Loke: Investigating the Resurrection

Peaceful Science
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As seen in this thread, it is vulnerable to criticisms that Loke is unfairly assessing the naturalistic hypotheses first.

*As I explained in my previous replies to Faizal, the method I use is not unfair, on the contrary it is what historians would use to assess the claim of resurrection of Bodhidharma, Schneersohn etc.

If he had assessed the supernatural first and deemed it to be low probability (for example, due to supernatural events being rare in general), then one of the naturalistic hypotheses could have ended up as the last hypothesis assessed and thus being non-excluded.

  • As I explained in my previous replies to Faizal, rarity does not imply improbable in the case of evaluating a miracle (see also the point made by Stephen Davies quoted on page 175 of my book). I don’t think there is any valid way to determine that the supernatural hypothesis has low probability independent of considering the evidence for excluding the naturalistic alternatives. In the absence of such evidence the claim is indeed unlikely, not because we can read the mind of God using methodological naturalistic methods to know that the prior probability that He would not do a miracle in a particular case 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. However, concerning the claim of Jesus resurrection we do have good evidence to rule out the naturalistic alternatives such that there is no ‘last hypothesis’ standing.

What Loke should have done, is to independently assess the probability that supernatural powers exist that are capable of resurrecting Jesus. This might include arguing that the Christian God exists and that the religious context of Jesus and Christianity makes it likely that he could be resurrected.

*I have already offered a Cosmological Argument for the existence of God which is independent (in my other book God and Ultimate Origins, Springer Nature 2017). Swinburne would argue similarly as you suggest, and I cited his work in Chapter 8 too. Your suggestion concerning renormalization is interesting and deserves further consideration, but in any case I have explained why the objections raised in this thread have failed to undermine the arguments in my book.

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My point is that each time you make an assumption, supposition, and/or what Vincent called “hypothetical reasoning”, the rational solidity of the belief (or disbelief) derived from that line of argument becomes additionally fuzzier.

*Not true, it depends on the reasonableness of the assumption. Some assumptions are unreasonable (such as the ones you made, see below), but some assumptions are reasonable. For example, nowhere does that New Testament says that the apostles peed and pooed. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable assumption that they did and that their fellow Christians would have observed their need to do so. This reasonable assumption strengthens the argument that their fellow Christians would have realized that the apostles had physical needs of normal human beings (a point that Paul sometimes appealed to).

Concerning questioning the ‘500 witnesses’:

a) You must assume that the journey would be sufficiently practical (in spite of the long distance from Corinth to Jerusalem, hazards, disruption to livelihood, etc) and proportionate (that even the most fanatical of skeptic would judge such a journey worth while, just to test a single claim in a letter) to have a reasonable likelihood of occurring.

  • Your objection is based on the UNreasonable assumption that they would need to travel from Corinth to Jerusalem, which neglects the historical evidence presented in Chapter 2 of my book which indicate that the apostolic witnesses were quite mobile rather than remain fixed in Jerusalem! You also neglect the point made on page 52 that (in any case) it is very probable that Jewish Christians would have travelled yearly to Jerusalem for religious festivals, and the observation by historian Larry Hurtado of the evidence that

‘A well-attested ‘networking’ was another feature of early Christianity. This involved various activities, among them the sending and exchange of texts, believers travelling for trans-local promotion of their views (as e.g. the ‘men from James’ in Gal. 2:11, or Apollo’s’ travels to Corinth in 1 Cor. 1:12; 3:5–9; 16:12), representatives sent for conferral with believers elsewhere (as depicted, e.g. Acts 15:1–35), or sent to express solidarity with other circles of believers (as e.g. those accompanying the Jerusalem offering in 1 Cor. 16:3–4). After all, travel and communica-tion were comparatively well developed in the Roman world generally, among wealthy and a good many ordinary people, for business, pilgrimage to religious sites/occasions, for health, to consult oracles, for athletic events, sightseeing, and other purposes. ‘So’, as Richard Bauckham observed, ‘the context in which the early Christian movement developed was not conducive to parochialism; quite the opposite.’ Indeed, in that world of frequent travel and communication, the early Christians particularly seem to have been given to networking, devoting impressive resources of time, money, and personnel to this, and on a wide translocal scale.’ (Hurtado 2013, p. 454)

The fact that you neglected what I wrote above is evidence that you have not read my book carefully.

b), c) and d): You explicitly assume that a list of the 500 names might have existed, and implicitly further that it was available…you must assume that the list had been created in the first place. This would have taken quite a lot of effort…You must assume that the intrepid skeptic was able to track down eye witnesses, who (even if still alive) may well no longer be in Jerusalem, be misidentified on the list, or merely simply have too common a name to be practical to track down.

