Thinking Christian

Where can the small things take you?

Responding to my last point on the distinction between magic and supernaturalism, doctor(logic) offered this:

When you make a voodoo doll, don’t you have to follow a recipe and include one of the victim’s hairs or possessions?

That would mean that there’s a very specific relationship between the actions of the voodoo practitioner and the pain or death of the victim. There are laws that control the magic. Voodoo is predictable. Scientifically falsifiable, even.

In contrast, prayer to God has nothing of the sort. Pray for a cardiac patient, and they’re as likely to die or recover as anyone else.

The defining characteristic of superstition is improper statistical sampling, and the amplification of bias. Superstition is all about creative interpretation of individual events, and assigning significance to events based on bias and emotion. It has nothing to do with relationship or mechanism.

There’s a whole worldview contained in there, and it’s one of the most characteristically defining worldviews of our age. It’s a view that takes it that except for mathematical knowledge, all knowledge of the world begins with particulars.

What do I mean by that, and what difference does it make? doctor(logic) has given us the illustration we need to explain it: voodoo. Those of us who have followed his comments know that he does not accept the existence of magic or the supernatural, so we can be quite sure that he does not believe in voodoo (except if there is some psychological impact associated with it, which is a different thing entirely). But here he suggests the following:

• If statistical sampling were applied to voodoo in actual practice, and
• If bias were removed from interpretation of the results, and
• If a genuine, unbiased association were found between the practice of voodoo and its intended outcomes,
• Then voodoo would be predictable, and
• Then voodoo could be regarded as a real phenomenon, and presumably
• Then work would have to be done to investigate the means by which it operates.

Statistical sampling is a matter of gathering particulars: actual individual instances, each measured one by one, in which voodoo practice* is attempted, and actual individual instances of its “success” or “failure.” These individual instances are collated and analyzed mathematically. If that analysis says something is going on, then the researcher lifts up his head and looks around, so to speak, to theorize possible larger explanations and connections. If there were some statistical correlation between voodoo practice and its outcomes, and if other confounding variables were weeded out, then we would have to think hard about some theory to explain it.

This is how doctor(logic) would handle voodoo as a matter of knowledge, if I read him correctly (and he’s been saying this sort of thing a long time). Those two processes—the gathering of many individual instances, and mathematical analysis—are at the basis of all knowledge of the world, according to this viewpoint. If it’s not statistical, it’s not about reality. But we have to recognize that for what it is: particulars upon particulars upon particulars, aggregated and collated and analyzed statistically. The world is known only through its small things.

This is not only about one commenter’s position. It seems to me this is characteristic of the natural sciences in general, and even of human sciences like psychology. The description of knowledge-generation I just gave could have come from my grad studies in industrial and organizational psychology, the science of human effectiveness on the job and in organizations. I/O psychology research and knowledge is all about statistical analysis of individual people and events, measured one by one by one. Small things, aggregated.

On this view, knowledge of small things leads to knowledge of larger things: general theories or laws regarding how nature operates. It never works the other way around: we never start with knowledge of larger things. And that leads me to several questions. These are not fully thought-out conclusions, but conversation starters instead.

• Other than mathematical knowledge (based on axioms and logic) do the sciences ever start with anything other than particulars (small things)?
• Is it possible that there is a method-to-result correlation here? That is, the sciences are infamously reductionistic in their conclusions with respect to matters like thought, design, and so on. Could their reductionist results be as much a product of method as it is of the reality being so studied?

I need to illustrate my next question before I ask it. A friend of mine once told me about a certain science-fiction story in which an earthling was trying to communicate with an alien. He pointed to a rock and said, “Rock.” The alien pointed and repeated, “Rock.” The earthling, excited by that success, pointed at it again and said, “Rock.” Unfortunately, this didn’t work for the alien. It thought, “How strange! There was ‘rock’ there a moment ago, so how could there be ‘rock’ there now? What was there has changed so much since then, in all of its deep molecular and energy structure; it no longer exists in the same state. If it was ‘rock’ before, it must be something other than ‘rock’ now. How can this other being so unaware of that?”

