Loke: Investigating the Resurrection

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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Sigh…another assertion from you without replying to the arguments that I gave.

Let me first summarize my argument against Faizal’s claim before responding to yours. My argument is, given the presence of a phenomenon (i.e. ‘The historical evidence indicates that there were people in mid-first century CE who claimed that they had seen Jesus alive after his crucifixion, they truly saw something, what they saw was not caused intramentally but extramentally, and the extramental entity was not anyone else but the same Jesus who died on the cross. Therefore, Jesus resurrected’ as argued in my book), should we use methodological naturalism to exclude the hypothesis that ‘God resurrected Jesus’ as an explanation for the phenomena? I have explained that we should not, because ‘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’ (p. 175). Whereas we can use methodological naturalism to exclude hallucination as an explanation for the phenomenon ‘they truly saw something’ because ‘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.’

However, in your examples such as ‘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’, ‘I observe that the sky isn’t filled with unicorns’, you are referring to the absence of phenomenon to be explained (absence of purple sky, absence of unicorns). Therefore, these examples are disanalogous to the case of Jesus resurrection where there is presence of phenomenon to be explained, as noted in the paragraph above.

There is a longstanding debate between determinists and indeterminists whether humans are really free. I personally affirm that humans have limited libertarian freedom; I emphasize that this freedom is limited e.g. if someone suddenly step on my toes really hard, I would not have the freedom not to say ‘ouch’. I therefore agree that in many cases it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that it is a priori extremely unlikely for humans to decide to do some things now or at any point in the future, and that is because humans are not supernatural nor perfectly free, rather their freedom is limited by many natural factors which can be studied by psychologists, sociologists, etc. I myself state on p.202 that ‘No group of people would be willing to sacrifice everything for what they do not believe to be true and be condemned by God after death for being false witnesses.’

Things are different when it comes to whether God would choose not to resurrect most other people but resurrect Jesus. In this case we do not have evidence to think that God’s choice not to resurrect most people is limited by natural factors which can be studied by psychologists, etc. Hence this would not be a valid reason to conclude that the prior probability that God would raise Jesus is low.

Yes as you say it is unlikely that anyone who claims to be able to naturally grow to 100 feet tall would naturally be able to do so, because we know that is not how the natural works when it is left on its own and given certain circumstances.

You tried to argue that it is likewise unlikely that anyone who claims to be able to supernaturally grow to 100 feet tall would supernaturally be able to do so, because we know that is not what God often chooses to do.

I disagree that ‘we know that is not what God often chooses to do’ is a good explanation for the unlikelihood of God making just ‘anyone’ taller. First, we need to consider who this anyone is. Is he as special as Jesus? (see the discussion of religious context of Jesus in Chapter 8). We cannot read the mind of God like a psychologist to rule out the possibility that a particular person X is specially chosen by God to manifest a miracle and reveal Himself within a specific religious context. Thus we might say that the prior probability is indeterminate (Swinburne argues that the prior probability of God doing a miracle given Jesus’ religious context is in fact high, but let’s set aside Swinburne’s argument first).

Second, in the absence of evidence the claim is indeed unlikely, not because we can read the mind of God to know that the prior probability that He would not make him tall is low, but because we know that there have been many mistaken claims of miracles. In other words, there are common naturalistic alternatives which—in the absence of evidence to rule them out—are very likely, and given that the probabilities must all add up to 1 this would imply that the miraculous claim is unlikely.

Nevertheless, in the case of Jesus’ resurrection there are evidences to rule out all the naturalistic alternatives as I argue in my book. I wrote on p.184 ‘one should ‘distinguish between the probability of a miracle claim considered apart from the evidence and the probability of the claim given that evidence’ (McGrew 2013). Therefore, while there have been many mistaken reports in general, one should consider the evidence that is specific to the particular case of Jesus’ resurrection and think about the possible ways by which the reports concerning Jesus’ resurrection appearances could have been mistaken, and these ways have all been excluded by the considerations explained in the previous chapters’.

We can arrive at the probability of the resurrection by using the logically exhaustive list formulated in my book and using argument by exclusion, without having to first assign a number for the prior probability of Jesus’ resurrection which (as I explain above) is indeterminate. As I wrote on page 185-186: ‘the probability of each of the seven possible categories of explanations concerning the claims of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances—viz. legends, no experience, intramental, mistaken identity, swoon, escape, and resurrection—must add up to 1. Since each of the six naturalistic alternatives has negligible probability and that the probability of the disjunction of six negligible probabilities is negligible, it can be concluded that the resurrection of Jesus happened (i.e. the probability of Jesus’ resurrection has negligible difference from the probability of 1)… Even if one disagrees with my assessment that each of the naturalistic alternative hypotheses has ‘negligible probability’ or ‘vanishingly small probability’ (to use McGrew’s term), one can still say that each of these naturalistic alternatives has been shown to be very improbable. For example, even if one assigns to each of the six naturalistic alternatives a probability of one in a thousand (which is very generous and much higher than the vanishingly small probability calculated by McGrew), that still leaves the resurrection with a probability of 99.4%.7 This should warrant assent from a reasonable person.’

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I’ve already bear the burden of proof and presented the evidence in my book, but it seems that some atheists here are ignoring it.

