Ed Feser continues to argue for the scientific and rational basis of religion:
If you really think that denying that religion is “unscientific” amounts to endorsing lame exercises in pop apologetics like the Templeton prayer experiment, then I’m afraid you’re simply proving my point. That you focus on such easy targets — here and in your other writings on this subject — seems to me pretty strong evidence that you know nothing about serious arguments for religion.
Readers of Secular Right still await Mr. Feser’s proposal for a “serious” “scientific” test for religion. We would like to know on what “scientific” basis he would have potential believers decide whether to attach themselves to Mormonism, say, rather than to Islam or to Christianity. He claims that only someone “smugly unreflective and dogmatic” would say that such decisions rest on “blind faith.”
So let’s move beyond “blind faith.” Unfortunately, the runic tablets read by Joseph Smith with his magic spectacles have been transported back up to heaven, so we are unable to subject them to the usual tests for historical authenticity. But we can at least investigate the claims of those golden tablets, such as that the United States was populated by the lost tribes of Israel. If an archeological investigation determines absolutely no basis for such a revelation, will Mr. Feser declare it a delusion if not a fraud? Or does he have in mind a different kind of science that is more appropriate to religious claims?
Perhaps I am being crudely materialistic. I await any other objective, rational test that will allow me to distinguish between the truth claims of various religions, and that will be accepted by their adherents, who, according to Mr. Feser need nothing as crude as ‘blind faith” to attach themselves to this and not that religion.
What Mr. Feser calls “easy targets” are simply the day-to-day claims made by the religious and by religious leaders. Somehow, it is viewed as impolite and “ignorant” to ask that these claims meet the most elementary standards of plausibility. Apologists like Mr. Feser want to turn our attention to Medieval metaphysics; I ask him to turn his attention to the actual practice of religion and defend its “rational basis.” As I noted in my Beliefnet exchange with Michael Novak, last year, Pope Benedict XVI canonized an 18th century friar, Antonio de Santa Ana Galvao, as Brazil’s first saint. Nuns in Brazil dispense pills containing little scrolls with prayers to Fra. Galvao wrapped up inside. In canonizing Fra. Galvao, the Church declared that ingesting those pills had helped cure a young girl of kidney disease and had allowed a woman who had had a series of miscarriages to carry a child through the first two trimesters of pregnancy after doctors declared her incapable of doing so.
It would be great if Mr. Feser proposed a scientific test for the efficacy to the Fra. Galvao pills—would he support a double-blind experiment regarding their usefulness in treating kidney disease? What is his theory for how they work? There is a product peddled on late-night TV called Kinoki Detox Foot Pads. These large Band-aid-like strips are applied to the soles of the feet at night to remove “toxins” and cure arthritis, diabetes, cellulite, and insomnia. Mr. Feser is an educated man, so I assume he would share my confident rejection of such a claim. He might even share my distress that educated Westerners with all the benefits of scientific education would not ask by what imaginable biological theory could such a product work. I’m sure therefore that he also would hope that educated Westerners ask the same questions of the claim that a piece of bone in a jeweled case, say, or a medal to a saint, has curative powers
Mr. Feser asserts that “theism is true, indeed rationally unavoidable.” Let’s look at the “rational” part. I am puzzled by the following logic:
Situation A: A mine collapses and the miners are trapped in terrifying blackness and waning oxygen for five days. Rescue efforts prove successful, however. Their rescue shows God’s love for humanity, that he cares for every one of us.
Situation B: A mine collapses and the miners are trapped in terrifying blackness and waning oxygen for five days. Rescue efforts prove unsuccessful, and the miners die. Their death shows God’s love for humanity, that he cares for every one of us.
X (miners live) = proof of God’s love (Y).
Not-X (miners don’t live) = proof of God’s love (Y). So X = not-X.
There is no imaginable occurrence that a believer in God’s loving personal attention to each individual will ever accept as inconsistent with that proposition. Saved from cancer, died from cancer, rescued from the tsunami, drowned in the tsunami, pulled out of the burning house, incinerated in the burning house, all mean the same thing: God loves us as a loving Father and exercises his omnipotence and omniscience on our behalf.
I am grateful that medical science and engineering do not rest on such a “rational basis.”
Usually a particular religion’s apologists are leery of trapping themselves by offering independently verifiable assertions. The Mormons got caught out by the advance of science. (Will the same fate befall the string theorists?)
And speaking of physicists, remember your Feynmann – ‘It’s all words about words.’
Fortunately for Christians, the Bible contains no such wacky, easily-disproven assertions about, say, million-person battles that took place in Mesopotamia, or large-scale emigrations out of a nation with excellent records, or anything like that. Oh, wait….
Tangental aside but Mormons don’t think the Americas were populated by the lost tribes of Israel but that a small group of Israelites came across. I think most thoughtful Mormons think their DNA would be swamped out and largely undetectable. Of course not all Mormons in history thought that but there are good reasons from the text to think that.
Which isn’t to disparage your larger point which I completely agree with. There’s no way via science at this time to verify or falsify religion. One can falsify some religious claims. (Obvious examples being Young Earth Creationism, anti-evolution, and so forth) But the larger question of God seems beyond science at the moment. And as you note even if you could prove there was a God it wouldn’t tell you much about how to worship him/she/it.
I prayed to my Golden Calf this morning and I am still alive to type this. We theologians call that Q.E.D.
Heather and Andrew T.,
I used to be skeptical of truth claims in the Bible, but here is the thing: the New Testament Gospels have in fact, held up very well to all sorts of challenges to their authenticity and historical accuracy. I assume what you object to in the Gospels are the claims to witnesses to miracles (the most important being Jesus’ resurrection).
As a start for your skeptical inquiring minds, I recommend this paper:
http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf
Another good place on the web is Mark Robert’s website, which has a whole series of articles on the historical Jesus:
http://markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/knowaboutjesus.htm
The Old Testament is obviously very different from the New Testament, but there again, the question is not whether the history in the Old Testament is correct on every point (e.g. I don’t believe that the world was created in seven, 24 hour days) but what is the genre of the particular book in question and in the case of a book that is more allegorical, what is the story trying to tell us about God. My recommendation for thinking seriously about the Old Testament would be Leon Kass’ “The Beginning of Wisdom”.
