being who is not "subject" to them. If Christianity can only be made coherent by accepting that God's actions make no sense and are nakedly contradictory, then that's good enough reason to reject it anyway.
I think there are religions that don't depend on any supernatural claims (thinking of Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Taoism here), so lack of miracles in them doesn't tell you much as to validity. In a way, it's pretty easy to just see for yourself that the Ashtavakra Gita is right.
Hindus believe that Vishnu incarnates periodically in Avatars. Vishnu isn't "God" I guess, but he's one of the ultimate Trinity. You could say he's the Divine in his world-preserving Aspect. I've heard some Hindus say Jesus is himself one of Vishnu's avatars! They can be pretty ecumenical.
My impression of the Subcontinent is it's replete with miracle accounts thru its religious history, though those acts are often conceived as "siddhis", as expression of yogic powers - so not, strictly, as violation of Natural Law. The Sai Baba movement is full of miracle stories, to take a contemporary example. I'm not sure they've been convincingly debunked.
re the Lewis trilemma, I wonder about a fourth option, that Jesus had a justified false belief about his own status. If something like Monism is true, then as we approach Enlightenment we begin to self-identify with the Supreme reality. It would be easy to misinterpret this experience egoically, as evidence that I, Yeshua, am the One. I think this kind of thing happens frequently, like it seems to have with Adi Da, recently. Bernadette Roberts talks about a version of this "tempting" self-interpretation in her spiritual autobiography.
I don't think the Hindu miracle claims are generally as impressive and Christianity can accommodate some of them being done.
That's an interesting point re Lewis's trilemma. To be clear, I don't think it's anything like a knockdown argument, it's just like, someone making Jesus's claims probably would have been crazy or evil, but he wasn't, so that's some evidence that he was divine.
The last option misses that Jesus did not hold himself to be “God” on par with everyone else being “one with the supremes foundation of reality” or something like that, but that he was specifically the predicted jewish messiah in the prophets that all the world would worship and establish an eternal kingdom by his eternal priesthood, him being descended from heaven and having eternally preexisted. You cannot seriously believe that and be a sane person. (Unless of course it is true)
As one approaches mystical union, one feels an expansion of personal value, scope, et cet. Someone steeped in a theistic, Messianic culture may mistake that expansion as evidence that "I am the prophesied Messiah", "I am the Son of God", et cet. If Monism is true, it's actually true of *each* of us that "I am the one whom all the world worships" and "I eternally pre-existed", and so on. Monism is a weird truth, if it's true, and might be hard to accurately conceptualize/recognize even as one mystically approaches it. We interpret it via locally available categories.
Also, even if monism is true, not everyone can be the messiah. There were some very specific prophecies he had to fullfill, as be davidic, born in bethlehem, come before fall of the temple, come at a specific time (dated to be 32AD by pre-christian jews in BC by decoding the prophecies of Daniel), suffer and be killed, forgive all our sins, make all nations of the world believe in him, be called a king, be the son of God, be divine, have a dominion that never ends etc. many more that Jesus himself believed to fulfill, but certainly not everyone.
Any contemporary of Jesus could believe themself to fulfill some of those Messianic prophecies: e.g. coming before the fall of Temple, or being around 32 AD. And before one dies, one might think it likely they'll be killed, have a bit of a persecution complex. If you're out there preaching and ruffling feathers, it's not a terrible inference. A prophecied messianic profile with multiple attributes, some of them debatable, some of them vague - some individuals are bound to fulfill some of that profile, by chance or by self-fulfilling. So that somewhat justifies their false belief.
Is it false though? If he actually fullfills the prophecies?
Yes, could be he has a JTB about his exalted status. Could also be a JFB. . . . my only point here is there's this fourth option beyond the Lewis Trilemma. Which option is most likely, I don't know.
Actually, most saints agree that as one approaches mystical union, self-value goes down and great humility and feelings of unworthiness grow. In general it is also said to be a marker of a genuine mystical experience that it increases humility, while a marker of illusory “progress” if it causes pride.
My impression from the cross-cultural record of mysticism isn't so simple. The approach to Union has a paradoxical quality: one's ego diminishes, because one is now identifying more with the Divine; but that identification entails an increased self, a newer bigger Self. Lots of accounts of mystics making outrageous claims of self divinity, because of this latter expansion. If we call that "false" or "illusory" mysticism, then we might be committing the No True Scotsman fallacy. e.g. "Any mystics who make claims of self divinity are false mystics." But I agree that a mystic who thinks themself ontologically special is probably mistaken, confused by their self-identification encounter with the Divine.
