Loke: Investigating the Resurrection

Hi Faizal, I asked you to read Chapters 4 and 8, you said you have read chapter 4, but based on what you wrote on this thread it seems that you haven’t read chapter 8, haven’t you? In your previous reply to me, you mentioned your objections concerning Chapter 4, but the objections you mentioned are addressed in Chapter 8! It is not right of you to take chapter 4 out of context of the argumentation of my whole book. Please read carefully chapter 8 on ‘The Problem of Miracle’ and also the methodological issues discussed in Chapter 1, and let me know if you have any more remaining questions

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This is the point, by the way, I am most skeptical of @Andrew_Loke’s argument. It is very difficult to produce a logically exhaustive list, which also captures all meaningful variation, and that is what Loke claims he has done.

My guess is that this is where his case is most likely to be shown incomplete. I’d be interested to see if we can imagine any alternate hypotheses for the Resurrection that do not fit well into his Kirt.

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This is another example of what I am talking about. There are some ideas that have been formulated regarding how legends arise, and the circumstances under which these may be more likely to happen. It is far from an exact science, of course, but lets say this is as well-established as the fact that dead people do not ordinarily come back to life.

So we have two possible events that would defy the usual expectations: A legend developing where one would not ordinarily expect it, and someone coming back to life where one would not ordinarily expect it.

The claim is that we cannot rule things out based on prior probability, because maybe there’s a God and therefore prior probability cannot really rule anything out.

OK, then. So how do we rule out legendary development if we are not going to allow prior probability to be a factor?

We can’t.

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I hadn’t then, but I have now. It does not address the issues I have raised. I am not certain you understood the argument I am making here. Probably my fault, I have a habit of favouring terseness sometimes at the expense of brevity. If you are interested in an ongoing discussion, please re-read my comments here and if you still believe you have addressed my objections, then refer me to the exact pages where you have done so. Or if you find you do not understand what I am saying then feel free to ask.

I’ve no time to re-read the previous comments because there are so many! Please summarize which points you think I haven’t address and I’ll address them here.

Which ‘meaningful variation’ is not captured by the logically exhaustive list in my book?

Oh, but I’m expected to read your entire book. Yeah, that’s really fair.

But I’ll play by your rules. Here, I’ll just re-quote my comment:

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You’re just repeating a question which Josh has already answered on my behalf. See the points I made about identification of miracle and evaluation of natural impersonal causes on pages 174-6 of chapter 8. I thought I asked you to read Chapter 1 as well. See page 34 where I state ‘While science
by itself cannot identify a miracle, science can be used by philosophical argument to rule out certain naturalistic alternatives as one of the steps towards identifying a miracle.’

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You still are not understanding my point.

I am not questioning how you rule out possible naturalistic explanations for the “resurrection”.

I am asking how one can rule out possible explanations once one has dismissed (methodological) naturalism as a means of assessing possible claims.

Here is how the argument is going:

“I believe the claimed resurrection of Jesus did not happen, because the available evidence shows that resurrections do not happen.”

“You can’t do that. That’s begging the question. You can’t presume off the bat that resurrections are don’t happen.”

“OK, well, why couldn’t the claims of Jesus’s resurrection be the result of legendary development?”

“Because the available evidence shows that legendary development could not occur over this span of time.”

“You can’t do that. That’s begging the question. You can’t presume off the bat that legendary development could not occur over this span of time.”

“No, that’s wrong.”

“Why is it wrong? I just said the same thing you did regarding my argument.”

How would you respond at this point?

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As I said before, the response is in pages 174-6 of chapter 8:

‘In particular, it should be noted that the objection against the reasonableness of miracles based on the apparent infrequency of miracles does not work. When evaluating rare hypotheses, infrequency is not the main consideration; the main consideration is the reason for the infrequency. In the case of evaluating natural impersonal causes, infrequencies can help us exclude natural impersonal causes and naturalistic alternatives to Jesus’ resurrection given that natural causes are supposed to act in predictable and law-like ways. For example, by thinking about the law-like causal pathways that are required to produce perceptions, we can determine that, without a corresponding external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ, the mental states internal to each person within a group of people would not agree on various details concerning their experience of the external world. Given this reason it is no wonder that a recent study by Bergeron and Habermas (2015) concludes that collective hallucinations are not found in peer-reviewed medical literature. However a miraculous event is supposed to be caused by a supernatural personal free agent, and it is not unreasonable to think that an infrequent event happened as a result of a personal agent freely choosing to act in a certain unique way only on a special occasion.’

