Our young Baptist preacher, David Stephens, has posted a comment on my “Prove Just Two Claims and I Rest My Case” (August 3, 2013 : scroll down to page 3 of the Comments, the second page of “Older Posts”). Because he states that I am “unaware” of the arguments concerning the Problem of Evil and that he can find in my Blog “no statement of the problem itself or any engagement with the possibility that there could be GOOD REASONS FOR ALLOWING EVIL” (!), I have decided to reprint here the first of the 227 Reflections to be found in my book, “From Illusions to Illumination”, “God Could Care Less ?” (pp. 47-50), as well as a briefer Reflection, “Evil Live” (pp. 222-223).
GOD COULD CARE LESS ?
Another earthquake, another flood, another fire, another war and another gruesome report, in living color, of nations that are dying of hunger. Joseph Heller wondered about it all : ” A man was shot today in the park. Nobody knows why. No one’s in charge.” God, it would seem, couldn’t have cared less.
There are, of course, people like me who do not believe in God. “The only thing that will excuse God for the suffering of an innocent child is the fact that He does not exist.” For Roger Ikor and countless atheists like us, the mystery is that so many people can continue to believe in a benevolent providence in spite of the overwhelming evidence that such a belief is a product of their own wishful thinking. “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality”, wrote Freud, “that it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.”
The believer may react, like the psalmist in the Bible, and call us fools. An eye for an eye, an insult for an insult, and the dialogue of the deaf goes on. Or he may go a step farther and try to win a convert. Thumb-screws being no longer legal in such situations, he will talk about causality and contingency, sunsets and the search for happiness. If all else fails, he will fall back on something like one billion Catholics can’t be wrong. He can handle objections about religious hypocrisy, sectarianism and superstition, but if his potential convert brings up the problem of birth-defects, tidal waves, famine and the meaninglessness of suffering and death, he will usually slip in a cautious “petitio principii”, a begging of the question, and say that God works in mysterious ways, or that trials are sent to test us, or that we are looking at the tapestry of life from the reverse side, and that one day we shall see the meaning of it all. His patient listener may be too polite to say so, but he is thinking that all of this is remarkably similar to that pie in the sky which was his objection in the first place.
The pathetic thing about such sterile arguments is not so much that the atheist gets no valid answers, as that the believer fails to recognize the validity of the atheist’s questions.
For the believer, they say, no proof is needed; for the unbeliever no proof is possible. It is true that many believers do not need proof. God is a given, part of the package of ideals, prejudices and beliefs they grew up with. But it is also true that for the believer as well as for the unbeliever no proof is possible. His reasons for believing in God range from the unquestioning acceptance of an inherited belief, to the need to believe there is Someone in control who can provide protection, fulfillment and purpose if not now at least after death, to some sort of personal experience of transcendence which he has learned to call God. He may be satisfied with his reasons, but none of them is a proof that God exists.
The extraordinary thing is, however, that believers not only believe that God exists, but say they believe in Him, they count on Him. “In God We Trust“, proclaims the American dollar bill. In spite of dungeon, fire and the six o’clock news, they live and die with the conviction that God could indeed care less because He could not care more. As Victor Frankl put it, they can go to the gas-chambers of Auschwitz with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema on their lips. That surely is the ultimate absurdity, evidence of a psychotic blindness to reality. For the believer, however, it is we atheists who have not yet learned to see !
The problem of suffering, caused either by human malice or indifference or by natural disaster, has exercised the minds of thinking men ever since they crawled out of the cave of sub-humanity. The problem was, and is, simple enough for the primitive who peoples his pantheon with despotic divinities. It took a different focus in the tradition that gave birth to monotheism and the myths of Genesis. A good God gives man a Paradise, and if Paradise is lost it is not God’s fault but man’s. God gets angry, but his “just” anger is tempered by an unheard-of mercy. Adam and Eve are punished and they will die, but they are not struck dead on the spot. Cain is exiled, but is given a mark that will protect him. God floods the earth, but Noah and all of us get a second chance.
There may have been in these stories of Genesis a giant leap beyond the idea of gods in other primitive religions, but it is doubtful that many believers have taken any more than a small step since. People still pray for rain to start or stop, still expect God to provide good grades, good jobs, good health, still ask to be saved from accidents, energy crises and atomic annihilation. They still see suffering as a punishment from God. One of the prayers of the venerable Roman Missal, typical of many prayers still in use, asks the Lord to “save us from famine, so that the hearts of men may know that scourges of this kind proceed from thy wrath and cease by thy compassion”. One could fairly ask, with Sigmund Freud, whether mankind has progressed very far from “the ignorant childhood days of the human race”.