And then the earthling pointed at another object on the ground, and again said “Rock.” At this point the alien knew it was hopeless.

Where the earthling saw similarity, the alien saw constant change and difference. Where the earthling saw and analyzed on the macroscopic level of visible and touchable hardness, color, texture, and so on, the alien saw and analyzed on the level of molecules. Where the earthling saw constancy across time, the alien saw massive change.** Which one of them was right? On what basis? How do we know what to aggregate? If the answer to that is based in some human mental process with no larger justification, then it is very contingent, and its reliability is suspect. Another kind of being might see reality very differently, and there’s no telling whether we or it have a better handle on what’s real or true. But if aggregating small things is the basis for all knowledge, and we don’t have a reliable way of knowing what or how can be aggregated, then the basis for all knowledge is highly suspect.

It’s not necessarily as hopeless as that, though, for science does offer an answer to that question: if you can correlate ‘em, you are justified in aggregating ‘em. If two events, objects, processes, or other phenomena have mathematical similarity, then you can call them similar in reality. With that as background I return to my bullet-formatted questions:

• Isn’t there some function in the human mind that just knows that a rock is a rock, and knows it with high reliability, without mathematical analysis?
• Could we even study anything on the level of particulars without prior knowledge of at least some generalities (and I’m not talking about logical/mathematical axioms)?
  If so, then not all knowledge is statistical, for statistical knowledge depends on a different, prior kind of knowledge.
• If we approach all knowledge from the small end, looking for generalities through statistical analysis of particulars, what might we be missing in the form knowledge that can’t be gained by that method?
• If there is a God, what is the likelihood we would find him by starting our search from the small end of everything? Could it be that if one insists on starting at that end, one is guaranteed to miss the potentially biggest reality of all?

Just some questions. I haven’t thought them through well enough to be sure of the answers, but I think there’s something there. If there’s a God, and the goal is to know him, can the small things take you there? I doubt it. And I doubt that starting from the small things is the only way for us to know what is real.

*There are probably errors in the popular conception of voodoo that this characterization calls to mind. I’ll grant that, and ask the reader to recognize that this is an illustration of a point about knowledge, not a treatise on voodoo; and the illustration is based on how voodoo is popularly conceived, not on how it is actually practiced or what its proponents actually believe.

**There are other interesting questions and inconsistencies to be considered in that exchange, like, did the alien actually hear the same word “rock” both times, and did it think the earthling was the same being from one moment to the next? But I didn’t read the story, and that’s not what matters here anyway.

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This has come up often enough now to merit its own discussion: the pejorative use of “magic” to describe what God does. The most recent was this morning:

Just my two cents, I consider the swoon theory among the least likely hypotheses concerning the events leading up to the emergence of Christianity as a religion.

But still a few thousand times more likely than a magical resurrection (and that’s even if we assume the supernatural exists—magical resurrections are still massively rarer than survival after grave injuries).

Let me ask: what is the definition of magic? Is there a distinction between “magic” and “work of God”? Is there a good reason for that distinction, for those who consider there is one, or for the lack of such for those who think there is none? Does “magic” do any fruitful work in the discussion beyond its emotive effect? What work is that?

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I continue my survey of historical evidences for Jesus resurrection with an outline of evidences for the empty tomb. This is part of a continuing set of cumulative evidences, not intended to be complete in itself but to be read as part of the series on Evidences for the Resurrection. I am using William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith as my source again.

Craig lists six “lines of evidence” supporting the historicity of the empty tomb:

1. The historical reliability of the story of Jesus’ burial
2. Multiple, early, independent attestation of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb
3. The use of the phrase “the first day of the week” in a way that reflects ancient tradition
4. The simplicity of the way Mark presents the story: it lacks legendary or theological development
5. The account of the tomb’s being discovered by women
6. The earliest Jewish polemic, which suggests the empty tomb

I can’t (and shouldn’t!) re-write all of Craig’s support for each of these. I will just summarize a few significant points, beginning with this overall observation: the manner in which Craig and other current apologists approach these issues is historical, not faith-driven. There are historical reasons to consider each of these lines of evidence to be valid.