It isn’t really a “self” though. It is everything but the self. The self is the separation from God itself. If that’s what’s growing, you’re cannot be getting closer. And calling yourself God is probably the epitome of pride, as the divine is typically seen to be perfect, and the creator of everything, and also the people I generally see claiming it are generally not doing well at all. (here’s an example: https://youtu.be/uZvuk0fQKQg?si=X9kC1A2CjX_yiheU)
If monism is true, it's true that I'm god! Proud or not:) And God would be a self in that God is a conscious Person. Even the more impersonal Brahman of Indian monism is characterized by Sat/Chit/Ananda - a blissful consciousness. That sounds pretty Selfy to me! i.e. it's experiential, and might speak in the First Person without undue distortion. And as the smaller ego makes approach of that Divine Self, things might confusingly mix. i.e. the small self identifies with that boundless divine Self, and comes down from that mountain with the belief that "I am special."
Eric, we might be talking past each other somewhat. I should better distinguish between "genuine mystic" and "mystic with true mystical beliefs". By "genuine" I just mean anyone who's made experiential contact with the Divine. But they might infer an incorrect Ontology, based on that contact. I'm hypothesizing [I really don't have a strong belief in it] that Jesus had genuine contact with the Monistic ground of reality, then inferred incorrect beliefs from that. But his inference might be justified, given the local Metaphysics of his culture [i.e. non-Monistic theism], given that the ground of reality is a Mysterium [so that it's easy to infer false beliefs from one's experience of it], and given that Jesus may have coincidentally and through self-fulfillment fulfilled some of the prophecies about the Messiah.
Perhaps our duality of sane/insane doesn't map easily onto mystics. The mystical experience is powerfully disruptive enough that it may, at least temporarily, cause some dysfunction in the experiencer. Gopi Krishna recounts some of this struggle in his classic Living With Kundalini.
"Christianity is unique in claiming God becomes incarnate." Well, no. Hinduism claims that God incarnates over and over again ("avatar") to lead ever-straying humanity back to the path of truth. Just sayin'.
Your carefree dismissal of all other supernatural beliefs which are not Christian is damning.
I was previously unsure whether you merely aimed to describe a kind of debate between Christian apologists and their atheist critics. Usually, Christians think that all other religions are not worth considering, lumping them into the wastebasket category of paganism. New Atheists also often assume that their criticisms of Christianity extend to all the other religions they are unfamiliar with.
The belief in supernatural events is a human universal, so much that without a modern secular education you should assume that most people you know would report having witnessed a few of them in their lives. But you seem to ignore this, as though members of other faiths could not similarly point to inexplicable events as proof for their beliefs being true. The multitude of non-Christian miracles reported by ancient writers of Greek and Latin should at the very least be considered, since it casts doubt on Jesus being such an exceptional figure.
Excellent! I've been praying for you regularly since we talked Matthew. I hope and pray that you will soon become a Christian. God uses different people for good in different ways. I can easily see Him using you to help others believe. Grace and Peace.
That's very kind, thank you!
"In fact, this scenario is historically unparalleled in world history, to the best of my knowledge."
Dale Allison makes a similar point: "Early Christianity offers us a missing body plus visions to several individuals plus collective apparitions plus the sense of a dead man’s presence plus the conversion vision of at least one hostile outsider. Taken as a whole, this is, on any account, a remarkable, even extraordinary confluence of events and claims. If there is a good, substantial parallel to the entire series, I have yet to run across it" (The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History, 346).
I don't really find any of the arguments here that convincing. You can make the prior probability of Christianity sound high by only mentioning the things about it that aren't extremely implausible, but in reality, you have to contend with the fact that Christian doctrine implies a lot of extremely unlikely things, like the co-existence of an all-good God with Hell. Sure, you can go for universalism and say there's really no such thing as Hell, but then you have to explain why Christians have nearly unanimously considered the existence of Hell to be a central part of their religion, just as certain as any other belief, for their entire history, why universalists are considered heretical by the major Christian denominations, why Christianity's holy book talks about Hell a lot, etc. At the very least, this undermines the argument that it's likely that God would set up a church to spread his true religion - why would he set up such a church, only for it to teach doctrines that are monumentally out-of-step with the truth as being just as certain as the true ones?
Utilitarianism is also explicitly against the doctrines of almost all Christian denominations, or at least all the ones with a sophisticated enough theology to have systematic moral doctrines. Why would the true religion set up by God himself teach the wrong moral theory?