There are some, however, whose belief in God is not diminished by either the reality of human suffering or even traditional religions’ anthropomorphic portrayal of God as a dispenser of rewards and punishments. They believe that God punishes no one. They claim to have a larger vision of God and His creation, of man and his history, than either the fundamentalist or the atheist. They do not expect God to protect them from crashes on any street, let alone Wall Street. And they consider it blasphemous to suggest that God is punishing anyone by earthquakes or floods or famine, and even to call such disasters “acts of God”. They insist that they believe in a God who believes in Man, a God who trusts man to the point of leaving him alone in this world, with all the potential to make of it the paradise it has never been. God could have given each product of evolution a guardian angel to guide him through the jungle, across the street, and to the outer reaches of the galaxy. He could have shown us how to exploit, prevent or at least predict every natural cataclysm. He could have provided us with bodies naturally immune to sickness, or at least given us a cure for cancer. He could have decided to interfere by making a tree fall on every mugger in the park, or arranged the weather so that it never rains on weekends except in the sub-Sahara. He could have solved our problems for us. He could have, says the self-styled, enlightened, modern, liberal believer, but He cared too much for us, respected our freedom and intelligence too much to do for us what we can do for ourselves.
The debate will continue as to whether God is “psychologically nothing other than a magnified father ” (Freud), “the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat” (Julian Huxley), or “the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being” (Paul Tillich). But “liberated” believers have to live as though God were not “there”. They do not believe in a God who arbitrarily reserves His blessings for the elect and condemns others to misery, or a God who can be badgered into providing miracles for the chosen few. God, they say, is not going to stop us blowing ourselves up, anymore than He stopped us blowing Hiroshima up. He is not going to give us peace in our time, nor feed Africa, nor prevent the death of innocent children (or even guilty adults). That is our business, not His.
One has to admire such valiant, last-ditch attempts to make sense of continuing to believe in an apparently indifferent God, whose loving care is now claimed to be evidenced precisely by His not “interfering”. There is a simpler explanation. God did not create us. We created Him.
EVIL – LIVE
Evil has always been a problem – for those like most of us, who, in varying degrees, have had to endure it – but especially for believers. One of the gems of the Old Testament, the Book of Job, famously addresses the question of its origin and why God would permit it. Atheists know, of course, that the question is meaningless, given the non-existence of God. But we can appreciate the challenge which evil represents for those whose belief in God forces them to wonder why He allows it. The world’s literature is full of the Job question, and believers’ answers – ranging from “we deserve what we get”, to “trials are sent to test us”, to “the separation of the sheep from the goats and the men from the boys” (or “answers” to that effect) – are, to be kind, simply pathetic.
But it is one thing to read about evil and its horrific dimensions in the history of mankind; it is quite another to experience it personally, or even vicariously, through the media, often in real time : evil live. The two words happen to be palindromes. But the reality is a frightening revelation of our vulnerability not only to the destructive foibles of nature but especially to the malice, cruelty and viciousness of our fellow human beings.
It is no wonder that Jesus taught us to pray to His and our Father (who art, He thought, in Heaven) to deliver us from omnipresent, multiform, sometimes intolerable evil.
There are no easy answers here, unless you accept the reasons Theology offers. Evolution produced animals that devour others for their own survival. Nothing particularly evil, or even cruel, here. But we humans go further. We kill, rob, rape, torture our own kind for selfish, venal, territorial but also for the most incomprehensible, meaningless, irrational of pretexts.
Believers, in their certitude, think they have found an explanation for evil. Atheists will continue to search for the truth. All of us, however, whatever our differences, have a shared interest in containing, limiting, eliminating as far as we can, the evil that is part of our human condition. Some of us, atheists and non-atheists, will even strive to make this imperfect product of natural selection a better, safer, more human place to live in.
P.S. (August 31, 2017) : The devastation wrought by Harvey in Houston and beyond, which currently fills our TV screens in real time – and the floods raging in India, Nepal and Bangladesh which have had 40 times as many fatal victims – is a poignant and pertinent reminder that this discussion never was merely academic. Tragedies like these may be the closest we will ever get to confirming that evil is real and that “God” is not.
D E L E N D A R E L I G I O
P.S. (March 24, 2020) The coronavirus, Covid-19, has reached already 150 countries, and the death-toll is increasing, sometimes doubling from one day to the next. God, as usual, has nothing to do with it, and praying is the most extreme example of brain-dead credulity ever practised by Homo Sapiens. I hope to be around a while longer, though at 83 with a heart condition, I am on the endangered list. I will do my best to keep on blogging. I used to say that if the gators don’t getcha, the skeeters will. Now the race is in danger of decimation if not extinction. Time will tell, or if you prefer another cliché, that of the Tweeter-in-Chief : “We’ll just have to wait and see”. Carpe diem, my friends.
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Blind Faith: Blind Folly 
Very well written, Frank! I do look forward to reading your book when it arrived. You are eloquent and thoughtful. I do wonder something that struck me at the end of your post.
You say that evil is real and God is not. I’m curious as to why you think evil is anything other than a human construct, given atheism. Supposing that there is no God, how would we come to the conclusion that a flood is evil? Or that the rape you speak of is morally different from the forcible copulation sometimes exhibited by sharks? Or that cannibalism is morally different than when a troop of chimpanzees devours the young of rival troops? Given atheism, would it not be true that the concept of evil is no more than a biological spinoff of evolution? That what we say is “evil” is really just “disadvantageous” to our particular species? Why do you think that it is really objectively morally “wrong” for these things to happen? Even Richard Dawkins has to admit that there is, at bottom, “no evil, no good.” Is he wrong?
