- \n
- Arguing about ontology<\/a>\u00a0– on\u00a0Plantinga and Craig’s formulation of the ontological argument,<\/li>\n
- Infinite dreams<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Infinity minus infinity<\/a>\u00a0– on\u00a0aspects of the Kalam cosmological argument,<\/li>\n
- Arguing about risk<\/a> – on Pascal’s wager,<\/li>\n
- Craig’s calamitous cock-up<\/a>,\u00a0Body of Jesus discovered<\/a>, Did the disciples die for their beliefs?<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0Evidence for teleportation<\/a>\u00a0– on\u00a0parts of the argument from the historicity of the resurrection.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So, although I haven’t discovered a mountain of free time, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and write\u00a0a series on\u00a0the\u00a0resurrection. \u00a0Although I had originally planned to tackle arguments such as the fine tuning and moral arguments first (since the argument from the resurrection builds on the others, in the sense of moving from an almost deist god to the specific God of Christianity),\u00a0various considerations have led me to treat the resurrection next. \u00a0Actually,\u00a0it\u00a0seems reasonably fitting to go straight for\u00a0the resurrection as it is the arguably the\u00a0heart of Christianity. \u00a0As the apostle Paul himself said:<\/p>\n
\n
[I]f Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.\u00a0 (1 Corinthians 15:14, NIV)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Although it’s hard to get all<\/em>\u00a0Christians to agree on anything, the resurrection of Jesus is certainly a central pillar in the faith of most believers. \u00a0What’s more, quite a few of my Christian friends have told me that they are Christians because they believe there is good historical evidence for\u00a0the resurrection.<\/p>\n
So the next few posts will be on the resurrection, and I intend to\u00a0structure the series around the modern style of argument made by apologists such as\u00a0William Lane Craig – see for example this post<\/a>\u00a0of Craig’s or this one<\/a> from Gary Habermas. \u00a0You can actually get a\u00a0good introduction to some of the arguments for the resurrection (and skeptical responses\u00a0to them) by watching any of the many debates on the topic, and I highly recommend any of the following (featuring some of the more entertaining and well informed scholars going around):<\/p>\n
- \n
- William Lane Craig vs Bart Ehrman<\/a><\/li>\n
- William Lane Craig vs Richard Carrier<\/a>\u00a0(rather humorously entitled “William Lane Craig destroys Richard Carrier” by the uploader)<\/li>\n
- Mike Licona vs Bart Ehrman<\/a><\/li>\n
- Mike Licona vs Richard Carrier<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The modern\u00a0argument for the resurrection is generally comprised of\u00a0two parts: \u00a0it is argued separately that<\/p>\n
(1) \u00a0<\/strong>certain claims made in the gospels (that Jesus\u00a0was\u00a0crucified, that his tomb was found empty, that the disciples and others\u00a0believed Jesus\u00a0appeared to them\u00a0after his death, and so on) can be established as historical facts, and<\/p>\n
(2) \u00a0<\/strong>these “facts” are best explained by the resurrection.<\/p>\n
This approach is known as the\u00a0Minimal Facts<\/em> approach and is utilised by a number of apologists (Craig, Habermas, Licona, etc). \u00a0I have considered the general validity of such\u00a0an approach in another post<\/a>, but in this series I will tackle both parts of the Minimal Facts argument head on. \u00a0Specifically, I will argue that:<\/p>\n
(1)’ \u00a0<\/strong>there are good reasons to be suspicious of some\u00a0of the proposed “minimal facts”, and<\/p>\n
(2)’ \u00a0<\/strong>even if we grant the proposed “minimal facts”, the resurrection is not the best explanation.<\/p>\n
But this introductory\u00a0post\u00a0does not argue directly against the Minimal Facts argument. \u00a0Rather, it considers what a skeptic\u00a0needs to do to deflect the Minimal Facts argument, or – more to the point – what a skeptic does\u00a0not<\/em> need to do. \u00a0Specifically, I want to take this opportunity to clear up\u00a0a crucial (and far too common) misconception. \u00a0Consider the following words\u00a0from the mouth of William Lane Craig:<\/p>\n
