Why are Swinburne's arguments for expecting an incarnate God "utterly ludicrous"? The idea that God would have an obligation 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.
Is crossing the Rubicon that odd? Popular general decides to take political power is something we see a lot in history. What happened with Jesus, we don't see so much of. Arguably only Muhammed and Sidharta have had similar impacts on world history, yet even they didn't claim to rise from the dead or be the incarnation of God.
Saying that God "decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention" doesn't seem to be giving the Christian explanation a fair shake: the Christian view is that God intervenes in the world all the time, and is deliberately shaping the outcomes of events to align with a larger plan (ie, the concept of Providence).
I don't think it's very accurate to call Jesus' moral teaching vacuous, that stuff basically deleted pagan morality, to this day a lot of our taken-for-granted moral intuitions come from Jesus and were not there in the ancient world before him. There are even historians who consider the abolition of slavery to become unlikelier in the absence of Christianity, as abolitionism was a distinctly Christian movement, and let's face it, none other than Aristotle defended slavery: abolition was not going to come from them, or any people that descended from the pagan worldview.
You also need to consider that it superficially looks silly to think God would manifest in this particular way, but you can't argue with the results: Jesus influenced world history for over a 2,000 years and counting. There are very, very few people who accomplished something like that, even Buddha and Muhammad fall short, and as Jesus teaches, "by their fruits ye shall know them", is the real metric for distinguishing legitimate spiritual authorities from fakes, that's the correct measurement, not a philosophical analysis.
Though of course, judging Jesus' fruits we find Crusades and the slaughter of 'heretics' among them, so it's a pretty complicated picture, but I still think it's one mostly favorable to Jesus.
To be fair, first century Roman Palestine was a great spot to appear. Much earlier and Christianity wouldn't have benefitted from expansive Roman trade networks. Much later and the empire's decline and eventual split would have strangled Christianity's growth. Appearing near the peak of the largest empire of the day is a pretty good sweet spot.
Do you have any concept of, say, what the cursing of the fig tree and the denunciation of hand-washing mean, or are you pulling these out of context in order to sneer at their seemingly odd surface appearance without understanding the nature of the argument presented by the gospels?
I think there are a couple of week points here, some of which have been pointed out by others (e.g., the handwashing point just doesn't seem to me to have force at all, for reasons others have given). But one other odd thing, it seems to me, is that you're basically comparing the entire Christian picture to what we might call the "local" naturalistic explanation. The Christian explanation for the historical facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead; you don't need the Trinity, Incarnation, etc. for that, even if God raising Jesus from the dead provides evidence for these things through some further bit of reasoning. It feels a bit like rejecting the naturalistic explanation of the minimal facts on the ground that a naturalistic explanation of the resurrection requires a life-permitting universe, which is very unlikely on naturalism--except that the naturalistic explanation actually does require a life-permitting universe, whereas a supernatural explanation doesn't require the Trinity, etc.
In my opinion, this post is not persuasive, as you sweepingly accept many background assumptions without justifying them, or even explicating them in sufficient detail. In what follows, I string my critiques, some passing, others crucial to the outlined central flaw. For some, I offer responses, and for others, I am simply satisfied to point them out as unjustified.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon is not comparable with a man rising from the dead.
> 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
The assumption in this context is that the bare phenomenon of Jesus's resurrection is dependent on Christians' having a coherent theological framework. But this is clearly not true. It is entirely conceivable that Jesus was resurrected for some unknown reason X. This would be a potentially good counter to the claim that *the Christian religion* (defined by the broad restrictions of perennial orthodoxy) is a good explanation of the facts. But you make a further unjustified jump: Christianity is incoherent, therefore naturalism best explains the facts at hand. But as I argue, the matter is not so simple.
> decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention in the world to become incarnate in first-century roman Palestine
Christians would deny that God does not intervene in the world. This assumption needs ample support.
> cursing a fig-tree, denouncing hand-washing, giving ambiguous teachings about hell
You do not explain why any of these would lessen the credence of the Christian explanation. If I had to guess, you would take God's omnibenevolence to prevent him from cursing any living being, encourage hygienic practices for the same reason, and not teach unambiguously about hell for the same reason also. This can be paired with arguments for the absurdity of certain models of hell.
> aligning with a genocidal God described in the old-testament
The unjustified assumption seems to me this: "No one is morally justified in aligning with a deity to whom obviously immoral things have been ascribed." But this principle is a weak and dubious one. Simply being ascribed immoral acts does not make one untouchable as association goes, for otherwise one could never align with a falsely accused person. Some Church Fathers also respond in this vein: they deny that the God of the Old Testament really ever did commit any atrocities ascribed to him in it.
> his moral teachings remained ambiguous and vacuous, the types of things one would expect from one of his time
As far as the societal impact of Jesus's teaching from 1st century AD up to the present day goes, it cannot plausibly be denied. This is further supported by his many controversies with competing Jewish teachers of his time. Radical love which Jesus preaches was especially foreign to pagans and this is why their conversions were sometimes dramatic, as they stepped into a completely different moral world. So I do not see what you mean by "ambiguous" and "vacuous" here.