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So now that we have dismissed the Problem of Evil as a “human construct”, let’s move on to the Origin of Morality. Then we can tackle the Existence of an Immortal Soul, the Inerrancy of the Gospels, the Divinity of Christ and Life after Death. As for those dozens of loved ones for whom families are grieving in Texas, and the 1200 drowned in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, not to worry – God in His Goodness saved them from committing the sins that would have made Him plunge them into His Hell. Can’t you see why I chose my mantra “Delenda – or at least Ridenda – Religio” ?
I hope, David, that in sending you my book I have not cast pearls before swine. Just for a moment, allow your certitudes to be questioned, let the light in. It would be hard if you had been born into Islam but no one is going to decapitate you if you allow yourself to recognize that you have been brainwashed from the git-go. Your folks won’t like it, but you can give yourself a life NOW, without wasting the decades I did. Pax et bonum, mate. I won’t say “Goodbye”, because it means “God be with you”. That’s your problem : you think He is.
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Frank, I feel like you’re confusing the strands in the web of Christian belief. The immortality of the soul and life after death are not central tenets, but are strands on the sides, held up by the doctrine of inerrancy. Inerrancy is in turn held up by the authority of Christ, which is in turn held up by His resurrection. The peripheral tenets ought not to be construed as central. Really, if you could prove the Bible was not inspired, and rife with errors, the case for Christianity would stand on the evidence for the resurrection, which does not presuppose inspiration. What you, as an atheist, ought to do is aim for the core of Christian belief: the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without these, my faith would be in vain. Without inerrancy, however, I could still be a reasonable Christian, albeit a more cautious one. Again, the case for the center of Christian belief does not presuppose life after death or inspiration. These presuppose the existence of God and the resurrection. These are what ought to target. Grapple with the premises of the classical arguments, and you’ll be heading towards a solid, aggressive atheism. As it stands, most Christians I know would not feel particularly threatened by your attack on inerrancy, since the case for inerrancy rests on strong grounds that you’re not dealing with head on.
You haven’t at all answered my question. Why, on atheism, is a flood evil? I believe that given God’s existence, there could be good reasons for allowing it, namely, the eternal salvation of many. Absent God, I can’t think of why rape and torture pose any philosophical problem. Why are these objectively wrong, as opposed to b merely disadvantageous to species?
Forgive me, Frank, if you’ve answered this elsewhere. I genuinely, truly do not know what atheist would say to these questions, and I am sincerely wanting your input, as a person of differing beliefs. Consider me as a seeker. What answers do you have for these? I know what answers Christianity provides? What answers are available on atheism? Where does real, objective evil come from?
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Delusion abounds. the same old story… If it weren’t for belief in resurrection and an afterlife monotheism would die overnight! GROG
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Thank you, David, for your advice in “heading me towards a solid, aggressive atheism”. Rather than continue trying to communicate with such an expert, allow me to give you the advice the angel gave St Augustine on the beach : “Tolle, lege” – “Take and read” my book. I think you’ll find it already solid and aggressive enough. I have been called “the sledgehammer of believers”.
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Fair enough, Frank! I will wait until I can read your book. It’s like pulling teeth to get a straight answer from you on your blog. I truly hope, as a genuinely interested party, that there is a solid answer in your book about where you think objective evil originates or why you think it is impossible that a world with evil is a world where more people freely find eternal life. Those are my big, unanswered questions, and I’m beginning to think that there is no answer from atheism at all regarding about these things. Surely the sledgehammer of believers would have a ready answer. I suppose you are going to make me wait to read them though, which is your prerogative. You may wish to inform believers on the brink that they will not encounter the answers here, however.
I apologize if I came across as smug. I’m not claiming expertise in atheism. I can’t really pin you down on any solid answers anyway, so I don’t really know what the central tenet of atheism would even be, at this point. I was actually showing you my hand, as a theist, giving up my strategy, as it were. The resurrection of Christ is the queen of my faith, as it were, supported by the rooks and bishops of sound contemporary historical, philosophical, and scientific reasoning. The king, of course, is the witness of the Holy Spirit. It is this group of powerful pieces that supports the smaller pieces on the periphery, like the pawns of inerrancy and life after death. By taking out these pieces, my strong theism isn’t really affected, and I have ample support to reinforce them based on the central tenets.
My reasoning would run this way, for example:
1. Whatever the Scriptures is true.
2. The Scriptures say there is life after death.
3. Therefore, there is life after death.
Of course, you will ask me to support the first premise. I would support it thus:
1. Whatever Christ says is true.
2. Christ said that the Scriptures are true.
3. Therefore, whatever the Scriptures say is true.
Of course you will now ask me to support the first premise again, to which I will say that Christ’s ultimate authority in spiritual matters was vindicated in His resurrection from the dead. You see how premises go back to this? I guess I was trying to save time by just cutting to the chase.
In any case, taking out peripheral things like life after death is hardly taking a sledgehammer to theism. There are prominent Christian theists who don’t even believe humans have souls, like Peter Van Inwagen. Again, even if you could demonstrate that the Bible was totally human in origin, I would have good reasons for thinking God exists and that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, and I would still be a Christian on those bases. That’s all I’m trying to say! Sorry again if I offended you.
I will wait to read your book, and anticipate great answers to my questions!
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O M GGGGGGGGGGGG !! Quod scripsi, scripsi.