In order to explain that the resurrection is improbable, [a skeptic]\u00a0needs not only to tear down all the evidence for the resurrection, but he needs to erect a positive case of his own in favour of some naturalistic alternatives. \u00a0(William Lane Craig, debate with Bart Ehrman, 2006 – transcript<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I actually hear this kind of claim quite a lot, but it’s simply not true, and it’s very disappointing to hear someone of Craig’s reputation make it. \u00a0But since Craig and others\u00a0do<\/em> make it – all the time\u00a0–\u00a0it’s important to be\u00a0clear about exactly why it’s wrong. \u00a0The problem is this: in order to explain why you think a certain event is unlikely to have\u00a0happened, you don’t have to demonstrate that some other event happened instead. \u00a0You don’t even have to demonstrate\u00a0that another event is more likely to have happened. \u00a0Let me illustrate with a\u00a0couple of\u00a0examples.<\/p>\n
Suppose\u00a0I decide to play a guessing game with my students one day. \u00a0I ask Adam\u00a0to go into another room where he finds\u00a0a huge barrel filled with thousands of marbles each labelled with one of the numbers\u00a01,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0. \u00a0Adam is to pick 20\u00a0marbles at random\u00a0and write the sequence of\u00a0\u00a0labels on a blackboard in the order he draws them from the barrel. \u00a0When he returns, I announce to the class “I claim that\u00a0Adam wrote 00000000000000000000”.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, my students are now questioning my mathematical ability. \u00a0There are 10^20=100,000,000,000,000,000,000, or one hundred quadrillion possible sequences Adam could have written on the board, each of which is just as\u00a0likely as any other – how could I expect to guess correctly? \u00a0My chances of being correct are 0.000000000000000001%. \u00a0I am almost certainly wrong. \u00a0But could my students “erect a positive case” in favour of any of the other 99,999,999,999,999,999,999 possible sequences? \u00a0Certainly not! \u00a0What reason could you possibly give to suggest that 76989331655938885021, for example, is more likely than 00000000000000000000? \u00a0All of the possible sequences are equally likely. \u00a0So, even though such a “positive case” could not possibly be “erected”, my\u00a0claim is still highly<\/em> unlikely to be true. \u00a0The point is not that there is some single alternative sequence\u00a0that is more likely than the claimed one\u00a0– it’s that there are so many other possibilities. \u00a0To assess\u00a0the likelihood\u00a0of my claim, we don’t\u00a0compare the “all zeros” hypothesis to some\u00a0specific\u00a0“sequence X is on the board” hypothesis. \u00a0We compare\u00a0the “all zeros” hypothesis to the “anything other than all zeros” hypothesis.<\/p>\n
Let me stress that I’m not claiming the resurrection is just one of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000\u00a0equally possible explanations for the proposed “minimal facts”. \u00a0I’m simply explaining that one event can be exceedingly improbable even though it’s impossible to argue in favour of any rival event. \u00a0But even more can be said. \u00a0In fact, an event can be exceedingly improbable even if it is overwhelmingly more probable than any other given event. \u00a0Let me explain.<\/p>\n
In the next lecture,\u00a0I decide to play another guessing game with my students, but this time I change the rules a little. \u00a0This time, Brenda is to go into the\u00a0other room where she finds the same\u00a0barrel filled with the same labelled marbles. \u00a0But there is also a coin on the table. \u00a0Brenda’s instructions are as follows. \u00a0Before touching any marbles, she is to toss the coin 20 times. \u00a0If she gets 20 consecutive tails, she is to simply write 00000000000000000000 on the board. \u00a0If she gets any other sequences of heads\/tails, she is to use the marbles to produce a 20 digit sequence\u00a0(just like Adam did) and write this on the board.\u00a0\u00a0When Brenda\u00a0returns, I again announce to the class “I claim that Brenda\u00a0wrote 00000000000000000000”.<\/p>\n
What do we make of this situation? \u00a0What are the odds that I am right? \u00a0As it turns out,\u00a0there is about a 0.000095% chance that the blackboard contains an all zero sequence – worse than one in a million\u00a0[the boring details of the calculation are at the end of the post]. \u00a0So I’m almost certainly wrong. \u00a0Again. \u00a0That small number may sound very unimpressive. \u00a0But appearances\u00a0change a little when you compare it to the odds of some other given sequence – for any other conceivable sequence (76989331655938885021, say), the chance\u00a0that this is the sequence written on the board is\u00a0around 0.00000000000000000099%. \u00a0Again, this doesn’t seem all that