Concerning the multiple, early independent attestation of the stories of the burial of Christ, and of the empty tomb being discovered, we have already discussed the most contentious issue: the independence of the sources. In Craig there is much more by way of demonstration of the probable independence of the accounts, specifically on this issue. Whether one views the various Gospel accounts as having come from oral tradition, from other prior sources, or from the authors’ own experiences and recollections, the woven pattern of varying details indicates they did not draw all of their information from a single source, and they did not collude with each other to craft a single narrative of deceit.

The point regarding the “first day of the week” requires knowledge of the original languages. Craig points out that it is awkward Greek, but if the Greek is back-translated into Aramaic, the language used in Jerusalem at the time, the resulting phrase is perfectly natural and reflective of Jewish tradition (the term “Sabbath” is used). This suggests that the phrase was first used in Aramaic, which implies that it was used early.

Mark’s simple account of the resurrection is not what one would expect of a fable developing long after the events.

The discovery of the tomb by women is quite remarkable. The social status of women in both Judaic and Greco-Roman culture at the time was lower than most of us could even conceive (more here, mp3 file). They had the social status of children at every age. They were not allowed to give testimony in court; they had no credibility as witnesses. If the early church had been trying to create a believable story at some later date, it is highly unlikely they would have made women the discoverers of the empty tomb, or the first witnesses of the risen Jesus. The most credible explanation for their being recorded as the first witnesses is that it was true.

The Jews who wanted to deny the resurrection spread a tale that the disciples stole the body (Matthew 28:11-15, especially the latter part of verse 15). How did they try to put an end to claims of the resurrection? It would have been simple to say, “These followers of Jesus are nut-cases.” If Jesus’ body were still in the tomb their rebuttals would have been easier still! Obviously there was a reason they did not use that answer: anyone could have checked and seen whether it was true or not.

******

We’re on a continuing path here. The fact of Jesus’ empty tomb does not prove the fact of his resurrection, but it contributes to a historical case that I will keep adding to as I continue this series.

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David Ellis wrote,

So when one person has a religious experience in which he recalls past lives and another has a religious experience in which he sees a vision of Jesus telling him that he alone is the way to salvation the most reasonable conclusion is that both are in contact with a supernatural realm and not that at least one of them is just imagining things?

All of you keep trying to sidestep just how big a problem this is for your thesis but it won’t go away by ignoring it.

If religious experience were the only guide to truth, then we would have a significant problem of a specific sort, with respect to the truth of religious claims. It is specifically an interpersonal problem. Let us suppose two persons’ experiences lead to contradictory beliefs, as is the case with the example David presented. There are three options. Belief a could be true and Belief b false; or Belief b true and a false, or both might be false.

The fact that Persons A and B have experiences that lead to contradictory beliefs does not prove that either belief a or b is false. It does not even mean that person A or B is unwarranted or unjustified in holding belief A or B; for the warrant could quite reasonably come from the experience itself. (It is unreasonable to insist that God, if he exists, could never impress himself on a person with sufficient knowledge and persuasion to give that person warrant for believing in God.)

Neither A nor B need have any particular reason to conclude, as David suggests, that the most reasonable conclusion is that both are imagining things. Maybe person C thinks she has reason to conclude that, though. Perhaps David sees himself in the position of C, who has had no experience like A’s or B’s, or like any other religious believer’s.

But person C’s experience c needs to be taken into account: that is, that C has had no experience that C would consider to be spiritual. Is c veridical for C? I can’t see why A or B should think it was. But can C claim that his experience c has had nothing to do with his evaluation of a or b; that her experience has had no influence whatever on his own beliefs? That would be naive.

So whatever may be the problem caused by contradictory experience-based beliefs, it is not this: that the beliefs A, B, C, D, E, … may come to are all necessarily false or unwarranted. One of their beliefs may be both true and warranted, in spite of the others having different experiences and beliefs. I hope that’s clear.