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I know that Frank is well able to defend his cause – so I’ll be very brief.
I imagine that if the Bible is inspired it should be free of any error/s. We all know that that is not the case for either the Old or New Testaments.
David’s case rests, by his own admission, on his certitude that God exists which is founded in his personal experience of God thanks to the intermediation of the Spirit.
David might be happy with this but it leaves me absolutely cold. You cannot prove the existence of God be the mere use of words. David’s case for the existence of God is not more likely than not (hardly a good or adequate basis given the quite extraordinary nature of the “God Hypothesis” which is rooted in our acknowledged current lack of understanding of the origins of the Universe).
David further posits as an unquestionable certitude the Resurrection of Christ – a matter about which argument has raged and will continue to rage without resolution. In any event the existence of God, despite the fact that it is unproved, does not necessarily give rise to the saga of the birth, death and resurrection of Christ – that saga being rooted in the Bible narrative, the claimed inspiration of which again being beyond either proof or even adequate justification.
The standard of proof required here must be even more stringent than the criminal law standard of “beyond reasonable doubt”.
I repeat, the claims are so extraordinary that they should be proved by their proponents beyond any including unreasonable doubt.
I rest my case.
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Amen !
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I should add that my contribution above relates tangentially to the problem of evil in so far as David seems happy to accept that extraordinary hardship, suffering and deprivation might have good reasons in “God’s” scheme of things – I presume that as David is unable to articulate any obvious “good ” reasons he must be prepared that his “God” might not have a good reason.
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1. Again, inerrancy can fall by wayside if you wish. I do not believe in God or Jesus because the Bible is inerrant.
2. My appeal to the witness of the Spirit is to demonstrate that I personally have warrant for my beliefs, like I’m warranted believing my sensory experience. I would not attempt prove that God exists to you on that basis.
3. I do not consider the First Cause argument to be remotely enough for Christian theism. There are a plethora of arguments I could pull from. I can’t imagine how long that would take though, given Frank’s unwillingness to tackle even one premise of the First Cause argument with any reasons or evidence.
4. The case for the resurrection of Christ does not rest on inerrancy, but historical criticism of the NT text. I could go into it, but I don’t think we’re close to being ready for that here.
5. What justification is there for thinking that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? If a hypothesis is the best explanation of the facts, why abandon it just because it is surprising?
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6. I have articulated several good reasons that God might allow evil. I posit that a world filled with moral and natural evil is a world where the most people freely find Christ, and the most people experience eternal bliss. That’s not a good reason? The question is not if I can prove what reason God has. The question is whether it’s possible that God has good reasons. I can’t think of any reason why that’s not possible. Can you? That’s what I’m genuinely trying to figure out. Why should I think that it’s impossible for there to be good reasons for the allowance of evil?
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Now that you have received and are reading my book, I feel you will appreciate a little more why I am an atheist. Having reread all your comments above, I feel it fair to say that your faith rests on two foundations. The first is, of course, your unquestionable “personal revelation”. Such phenomena are well-known to psychologists (and psychiatrists : I am thinking of Joan of Arc and Jim Jones). You, like these renowned energumens, have built an impregnable fortress around yourself. Or, if you prefer, you are hermetically sealed in an impenetrable bubble against which the most compelling arguments simply bounce off. But there is a second foundation for your faith. It is the Resurrection of Christ, recorded in the Gospels and amply exploited by Paul of Tarsus, who like you had a mystical experience of revelation on his way to Damascus. If I ask you how do you know that the Resurrection really happened, you would reply, as you have in the comments above, NOT because of the supposed inerrancy of the Bible, but for a different reason :”The Resurrection of Christ does not rest on inerrancy but historical criticism of the NT text.” Having spent a considerable amount of time in my doctoral studies of Sacred Scripture on such analysis, I am quite familiar with the subject. But at the end of the day (as Brits infuriatingly say), the only reason people take seriously the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, is the Gospel testimony of “witnesses”, who – post-factum – are said to have discovered an empty tomb, or met the Risen Christ on the way to Emmaüs. But why should we believe what we read in the New Testament ? There is no objective evidence for its claims, including Christ’s “miracles”. When you say that “evidence of the Resurrection does not suppose inspiration”, you suggest that scholars have found such evidence in … the text ! But why believe the text, unless it is indeed the word of God and therefore inerrant ?. You claim to have “good reasons for thinking that God exists and that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead” – “even if the Bible was totally human in origin” ! It is time, David, that you let us into the secret you alone seem to possess.
You suggest that immortality, life after death, like inerrancy, is a “peripheral tenet”. For Heaven’s sake (!), David, don’t say that at a funeral . . .
A final word on the Problem of Evil. You glibly suggest that evil and suffering are permitted by God so that “more people find eternal life” ! Once again, Reverend, don’t say anything like that in Texas, Florida and other United States where in spite of your greenback’s act of faith, people may well wonder why they should say “In God we Trust”.
Frank
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G’day Frank!