*This is another unreasonable assumption. Even though I have not seen a list of names of people who attend my church regularly, I could still recognize and distinguish between most of them (even though some of them have common names!) because of the networking that exists.

I’m sorry, but based on this, I have little epistemological certainty…On the subject of “evidence”, evidence can be misrepresented…

*You have misrepresented the evidence I presented in chapter 2 of my book, that is why you have little epistemological certainty. Since you have not read my book carefully and make UNreasonable assumptions (as shown by the evidence noted above), it is not surprising that you would conclude that ‘I would describe your list as “widely asserted”’ and disagree with my probability estimates.

Concerning methodological naturalism, you wrote ‘It’s an all or nothing thing. Either you accept MN and are willing to apply it to all the hypotheses under consideration, or you forgo its norms and regularities for all of them. To ask for an exception solely for your preferred hypothesis is the very definition of a Special Pleading .

  • Special pleading is an informal fallacy wherein one cites something as an exception without justifying the special exception. My argument is not special pleading because it is justified on the basis of the reasons I presented previously viz. a supernatural hypothesis ex hypothesi is not supposed to be a hypothesis about how the natural world when left on its own operates, therefore it is inappropriate to use MN to evaluate it. Your insistence of all or nothing is like someone who insist ‘its all or nothing that I use a metal detector for detecting everything’, without realizing that it is inappropriate to use a metal detector to conclude or exclude the existence of (say) a piece of wood.

You wrote ‘In any modelling, you simply cannot compare results obtained under two different sets of assumptions, and expect them to be directly comparable.’

*But my methodology is not based on directly comparing natural and supernatural hypotheses, rather it is based on evaluating each hypothesis using the method appropriate for the hypothesis to be evaluated.

You wrote ‘Ockham’s Razor would suggest that it is more likely that you overestimated the certainties of your argument, not that a supernatural event occurred.’

*I based my probability estimates on what is warranted by the historical evidence, which you failed to understand because of your unreasonable assumptions (see above) which led you to underestimate the probabilities.

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**Whenever we encounter a claim that something supernatural occur, following Ockham’s razor the first step is to consider the naturalistic alternatives to the claim rather than another supernaturalistic alternative—there is nothing arbitrary and self-serving about this!

But that’s not what you are doing. You are not just considering naturalistic alternatives to a claim that “something supernatural” happened. You are narrowing all the possible “supernatural” options to just the one that you favour, without any rhyme or reason.

*You are taking my words out of context. Did you not read what I go on and say about the claim that Bodhidharma resurrected, which indicate that by saying ‘something natural’ I am referring to specific supernatural claim? It would be ridiculous for you to object that the historian is narrowing down the possible supernatural option to just ‘Bodhidharma resurrected’ and then arguing against it by demonstrating the plausibility of the alternative naturalistic legend hypothesis (which work well in Bodhidharma’s case as indicated by the historical evidence). The reason why your objection is ridiculous is because the historian is looking at what is being claimed in some early Buddhist document and trying to evaluate whether there is a plausible naturalistic alternative explanation to that claim—this is a perfectly proper methodology and no scientist or historian I know would object to that! If that is so, why then do you complain when I look at what is being claimed in some early Christian document and trying to evaluate whether there is a plausible naturalistic alternative explanation to that claim? Unless your complain is due to the fact that after evaluation we realize that there isn’t a plausible naturalistic alternative explanation in the case of Jesus’ resurrection, in which case your complain would be arbitrary and self-serving! It would be like arguing ‘if a plausible naturalistic alternative can be found, then the methodology is proper, if not, then it isn’t proper, so in any case naturalism wins!

Concerning your marble analogy, you fail to note I said ‘following Ockham’s razor…’ In other words, we leave out the whole bunch of possible supernaturalistic hypothesis (‘white marbles’) first, and see what we obtain—just like what a historian investing the claim of Bodhidharma resurrection would do! Having shown that all the naturalistic alternatives to what is being claimed in some early document fail, which indicate that the claim has high probability, I then go on and assess whether the high probability need to be revised by considering and evaluating other possible supernaturalistic hypothesis in Section 8.7 of my book where I show that ‘God raised Jesus’ is superior to other supernatural hypotheses

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Loke’s list of purportedly “well established” considerations are too long for me to address individually (though I think my previous discussion of the 500 has already addressed his #7). One point did however catch my eye:

It caught my eye for two reasons. (i) It is a claim that seems to be both widely made
(by Christian apologists) and widely disputed (by skeptics). (ii) It is sufficiently vague as to be largely worthless.