Another problem arises when you start talking about the evidence for the resurrection. As you note, the prior probability that any given person would rise from the dead is extremely low, but if you believe in God, the prior probability that someone would rise at some point in history is maybe not all that low. But this doesn't imply that the prior probability of *Jesus* rising from the dead is high. Maybe you could say that it's a little higher than average given his exemplary behavior, but it's still much closer to the prior probability of some random guy rising from the dead than it is to the prior probability of God ever incarnating and then rising from the dead. Jesus, after all, is still just one specific person, and the only reason we have to suspect that he might be the incarnation of God is from the fact that he allegedly resurrected. Using the fact that Jesus is already suspected to be the incarnation of God as a reason to increase the prior probability of his resurrection is therefore double-counting the evidence. All the evidence you point to in your section on the resurrection is *the reason* why people believe Jesus is God in the first place - a major world religion claiming that he's God would never have arisen if that stuff hadn't happened. So you can't use the latter fact to raise your prior in Jesus's resurrection and then also use the evidence for the resurrection to raise the posterior even further - you can only update on the same evidence once.
As for the evidence of Jesus's resurrection, sure there is some, but it's not nearly as strong as you seem to think. The main argument is that many people have to have seen Jesus alive to explain the historical data. But in reality, we know that Paul had an experience that converted him, and some of Jesus's disciples believed they had seen him risen from the dead. But that's about it. It's not true (or at least, we don't know that it's true) that all of Jesus's disciples saw him risen from the dead. We don't even know whether they all became Christians or not. And there's no evidence of group appearances except for accounts that came years after the supposed experience and weren't written by the people who were supposedly involved. The example from 1 Corinthians is at least third-hand, if not even further removed.
So all the skeptics really need to explain is why a few close followers of an apocalyptic preacher became convinced that he wasn't really dead after his execution, managed to convince others and start a movement around it, and eventually managed to get an early critic who had persecuted them to join. It's pretty easy to imagine how this could happen: One of his followers has a private experience (or perhaps a few independently have such experiences), likely a post-bereavement hallucination, that they interpret as seeing the physically risen Jesus. They tell his other followers the good news that he's still alive. This manages to convince some of them - perhaps it even primes them to have their own PBHs. Because they're sincerely convinced, it's not hard to explain why they'd be willing to be martyred if they in fact were (though many martyrdom accounts are apocryphal, so we don't even know how many of Jesus's disciples were really martyred, nor do we know if they were martyred for their beliefs or just political reasons or if they could've saved themselves by recanting their beliefs). As far as I can tell, this fully accounts for why early followers came to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. I don't know what's supposed to be so surprising about James converting - why would Jesus's brother, of all people, be less likely to believe that he was really alive? If anything, I'd expect a grieving brother to be more receptive to claims like that.
The only person whose belief in the resurrection is really surprising is Paul. But is it really so surprising that we have to posit a genuine miracle to explain it? I don't think so. Critics of a movement become believers all the time. This is not a particularly wild phenomenon.
The one piece of resurrection-related evidence that isn't just about people coming to believe in the resurrection or reports of people seeing the risen Jesus is the empty tomb. But the case for it is far from solid. We don't even know that Jesus was buried in a tomb in the first place (crucifixion victims were often buried in unmarked graves), so it's not true that enemies of Christianity would've been able to dig up Jesus's body as proof that he was still dead. Even if he was buried in a tomb, they would have to know where it is, be willing to suffer the social and legal consequences of digging up someone's grave, and do all of this very shortly after his death, when the body was still identifiable. Even if Jesus's followers really did start claiming that he had risen very shorty after his death, and formed a mass movement very quickly, it's unlikely that they would amass enemies motivated and capable of doing this so quickly.
We also don't have early reports of the empty tomb. The Gospels were all written at least a generation after the fact (the earliest Gospel, Mark, is generally dated to around 70 AD, or the 60s at the earliest). 1 Corinthians was written around 53-54 AD, two decades after the fact, and it doesn't even explicitly mention the empty tomb. That's just inferred as the logical implication of Jesus being buried and then rising, but of course, the fact that Paul claimed things that logically imply the empty tomb is no evidence for there actually being one - the evidence is supposed to be that people actually saw the empty tomb, which Paul does not mention.
The reports of Jews saying the disciples stole the body are also very bad evidence for the empty tomb. As you mention, this could just have been developed as a counterargument by Jews who believed the empty tomb was real due to Christians claiming it, and, "Yeah, but it's also plausible that the belief was made to explain the actual empty tomb," isn't a refutation of this. In order for this to actually be good evidence for the empty tomb, you need to show that alternative explanations are unlikely, not just that they aren't the only possible explanation! The fact that the Gospels didn't also mention Jews denying the empty tomb is maybe slightly notable, but it's not very strong evidence - it's not like the Gospel writers were meticulously recording all the counterarguments against their religion. They were trying to make the best rhetorical case for their beliefs, which likely included strawmanning the opposition. so it makes perfect sense that they would only record the weaker arguments of their opponents, that could be used to implicitly justify the empty tomb.