Could the secular rightists here give us an example of a thriving secular conservative society? Just by way of comparison.
Unfortunately, Heather, you continue to do exactly what Feser criticized you for: attacking easy targets. Snickering over the absurdities of the beliefs of ignorant peasants is not the same thing as proving that religion is inherently unscientific. You do not disprove Aquinas or St. John of the Cross by laughing at silly folk beliefs. Much better arguments than yours are possible on this subject, but if you had the background to produce such an argument you would probably have done so instead of sneering at the rabble.
One thing to understand about religion is that the churches (of any faith, I daresay) know full well that the average citizen is not suited by intellect or education to appreciate theological subtleties. If the churchmen want to bring the masses into their fold, they have no choice but to develop a product, so to speak, that the masses will buy. Thus church teachings, insofar as they are aimed at the general public rather than at their own intelligentsia, unavoidably have a certain air of idiocy about them. So if some minister (an ignorant lout himself, in most cases) says that the death of dozens of men in a mine collapse somehow shows God’s love, he is simply trying to offer consolation. It’s one of the things churches have to do to stay in business. Critiquing such a statement on intellectual grounds simply misses the point of it.
If you really want to go after a particular religion, you really need to familiarize yourself with its esoteric side. It may be the case that the most sophisticated theology or mystical teaching of some religion makes no more sense than the drivel its churches spoon-feed to the masses, but it certainly isn’t the same thing.
I think the ultimate test of any religious belief is whether it accepts the falsification of its own claims under scientific rigor.
Consider the tale of the flood. We know today that the story as given in scripture is impossible. We can point to several laws of physics and simple mathematics that clearly show Noah could not possibly have built an ark to contain two of every animal, and simple zoology tells us that it’s completely irrational to put sea-dwelling animals in the ark or to expect one could keep all but two of the flying animals off of it.
So any rational and sensible religion must admit, at the very least, that this story is not – and never was, nor could it ever have been – the literal truth. If one wanted to retain maximal credibility for the scriptures, the best argument (IMO) is that the scripture was written by a primitive and ignorant people who didn’t really know how high the water was or whence it came or how long it lasted, let alone how many animals there were and how big an ark would have to be to carry them. What you can take away from this is “there was a big flood, but a guy built a boat and saved what land-dwelling animals he could”. That’s a reasonable and rational claim that doesn’t fly in the face of reality, and a religious individual who is honestly seeking the truth can accept that.
What irritates me is the number of religious people who are simply unwilling to accept challenges to their scriptures. The truth is the truth; 2+2=4 no matter your language or your religion. If God exists, this is no less a fact than the existence of air or water, and no amount of argument or mental gymnastics can change it. No challenge to the truth can ever succeed, because truth is ultimately… well, true.
That’s where the faith really comes into play. If you really have faith, you’ll not only accept but ENCOURAGE challenges – because you know they can never succeed. You should regard the challenge with the same amusement that physicists have for efforts to invent a perpetual motion machine. They’ll listen, but mostly so they can tell other physicists later and have a good laugh. If you’re serious about your religion, then treat it like it’s serious; challenge it, attack it, beat the living crap out of it, and whatever fails the test – well, it’s clearly wrong, so discard it.
If you can’t do that, then you must admit that your faith isn’t really there in the first place, and that you cling unreasonably to a tradition you know full well may be false.
Jeff Singer: My experience with Lydia McGrew does not incline me positively to either her veracity or her intellectual prowess.
In any event: do you really think these aren’t arguments I (and especially Heather!) haven’t heard before? I would recommend you take a look at Richard Carrier’s “Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story”.
If there are any claims you think survive Carrier’s argument, I’d love to hear them.
Ms. MacDonald,
The trouble with attacking paradigms is that of finding common ground to do so. Various religions of course attack the validity of other religions, and when they do so, they start by finding the common threads between them. Mormons are a great target for Christians, for example, because Mormonism shares all the same presuppositions, but then purports to add a whole slew of additional tenets. This is easy pickings for Christians, since the New Testament, which both religions share, specifically forbids this. (I’ve been a bad student of the Bible the past several years, so forgive the lack of a citation.)
The problem with your meta-attack (i.e., an attack on sectarian attacks) is your incorrect assumption of neutrality. I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of secularists — they believe by disavowing religion, they take a paradigm-neutral position by suggesting that science is the only necessary and sufficient common ground allowed. But as David Hume (the pudgy dead Scotish one, not the blogger on this site) showed, science doesn’t come out of the box ready to use. It requires certain extra-empirical preconditions. Nor is it readily apparent that we can talk about things like morality and teleology without laying out your views on what things like “human flourishing” means, what “the good life” entails, and so on.
Religionists have their own internal problems, but at least they give us an instant sense of their presuppositions. We don’t get that with secularists, as they tend to take a “shopping cart” approach to values and preconditions of science and rationality and intelligibility. (E.g., “since science requires induction, and I cannot observe induction empirically, and I really really want to use science, I will just assume the uniformity of nature and that the future will resemble the past.”)
This may be fine for most purposes, but secularists ought to be honest about it. Before attacking someone else’s paradigm, then, a secularist ought to first put the terms of his or her own on the table in a philosophically cogent way.
I used to be skeptical of truth claims in the Bible, but here is the thing: the New Testament Gospels have in fact, held up very well to all sorts of challenges to their authenticity and historical accuracy. I assume what you object to in the Gospels are the claims to witnesses to miracles (the most important being Jesus’ resurrection).
If I remember right, the gospels identify by name about 15 people who allegedly saw Jesus after the resurrection, and state that hundreds, maybe up to 5000, who go unnamed allegedly also saw him.
Compare to the fact that thousands of people alive today claim to have been abducted by aliens.
What, if anything, is the difference?
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AC: The U.S.A. prior to WW1, and again 1921-29.