  1. Which eye witnesses specifically is it being claimed sacrificed their life?

  2. What specific basis do we have for claiming each of their martyrdoms, and how credible are those bases?

  3. What basis do we have for claiming that they were killed for their eye-witness claims specifically, as opposed to because they were convenient scapegoats, disruptive of the status quo, etc?

  4. Although Loke has distinguished them from suicide bombers specifically, it is unclear that they can be distinguished from all martyrs-for-some-cause (a wildly varied group).

Lacking answers on these points, I cannot allow that his claim comes anywhere close to being “well established”.

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Yes, and good luck with that.

Any attempt to come up with solid numbers for any of those is going to be pure make-believe. It doesn’t matter what sort of fancy equation you are plugging the numbers into, the GIGO principle still holds.

Overall an excellent analysis, though. Thanks.

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Regarding your questions concerning ‘10 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’, those questions are addressed in Chapter 3. See chapter 3 and also my previous reply to you concerning your unreasonable assumptions and failure to read carefully what I wrote.

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@Andrew_Loke

  1. “Reasonable” is a relative term, and what may be a “reasonable assumption” where information is thin, need not be a necessarily accurate one. Many reasonable assumptions turn out to be wrong in hindsight.

  2. “Mobility” is not an all-or-nothing binary variable. It is therefore cannot be stated as a silver bullet for your argument. It tends to be limited both geographically and in frequency of movement. How far did these eye witnesses typically travel (within their province, to neighboring provinces, further afield), how frequently, and how many of them were traveling? All these questions would need to be answered before we could evaluate the reasonableness of your assumption. And even if it were found “reasonable”, that still does not make it a certain fact, which means that it would still add uncertainty to your conclusion.

  3. I also find it strange that all these many detailed eye witness accounts were bouncing around Greece and the Near East, at the time of Paul’s writing, but none of them found contemporaneous written form. Does any evidence of these accounts survive? Or is this simply more “hypothetical reasoning”?

  4. I would suggest that a group that meets weekly (or more frequently), whose membership resides within a few km of each other is a poor analogy for a group that lives hundreds of km apart and may see each other far more infrequently.

  5. The interpretation of the historical evidence around this issue, and what is “warranted” by it, is frequently disputed, even among the experts. That renders all probability estimates based on any given interpretation necessarily uncertain. Okham’s Razor would appear to favor known disagreements, and the uncertainties they engender, as an explanation, over a supernatural event.

  6. With respect to your point #10, I took another look at Chapter 3. The answers would appear to be (i) only Peter and James. (ii) Only tradition (plus a couple of obscure NT mentions that might be talking about his death) for Peter, James is recorded, several decades later, and somewhat theatrically, as having been thrown from the pinnacle of the temple. Was the latter an otherwise-recorded method of execution? (iii) No basis. Thank you, but I won’t take this as a “well established” consideration.

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I agree that we should not assign too much significance to the general rarity of supernatural events - as you argued on page 182 (quoting McGrew), the probability of a generally rare event could go up significantly in light of new evidence. That’s why in my probability calculation above, 1) I did not include an independent factor for the general rarity of supernatural events and 2) I also added that the probability assessment for statements 2 and 3 (that God would want to reveal himself to humanity through Jesus) should be considered not in isolation, but also in light of the historical evidence surrounding the Resurrection that we have, just as we did in the case of the naturalistic hypotheses. (In addition, I note that in this case we have the benefit of two independent pieces of evidence - the empty tomb and the post-mortem appearances. They can be used to support each other.)

This is also reflected in the case I suggested to Faizal, namely that the normally low probability of a large asteroid hitting Earth shouldn’t prevent us from regarding it as a likely hypothesis for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs in light of independent evidence supporting it and also the failure of other hypotheses to explain the same phenomena. That being said, I think it’s obvious that, say, if we had large asteroid impacts every 1000 years instead of every 100 million years, it would be much easier to prove that it explains the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. So the general rarity of the event can play a role, even if it shouldn’t be overstated compared to specific considerations of the case.