I hope it is also clear that we are not only talking about so-called spiritual experiences; the lack of such an experience is also a kind of experience that can certainly influence persons’ beliefs.

But of course there is a problem that is at least in the same neighborhood as the one that David poses. Let us suppose A is fully warranted (justified) in believing a just on the basis of A’s spiritual experience; and let us suppose that a is true. How can A convince B of a? There is no common ground to do so, no basis for discussion. So A may truly know a, and yet be unable to communicate it, much less mount a persuasive case for it.

That is meant when I said that if religious experience were the only guide to truth, the kind of problem that would result would be an interpersonal one. A may have a true and fully justified belief a, but  it is necessarily a private belief. It is certainly private as far as persuasion goes.  It is probably also necessarily private even with respect to the content of the experience and the belief. What can A say about it? Even if there is some other person D who claims to have had an experience like A’s, it’s likely they would have no language with which to discuss it, no way to know if they were talking about the same thing or not.

But the case David has proposed here is purely academic, for there are many other ways to test the truth of religious claims. Every religion makes claims that go beyond interpersonal experience. (If there was one that claimed to contradict that generalization, it would fail; for it would necessarily include the publicly accessible claim that Christianity’s publicly accessible claims are not veridical.) Every religion makes claims regarding externally accessible content that accompanies (or precedes, explains, clarifies) its claimed experiences.

Therefore we have by no means sidestepped what David calls a “big … problem for your thesis.” We are not ignoring it. Every philosophical, historical, or existential argument in favor of Christianity is an argument in favor of the veridicality of Christian experience.

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This is intriguing, to say the least:

According to a report in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, by Wajih Al-Saqqar, archeologists have discovered ancient Egyptian coins bearing the name and image of the Biblical Joseph.

Source: MEMRI: Latest News.

But I don’t know what to make of it, except I can’t accept the Koran as proof that Egypt used coinage in Joseph’s time. If this is for real, though, and if it can be verified by proper archaeological means, I expect we’ll hear more about it.

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Geoff left a comment yesterday pointing us to what he called “a simple presentation explaining why all of these arguments are ultimately unconvincing to most atheists.” The video, “Putting faith in its place,” represents itself as a kind of ultimate answer to all theistic arguments. It’s an example of the kind of thing that both perplexes and grieves me.

Overview of the Video

It begins with a logical presentation of what we can or cannot know about that for which we have no direct evidence, drawing the sensible conclusion that where we have no evidence, all we can know for sure is that logical impossibilities are logically impossible. The spiritual world, it says, is physically inaccessible to us, so all we can know about it is what cannot be true of it: that it cannot contain or include that which is logically impossible. “Logic alone cannot show that possible [divine] beings exist without evidence…. measurable, verifiable evidence.”

Therefore, says the video, every logical argument for the existence of God is fallacious, so then all one needs to do in each case is identify the fallacy. So for example, William Lane Craig’s argument leading to the necessity of a changeless disembodied mind as Creator must be wrong, and in this case the error is that “a changeless mind is by definition non-functioning.” Craig’s conclusion is self-contradictory and logically impossible.

Then it moves into discussion of “proving God with logic,” and says that 100 invalid arguments don’t accumulate into one valid one. But when those who take them as true disparage people by saying, “You’re worthless, you’re immoral, your lives are unlivable, I don’t know that atheists should be considered citizens, you’re human garbage, non believers are human rubbish, join our religion of love and peace or go to hell!” those they try to oppress should be expected to try to refute such arguments.

So when we Christians try to pressure others into saying grace before a meal, one appropriate response might be, “Please, either show your god exists or stop nagging.” Don’t push your beliefs on me, in other words. “You can’t pester and bully people and then hide behind faith when you’re challenged on your behavior,” and “resorting to emotional blackmail is a dishonest tactic.”

Believers in God particular stumble over defining the deity: there’s no evidence for any attribute for their god. If your definition includes, “God is non-physical,” then immediately you have a God in mind that “by definition cannot be quantified, tested, perceived, even in principle.” If God (or a god) dropped a message from the moon, the most we could conclude is that something was going on that involved some “power, intelligence or technology unknown in number and unknown in its nature,” or it could be something like a hallucination. Coming to the truth of the matter is beyond the reach of our limited brains.