Bradlaugh, that is a highly innovative interpretation. You’re joking, aren’t you?
AC says:
Could the secular rightists here give us an example of a thriving secular conservative society? Just by way of comparison.
I would consider Japan both secular and rather conservative.
Snickering over the absurdities of the beliefs of ignorant peasants is not the same thing as proving that religion is inherently unscientific. You do not disprove Aquinas or St. John of the Cross by laughing at silly folk beliefs.
This argument comes dangerously close to The Courtier’s Reply. At the very least, it argues that what the vast majority of the religious actually believe is not defensible, and it is only a few cognoscenti who have the “true” or “real” religion, which should be of very cold comfort (unless one is a gnostic).
Ms. MacDonald doesn’t understand science or religion. All science is empirical. It is based on the experience of our senses through a brain that organizes (pun intended) sense experience.
The experience of God is a sensory experience which is then interpreted through organizing features of the human brain.
Reason is neither separate from the organization of sensory data that results in conclusions about nature, nor separate from the organization that results in the sensory data of “spiritual” experiences (like love or God) that result in conclusions about nature since everything we experience is by definition, natural.
Of course, reason frequently mismanages interpretations of experience (data) to result in false conclusions about nature. This is true in science and matters of faith.
MacDonald wants a scientific test for theism? Easy enough. All she has to do is perform an experiment in the same way and anthropologist or molecular biologist would. Go out and meet God by making the proper preparations that would induce God to approve a meeting, which would mean meeting God more on his terms, or rather in a manner that has proven successful for countless other humans.
An anthropologist doesn’t insist that some aboriginal tribe journey to New York, take up residence in a nice house so he can study them at his convenience, does he?
Nor does a biologist demand that molecules he wishes to study first conform to his theory about their behavior in solution.
H MacD:
I’m certainly not surprised that you are puzzled by the logic of your A/B construction, nor your rational puzzlement, if such a thing can be said to exist, generally, if X represents your understanding of the religious response to either A or B.
While I make no claim to the religious beliefs at issue or to doctrinal expertise, I think it would be more accurate to describe X as the belief that God has a plan for each and every one of us. That belief would precede both A and B and would not, in fact, be “proved” by either one of them.
“A” would simply be evidence that God’s plan is not necessarily immutable, and that He can sometimes be prevailed upon to answer the prayers of the virtuous or valorous, or entertain the promises of the desperate — for reasons of His own, whether gesture of love, reward or demonstrable blessing. “B” would be testament to the unfathomable nature of God’s plan, which — as in the case of a kind and careful nurse who bathes a burn victim’s skin — may include excruciating pain for purposes we have yet to discern.
johnmark7: Ah, non-overlapping magisteria. An “elegant solution,” as Dr. Gould put it, with only one minor drawback: how do you deal with the fact that so many of your co-religionists disagree with it?
Andrew T,
I hate to hijack this post with and back and forth about Richard Carrier, but to build on your own analogy, do you really think that people like the McGrews aren’t familiar with Carrier and his arguments? I came across Carrier this summer when I was investigating the truth claims of Christianity, and found his discussion of the Rubicon analogy persuasive. Then I read this “fisking” of said analogy and realized Carrier is NOT intellectually honest, and doesn’t have a good grasp of history and archeology:
[Carrier quotes are first, then the response]
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It is certainly reasonable to doubt the resurrection of Jesus in the flesh, an event placed some time between 26 and 36 A.D. For this we have only a few written sources near the event, all of it sacred writing, and entirely pro-Christian.
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What did Carrier expect – “Yes, Jesus rose from the dead, but of course I’m not his follower”?! Here Chalmers is exactly right: there is no reason to be biased against a Christian witness simply because he is a Christian. The slanted description “sacred writing” is also disingenuous; it is perfectly obvious to anyone who compares the gospels to the Vedas that the former are memoirs and not “sacred writing” in some sense that disqualifies them from conveying historical truth. There is no evidence that the evangelists considered their memoirs of Jesus to be “sacred writing” as opposed to an actual account of a life lived before their eyes.
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Pliny the Younger was the first non-Christian to even mention the religion, in 110 A.D., but he doesn’t mention the resurrection. No non-Christian mentions the resurrection until many decades later–Lucian, a critic of superstition, was the first, writing in the mid-2nd century, and likely getting his information from Christian sources. So the evidence is not what any historian would consider good.[4]
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This is false. Josephus mentions it in the Antiquities, written about A.D. 94. The passage has been disputed, but since the discovery of the Arabic text by Shlomo Pines in 1972 there has been an established scholarly consensus that the Testimonium Flavianum, though interpolated, was not a wholesale Christian invention. Only on the internet do wild-eyed conspiracy theories about Josephus still flourish. (Carrier, of course, finds it convenient to buy into those theories.)
My colleague Paul Maier, in his translation of Josephus, renders Antiquities 18.63 directly from the Arabic text, reflecting this scholarly consensus.. Here is his translation, from Josephus: The Essential Works (1994), pp. 269-70:
At this time there was a wise man called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. Many people among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have reported wonders. And the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day.
So here we have both the religion (“the tribe of the Christians, so named after him”) and the report of the claim of the resurrection in a work by a non-Christian historian published about A.D. 94.
For more on the Josephus question, see Robert van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (2000), pp. 81-104.
As for Carrier’s claim that “the evidence is not what any historian would consider good,” Maier certainly does consider it to be good – and Maier is a distinguished University Professor of History here at Western Michigan University and the author of numerous scholarly books, articles, and translations. But of course, Carrier’s evaluation is colored by his animus and by the various conspiracy theories he adopts regarding the historical record.