The lord, liar, or lunatic point is also pretty weak. The details of Jesus's life are not very well-attested (sources written decades later that are second-hand at best and likely much worse are not enough for me to call something "well-attested"). So we don't really know if he claimed to be God. Nor do we know if he was really as morally exemplary as the Gospels portray him - even if he was some immoral huckster, we would expect his followers and the movement they started to portray him as morally outstanding afterwards. And likewise, he could've been much crazier than the Gospels portray him as, with the crazy parts being edited out of the stories people tell about him over time to portray him in a better light. So all three of the alternative possibilities - Liar, Lunatic, and Never Claimed to be Lord in the First Place - are plausible. I also don't find it all that implausible that Jesus was a morally good person with a lot of good teachings who nevertheless thought he had some sort of grandiose religious destiny. Given the historical context he lived in, I really don't think it's so implausible that he was just sincerely mistaken about his own cosmic importance without being otherwise crazy.
The miracles of Joseph Of Cupertino are pretty surprising if all the things you mentioned are true. I admittedly haven't investigated all of these claims in detail, so I won't say that they're definitely all BS, but in my experience, claims of supposedly extraordinarily-well-evidenced miracles usually fall apart when you start looking into the actual evidence and find that it's all been exaggerated by motivated Christian sources. So I'm not that strongly inclined to trust this info, given that you got it all from one book written by someone who could very well be credulous or motivated to reach a certain conclusion.
The other two miracles you mention are far less convincing. The photos from Our Lady of Zeitoun don't show anything clearly distinct as the Virgin Mary. I can see why people would think it looks like Mary given that it appeared above a Church, priming people to interpret it as a religious figure, and especially after being told by others that Mary was appearing above the church. But it's far from obvious that the bright spots are actually Mary - it seems like a clear case of pareidolia to me.
Of course, there's still the unexplained phenomenon of strange lights appearing above the church, but is there any reason to think this is a miracle? We know that unexplained natural phenomena happen all the time, and many supposed miracles that remain unexplained for a long time are later found to have a natural cause that just hadn't been identified at the time. Would anyone interpret this as a miracle if it hadn't happened above a church?
As for people claiming they were healed after someone prayed for them, I mean, come on. You should know better than to take that at face value. Religious people always pray for their loved ones when they get sick or injured, so any time a religious person (or someone with religious loved ones, i.e., almost everyone in the world) recovers from an illness, someone was praying for them. I know you don't like logical fallacies, but this is a very clear example of a fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, as well as a spurious correlation (you only see recoveries attributed to prayer, but never hear about all the times religious people prayed for their loved ones and they didn't get better).
The final calculation you do is a horrendous butchering of Bayesianism. The specific numbers you give all seem like wild overestimates to me. Even if I was much more convinced by your arguments than I actually was, there's no way I would update by a factor of 1000 just on the basis of the supposed eyewitnesses willing to be martyred, and I don't see how any reasonable person would perform such a drastic update. It seems like this is another case of overcounting the evidence - you use the fact that less than 1/1000 people today have lots of people claim they were resurrected after they died, but that's not the relevant comparison to make. Of course it's very unlikely than any particular person would have tons of followers who claim they rose from the dead after they died and started a world religion - that's why there's only one such person in history. But there's also nowhere near a 1/1000 chance that any particular person is really the incarnation of God - there's not even a 1/(8 billion) chance of that. So if you're starting out with a 1/1000 chance that Christianity is true, you already got there by considering facts that make Jesus more likely than just some random person to have risen from the dead. Facts like, "His followers claimed he rose from the dead and started the biggest religion in history, which many smart people believe, around this claim." You can't count this evidence a second time to raise your 1/1000 probability even higher!