Even if there were some intelligence responsible for creating the universe, we could not know anything about its nature, its number, or whether it was interested in humans or could communicate. Anything that “can’t be reliably examined/quantified even in principle” is a “non-scientific concept” unsupported by logic or evidence.

So we who accept such a God have “no grounds for bullying or ostracizing” those who disagree. They’ll keep popping holes in our fallacious arguments until we’ve outgrown our need for everyone to agree with us.

In the end “It’s not whether we believe in gods but how we treat each other that determines our character.”

Response to the Video

So goes the statement in the video. What shall we make of this?

First, to the extent that Christians (or those who claim to be Christians) attack those who disagree with them as indicated in the fourth paragraph (see above), I am very grieved about this. I am aware that it happens. I hate it, and I grieve it.

Yet there is such a thing as standing against ideas and for ideas; standing against falsehood and for truth. And those who say, “stop pushing your beliefs on me!” are themselves pushing a belief. Christians have every right and duty to speak our beliefs. The point is to do it in love and with respect.

I am further grieved and perplexed at the fallacies contained in this supposed comprehensive answer all fallacious beliefs in God. Is a changeless mind by definition non-functioning? Sure, if you define it a certain way, a way that has nothing to do with Christian belief. The Christian conception of God is that he is changeless in his being-ness, in his attributes and character; not that he is frozen immobile and incapable of doing anything. The video effectively proves that a certain kind of God doesn’t exist: a God that nobody has ever thought about believing in. It has no relevance to any God that anybody (Christians, at least) actually thinks might exist. It’s a straw man. But it’s supposed to represent the way any argument for God is fallacious.

It’s such an obvious error, it causes me to wonder if we believers have done such a poor job of communicating what we actually believe! But it’s hard to imagine that we’ve let something as basic as that go unstated.

The argument goes on scientistically to presume that if we cannot detect a god by physical means, then we can say nothing about it/him/her/them. Even if some great event happened by which something seemed to be communicating to us as a God would do, we could not trust our brains to conclude truly what really is behind those phenomena.

(It’s not at all clear how the author of the video thinks we can believe anything at all, even what we know through scientific means, given his absolute skepticism regarding how we should interpret putative messages from God. If aliens or hallucinations could be responsible for such messages, the same could be responsible for everything we believe. Brain in a vat, anyone?)

I suppose there is some truth in the idea that our own research and evidences can’t lead us to a correct and reliable view of God. If it were entirely up to us to investigate and conclude, then we would be incapable. But that would be to say that if there is some God, then that God must be incapable of communicating reliably to us. What a pathetic thing this god would be, whose skills are not up to those of the average human being. It cannot get a message across. I can get on the phone and say, “Hello, this is Tom,” and I can communicate that message successfully. But this video says God isn’t up to such a task.

This view that discovering the truth about God is entirely up to us, and that God has nothing to offer in the exchange, has a name: pride. It is the first cardinal sin, the foundation of all sin. It is saying, “God, thanks but no thanks, you have nothing for me, it’s all on my shoulders.”

Christians don’t believe in a deaf-mute God, any more than we believer in the kind of changeless God the video spoke of earlier. We believe God can communicate, and that he has done so.

So in summary, when Geoff offers this as an example of why non-believers are not impressed with arguments for God, I respond thus: Christians most assuredly ought not to be offensive. Our persuasion ought not to be to meet some inner need to make everyone agree with us. It ought to be an expression of love and truth, the sharing of good news about real life. That is my intent and my goal, and I hope I attain to it to some extent.

But the video’s arguments against Christian arguments are otherwise a complete failure, because they argue against a straw man, a god that nobody believes in and is irrelevant. The God in whom Christians believe is able to make himself known, and for those who will look and listen, he has done so.