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Nevertheless, Christian apologist Douglas Geivett has declared that the evidence for the physical resurrection of Jesus meets, and I quote, “the highest standards of historical inquiry” and “if one takes the historian’s own criteria for assessing the historicity of ancient events, the resurrection passes muster as a historically well-attested event of the ancient world,” as well-attested, he says, as Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.[5]
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Knowing Carrier’s penchant for falsifying the facts, I looked up the article from which he is quoting. You’ll notice that the last claim is not actually in quotation marks, and there is a reason for this: here again Carrier is misrepresenting the facts by distorting what Geivett actually says. Geivett puts an objection in the mouth of an imagined skeptic (pp. 185-86). To avoid the possibility of misrepresentation, I will give it just as it appears:
It may be that the New Testament reports concerning miracles enjoy the same measure of support for historical purposes as the best-attested reports of other ancient events (such as Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.) that we do not hesitate to accept. But no consensus has been reached among historians about the criteria that must be satisfied before the testimony of a miraculous event can be accepted as genuinely historical. Indeed, the tendency is in the other direction: to assume that, at best, eyewitnesses reached the conclusion that they had witnessed a miracle, but that the event that occasioned this conclusion probably was not being accurately described by that label. The historian can perhaps determine what first-hand observers thought they had observed; he cannot judge that they were right in their verdict regarding the nature of the event.
In other words, Geivett puts this concession in the mouth of a skeptic as a rhetorical move – technically, paromology – in order to help him to make the objection that even in a best-case scenario, the disanalogy between natural and supernatural events scotches the comparison. On p. 186 Geivett does say that “[t]he attempt by Christian apologists to draw parallels between, say, the historicity of reports about Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon and the historicity of reports about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is laudable,” [emphasis mine] but he does not say that the evidence is equivalent.
I am therefore going to omit detailed consideration of the next few paragraphs of Carrier’s piece, since he is beating on a straw man. (I cannot resist pointing out, though, that with the exception of Caesar’s own account, the sources he lists for Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon are not even close to being contemporaries – e.g. Appian’s account is written about two centuries after the event, Dio Cassius’s account half a century later still, rather like it would be for one of us to write about the signing of the Declaration of Independence.) But I will pick on this paragraph, where he interrupts himself to rant about the supposed infirmities of the evangelists and manages to pack a remarkable number of false statements into a small space:
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Compare this with the resurrection: we have not even a single established historian mentioning the event until the 3rd and 4th centuries, and then only by Christian historians.[6]
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Except for Josephus; but Carrier, like most internet skeptics, finds comfort in the fantasy that the wicked Christians invented the Testimonium. And note the misdirection once again: Carrier wants to focus on “historians” and thereby sidesteps the question of whether the writers we do have, who were admittedly not sitting at their writing desks in ancient libraries two centuries after the fact but were rather ordinary people on the ground in Palestine during or immediately after these events, were up to the task of giving a reliable account of what actually transpired.
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And of those few others who do mention it within a century of the event, none of them show any wide reading, …
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It is hard to say what counts as “wide reading” here or why this is particularly relevant, but Luke was certainly widely read and has a vocabulary and command of Greek that indicates a high level of education.
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… never cite any other sources, …
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The gospels are memoirs written out and then copied on scrolls, not critical histories composed in libraries. So this objection, even if it were true, would be irrelevant. Luke certainly used sources, as everyone acknowledges, but he does not name them like a modern historian would, since he is not writing a history in the library-research sense. But see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006) for evidence that even in the memoirs, the gospel writers used the standard technique of inclusio as a means of indicating their sources.
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… show no sign of a skilled or critical examination of conflicting claims, …
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Matthew 28:11-15, anyone? But I supposes that an examination is not “critical” or “skilled” unless it comes up skeptical. Note that if “critical” examination means a comparison of sources, it is irrelevant for eyewitnesses, who are writing before there is time for there to be “sources” on any wide scale.
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… have no other literature or scholarship to their credit that we can test for their skill and accuracy, …
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What is the force of “other” here? Can we check on the historical accuracy of Luke, for example? Sure; even D. F. Strauss, no friend to Christianity, comments on the accuracy of Luke’s historical references. We can cross-check the authors of the gospels and Acts with Josephus and Dio Cassius.
Here, so you don’t think I’m just bluffing, are half a dozen passages in which the evangelists mention details that can be cross-checked:
Matthew 2:22 – When he (Joseph) heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea, in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither; notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside in the parts of Galilee.
We find here that (a) Archelaus reigned in Judea, but the text suggests that his power did not extend to Galilee; (b) Archelaus reigned (βασιλευει) as a king; (c) Archelaus was notable for his cruelty. Compare (a) Josephus, Antiquities 17.13.1; (b) Josephus, Jewish War 1.33.7; (c) Josephus, Antiquities 17.13.1.
Luke 3:1 – In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,—Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip, tetrarch of Iturea and of the region of Trachonitis,—the word of God came unto John.
Here there are two points of interest: (a) By the will of Herod the Great, and the decree of Augustus, Herod Antipas was appointed tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, and Philip was appointed tetrarch of Trachonitis and the neighboring countries; (b) They were in these stations in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. See (a) Josephus, Antiquities 17.8.1 for their having these dominions; (b) For their remaining in them past the 15th year of Tiberius, Antiquities 18.8.2 (Herod removed by Caligula) and 18.5.6 (Philip died in the twentieth year of Tiberius).
Mark 6:17 (cf. Matt 14:1-13; Luke 3:19) – Herod had sent forth, and laid hold upon John, and bound him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife; for he had married her.— etc.
Two points here: (a) Herod the tetrarch had married Herodias, who was his brother Philip’s wife; and (b) Herodias had a daughter. See (a) Josephus, Antiquities 18.6.1; (b) Josephus, Antiquities 18.6.4.
Acts 12:1 – Now, about that time, Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church.—etc.
The significant detail here is that Herod Agrippa (grandson of Herod the Great) was considered to be a king at Jerusalem at this time—something not true for the preceding thirty years, and never true afterwards, but only in the final three years of Herod Agrippa I’s reign. See Josephus, Antiquities 18.7.10:
“Sending for him to his palace, Caligula put a crown upon his head, and appointed him king of the tetrarchie of Philip, intending also to give him the tetrarchie of Lysanius.”
For the inclusion of Judea in his kingdom at the end, see Antiquities 19.5.1:
“… adding also Judea and Samaria, in the utmost extent, as possessed by his grandfather Herod.”