> he contributed no particularly novel scientific contributions, never seeing fit to mention, for instance, the germ theory of disease
The unjustified assumption here seems to be: "God would make some scientific contributions, were he among us." If you try to ground this in God's omnibenevolence, this just becomes a general argument from evil, and more specifically, God's permission of moral and natural evil, which is not specific to Christianity at all.
> 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.
The assumption here is: " If God produced a text about himself, this text would have the form of a list of propositions, and God would perfectly preserve it." It is easy to see just how complex your assumptions can be, and therefore, how easy it is to attack them from various angles, which I do not explore here.
To evaluate your other claims, one would require substantial knowledge from various fields, such as New and Old Testament textual criticism, which I do not have, so I keep silent.
These are my thoughts for now. God bless you. You are in my prayers.
I think part of the incoherence in the views you are outlining comes from the fact that they seem to involve a very different concept of God than the one that is the subject of doctrines such as the Trinity or the Incarnation as traditionally understood.
Do they really need to believe something that odd happened? I mean even the earliest written gospels are believed to date from something like 100 years after those events and just look at mormon beliefs. In a much more modern era when we have essentially disproof of some of the claims of translation 100 years after those events what survives is highly credulous religious texts.
And that's just one group. In general religious beliefs are transmitted by the believers so it's not at all weird they tend to be fairly credulous.
I would be more interested to hear how well you think the facts around the reported resurrection fit Christianity versus how well it fits the next best explanation. What Bases factor would you say it has? Or with claimed prophetic fulfillment? Is the Christian record no more impressive than other religions who claim some preexisting text predicted their founder/prophet? Or is it unusually good?
It’s also important to realize what we would expect to see under non Christianity—namely, over the course of thousands of years it doesn’t seem extremely improbable that something like the Jesus story would happen. If all of history was the Jesus story, I admit that that would be much greater evidence. Additionally, there seems to be a sort of asymmetry between god explanations and naturalistic ones. Namely, you can point to certain improbable events and say that that is unlikely on atheism but there are no particular events (besides maybe evil - though I disagree with that this actually is not what we would expect on god, even a benevolent one) where we would say that this is unlikely on god. I think it would make sense if when we explained more phenomena (for example, evolution being true but really for any advancement in science that explains some phenomena we didn’t understand before) lowers the probability of god because we previously didn’t have an explanation for something that didn’t require a god to explain it and now we do.
Why are Swinburne's arguments for expecting an incarnate God "utterly ludicrous"? The idea that God would have an obligation 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.
Is crossing the Rubicon that odd? Popular general decides to take political power is something we see a lot in history. What happened with Jesus, we don't see so much of. Arguably only Muhammed and Sidharta have had similar impacts on world history, yet even they didn't claim to rise from the dead or be the incarnation of God.
Saying that God "decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention" doesn't seem to be giving the Christian explanation a fair shake: the Christian view is that God intervenes in the world all the time, and is deliberately shaping the outcomes of events to align with a larger plan (ie, the concept of Providence).
I don't think it's very accurate to call Jesus' moral teaching vacuous, that stuff basically deleted pagan morality, to this day a lot of our taken-for-granted moral intuitions come from Jesus and were not there in the ancient world before him. There are even historians who consider the abolition of slavery to become unlikelier in the absence of Christianity, as abolitionism was a distinctly Christian movement, and let's face it, none other than Aristotle defended slavery: abolition was not going to come from them, or any people that descended from the pagan worldview.
You also need to consider that it superficially looks silly to think God would manifest in this particular way, but you can't argue with the results: Jesus influenced world history for over a 2,000 years and counting. There are very, very few people who accomplished something like that, even Buddha and Muhammad fall short, and as Jesus teaches, "by their fruits ye shall know them", is the real metric for distinguishing legitimate spiritual authorities from fakes, that's the correct measurement, not a philosophical analysis.
Though of course, judging Jesus' fruits we find Crusades and the slaughter of 'heretics' among them, so it's a pretty complicated picture, but I still think it's one mostly favorable to Jesus.
Did I ever bring up perennialism with you? The view that the different religions are the same God speaking in different languages. Maybe you think that violates the law of non-contradiction, but this pic is what I think of that law: https://i0.wp.com/maryfrancesflood.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/truth-and-perspective.jpg?resize=700%2C525&ssl=1
To be fair, first century Roman Palestine was a great spot to appear. Much earlier and Christianity wouldn't have benefitted from expansive Roman trade networks. Much later and the empire's decline and eventual split would have strangled Christianity's growth. Appearing near the peak of the largest empire of the day is a pretty good sweet spot.
Do you have any concept of, say, what the cursing of the fig tree and the denunciation of hand-washing mean, or are you pulling these out of context in order to sneer at their seemingly odd surface appearance without understanding the nature of the argument presented by the gospels?
