Why Christianity Doesn't Make Sense
Christianity is a bad explanation of the resurrection facts
I no longer endorse much of this—see here for a response to myself.
There are several core facts agreed upon by historians: that Jesus existed, died, that his followers saw visions that they interpreted to be him after his death, and that Paul, a persecutor of the Church, converted. Any non-Christian explanation of these facts will be rather odd—invoking a few coincidentally well-timed hallucinations. Christianity, in contrast, offers a single, simple, unified explanation of all of the relevant facts.
Christians are right that non-Christians will have to think that something rather odd occurred in first-century Roman Palestine—both Paul and some disciples had hallucinations at similar times. Yet odder do happen. Caesar crossing the Rubicon is a rather odd thing, yet it happened. Sometimes, we have reason to believe that odd things did happen if the alternative explanation is poorer.
And the Christian explanation is much worse than even the most contrived naturalistic theory. The Christian explanation is that God, possessing three persons as part of one being, something of such doubtful coherence that some of its proponents have jettisoned believing in the law of non-contradiction to make sense of the doctrine, decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention in the world to become incarnate in first-century roman Palestine, while cursing a fig-tree, denouncing hand-washing, giving ambiguous teachings about hell, and aligning with a genocidal God described in the old-testament. Curiously, his moral teachings remained ambiguous and vacuous, the types of things one would expect from one of his time, and he contributed no particularly novel scientific contributions, never seeing fit to mention, for instance, the germ theory of disease. Even more curiously, his deeds were recorded in a series of deeply contradictory books written many decades after the facts they describe, providing fairly unimpressive historical testimony relative to what he could have provided, that show clear evidence of later embellishment.
And then, one takes a look at the other evidence and it’s even worse. The so-called prophecies fulfilled by Jesus are, without exception, random verses pulled from the Old Testament willy-nilly which when read in context resemble prophecies about as much as the God of the old-testament resembles a perfect being. Swinburne’s arguments about why one would expect a God to become incarnate in a way much like Jesus did are utterly ludicrous. The supposedly reliable gospels are wildly unreliable and frequently contradictory.
Christianity thus is a remarkably bad explanation of the relevant evidence. While everyone must hold that something weird happened in first-century Roman Palestine, this is among the strangest and least plausible theories.
Why are Swinburne's arguments for expecting an incarnate God "utterly ludicrous"? The idea that it would be fitting for God to suffer alongside his creatures (given that he allows us to suffer for a good purpose) doesn't strike me as crazy. More broadly, the idea of God living a life of suffering seems to be quite philosophically fruitful (see e.g. the use to which Marilyn Adams put it). And if God is going to become incarnate to live a life of suffering, first-century Palestine seems like a pretty good place to do it (consider e.g. the strongly monotheistic Jewish culture being brutally oppressed by the Roman government, thus affording lots of opportunities for courageous opposition).
I also think (following e.g. Herbert McCabe) that the Incarnation is plausibly necessary in order for God to love us as equals, and so it's almost certain that a morally perfect God would become incarnate. But that relies on more controversial assumptions.
Also, it isn't clear why the fact that Jesus' life was only described in later (sometimes contradictory) books is relevant. The alleged unreliability of the gospels only matters insofar as it leads one to doubt the relevant historical facts (i.e. the basics of Christ's ministry and teaching, his crucifixion, the tomb, and the appearances). Once we've *agreed* on those facts (which, as you note, most historians do), Gospel reliability ceases to matter with respect to the resurrection argument.
I mostly agree, but this is the type of article that won't and shouldn't convince anyone who isn't already basically convinced. Your strongest argument, the one about bible verses would be strong if you bothered to quote a single one of them in context to prove your point and not just replaced that critical part with a random dig.
For example: Matthew writes that baby Jesus' escape and then return from Egypt satisfied the prophecy in Hosea:
"And was there (Egypt) until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son. (Matthew 2:15)
The verse cited reads:
"When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images." (Hosea 1:11).
Since Jesus is alleged to have never sinned, and since sacrifice to Baalim is on the peak of biblical sins, this cannot be a prophecy of Jesus.
- That's what an actual argument as opposed to mere sneering looks like. You can do the sneering after you win an argument (sure we all have the right to have a little fun), but not before.