Acts 12:19-23 – And he (Herod) went down from Judea to Cesarea, and there abode.—And upon a set day, Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them; and the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man; and immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory, and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.
Josephus, Antiquities 19.8.2 concurs in the place (Cesarea), resplendent attire, acclamations of the assemply, specific nature of the flattery, Herod’s reception of it, and the sudden onset of his fatal illness. Only Luke’s description, “eaten of worms,” is not noted by Josephus.
Acts 13:6-7 – And when they had gone through the isle [Cyprus] to Paphos, they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Barjesus, which was with the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus, a prudent man.
Here we are told that Sergius Paulus was a deputy or, as the term is more accurately rendered, proconsul (ανθυπατω). This small detail is confirmed by Dio Cassius, Roman History 54, ad A.U. 732 (that is, 732 years after the founding of Rome (dated by Varro at 753 B.C.), or 21 B.C.), Cyprus, which in the original distribution was assigned to the emperor, had been transferred to the senate. After this transfer, the appropriate title of the Roman governor was proconsul.
So much for Carrier’s insinuation that we cannot check on the historical accuracy of the authors of the gospels and Acts.
I can produce many more such correspondences and cross-checks if you like.
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… are completely unknown, …
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Hey, how ’bout that, a question-begging assertion slipped right into the middle of this grocery list of complaints! Luke was a traveling companion of Paul, mentioned by name in Colossians 4:14. The traditional ascriptions of the authorship of the gospels are reasonably well attested; in particular, it is hard to imagine why anyone inventing authors (or inventing gospels) would choose relative nobodies like Mark and Luke as authors over figures who play a more dramatic role in the narratives, like Peter or Thomas – and indeed, if we go into the second century when there were spurious “gospels” invented, we find gospels of Peter and Thomas, just as we would expect.
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… and have an overtly declared bias towards persuasion and conversion.[7]
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A “bias” that leads them to faslify the truth in order to die grisly deaths for something they knew was a lie? Or the “bias” that we would expect of eyewitnesses who knew that what they were saying is true?
Checking Carrier’s footnote here, we see that he is accusing the gospel writers of “an overtly stated propagandist mission.” Really? Propaganda is false, selective, or slanted statement for the sake of persuasion. None of the references Carrier cites (John 20:31, Mark 16:16, 1 Corinthians 15:1-2, Galatians 1:1-9) justify this description; the intent to persuade, which is certainly visible in these passages, is not as such sufficient for something to qualify as propaganda, or else every physics textbook would count as propaganda as well. Indeed, Carrier’s use of the word, like so much else in this passage, itself qualifies as a piece of propaganda: a misleading description chosen and deployed with the intent to persuade.
For the record, the long ending of Mark, from which Mark 16:16 comes, is generally acknowledged not to have been part of the original text. Carrier neglects to mention this fact since he wants a list of passages to cite as evidence that the gospel writers are engaging in “propaganda.”
I also take exception to this:
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Fifth, the history of Rome could not have proceeded as it did had Caesar not physically moved an army into Italy. Even if Caesar could have somehow cultivated the mere belief that he had done this, he could not have captured Rome or conscripted Italian men against Pompey’s forces in Greece. On the other hand, all that is needed to explain the rise of Christianity is a belief–a belief that the resurrection happened. There is nothing that an actual resurrection would have caused that could not have been caused by a mere belief in that resurrection. Thus, an actual resurrection is not necessary to explain all subsequent history, unlike Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon.[8]
*****
This is misleading at best. What is required to explain the rise of Christianity is not just belief, but belief that remains resilient in the face of horrific persecution. I might as easily say that all that is necessary to explain the history of Rome is that everyone believed that Caesar had physically moved an army into Italy, including Caesar (and the army). But Carrier is counting on his readers to swallow the unstated assumption that belief is easy to induce.
I also take exception to Carrier’s tendentious summary:
*****
It should be clear that we have many reasons to believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, all of which are lacking in the case of the resurrection. In fact, when we compare all five points, we see that in four of the five proofs of an event’s historicity, the resurrection has no evidence at all, and in the one proof that it does have, it has not the best, but the very worst kind of evidence–a handful of biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses.
*****
Biased? Not in the sense Carrier wants to claim.
Uncritical? Only in the sense that they did not become skeptics like Carrier. (Note that, according to all of the accounts we have, some did doubt at first; Matthew 28:17, Luke 24:21-24, John 20:25).
Unscholarly? Only in the sense that they were not writing researched histories in a library hundreds of miles and hundreds of years from the place and time where the events transpired.
Unknown? Hardly: the traditional designations are unanimous, they were never challenged either by early heretics (e.g. Marcion) or by early critics of Christianity (e.g Celsus) and we have not a single manuscript or copy of any of the four gospels that is unattributed. If the argument is simply that the four gospels do not internally identify their authors, then we are going to have to classify the works of Tacitus as anonymous as well – and that’s just silly.
Second-hand? In the case of Luke’s gospel and the first half of Acts, this is true, and he tells us so himself. To make up for this, Luke is the one evangelist who appears to have made the most extensive use of eyewitness sources. On the other hand, beginning in Acts 16:10, the use of “we” strongly indicates that Luke was himself a companion and an eyewitness of what transpired in those passages. In the case of Mark, it may be so; tradition says that in composing his gospel he wrote down whatever Peter said, but without paying attention to chronological order. In the case of Matthew and John, on the other hand, it appears that we have eyewitness testimony at first hand.
On all five points, then, Carrier has struck out.
After a little disagreeable chest thumping, Carrier goes on:
*****
We must consider the setting–the place and time in which these stories spread. This was an age of fables and wonder. Magic and miracles and ghosts were everywhere, and almost never doubted. I’ll give one example that illustrates this: we have several accounts of what the common people thought about lunar eclipses.
*****
And with that, Carrier is off on a guilt-by-association errand: some Roman peasants within a century or so of the gospel events were superstitious about eclipses; therefore, Jews could easily be persuaded that Jesus had risen to life again. This is unworthy of someone who aspires to be an historian.