I think there are a couple of week points here, some of which have been pointed out by others (e.g., the handwashing point just doesn't seem to me to have force at all, for reasons others have given). But one other odd thing, it seems to me, is that you're basically comparing the entire Christian picture to what we might call the "local" naturalistic explanation. The Christian explanation for the historical facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead; you don't need the Trinity, Incarnation, etc. for that, even if God raising Jesus from the dead provides evidence for these things through some further bit of reasoning. It feels a bit like rejecting the naturalistic explanation of the minimal facts on the ground that a naturalistic explanation of the resurrection requires a life-permitting universe, which is very unlikely on naturalism--except that the naturalistic explanation actually does require a life-permitting universe, whereas a supernatural explanation doesn't require the Trinity, etc.
>Utilitarian
In my opinion, this post is not persuasive, as you sweepingly accept many background assumptions without justifying them, or even explicating them in sufficient detail. In what follows, I string my critiques, some passing, others crucial to the outlined central flaw. For some, I offer responses, and for others, I am simply satisfied to point them out as unjustified.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon is not comparable with a man rising from the dead.
> 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
The assumption in this context is that the bare phenomenon of Jesus's resurrection is dependent on Christians' having a coherent theological framework. But this is clearly not true. It is entirely conceivable that Jesus was resurrected for some unknown reason X. This would be a potentially good counter to the claim that *the Christian religion* (defined by the broad restrictions of perennial orthodoxy) is a good explanation of the facts. But you make a further unjustified jump: Christianity is incoherent, therefore naturalism best explains the facts at hand. But as I argue, the matter is not so simple.
> decided to take a break from his usual policy of non-intervention in the world to become incarnate in first-century roman Palestine
Christians would deny that God does not intervene in the world. This assumption needs ample support.
> cursing a fig-tree, denouncing hand-washing, giving ambiguous teachings about hell
You do not explain why any of these would lessen the credence of the Christian explanation. If I had to guess, you would take God's omnibenevolence to prevent him from cursing any living being, encourage hygienic practices for the same reason, and not teach unambiguously about hell for the same reason also. This can be paired with arguments for the absurdity of certain models of hell.
> aligning with a genocidal God described in the old-testament
The unjustified assumption seems to me this: "No one is morally justified in aligning with a deity to whom obviously immoral things have been ascribed." But this principle is a weak and dubious one. Simply being ascribed immoral acts does not make one untouchable as association goes, for otherwise one could never align with a falsely accused person. Some Church Fathers also respond in this vein: they deny that the God of the Old Testament really ever did commit any atrocities ascribed to him in it.
> his moral teachings remained ambiguous and vacuous, the types of things one would expect from one of his time
As far as the societal impact of Jesus's teaching from 1st century AD up to the present day goes, it cannot plausibly be denied. This is further supported by his many controversies with competing Jewish teachers of his time. Radical love which Jesus preaches was especially foreign to pagans and this is why their conversions were sometimes dramatic, as they stepped into a completely different moral world. So I do not see what you mean by "ambiguous" and "vacuous" here.
> he contributed no particularly novel scientific contributions, never seeing fit to mention, for instance, the germ theory of disease
The unjustified assumption here seems to be: "God would make some scientific contributions, were he among us." If you try to ground this in God's omnibenevolence, this just becomes a general argument from evil, and more specifically, God's permission of moral and natural evil, which is not specific to Christianity at all.
> 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.
The assumption here is: " If God produced a text about himself, this text would have the form of a list of propositions, and God would perfectly preserve it." It is easy to see just how complex your assumptions can be, and therefore, how easy it is to attack them from various angles, which I do not explore here.
To evaluate your other claims, one would require substantial knowledge from various fields, such as New and Old Testament textual criticism, which I do not have, so I keep silent.
These are my thoughts for now. God bless you. You are in my prayers.
I think part of the incoherence in the views you are outlining comes from the fact that they seem to involve a very different concept of God than the one that is the subject of doctrines such as the Trinity or the Incarnation as traditionally understood.
Do they really need to believe something that odd happened? I mean even the earliest written gospels are believed to date from something like 100 years after those events and just look at mormon beliefs. In a much more modern era when we have essentially disproof of some of the claims of translation 100 years after those events what survives is highly credulous religious texts.
And that's just one group. In general religious beliefs are transmitted by the believers so it's not at all weird they tend to be fairly credulous.
I would be more interested to hear how well you think the facts around the reported resurrection fit Christianity versus how well it fits the next best explanation. What Bases factor would you say it has? Or with claimed prophetic fulfillment? Is the Christian record no more impressive than other religions who claim some preexisting text predicted their founder/prophet? Or is it unusually good?
It’s also important to realize what we would expect to see under non Christianity—namely, over the course of thousands of years it doesn’t seem extremely improbable that something like the Jesus story would happen. If all of history was the Jesus story, I admit that that would be much greater evidence. Additionally, there seems to be a sort of asymmetry between god explanations and naturalistic ones. Namely, you can point to certain improbable events and say that that is unlikely on atheism but there are no particular events (besides maybe evil - though I disagree with that this actually is not what we would expect on god, even a benevolent one) where we would say that this is unlikely on god. I think it would make sense if when we explained more phenomena (for example, evolution being true but really for any advancement in science that explains some phenomena we didn’t understand before) lowers the probability of god because we previously didn’t have an explanation for something that didn’t require a god to explain it and now we do.