However, while you and McGrew correctly argue that the probability of the supernatural should go up in light of the evidence for the Resurrection, I think that you must also concede that the skeptic can also argue that the probability of mass hallucinations, people dying for beliefs they know are wrong, etc. can also increase in light of this same evidence. This symmetry is seen by considering the two hypothetical cases:

  1. If we assumed for the sake of argument that mass hallucinations happened in this case, for example, then skeptics can use that assumption to argue that other claimed supernatural phenomena (e.g. that Jesus turned water into wine) are also less likely to have happened, because apparently mass hallucinations happen more frequently than what we previously thought (and psychologists have to get to work explaining this).
  2. If on the other hand for the sake of argument we assumed that Jesus was resurrected supernaturally in this case, then Christians could argue that other claimed supernatural phenomena (e.g. Jesus’ other miracles, the miracles of the Twelve, modern-day claims of miracles) are more likely to have genuinely happened as well, because apparently supernatural events happen more frequently than what we previously thought.

Thus, to be fair, we have to allow both types of hypothesis (i.e. natural and supernatural) to “benefit” from the relevant evidence under consideration. Now, whether the probability of both types should increase equally is unclear to me. In my above calculation I have assumed that they increase proportionally. But perhaps one could argue on other grounds (e.g. explanatory scope, coherence, etc.) that it should benefit the supernatural resurrection hypothesis more.

I agree, and that’s why I think it should be part of the calculus, along with many arguments for the existence of God that have been offered by other philosophers.

Yes, I see that now on page 185. I just am not convinced that an argument purely by exclusion of other hypotheses is legitimate. I think the renormalization approach preserves the benefit of your systematic logical structure while treating hypotheses equally. I believe this should be done also for claims of resurrections and miracles in other religions. However, the exclusion approach could be persuasive as a quick approximation tool for people who are already OK with the idea of supernatural occurrences, such as perhaps the Catholic Church when it is evaluating whether a miracle happened after praying for intercession from a saint.

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8 posts were split to a new topic: Issues with Probability in Arguing for the Resurrection, Evolution, etc

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I think it’s obvious that, say, if we had large asteroid impacts every 1000 years instead of every 100 million years, it would be much easier to prove that it explains the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. So the general rarity of the event can play a role, even if it shouldn’t be overstated compared to specific considerations of the case.

*If a certain kind of natural event happens more frequently, we can conclude that it is more likely. But my point is that the converse does not hold when it comes to evaluating a miracle, i.e. we should not think that, if a miraculous event happen less frequently, we can conclude that it is less likely, because (p. 175:) ‘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,’ e.g. to confirm the claims of Jesus (rather than Bodhidharma, Schneersohn, etc) if the incarnation of Jesus was indeed a historical event that made possible the redemption of humanity.

However, while you and McGrew correctly argue that the probability of the supernatural should go up in light of the evidence for the Resurrection, I think that you must also concede that the skeptic can also argue that the probability of mass hallucinations, people dying for beliefs they know are wrong, etc. can also increase in light of this same evidence.

*I don’t think so, because ‘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’ (p. 175).

In other words, I don’t think it is reasonable to argue that the probability of naturalistic mass hallucinations etc. increase in light of the same evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, because we already know that the natural world does not work that way, and also because, given that a naturalistic hallucination ex hypothesi is supposed to be an intramental processes which occur in the absence of external causal relations to the putative entity, it is unreasonable to think that causal mechanisms internal to each person in a group simultaneously generated similar experiences that are consistent with others’.
In summary, because we have very good evidences and reasons against the naturalistic alternatives, we can legitimately exclude them. That is the reason why my argument by exclusion is legitimate.

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  1. You are confounding (1) ‘reasonable’ with (2) ‘what seems reasonable to a person’. (2) is a relative term: the assumption that the apostles would have peed and pooed may not seem reasonable to an ignoramus who doesn’t know elementary biological considerations of how human bodies function, but it is reasonable based on the evidences for how human bodies function and is unlikely to turn out to be wrong on hindsight. Likewise a person who doesn’t know elementary historical or psychological considerations (p. 51) may not find my assumptions reasonable, but they are reasonable nonetheless on the basis of historical and psychological evidences.

  2. When you said ‘in spite of the long distance from Corinth to Jerusalem’, you (not me) were the one who falsely assume that “mobility” is an all-or-nothing binary variable i.e. you were the one assuming that the ‘eyewitnesses’ were all immobile (‘nothing’ mobile) and remained fixed in Jerusalem. I cite the evidence of mobility to show that YOUR assumption is unreasonable.