No, I haven’t “thrown in the towel,” as you say. To be honest, I was just very disappointed in your last email; I’m just not sure there is much more that can be said. You frankly completely missed what I was saying at almost every point. For example, you *still* gave none of your overwhelming evidence for the wishful origin of religious belief, despite continuing to claim that you have some. Do you have evidence or not? If you do, I’m only asking that you share it. If you don’t, you shouldn’t say that you do. You also argue that God, if He exists, either would not or could not allow evil for any reason. I’m only trying to figure out how you come to that conclusion. What’s the reasoning supposed to be? But again, I’m having major doubts in your ability to understand the dialectic here, which is draining the potential for meaningful discussion…
Let me reiterate at this point that I do not offer my spiritual experience as an argument for my theism. My experience of God is sufficient for me to have *warranted* belief, which is what kicked this whole discussion off, if you remember. You were making the claim that theism is not *warranted.* However, if I have an experience of God, I am fully within my rational rights to believe the deliverances of my experience until I have good reason to think otherwise. Now, I also find that the particular beliefs instilled in me by this experience are indeed supported by good reasons, which gives me more confidence. So I’m not trying to convince you that God exists because I experience Him; not at all. I’m just trying to say that my experience gives me, personally, good *reason* to believe in Him, even absent any argument for His existence. In other words, I’m not being silly to believe in what I consistently perceive to be true, and I consistently perceive God to be extant in my life. Why should I doubt it? You might say, “You should doubt it because the beliefs that it produces in you are false.” Then we would be getting somewhere, and you could try to make your case that my beliefs are false. (Which shouldn’t be too hard, given the “overwhelming evidence” you apparently have tucked away somewhere that I actually believe in God because I want Him to exist… Anytime you want to bring that out would be helpful!)
As for the gospel accounts, your question betrays either a serious and unjustified bias or unfamiliarity with contemporary historical methodology. Maybe both. You ask, “Why believe the text, unless it is indeed the word of God and therefore inerrant?” No historian I know of ever asks this question when coming to any text. Why is such a high burden placed on these documents? I don’t think the gospels even claim to be divinely inspired, so why make them pass such a test? When we read the ancient biographies of say, Alexander the Great, nobody asks for evidence that they are inerrant documents before beginning to use them. The same goes for the biographies of, say, Caesar. We don’t think those need to be of divine origin before they can be used for historical study. Rather, we cautiously approach these texts, expecting there to be imbellishment, error, and bias to sift through before arriving at a likely historical core from the text which we then put into history books. Secular NT historians and Jesus scholars use precisely the same methodology for the NT text. Why shouldn’t they? When we do such a critical study of the text, it reveals a historical core of events surrounding the death and burial of Jesus of Nazareth that are widely accepted by even secular Jesus historians today. The Christian claim is that the best explanation of these facts is that Jesus was divinely raised from the dead. No comparably good explanation has ever been produced. I’m happy to go into this, but you’ll need to give me permission to post a lengthy comment. It can’t be done in three paragraphs. I’ll move ahead with your permission.
The Christian argument would then follow that if Jesus actually rose from the dead, that would radically vindicate His claims to knowledge of spiritual truths, far more than any other religious figure. And if Jesus claimed that Yahweh was the true God and that the Scriptures were reliable, then we have a good basis for the other doctrines of Christianity as put forth in those Scriptures. Indeed, if Christ substantiated His teaching by rising from the dead, we’d have it on the best authority possible that Yahweh is the only true God and that we can be saved through the sacrifice of His Son. Again, I can go into more details about this, but it would take a lengthy comment.
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David, you are saying to yourself : “Poor Frank ! He just doesn’t get it !” I am obliged to say the same thing about you, for the following reasons :
1. You want and expect me to offer evidence for the “wishful origin of religious belief”. Look around you : all those billions of people who – if I may imitate your debatable grammar – “absent” any solid reasons let alone proof for believing in God or life after death, believe in both. The only reason they do is that it seems reasonable to them that Someone must have created the world and that S/He would reward the good and punish the wicked if not now at least in a life after death. They would like this to be true, and when some preacher tells them that it is, they accept and share his perhaps sincere, but wishful, unfounded thinking. (In a minute you’ll be telling me that both the preacher, the shepherd, and his flock of sheep, believe because the Resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact. We’ll get to that below.)
2. God is supposed to be our loving Father. Any but a despicable father, who could prevent the suffering and death of his children, would do so. It is pathetic – and for a believer surely blasphemous – to suggest that though S/He could, God – who is Love – prefers to let Harvey, Irma and their current brothers and sisters put millions into harm’s way and wreak havoc, massive loss of life and devastating destruction, for which He must be excused for the reason you are forced to invent, that “more people find eternal life” !
3. You play down the power of your “spiritual experience” as “an argument for (your) theism”. Yet you admit it … “warrants” your belief : “(your) experience gives (you) personally good reason to believe in Him”. You can’t have it both ways, mate.
4. You claim to be indifferent to the divine inspiration and therefore the inerrancy of the Gospels, which you naïvely consider to be factual accounts of real history, which only benighted fundamentalists believe. Further, you insult my intelligence in telling me that Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” or other ancient historical texts do not “need to be of divine origin before they can be used for historical study” (you are not, dear David, talking to a mentally retarded child). The credibility of such texts, different from those of Greek and Roman mythology, is confirmed by other accounts and historical artefacts. However, when documents, ancient or modern, present miraculous events as historical, rational people recognize them as fiction, not history. Appealing to the claim that thousands supposedly recognized things Jesus reportedly did, as miracles, is as devoid of cogency as the “miracles” themselves. There is NO “historical core of events surrounding the death and burial” (and, I must add, a fortiori, the Resurrection) “of Jesus of Nazareth”. The death and burial may have been real, but you still have to prove that “the Christian claim is that the best explanation of these facts (?) is that Jesus was divinely raised from the dead.”. In Logic 101 this is called a “petitio principii”, a “begging of the question”.