I don’t understand what you mean by ‘one could simply disagree with your reasoning processes without concluding that there were other reasons to disregard your arguments’. Why do you disagree with my reasoning?

But you then use “methodological naturalism” to exclude other possibilities like mass hallucinations.

I know you refuse to see the problem here, but I am just pointing it out again.

And to be clear, I do not think mass hallucination is a reasonable explanation. Just that once we dismiss “methodological naturalism” as a method to judge the likelihood of claims, anything goes. We have no means of ruling out any possible “explanation”, no matter how unlikely or outlandish. Mass hallucination is just one of a potentially endless list that only incidentally happens to include a real resurrection.

I should also clarify that, in this context, “methodological naturalism” means nothing more than the idea that we can determine the likelihood of something happening by our observations of how the universe operates.

In your book, you give the example of a society which has never experienced below freezing temperatures and therefore denies the existence of ice. But in that example, a scientist from that community could determine that it is possible for ice to form at sufficiently low temperature by observing the change in physical states that occur at various temperatures, such as how a metal liquifies when heated, and drawing further conclusions from that. It would be improper for someone in that society to simply accept the existence of ice on the mere assertion that “Hey, anything can happen. You never know!”, which is essentially what you are demanding.

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Lots of disagreements but the clearest and simplest has been expressed elsewhere by others: a god who can reanimate a bunch of corpses is a god who can delude people or induce mass hallucination or (much more easily, it would seem) inspire people to confabulate/embellish/self-deceive/lie about events and accounts of events. And so, all the work to carefully calculate “probabilities,” even if those calculations are impeccable, is meaningless once a supernatural power is introduced. Multiple reanimations of festering corpses is ludicrous, but much much more importantly, the actions of a supernatural omnipotent being–one, BTW, with bizarre and morally appalling habits, as reported by his spokespersons–make it indefensible to argue that the alternative explanations are unlikely or implausible.

But my more important point is that your sentence about “running away from God” was revelatory about the backdrop to this conversation, which is now not about evidence or probability.

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Or maybe see if this helps:

I want to argue that the disciples experienced a miraculous mass hallucination that Jesus had come back to life after his crucifixion.

Since this is a miracle I am claiming, if science shows that such hallucinations cannot happen, this does not matter.

Now, someone else could argue “What if Jesus actually did come back to life?” Then, I could simply point to the fact that science shows this does not happen.

All other naturalistic probabilities are ruled out for the same reasons you give.

I have now proven that the only reasonable explanation is that the disciples had a mass hallucination.

This is no different than the argument you are making. We both decided a priori which scenario we would favour with special pleading. We just each chose a different scenario.

The other difference is that I realize this is a foolish argument to make. You don’t.

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I don’t believe I am excluding the possibility of it merely by pointing to the fact that as far as we can tell using observation, God isn’t in the business of resurrecting the dead. And with respect to observation, we are not saying it isn’t allowed to use observation to gauge what God might or might not do if he exists.

I’m not, and as best I can tell, nobody here is seriously advancing a mass-halluscination hypothesis as an alternative we should believe. I also don’t like your insistence on using the word exclusion, which seems to imply we can categorically rule particular hypotheses out. I don’t actually think we can do that, we can only ever try to give statements about relatively probabilities, which implies we can only have relative levels of confidence about each specific hypothesis.

No the whole point is that in both cases, there is an absence of phenomena to be explained. We don’t actually have the resurrection before us, just like we don’t actually have a green and purple striped and dotted sky.
We just have some claims. If someone were to come and show me that it says in an old book that the sky turned purple and green in stripes and dots, I would have good reason for not believing that too. And the point is that I can use that same reasoning about both naturalistic and supposedly supernatural phenomena. Bodies don’t appear to spontaneously come back to life, whether naturally or by God’s will. Hence I’m going to consider it unlikely to be true when someone insists some body came back to life because it says so in an old book and God totally could have done so if he wanted to.

You won’t be surprised to hear I also don’t believe the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.

Why would they have to be natural factors? The crucial point is whether resurrections appear to be something God is likely to do or not whatever the essential attributes of his reasons for doing so. There are millions of reasons imaginable for why a God might or might not do anything, and countless people have been their own unique and special type of person a God might or might not have had a unique, supernaturally-grounded interest in resurrecting. Even if a God exists, it appears to not have done so.

Anyone who ever lived is special and unique in their own way particular way. Good people, righteous people, bad people, faithful people, faithless people, people who knew their scriptures and took them seriously and really tried to live by them. People who had particular shades of skin colour, moles in particular shapes and locations, arteries with particular levels of clogging. People who were sincere and tried to spread the faith, and gave to charity. Or whatever other unique and specially deserving attribute you can imagine a God would deem worthy. They died and God didn’t bring them back.

That undermines your own argument. If you can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him unlikely to choose to resurrect someone, you also can’t read the mind of God to determine what attributes would make him want to resurrect someone. In effect you are the one making a judgement call about what you suspect God wants. But you truly have no idea. Your probabilities for the resurrection are in effect made up.

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Yes, that is much better worded than I have managed.

The position that rejecting resurrections as highly improbable does not entail taking any position on the existence of a god. Even if he exists, it is quite obvious that he only rarely, if ever, brings a dead person back to life. His tendency, by a very large margin, is to just leave them dead.

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