If you really want to do a proper Bayesian analysis of naturalism vs. Christianity based on the evidence for the resurrection, you can't start by assuming that this particular case is already really likely (and 1/1000 is really likely given what we're discussing) and then look at what happened only in this case. The proper Bayesian analysis would say, "What's the probability that a case like this would appear somewhere in history given naturalism, and what's the probability given (theism+God's incarnation+whatever other claims of Christianity you think are intrinsically likely enough not to bring the prior probability super low)?" And the probability that there would be *one* case like this in all of history given naturalism is... not that low. In fact, it's quite high. Even if there's only, say, a 1 in 500 billion chance that something like this happens to any individual person (the Bayes factor you came up with), well, there have been 100 billion people throughout history. So that would only provide a Bayes factor of about 5, even if we assume that the events are 100% likely given the proto-Christian hypothesis. And in reality, the situation for naturalism is even better than this. The Bayes factor you came up with is based on the improbability of this very specific sequence of events occurring, given naturalism. But there are plenty of other sequences of events that would have led to similarly compelling miracle claims, even ones that would comport with the proto-Christian hypothesis of God becoming incarnate. So the chance of some alleged miracle with similarly compelling evidence seeming to confirm a religion similar to Christianity (about as intrinsically plausible as it), given naturalism, is very high.
And that's before we get into the counterevidence, like the problem of Hell or the immoral prescriptions in the Bible that supposedly come from God. A proper Bayesian analysis has to consider these things too - if you only count the pieces of evidence that favor Christianity, of course you're going to end up wildly overestimating the probability of Christianity!
There is one more point to make here, which is that in Bayesian analysis, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If you try to do a Bayesian analysis of naturalism against some supernatural hypothesis, you can't just take every event that's better explained by the supernatural hypothesis and add a Bayes factor based on that event to your equation for the posterior. Otherwise, you'll predictably update towards supernaturalism regardless of whether it's true or not, in violation of the conservation of expected evidence. This is related to the point I made when criticizing your double-counting of the evidence for the resurrection, but it applies to all the other miracles as well. Under naturalism, we would expect seemingly compelling, unexplainable miracles to happen sometimes, but be very rare. Every case of such a miracle provides evidence against naturalism (but not decisive evidence), but every case where no such miracle occurs must, by the same token, provide evidence for naturalism (Denying this violates the law of total expectation). So even if we have a few compelling miracle claims that provide huge boosts to the probability of Christianity, every single instance of a non-miracle provides a small boost to the probability of naturalism. Which wins out, the few huge boosts or the many small boosts? That depends on how rare you think compelling miracles would be, given naturalism or Christianity. I think they would be rare given naturalism, but not so rare that we wouldn't expect to see a single one in human history. So the fact that there are a few fits with my expectations. On the other hand, I would expect them to be fairly common if Christianity were true. Maybe you can come up with reasons why they'd be less common, but those are post-hoc excuses, not my initial expectation, so I'd say the situation we find ourselves in is unlikely given Christianity. There are also some further epistemological problems that come up if you try to use miracles as evidence for theism while also claiming God has a reason not to reveal himself through miracles:
https://bothsidesbrigade.substack.com/p/why-really-convincing-miracles-are
(I don't agree with the full conclusion of this post, as I mentioned in my comment on it, but the main point that there's a conflict between positing miracles as evidence for theism and answering divine hiddenness still stands).
Whatever way you slice it, there's no way a reasonable person is going to go from 1:1000 odds to 500,000,000:1 odds based on the relatively weak arguments in this post, and putting some arbitrary numbers on things to make it come out to such a crazy value doesn't make he arguments more credible - it only makes Bayesian analysis look ridiculous. (I've actually seen plenty of people dismiss Bayesianism because people use it to come to crazy conclusions like this. IMO, they're wrong to dismiss it, since such arguments are just misusing Bayesian updating, but they might have a point in that Bayesianism makes one particularly likely to make such mistakes if they don't take the right precautions). Of course, I know you don't actually think someone should become so ridiculously overconfident, since this is just your steelman case, but I don't really see the point of making an argument with numbers you know are silly.
“Fourth, the Gospel of Mark reports that women were the earliest people to see the tomb. If the story were made up by Mark, he’d have had men discover it given the sexism and patriarchy of early Jewish society“
This point is so weak that I would have scraped it from the article.
Christianity is the least likely religion to correspond to metaphysical truth. It claims the world is a snow globe, Noah saved the animals from the flood by putting two of each animals on a boat, metaphysical teachings that violate the law of non contradiction, the world was created by a Jewish foreskin deity that loves you infinitely but will burn you in eternal fire if you don't follow a long list of dogmas from a Jewish storybook. It's nonsensical.
You are assuming a very fundamentalist reading.
The book makes no sense if you're not a "fundementalist", pretty much all of it is written like it's to be taken literally. The story of Noah's specifically give the size of the boat, what kind of metaphorical story does that? There is no obvious distinction between what is supposed to be fairy tale content and what isn't. What would be the metaphorical value of writing an entire book like you think the earth is flat with a dome?
This is all silly poor logic on top of laughable priors