David, I’ll give you one more chance to have another, final crack at justifying your belief in God and the Resurrection (let’s abandon any further reference to your “personal experience” … ). Within limits, it could even be a “lengthy comment”. It would be hard for me to be fairer or more patient than that. .
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Frank, of course I will be happy to explain why I find the case for the resurrection convincing. But this is *not* the same as convincing you. I doubt you will find anything I say compelling; but then again, nothing you’ve said has been particularly compelling to me. We will just have to live with that. So I state at the outset that this post is for other readers who may be interested. Also, this post is devoted solely to the resurrection, so it will not deal with your numbered points above. After that, I will probably be asked to leave off commenting further, so I will try to be thorough, and leave it for others to read over.
First, what follows is *not* my personal methodology for studying the NT. This is how NT historians and critics operate. People who are not theists, and even people who soundly deny the resurrection or any miracles at all, still work through the gospels in this fashion. This is simply the methodology that historians use to look at ancient texts, and the it can be found in any secular textbook on NT historical studies.
Now, let’s keep in mind that during the life of the apostles, there was not a “New Testament,” as we have it today. Rather, there were simply sources floating around about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, letters to and from churches, apocalypses, and so forth. It wasn’t like some Christians got together and decided to create a “divine book” and then wrote the NT. The NT we have today is just a collection of very old documents and letters, translated, and often with footnotes and commentary, depending on your version. The documents weren’t collected into a single volume until centuries after Christ.
Now when historians come to an ancient text that claims to report certain historical events, they recognize that there may well be bias, imbellishment, or error involved. So they have certain criteria by which they measure the relative probability of a particular event’s being historical. These include things like *early testimony,* *independent attestation,* *the criterion of dissimilarity,* *lack of legendary imbellishmen,* or *the criterion of embarrassment.* The earlier a source is, or the closer a source is to the actual events in question, the greater the weight that is given to it in historical study. Likewise, if a particular event is attested in multiple, independent sources, then the likelihood of its being historical is considered to be higher. Also, if an event shows dissimilarity to accepted beliefs at the time of the author or to the beliefs of the author himself, then it is less likely to be the result of bias, and more likely to be historical. If the source shows little of the legendary characteristics that show up in later sources, the likelihood of its historicity is increased. Finally, if the event would have been embarrassing to the cause of the author, then it is also more likely to be historical. None of these can *prove* an event is historical, but sources that meet these criteria go into the history books because they are *likely* to be historical, especially relative to sources which do not meet these criteria, and we teach them in schools as historical.
The most ancient extant sources about the life of Jesus of Nazareth happen to be the four gospels and some of the writings of Paul. Not only do the gospel collection and the Pauline writings constitute early and independent attestation in themselves, but historians and NT source critics have gone a step farther. Source criticism seeks to uncover the sources that the gospel writers themselves used in crafting their works, as well as the literary sources that lay behind Paul’s writings, if any. What they find is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke share a likely common source that is earlier than any of them; Matthew and Luke share another common source, and John uses yet another. Luke claims to use sources not used by the other gospel writers, and Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians evidences a source not used by any gospel writers when he quotes an early outline of the historical events about Jesus. The creed used by Paul has been estimated by some historians to date within as few as five years after the events in question. So even the ancient documents in the NT, which are already closer to the events in question than almost any other ancient document in existence, utilize *more* ancient sources which independently outline the same historical core of events. The great antiquity of the sources lessens the potential for legendary imbellishment, which often takes decades or centuries to accumulate.
Of course, there are also plenty of other sources about Christ outside of the NT. Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus, and even gives information about his brother James that is not found in the NT. Roman historian Tacitus mentions Jesus’s death, and the Syrian writer Mara bar Serapion likely mentions Jesus of Nazareth as well. There is reference to Jesus in the Jewish Talmud, and in a host of other ancient Christian sources that are extra-biblical. However, none of these are as early as the gospel accounts and the writings of Paul.
So what is the historical core behind the Jesus accounts?
1. Jesus of Nazareth was buried in a tomb after His crucifixion.
This fact is multiply attested by the very old pre-Markan source and the very old pre-Pauline source, as well as fitting the criterion of embarrassment since Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, the group that killed Jesus, and so is unlikely to be a Christian invention. It would not be likely that Christians would invent a case where the only one to care for Jesus’s body was one of his enemies. One Cambridge professor noted that the tomb-burial of Christ is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”
