A self-described “progressive Christian” has written a fairly thoughtful review of Matt McCormick’s Atheism and the Case Against Christ (which I reviewed here). I’m posting some excerpts of the review along with my thoughts:
“McCormick spends the first half of the book arguing against the resurrection. He does this first by comparing it to the Salem Witch Trials (henceforth SWT). His argument is that if it is reasonable for an individual to conclude that the resurrection happened on the basis of Biblical evidence then it is also reasonable to conclude that the women accused of witchcraft in the SWT were actually witches. He asserts that it is unreasonable to believe the latter and therefore the former should be jettisoned as well… [W]hat’s problematic is McCormick’s handling of the evidence. McCormick focuses solely on the quantity of evidence.”
This is not wholly true; McCormick emphasizes that the quantity and quality of the evidence for the Salem Witchcraft is better than for the resurrection (see pages 57-60). The reason the evidence is of better quality is because we have great assurance that the sworn testimonies came directly from eyewitnesses and that there was something along the lines of critical investigation that took place, which, again, comes from the court documents that have been preserved to us today.
“He argues that the evidence in favor of the SWT is superior than the evidence in favor of the resurrection. This is true, but this does not give McCormick the victory he believes he warrants. This is because historians not only focus on the quantity of evidence but how that evidence can be explained and this is where McCormick gives little argumentation (as we’ll see more below).”
The relevance of how much evidence we have and how good it is is self-evidently related to how certain we can be of any hypothesis used to explain that evidence. This is because the level of certainty we can attain about the hypothesis must be determined by the evidence we have.
“This is where most Christian apologists usually cushion their argument, namely, on the fact that no competing hypotheses can explain the resurrection in a superior fashion than Jesus rising from the dead. McCormick anticipates this objection and claims that even if there are no competing naturalistic hypotheses, this does not mean we can invoke the supernatural explanation. He says this is because there have been many cases in history where the supernatural hypothesis was deemed superior until later evidence overturned said hypothesis. Thus, he argues, we can be confident that the resurrection is one of those cases and a natural hypothesis will eventually overturn the resurrection hypothesis completely. But this is fallacious reasoning. We could claim this about any hypothesis that is currently being employed. ‘Oh don’t bother about hypothesis X because one day there will be evidence to overturn it.’ No, we can only go with which hypothesis explains the data in a superior fashion and then we can adjust said hypothesis when new evidence is uncovered.”
No, the objection McCormick makes cannot be equally applied to all hypotheses, and this is because supernatural hypotheses have a really bad track record, unlike so many other kinds of explanations. Moreover, McCormick defends his position that ‘we shouldn’t buy the supernatural explanation even if we don’t have a good natural explanation at hand’ with other arguments besides the one the reviewer mentioned. Namely, he defends it by analogy with the Salem Witchcraft trials: even if we aren’t sure of a good natural hypothesis to account for the facts at hand, we wouldn’t believe the real magic had actually been performed. As a side note, I’d like to mention that I think there are credible alternative theories for the emergence of Christianity which are far more likely than the resurrection, some of which I’ve written about here.
“McCormick then attempts to blow another hole in the resurrection hypothesis by utilizing psychology. He gives numerous examples of how psychology demonstrates that our cognitive faculties are not as reliable as we would like to think. He claims that things such as source amnesia, frame-of-reference problem, Asch effect, false memories, implanted memories and the Flynn effect et al. all undermine the reliability of the transmitters of the resurrection stories. The problem with McCormick’s argument here is that most (but not all) of his examples deal with individuals. This provides a problem for McCormick because scholars are aware that it was Palestinian oral communities that transmitted these stories and not individuals by themselves. Therefore, many (but not all) of McCormick’s psychological findings are no longer analogous to the Jewish transmitters. This is because oral communities (that have been scientifically studied) show surprising resilience to the aforementioned errors. In fact, scholar Jawaharlal Handoo has rigorously studied oral communities analogous to Jewish oral communities of antiquity and has argued that oral histories are sometimes more reliable than written histories.”