Andrew T.
From what I just read of Gould’s magisteria, I don’t buy non-overlapping fields of human experience as he seems to. The tools we use to evaluate sense experience are always the same – the brain, the mind, reason, intuition, inter alia.
There are degrees of insight from the childish to the sophisticated. Man first “saw” that the sun rises and sets by moving across the sky, not that the earth turns. Were they morons? They trusted their sense and reason which was accurate as far as they knew. The proof was obvious. and seemingly self-evident.
Abraham encounters God in a theophany and he seems to be a fellow who makes covenants just like Hebrews do. How about that! Is he a moron? No, he’s a man who turns to his reason to understand what has happened by drawing from his culture to explain. With a little more thought and development of criticism, he might revise his first interpretation with a broader one more like Moses’ (or Buddha’s, for that matter).
Japan’s a nice choice, but I find this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Japan
I don’t know enough about Japan to know how secular it is. The Wiki article says their religion is pretty pervasive.
It might be good for the secularists to elaborate on what a secular society would look like. I know that’s not the goal of this site, but if secularism can work, it should work all the way, for a whole society.
@ JM Hanes: “I think it would be more accurate to describe X as the belief that God has a plan for each and every one of us. That belief would precede both A and B and would not, in fact, be “proved” by either one of them.”
You proceed to essentially agree with Heather that there is no experience, no possible outcome which could cause you to doubt X. You hold X to be true in every possible state of affairs. Thus, X is empty, and has nothing to do with the world. “God’s plan” ceases to have a referent, and (some argue) ceases to have any semantic meaning.
This is the risk you run by trying so hard to insulate your relgious claims against the corrosive force of external reality: It becomes so well-insulated that it loses all contact with reality.
@ JohnMark7 & Jeff Singer: Why do you remain unconvinced by the claims of Islam? Who are you to say that the angel Gabriel did not indeed visit Mohammed and dictate the most perfect word of the God of Abraham to him? How do you know that the God of Abraham was wrong when he told Mohammed that the followers of Jesus were sorely mistaken? Leaving aside for moment your subjective emotions and your particular upbringing, what objective evidence can you point to which gives more weight to the claims of the followers of Jesus than to the claims of the followers of Mohammed?
Lastly, and be honest here, do you have any doubt that if you were raised in Saudi Arabia, and schooled in a madrassa there, that you would be as certain that Christians were wrong and Muslims right, as you are now that you are right, and Muslims wrong?
What, did you just luck out and happened to be born into the one and only correct religion? (Which hasn’t even been around that long)?
johnmark7:
I’ve always thought that flat earth folks get a bum rap from the enlightened. You would never set your martini glass down on a basketball!. To accept the earth as spherical is to deny the manifest evidence of one’s own perception which suggests that it can’t be. Ditto for the sensation of stability relative to measureable shifts in sunlight and shadow thoughout the day. To elevate an abstraction (a map/globe/photo) over one’s own perception takes a certain leap of faith in the due diligence of others.
At the same time, such abstract leaps are a critical component of cognition. The ability to imagine, or visualize, that which we cannot see (any theoretical construct of the universe) and to conjure up that which does not now exist (space elevators, symphonies) are the engines of progress. The ability to imagine and build upon that which cannot, to our knowledge, exist at all, is a staple of drama, science fiction and assorted arts which enrich our cultural, psychological and spiritual lives in ways that science as a discipline or rational coffee house argumentation never will. Reason sans imagination is thin intellectual gruel.
An argument over whether or not the Bible or the resurrection could, as a rational matter, be literally true stikes me as a side issue. Advocates of unadorned reason will always win such arguments to their own satisfaction and to no discernable effect on believers. To spurn “irrational” religious leaps of faith out of hand, however, is, by extension to deny a powerfully generative feature of human thought. It’s the subject matter not the process, which differs. It is behaviour, not belief, which is the proper concern of government — something which none of the contenders on either side seem to accept as given.
I don’t have the theoretical background to know what philosopher or school might encompass the points I’m trying to make. I’m afraid that’s part of why discussions like the ones I’ve come across in progress mostly seem like an exchange of obscurities to laymen like me — which I mention in case the self-defined secular conservatives here hope to make a place for themselves on the wider political stage. I’ve dropped in because I think the issue of political secularism is important, but it’s not terribly clear to me precisely where this collective site is really trying to go. Religious arguments don’t strike me as a credible form of conservative political engagement.
Jeff Singer: I can’t follow the long passage you’ve quoted from in this format; perhaps you could just link to it? Beyond that, two points:
1. This is the first I’ve ever heard anyone call Carrier “dishonest” — even pretty diehard apologist types tend to respect his honesty. In particular, I would direct you to the Carrier-Doherty exchange, in which Carrier engaged in very pointed and honest criticism of Earl Doherty’s mythicist hypothesis (to the point where both participants ultimately learned much from the exchange). Notwithstanding your internet critic, Carrier’s scholarly reputation seems pretty sound to me.
2. In any event, I don’t claim that Carrier’s arguments should be any sort of mystery to an educated person, just that they are (to me, anyway) persuasive. To pick just one example:
AC:
Speaking only for me, I would consider the following two aspects to be the general hallmarks of a “secular” society:
1) Government makes no effort to aid religion. Religious groups and their adherents receive no special privileges, breaks, benefits, or rights that non-members don’t get. Government dollars aren’t funneled to religious institutions. Generally what we refer to as the “strict separationist,” pre-Lemon interpretation of the Establishment Clause; and
2) Citizens understand that political arguments based in their personal religious beliefs are not “reasons” in the democratic sense and understand that “because I think my God wants it that way” is not a rational justification for voting/lobbying/attempting to fix public policy in any particular direction.