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The events surrounding the first Easter are not all as hotly disputed nor are they as much in doubt as some think. In a comment on the Independent Attestation thread earlier in this series, Dave noted that the historical tide on NT scholarship is turning. John A. T. Robinson is one example of a scholar who had been skeptical of early dates for the NT documents, but who by the force of evidence came to conclude that all of them were produced between AD 50 and 70.

He represents a growing stream. Whereas once it was considered scholarly consensus that we could know little to nothing about the life of Christ, and especially his death and the events following, now that consensus is shattered. The well-known Jesus Seminar, for example, is now considered old-school and generally disregarded among serious scholars.

This is not to say that everyone believes that Jesus rose from the grave by the power of God. William Lane Craig points out in Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics that we can distinguish two kinds of questions: what can we know historically about the events of those several weeks, and what do those events mean?

Craig demonstrates the new historical consensus by pointing to skeptics who agree to the reality of many of the events recorded in the New Testament. The already-mentioned John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) is one of those: though a bishop, he was of the liberal, secularizing camp; hardly an evangelical apologist.

Bart Ehrman has detailed his skepticism in many publications, yet in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (published by Oxford University Press in 1999), he acknowledges,

Historians … have no difficulty whatsoever speaking about the belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since this is a matter of public record. For it is a historical fact that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution.

The source from which I obtained that quote is Craig’s book, already mentioned (page 350). Note that word “soon.” Craig later writes (p. 351),

Indeed, Ehrman himself, after expressing initial skepticism concerning some of these facts, came to regard them all as historically well founded.

The facts in question here are Jesus’ burial in a tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea, the finding of the empty tomb by women on the third day, and that some of Jesus’ actual disciples claimed to have seen him alive after that.

In fact most New Testament critics, including John A.T. Robinson, now accept that Jesus was executed by the Romans and buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb. Craig quantifies this by referring (pp. 370-371) to Gary Habermas’s study of “over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French and German since 1975,” in which

Habermas found that 75% of scholars accepted the historicity of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb. The evidence is so compelling that even a number of Jewish scholars … have declared themselves convinced on the basis of the evidence that the tomb was empty.”

Then there were the appearances of Christ to his disciples. The skeptical scholar Gerd Lüdemann, would hardly accept that Jesus made genuine resurrection appearances, yet still he wrote,

It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.

The late University of Chicago redaction critic (i.e., NT skeptic) Norman Perrin wrote,

The more we study the tradition with regard to the appearances, the firmer the rock begins to appear on which they are based.

(The prior two quotes are taken from Craig, p. 381.)

And no one doubts that the Christian faith originated in Jerusalem in the first century. Rodney Stark showed (as Dave has already noted) that it had spread to at least thirteen cities by AD 100.

My first three posts in this series have explored how that last fact — the origination of Christianity in the specific form it took — relates to the claims of the resurrection. A large portion of the discussion in response was of the form, “but we don’t really know what happened, do we?” The answer to that is an unqualified, qualified yes. Let me explain. We do know for sure that Jesus lived, died, and was buried in a grave provided by Joseph of Arimathea. We know for sure that the grave was found empty by several women on the following Sunday, and that several of Jesus’ disciples had experiences that they took to be the risen Christ appearing to them. We know for sure that within a few decades Christianity had spread to at least twelve cities outside Jerusalem. Those are facts that historians regard to be true, with little or no qualification.

What do these facts mean? That’s where the dispute still continues.

In future posts I intend to follow Craig and other authors in detailing how it is that we know these things so confidently, based on sound historical methods. I am not a historian myself (neither are those who have said, “we don’t really know what happened”) but the explanations for these things are transparent. They have convinced skeptics.

Do I expect this to convince skeptics here that the resurrection genuinely happened? That’s not the topic right now. Only after we recognize that the above-mentioned events really happened will we turn to the question, “Is the resurrection the best explanation for them?” We will consider various alternate explanations for them at that time. For now, I am hoping simply to put to rest the canard, long since rejected among serious scholars, that we are operating in the dark. We do know at least some of what happened, and we know it with a high degree of confidence.

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