Some of the psychological effects McCormick mentions, such as the Asch effect, only occur with groups, not merely to individuals. More to the point, while some oral traditions seem to be able to preserve their material reliably over a long period of time, other oral traditions do not, and in fact, can be very unreliable and can even encourage falsehoods and embellishments to enter into the material. On these points, see Theodore Weeden’s critique of Kenneth Bailey’s work. There is also an entire issue of “Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus” discussing Richard Bauckham’s work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses which drives home the same points. We don’t know exactly how the material was preserved between the time of Jesus’ death and the writing of the gospels. This doesn’t mean the material was necessarily transmitted in an unreliable way, and yet it also does not mean that was transmitted in a reliable way. However, the fact that we do not know adds a pretty significant factor of doubt about the veracity of the gospels.
“McCormick employs a lot of probability in his argumentation. In fact, on page 115 he uses probability to come to the tentative conclusion that there is a 0.0008 percent chance that the resurrection story is reliable. However, there is major problem with McCormick’s utilization of probability here, namely, he is using the wrong kind of probability. There are two kinds of probability: theoretical and evidential. McCormick utilizes theoretical when he should be utilizing evidential. For instance, let’s say one is involved in a game of poker and a person claims they have received a royal flush. How does one determine whether the individual actually has a royal flush? Do you calculate the theoretical probability which has a 0.00004 percent probability? No, because in theoretical probability it will always be against the odds to receive this hand. Rather, you must go off the evidential probability by asking the individual to show his cards. Thus, you base your conclusion on the evidence and not the theoretical probability. Therefore, McCormick is analyzing the theoretical probability when instead he should be dealing with the evidence firsthand and weighing the plausibility of different hypotheses. But, as we remarked above, he does not do this and thus his argumentation is flawed and fallacious.”
The point that the reviewer makes is logically sound: sometimes a theory with a low theoretical probability (also called “prior probability”) does have a high final probability (the probability of a claim after all of the evidence for and against it is taken into account). What we need to know is this: Does Jakie’s logical point prove problematic for McCormick’s case? No. A claim with a low prior probability needs to have a strong evidential probability in order to end up with a high final probability (all this is logically demonstrated by Bayes’ theorem, see for yourself with the Bayes’ Theorem calculator). How could we get a strong evidential probability for the claim “The early Christian stories of Jesus’ resurrection are true”? What is supposed to be our evidence, the remaining material from the gospels and Paul? But McCormick hasn’t ignored this point, indeed, he spends most of the book discussing the highly problematic and dubious nature of the gospels/Paul, thus meaning that the evidential probability of the resurrection cannot be very strong.
“McCormick continues on his line of faulty reasoning in his seventh chapter which deals with what he calls the Counterevidence Problem. The Counterevidence Problem is that we contain no potential counterevidence to the resurrection stories and thus don’t know if there was any potential evidence that would have negated said stories. McCormick then begins to list hypothetical evidence that, if it had existed, would have refuted the resurrection stories. But, McCormick seems to be oblivious to exactly how unreasonable this argumentation is. We cannot reject a hypothesis or withhold judgement about a hypothesis because we don’t have evidence that would overturn it. If historians employed McCormicks reasoning then they would have to withhold judgement regarding every single historical event in history since they could all be overturned by theoretical counterevidence we don’t have! No, we can only base our conclusions on the evidence we do have and sitting around concocting theoretical forms of counterevidence that we don’t possess is ridiculous.”
This is a total misstatement of McCormick’s point. His point was not merely that “there might be contrary evidence,” rather, his point was that, because of the very biased pro-Christian sources that we have, we would be very unlikely to have counterevidence had it existed. The point McCormick makes can be understood by analogy: suppose that someone forms their political opinions on the basis of listening exclusively to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, without reading any newspapers, watching news programs, or seeing anything that might present a different point of view or a set of facts that contradict these right-wing viewpoints. Such a person cannot make a sound decision because the biased nature of his sources effectively cut him off from having any evidence against extreme right wing viewpoints because he has no way of even checking whether such evidence might exist. Ironically, the reviewer says that McCormick’s reasoning could undercut almost any true theory, but it turns out that not heeding McCormick’s advice could support most false theories. Think about it: if you examined a theory by only looking at sources that were likely to contain nothing but supporting evidence and lack all problematic evidence, the theory might look true even though it isn’t.
I admire the reviewer’s courage to read material that opposes his point of view and to share his thoughts on the subject. I hope that he continues and that we can continue a constructive dialogue.