Thus, a “secular society” is bidirectional, and working towards it means changing not only social institutions but how people interact with them. This is why I am a “Secular Rightist” — I don’t think you can just pop a few strict separationists on the Supreme Court and force the 90% of Christians in this country, dragging and kicking, to shut the hell up about God already. You also have to engage those Christians and convince them that just because they have the majority, maybe they shouldn’t be trying to aggressively rewrite state constitutions to preserve their narrow religious views on the family and such.
Two implications follow: (a) a “secular society,” for me, is not measured by the religiosity of its adherents. A very religious populace might nevertheless have the self-awareness that its religious beliefs are not shared by others (particularly if the populace is diversely highly religious; i.e., with no one religion having a commanding majority or plurality).
And (b) I recognize that these two principles are goals, not criteria. I would say that a society becomes comparatively more secular the more it embraces these two principles. As a result, I don’t think you can dismiss (say) Japan as non-secular simply because large swaths of the population are religious adherents any more than you can dismiss the U.S. circa 1800 as secular even though virtually 100% of the population at the time self-identified as some sort of theist.
“Religious arguments don’t strike me as a credible form of conservative political engagement.”
And on that note, we can observe that the conservative blog highway is taking interesting turns. It’s a kind of new-age, road-to-Damascus exercise. I suppose that is bound to happen when one’s worldview gets nuked, when it’s not getting lost.
Indeed, there’s a sudden rush for free-agent, ideological credentialism on the E-netherworld and for some pressing need to establish that our-conservative-penis-is-just-as-conservative-as-yours. Don’t expect the moment to be circumcised, either.
Thus it becomes an imperative in all circles to somehow level the playing field and to fast achieve internet street-cred. Mission one is about identity theatre. So, here, at the secular door, religion needs to be marginalized less for its rejection of reason than for its traditional link to the conservative mother ship. It’s a case of the serpent needing to shed its skin.
Alternately, were we to beam over to the paleo enclaves, surely the gospel de jour would be to beg aloud for Burke, if not to recapture his soul than certainly to pray for his resurrection. If that’s not enough, then listen for the calls of anyone who’s been dead for at least as long as Reagan.
Thus the former asks for no god whilst the latter seeks a ghost. Welcome to the new conservative vanguard. You can’t make it up.
Where the NRO crowd now stands is beyond me, inasmuch as Buckley’s absence makes the place, in any event, a shadow of its former self. Were he looking down, I suspect, he would likely ask of the current heretics that they calmly replace the once-golden WFB initials on the walls with the now, more-apt initials, RIP. Then he might actually do so. Otherwise, I would imagine the stilted joint lays claim to actually knowing god, when it’s not pretending to be him.
So religious arguments on the Right ought to be seen no longer as theological grist or Faith v. Reason challenges. They are, today, cheap airbrushes for crafting the new political tapestry, much in the vein of Dorian Gray.
You can relax. Even your god is laughing.
A-Bax:
“You proceed to essentially agree with Heather that there is no experience, no possible outcome which could cause you to doubt X.”
Well, I don’t suppose X would qualify as an eternal truth if that were not the case, would it? It hardly seems scientific to argue that if something is true in every instance it is therefore meaningless, by definition, but never mind. My point was that HMacD’s construction is simply an inaccurate descriptor of religious thinking, as I understand it. In any event, if religious faith is irrational, the logic of assuming it will suddenly yield to secular argumentation or scientific proofing escapes me.
BTW, you seem to be under the impression that I’m a religious conservative myself. I am not, and I’m not defending my own religious beliefs or lack of them here, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m a political conservative and a social liberal — what we might once have called a Republican — if that helps you to place me on whatever continuum you might be using.
How does a blind person perform a scientific test proving the existence of colour?
I have replied to Heather MacDonald’s latest remarks in a post available either at my personal blog, or at the group blog What’s Wrong with the World. Take your pick:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2008/12/burden-of-bad-ideas.html
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2008/12/the_burden_of_bad_ideas.html#more
JM Hanes: There’s a difference between an X which is true in “every instance” (like the gravitational constant), and a Y which is true in “every possible instance” (God has a plan for you.)
For X, we can describe circumstances, such that if they obtain, X will be falsified. For Y, no matter what circumstances obtain, Y will remain unfalsified. This may seem like a minor point, but it has alot to do with determining whether or not a claim can be said to admit of objective evidence in it favor, or against. If a claim like Y cannot (possibly, under any conceivable circumstances) be rendered false, no matter what data is gathered, then Y is not “about” the world of experience. (It may be “about” something else, like logic or math, but it’s not “about” the empirical world”.)
That all I’m saying……that your claim that “God has a plan for each and every one of us”, as described by you, is not really about the empirical world of experience, unfortunately.
BTW – Political Conservative and Social Liberal…do you mean Libertarian? What would be some examples of policy positions that fit under that heading? Just curious, thanks.
Spectroscopy is well-established science. A blind man who had instruments that gave him information in braille could quite easily determine the existence of color – that is, different wavelengths of light.
@slumlord In addition to Greg’s comment, consider for a moment that physicists do essentially the same thing with subatomic particles and other hard-to-detect phenomena. How do you “see” a black hole?
A-Bax:
I understand the distinction, and agree that it is scientifically significant. It’s the secularists, however, who insist that there’s only one (empirical) playing field.
Secularist: Give me scientific proof that God exists.
Religionist: I don’t have to!
Religionist: Prove that there is no God.
Secularist: I don’t have to!
A-Bax:
Sorry, forgot your BTW. I’d pretty much subscribe to HMacD’s list of conservative principles in the “Rational Critique” thread, but I also favor certain safety nets here and there and am glad to have the Feds making sure my food & drugs are relatively safe. I’m against most of what seems to be the primary social/religious conservative agenda (I’m pro-choice, pro Gay marriage etc.).
JM Hanes: Sounds like you’re in the right place… 🙂
Curiously, secularists react similarly to demands to prove the nonexistence of leprechauns, pixies, and unicorns.
Only for leprechauns and unicorns. Presuppositional belief in magic pixies, on the other hand, is a properly basic belief and I defy you to prove otherwise.
Tulse,
I understand what you are saying, but I always wonder why a “critical mass” argument doesn’t factor into the courtier’s reply.