In other words, your statement ‘I am asking how one can rule out possible explanations once one has dismissed (methodological) naturalism as a means of assessing possible claims’ is a misrepresentation of my methodology. I do NOT dismiss (methodological) naturalism as a means of assessing possible claims. Rather, it depends on WHAT KIND OF possible claim we are considering. If we are considering the probability of a naturalistic hypothesis, then of course we may use methodological naturalism to exclude it. However, if we are considering the probability of a supernatural hypothesis (‘a miraculous event is supposed to be caused by a supernatural personal free agent’, who may ‘freely choosing to act in a certain unique way only on a special occasion’), then it would be unreasonable to use methodological naturalism to exclude it as explained above. The means that you use to assess a claim must be appropriate to the kind of claim that is being assessed. Your fallacy lies in failing to understand this point.

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Exactly. You use one set of standards to assess the conclusion you wish to reach, and then a completely different set for the conclusions you wish to deny.

That is not an intellectually defensible way to go about addressing a question.

Anyway, thanks for giving me enough information to realize that reading more of your book will not be a worthwhile use of my time, as it just commits the same basic error made by every other apologist for the “resurrection” that I have already encountered.

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I have already explained why the set of standards should be appropriate to the kind of claim that is being assessed. You reply by simply asserting that is not an intellectually defensible without explaining why it is not intellectually defensible, and without replying to the explanations that I gave. You thereby commits the same basic error made by many atheists that I have already encountered, namely making assertions without justification and without replying to objections. This is a sign that you are running away from God.

Atheists are not running away from (your) God. One does not run away from something that does not exist.

This is the same basic error made by many apologists that I have already encountered.

You will never convince any atheist that the resurrection occurred because your false assumption that atheists really believe your god exists will prevent you from even seeing the biggest hole in your argument and largest obstacle you need to overcome.

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No, it wouldn’t. Methodological naturalism(a misnomer, really) isn’t really restricted to only observing naturalistic phenomena. Nor non-free agents. I can observe right now that, if God exist, God isn’t choosing to supernaturally make the sky purple and green in stripes and dots. As far I can tell, God has never chosen to supernaturally make the sky purple and green in stripes and dots. So nothing prevents me from making inferences about what God is or isn’t doing, and hence likely to do or not, in the same way nothing prevents me from making inferences about what “nature”, or other free agents is or isn’t doing.

All the world’s human free agents, every living person, could in principle decide to all simultaneously go throw themselves in the sea and drown, or run into the streets and dance, or give all their money to charity, as a certain “unique event”. They could have done this unique event at innumerable opportunities in the past. But so far they haven’t, so it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that it is a priori extremely unlikely for them all to decide to do it now or at any point in the future. There’s are entire branches of science dedicated to the studying quantitatively what both human and animal free agents are likely do in all sorts of circumstances, called things like sociology, ethology, psychology, economics, marketing/advertising, and so on. Trying to understand and predict trends in behavior of “free agents”.

The thing about the God hypothesis is that if God wills it, it obtains. If God wills that the sky should be filled with unicorns as a unique event, the sky will be filled with unicorns. I observe that the sky isn’t filled with unicorns, hence if God exists it’s very unlikely he’s going to decide the sky be filled with unicorns.

God doesn’t appear to spend a lot of time making me or anyone else who ever lived 100 feet tall, it is a priori unlikely that anyone who claims so, have actually been 100 feet tall by the aid of God.
Same on naturalism, it doesn’t appear that anyone has ever grown to be 100 feet tall, hence it is a priori unlikely that anyone who claims so will be able to grow to 100 feet tall.

God doesn’t appear to be wanting to run around and supernaturally resurrect people all the time. And so on.

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You simply assert that God does not exist without responding to the arguments I presented in my book. This is the same basic error made by many atheists that I have already encountered. I did not assume that atheists believe God exists. Rather, my point is, by making assertions without replying to arguments, many atheists are refusing to consider the evidences for God.

I’m sure you are being honest in saying you believe you have done so. But you haven’t, and I lack the patience to try to explain further as you seem quite impenetrable to any explanations.

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If you’re going to invoke the resurrection as evidence for God’s existence, we first need to try to estimate the probability that the resurrection even occurred. The form of the argument seems to be something like the following:
Only if A is the case(God exists) and for no other reason, would we expect B to be the case(the resurrection occurred). B is the case(the resurrection occurred), hence A(God exists) must be the case.

Now obviously you can’t just say that the resurrection is likely to have occurred because God exists. And God is likely to exist, because the resurrection is likely to have occurred. That would be straightforward circular reasoning.

As an atheist I obviously don’t grant the premise that God’s existence is likely. Hence if you want to show me that God exists by appealing to the resurrection, you need to show first that the resurrection even occurred, and that only if God exists is that likely to have occurred.

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I think the objections raised to your reasoning are completely legitimate, but I also thought the disagreement was substantive, meaning that I thought one could simply disagree with your reasoning processes without concluding that there were other reasons to disregard your arguments.

Then I read this: “This is a sign that you are running away from God.”

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8 posts were split to a new topic: Evidence for and against God’s existence

Hitchens’ razor is an epistemological razor expressed by writer Christopher Hitchens. It says that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it.

Hitchens has phrased the razor in writing as “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

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