2. The tomb was found empty some days later by a group of Jesus’s women followers.
This is independently attested by both the pre-Markan source and the pre-Pauline source and fits the criterion of embarrassment as well, since the testimony of women was considered of almost no worth in those days. Also, if we take out the angelic vision of the women, we are left with the simple story of a group of women who go to anoint the body of Christ, find the tomb empty, and flee confused. This lacks any of the legendary imbellishment of later, spurious accounts. (In such accounts, Christ comes from the tomb with thunder and lightning, reaching to the clouds, and followed by a cross that can speak.) The early polemic against the Christian movement also points to the empty tomb; the Jewish leaders remarked, “The disciples stole his body.” That the earliest counter-arguments to the resurrection grant the empty tomb means the empty tomb’s historicity is favorably increased. Austrian NT historian Jacob Kremer writes, “By far, most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”
3. After his tomb was found empty, several of Jesus’s followers had experiences where they witnessed Jesus alive.
The appearances of Jesus to his followers are independently attested across all of the earliest sources. The appearance to Peter is attested by Luke and Paul, and the appearance to the twelve is attested by Luke and John. Appearances in Galilee and to the women are independently attested by the Markan, Matthean, and Johannine sources. Paul’s statements about the appearances list several eyewitnesses who were alive at the time Paul wrote. James, Jesus’s own brother, came to be convinced that Jesus was the Lord from a resurrection experience that is attested by Paul. One of the leading historians and critics of the resurrection, who has argued vehemently *against* the resurrection, Gert Ludemann, has said, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”
4. The apostles came to believe strongly that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead despite having every predisposition to the contrary.
This fits the criterion of dissimilarity. Not only did the Jewish conception of Messiah preclude any possibility of the Messiah dying, much less by crucifixion, which was considered a curse of God (Deut. 21:23), but the very idea of bodily resurrection, was for the Jew, completely an issue for the end of the world. In Jewish thought, nobody could be raised from the dead to glory and immortality until the end of the world, when everybody would be raised. Contrary to all Jewish thought, however, the experiences of these men led them to believe that Christ had actually received his glorious resurrection before the end of the world and before everyone else, and that he was the Messiah despite his humiliating death. Some powerful experience has to ground the reversal of the cultural-religio-historical background of these men.
You may not agree with these facts, but then you’d be in the extreme minority. You’re more than welcome to be in the minority, of course, but the fact remains that there is a general consensus in historical research today. These four basic facts constitute the historical core which is well-established by even secular Jesus historians. By far, the majority of NT scholars today, believers and unbelievers alike, hold to these facts. What they differ on is the explanation of the data. This is the reason for the multiple hypotheses about what happened after Jesus’s death, such as the hallucination theory, or the swoon theory. These theories all try to explain the burial of Christ, the empty tomb, the visions of Christ, and the conviction of the disciples that he had been raised to glory and immortality.
Some suggest, for example, that Jesus did not actually die, but survived crucifixion, revived in the tomb, rolled away the stone and showed himself to his disciples. Others have hypothesized that the disciples did indeed steal the body and then all had hallucinations of Christ. I’ve heard of one historian who hypothesized that Christ had a long-lost twin brother that stole the body and showed himself to the disciples to start his own movement.
Once a pool of viable explanations for a set of data is established, historians use several criteria to determine which explanation is more plausible. C. B. McCullough wrote a book entitled Justifying Historical Descriptions, which details historical methodology for determining which historical theories are likely to be true when recreating the past. These criteria are used across historical disciplines, and are by no means utilized only by NT scholars. The criteria are:
1. Explanatory scope: How much of the data is explained by the hypothesis?
2. Explanatory power: How adept is the theory at accounting for the data?
3. Plausibility: Does it fit with the historical context and setting of the events?
4. Lack of ad-hoc reasoning: Does the hypothesis avoid unwarranted assumptions?
5. Accord with accepted beliefs: Does it fit with current knowledge about the subject?
6. Plausibility over rival hypotheses: Is it the best viable explanation based on these?
When you put these hypotheses to the rigors of historical justification using these criteria, most of them fall woefully short. The hallucination hypothesis does not explain the empty tomb, unless the added assumption is made that the disciples stole the body. But if the disciples stole the body, they could not possibly come to believe that Jesus had been risen bodily. Any Jew receiving a hallucination of Christ would maybe have come to believe he was being granted a vision of Christ glorified in heaven, as was acceptable Jewish belief at the time, especially if he had the body of the man with him. Unless the hallucination involved real physical contact, it is not a plausible explanation of the data. It is also not plausible that all parties were in a psychological state to receive similar hallucinations, since the people who received them range from women followers of Jesus, to staunch religious opponents such as Paul, to unbelieving family members like James. No account can be given for the diversity of experiences.
The swoon theory denies perhaps the single most commonly accepted belief about Christ: that he died. Christ’s death on the cross at the hands of Roman and Jewish leaders is easily the best-attested fact about him, and the assumptions needed to keep Christ medically alive after being crucified and speared are far too great to sustain reasonable belief. It also does not explain the conviction of the disciples that Christ had risen to immortality since Christ obviously would have died later.
By contrast the hypothesis “God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead” meets all criteria. It explains all of the commonly accepted facts about Jesus, and why these events took place. It is in keeping with Jesus’s radical claims to divinity and his own prediction about his death and resurrection. It only requires the additional assumption that God exists, which is plausible for other reasons. Unless one has a predisposition against supernatural explanations, the resurrection hypothesis is by far the best based on contemporary historical methodology. To deny a supernatural explanation of the facts is to consign oneself to an explanation that will not fit the data, which, of course, you are free to do. I, for one, feel quite at liberty to follow the best explanation to its conclusion.