meaningful – another tiny number. \u00a0But if you divide 0.000095\u00a0by 0.00000000000000000099, you discover\u00a0that an all zero sequence\u00a0is\u00a0around 95 trillion times more likely than\u00a0any other specific\u00a0sequence. \u00a0(In particular, this blows out of the water any hope that a student might “erect a positive case” in favour of some\u00a0rival sequence.) \u00a0So does this mean I’m\u00a0likely to be right this time? \u00a0Of course not! \u00a0Even though the “all zeros” hypothesis compares extremely\u00a0well to any other specific\u00a0“sequence X is on the board” hypothesis, this is not the appropriate comparison to make. \u00a0As before, we need to compare the “all zeros” hypothesis to the “anything other than all zeros” hypothesis. \u00a0And the “all zeros”\u00a0hypothesis has only a 0.000095%\u00a0chance of being true – worse than one\u00a0in a million – while the “anything other than all zeros” hypothesis has a better than 99.99% chance of being right. \u00a0Even though my prediction\u00a0is a whopping\u00a095\u00a0trillion times\u00a0<\/em>more likely to be true than any other specific prediction, I am\u00a0almost certainly wrong. \u00a0My claim is crushed under the combined\u00a0weight of the alternatives.<\/p>\n
Let me stress that the above examples are not intended to be directly analogous (numerically equivalent) to the question of the resurrection. \u00a0Rather, the stories about coins and marbles, and the ludicrous numbers chosen, are\u00a0simply given to illustrate the fact that\u00a0an event can be exceedingly improbable even if it is more probable than any other given alternative event. \u00a0Even if we could imagine that\u00a0someone\u00a0somehow<\/em>\u00a0demonstrated\u00a0that the resurrection was\u00a0more likely to be true than any other specific explanation of the proposed “minimal facts” (and I should hasten to point out that this is a gigantic\u00a0“if”), this would not be enough to establish the resurrection as probably true. \u00a0It still might or might not be probably true, and this would depend on several other factors, including\u00a0the number of alternatives.<\/p>\n
Let me also stress\u00a0that\u00a0I am not claiming the resurrection can be disproved merely by arguing that there are a huge number of\u00a0alternative explanations for the proposed \u201cminimal facts\u201d. \u00a0As I said above, this post is not part of an argument against the resurrection. \u00a0Its purpose is simply to point out a crucial error in a\u00a0claim\u00a0of several apologists. \u00a0Contrary to the assertions of people like Craig, the skeptic does not have to “erect a positive case … in favour of some naturalistic alternatives”. \u00a0As it happens, I think there are plenty of perfectly plausible naturalistic alternatives that do at least as good a job of explaining the proposed “minimal facts” as the resurrection does (more on this in subsequent posts). \u00a0But I also think it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to pick a single such alternative hypothesis and argue strongly that this is really what happened way back then in the first century.<\/p>\n
But the burden of proof is on the apologist. \u00a0The apologist should not\u00a0demand a skeptic prove\u00a0some specific “non-resurrection”\u00a0hypothesis. \u00a0Rather, the apologist needs to show that the \u201cresurrection\u201d hypothesis is more probable than\u00a0the \u201canything but the resurrection\u201d hypothesis. \u00a0In my opinion, no apologist has ever succeeded in doing\u00a0this, and this series will outline my reasons for coming to this conclusion.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong><\/p>\n
Due to a couple of people objecting that the above examples don’t apply to the resurrection because the “alternative hypotheses” were all equally probable, I’ve posted another example that doesn’t suffer from this unfortunate distraction from the main point (which still stands) – check out Coins, marbles and the resurrection<\/a>.<\/p>\n
- William Lane Craig vs Richard Carrier<\/a>\u00a0(rather humorously entitled “William Lane Craig destroys Richard Carrier” by the uploader)<\/li>\n
- Infinite dreams<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Infinity minus infinity<\/a>\u00a0– on\u00a0aspects of the Kalam cosmological argument,<\/li>\n
![\"Religious\"](\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/reasonablyfaithless\/files\/2014\/10\/jesus-christ-stock-images-hd-stock-images-background-pictures-photos-pictures-image-pc-300x169-175813.jpg\" "\\"Jesus")
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