That is, you are correct that you do not need to study the works of the renowned pixielogians, for the simple reason that there are none, or very few, devout pixiests. However, there are a billion or more Christians. That, of course, doesn’t make them right. But it does mean, I would think, that they warrant serious attention–just from a numbers standpoint. In my own classroom, I do things differently if one student has a gross misunderstanding as opposed to half the class having the same problem.
And there certainly was a time when intellectual atheists said, something like, “Lot’s and lots of Christians out there, let’s learn what they believe, and show that they cannot even be self-consistent.”
Tulse:
That’s the point, of course. The terms you set for the argument relieve you from proving a negative. On the religious side, the nature of God is defies emprical proofs. Indeed, when you deny the existence of anything other than empirical proof/truth, or claim that God cannot exist, are you not asserting a negative yourself?
It seems that the existence of the Christian God would be obvious if he indeed existed. Why would the existence of a God be less obvious than the existence of the sun? Only a total lunatic denies the existence of the sun, as it is so obvious. Not so with God. Why is this all powerful God hidden? Actually, this all powerful od could prove his existence to me by sending me an email right now telling me 3 things that only an all knowing being could know about me. He could also throw in tonight’s winning lottery numbers. Think he will do so?
There are a billion or more communists, too, but I’m not sure that such means we need give their beliefs serious attention in an intellectual sense.
That is simply not true historically — remember the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the loaves and fishes, the resurrection? All of these were reportedly used as empirical demonstrations of the existence of god (and the ability of that entity to influence the natural world). And arguably, while naked “existence” may be an aspect of the alleged nature of god that cannot be attacked empirically, it is certainly the case that if you want to argue for any such interaction with the natural world, that becomes an empirical issue, and subject to empirical investigation. Unless you are satisfied with the naked existence of a Deist god, you believe in a god that does indeed allegedly interact with the natural world. That’s the point of Mac Donald’s “magic pill” example.
Tulse,
Really? I guess we have to disagree on that. Why it seems as obvious as the nose on my face that precisely because there are so many communists we are compelled to study it carefully and try to understand what its leading thinkers think. I am surprised you disagree.
Tulse:
“All of these were reportedly used as empirical demonstrations of the existence of god (and the ability of that entity to influence the natural world).”
“Reportedly used” is an unpersuasive basis for an assertion of “not true.” Believing such things literally happened, and considering same to be evidence of God’s love, is a far cry from proffering miracles as empirical proof of God’s existence to non-believers. Atheists seem to care a whole lot more about putatively “winning” such arguments than believers do, though the believers are certainly willing to engage. Indeed, atheists seem to think that they are winning these arguments, when in reality they’re only winning the argument they themselves set up. The number of people who actually change their minds as result is probably not even a measurable statistic.
“Actually, this all powerful god could prove his existence to me by sending me an email right now telling me 3 things that only an all knowing being could know about me. He could also throw in tonight’s winning lottery numbers. Think he will do so?”
So the all powerful god, if he exists, has to play by your rules? If I were God, I wouldn’t show up for the game either.
That’s like saying, “Hey, I’ll give Catholicism a shot, but only if the Pope comes to my house and explains it to me personally. Otherwise, forget it.”
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Why does an all powerful god care what any of us think? One way or another.
Even if you prove god exists isn’t that a long way from proving religion is effective or necessary? So why should god care is one way of framing Heather Mac’s line of inquiry.
We would like to know on what “scientific” basis he would have potential believers decide whether to attach themselves to Mormonism, say, rather than to Islam or to Christianity.
Brigham Young had what 25 wifeys or so. Muhammad a few. Xtians, only one. Ergo, the rational choice would be to stick with King Brigham & co (and polygamy still around in the Utah theocracy in places).
Seriously, the Feser sort of theological dogmatist presents a rather more difficult challenge than the usual hick biblethumper. First, he knows Latin, can quote chestnuts of Aristotle and Acquinas at length, and has a bunch of arcane arguments (or pseudo-arguments–) which he uses to befuddle ordinary American secularists. Most of them rest on the idea of infinite regress. Why something from nothing? You can’t readily answer that, so Doc Feser insists it’s God–not really even logical but a type of quasi-logic.
There’s no necessary reason why a regress must end with God. And why doesn’t “God” have a cause? It would seem that’s only because we assume his Omnipotence (by stipulation): another point theologians duck (how can they prove His omnipotence anyway?…)
For that matter, all of the supposed proofs of God must deal with the basic points raised by Voltaire in Candide; you say God exists, and yet He allows tidal waves (or black plagues, wars, genocide, etc). Given that God’s supposed to be all-knowing, powerful, and sort of concerned with Justice, that seems to make His existence rather unlikely, or at least somewhat absurd.
“Given that God’s supposed to be all-knowing, powerful, and sort of concerned with Justice, that seems to make His existence rather unlikely, or at least somewhat absurd.”
Since there are tons of theodicy insights, I’ll just trot out Leibniz to address your issue; namely, he maintains that evil (floods, death, genocide, etc.) is more or less a relative thing in god’s estimation. What one sees and despairs could actually be tons worse. Evil’s presence must be subject to the lens thru which it is viewed if one wants to incorporate omnipotence into the equation.
A simple example that illuminates the point is the General fighting the bloodiest of battles. Death surrounds the moment-hence no god, so say the detractors. How could a god possibly allow such horror, asks the skeptic. Except Leibniz would surmise that god knows of this “General” and his evil but allows it since it is the least evil of that available. God’s omnipotence gives him a wider vision and greater moral prism.
Had god intervened, the theory continues, then maybe that bloody battle would have become, alternately, a war of genocide. Thus, the same omnipotence-theory that is used to morally indict god on a corporeal basis can be used, logically, to exonerate him on a kind of transcendent basis.
In short, who are you to define and dictate the boundaries of omnipotence?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to defend the lunacy of believing in gods, myths and pretense. But what I can do is examine the merits-or demerits- of using omnipotence as a tool for a god’s indictment. There are more viable paths to pursue.