Again, I highly doubt you will find much of this compelling, despite the fact that, as I said, the overwhelming majority of scholars hold to these facts. If you *do* find it compelling, the challenge for you would be to put forth some alternative hypothesis that explains the facts in a way consistent with sound methodology in a way that rivals the resurrection. Until such a time, we Christians sit comfortably in line with the most-accepted understanding of Jesus’s history, and are happy to do so. Again, I’m doubtful any of this would be remotely convincing to you, however, given the rather disappointing flow of discussion we’ve had so far.
I appreciate the opportunity to put this forth, and I hope that it is helpful to someone. I know we haven’t even really gotten to any arguments for God’s existence, but perhaps you will come across a good formulation of those arguments elsewhere, and you can deal with them separately.
All the best,
David
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Instead of responding to my four points, you unfortunately chose to chicken out by delivering a prepared if not plagiarized discourse, intended to establish the probability of the “fact” of Jesus’ Resurrection, which ends up making it, in the words of Gert Ludemann whom you quote, “historically CERTAIN” ! But even the hypothesis of probability is severely put into question by authors like Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their “The Jesus Mysteries”, declared by the Daily Telegraph “Book of the Year” in 1999. I refer you to the book – or, to make it easier for you – to my post of November 1, 2016 : “What if the Jesus-Story Were a Rehash of More Ancient Myths ?”. (You accuse me of not keeping up with the literature, but here’s proof that my thinking is not as out-of-date as you unjustly and rashly suggest.) I do not expect either the book or my post to shake your certitudes, but readers of this Blog have already been given reasons to doubt you purported demonstration.
Thus, David, we part ways, unconvinced of each other’s arguments. Don’t take it too harshly, but here is my “in cauda venenum” : Keep the faith, mate. I don’t need it.
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Thanks again, Frank, for giving me some space to talk here on your blog. It’s been a pleasure.
Your comment reminded me of something, however. I do need to mention that everything I just said is indeed largely pulled from another source, which I ought to have cited. My apologies. I neglected to do so in my haste to get my post up quickly. You’ll forgive me for an unintentional failure to quote. If any reader would like to see more discussion on this topic, or look more closely at the source from which I gathered most, if not all, of the preceding post, I direct them to reasonablefaith.org, where you can search “resurrection” to be taken to some essays or dialogues about this, or simply peruse the site looking for information about a wealth of Christian doctrine and thinking. I urge you to visit it as well, Frank, and spend some time digesting some of the material.
Also, check out some of the scholarly reviews of your suggested book. I’m content that I’m on safer grounds without it.
As I said before, thanks for the space and the time!
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Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
I am not about to get into an extended exchange (certainly pointless if my reading of the dialogue, if such it be, between Frank and David is correct).
I do not believe there are adequate or sufficient grounds for belief in God. The “God Hypothesis” as an explanation for the existence of the Universe (including life within that universe) is unconvincing simply because it does nothing to resolve any of the admitted absence of knowledge about the origin of the Universe (and life). Modern science points us towards a “singularity” about which it is currently unable to tell us anything meaningful – and perhaps that will remain the case. Theists tell us that “God” is a non-material entity that existed before space and time existed (for reasons best known to them they refer to this non-material entity as He, Father). They then claim that at some point in non-existent time (the logic here escapes me) Space and Time (the Universe) began to exist – and further that the non-material entity existing outside of space and time caused this to happen. In support of their contention they offer not one shred of evidence. Their case seems to rest on the proposition that the non-material entity pre-existing outside of space and time “must” have caused the creation or beginning of space and time and life. This argument or explanation does not advance in any way our understanding of the origins of the Universe. I am not proposing an alternative hypothesis – I don’t believe I am obliged to do so. I am content to accept that the “mystery” surrounding the origins of the Universe might remain unanswered. But the “God Hypothesis” does not tell me anything intelligible.
All the above is by way of introduction to a more brief comment on the issue being thrashed out in the most recent comments – arising from the post’s original concern with the Problem of Evil.
David is a committed theist, which is his right, who further believes in the Christian Redemption narrative which encompasses the Resurrection story which was discussed at length most recently.
I have stated that I do not believe the “God Hypothesis”. The Redemption narrative is a further stretch of credulity. It relies on several propositions
. “God” created the world.
. “God” created human life.
. God’s creation offended “Him” in some way so grievously that in the absence of Redemption it (His creation) should suffer damnation and punishment for all eternity.
. To appease Him, His Son, Jesus Christ, who is also God, should be born as a real human being and should suffer and die and rise from the dead in expiation of the transgression that so offended His Father.
I have refrained, with some difficulty I must admit, from interpolating critical exclamations in the above synopsis. But really ! Is this seriously offered as a credible theory about an all powerful creator God, who created us in His own image and so loves us that He wants the blood-sacrifice of His Son – and if one had the temerity to dispute this one can expect suffering and damnation in Hell’s fires for all eternity ?
It doesn’t strike me as a credible story in any of its aspects.
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Thanks guys for attempting to shatter the shield of delusional faith! Once confirmed by the believing brain, God cannot be dislodged! GROG
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