On the other hand, my own argument does not assume “mobility” is an all-or-nothing binary variable.

Some ‘eyewitnesses’ would travel further than others to meet people, some would remain in Jerusalem and be visited by other Jewish Christians when they came to Jerusalem for yearly religious festivals, and the historical evidences I cited from Hurtado and Bauckham (see my previous reply) indicate that these are reasonable assumptions.

A first century person such as Paul would know the details about ‘how far who travel’ etc. better than you or I do, and in 1 Corinthians 15:6 he (not me) assumes that the Corinthians would be able to check out the eyewitnesses, which is a reasonable assumption based on the historical evidences I explained above and also based on other considerations I mentioned in Chapter 2. For example, Paul was addressing sceptics (1 Cor 15:2) and also knew that his credentials were being critically assessed by people opposing him (1 Cor 9:1-6). Given this context, Paul says in 1 Cor 15:6 that most of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses. He could not have done this and got away with it, given the power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true (Kreeft). This is based on elementary psychological and historical considerations just as the apostles peed and pooed is an elementary biological consideration. Any uncertainty about such elementary considerations would be negligible and hence any uncertainty that they add to my conclusions would be negligible.

  1. The reason why you find it strange that ‘all these many detailed eye witness accounts were bouncing around Greece and the Near East, at the time of Paul’s writing, but none of them found contemporaneous written form’ is because you neglect the oral culture of the ancient world in which many details were passed orally (and Paul implies that these details can be checked with the ‘eyewitnesses’). You also neglect the possibility that some of the detailed eye witness accounts were written down and incorporated into the Gospels (as explained in my book, the evidences indicate that the Gospel writers made use of earlier traditions).

4.My analogy is targeting at your insistence that a list of names need to be created in order for identification to take place, and for that purpose my analogy is adequate. Even for a group that lives hundreds of km apart and may see each other far more infrequently, a list would not have been necessary because of the networking. For example, I infrequently travel overseas to meet friends in overseas churches who introduced me to other friends without having to construct a list of names.

  1. Just because there is dispute among experts doesn’t entail that all probability estimates based on any given interpretation is necessarily uncertain. One needs to look into the details of their arguments and evaluate the reasonableness of their assumptions. When one does that, one realize that, despite disagreements about various aspects of the New Testament, there is widespread consensus among historical-critical scholars that (1) Jesus died due to Roman crucifixion, (2) very soon afterwards, a number of people had experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus, and (3) the body of Jesus was missing (Habermas 2005, 2013). Now there is dispute about what is “warranted” by these three ‘minimal facts’, but often the dispute is due to philosophical assumptions which are beyond the expertise of these historians. For example, not being a trained philosopher, Bart Ehrman makes very elementary philosophical mistakes in failing to ‘distinguish between the probability of a miracle claim considered apart from the evidence and the probability of the claim given that evidence’ (McGrew 2013). Ockham’s Razor is not a good substitute for looking into the details of the arguments

Re: 10 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.

You asked 1. ‘which eye witnesses specifically is it being claimed sacrificed their life?’2. What specific basis do we have for claiming each of their martyrdoms, and how credible are those bases?

These questions missed the point of my argument, which is not ‘No group of people sacrifice everything…’ (read carefully what I wrote above again! btw, you keep failing to read carefully; e.g. you noted Peter and James, but you failed to observe that there were two different James mentioned and you also neglected Paul), but ‘No group of people would be willing to sacrifice everything….’

As I explained in Chapter 3 page 70: ‘it should be noted that it is not required for the objector of the no experience hypothesis to show that these disciples did die for their faith, but that they were willing to suffer and die for their faith. Their genuine willingness to give up everything and die for their faith can be inferred from the following considerations….(read pages 70-73).

You asked 3. What basis do we have for claiming that they were killed for their eye-witness claims specifically , as opposed to because they were convenient scapegoats, disruptive of the status quo , etc?

Read page 77-82. You missed the point that the fundamentality of Jesus’ resurrection for the earliest Christians can be seen from Paul’s emphatic statement: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless’ (1 Cor. 15:17). The relationship between their suffering and their belief in bodily resurrection, which was grounded in them having witnessed the resurrected Jesus (1 Cor. 15:3–11), can be seen in 1 Cor 15:30–32:

‘And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’

You asked 4.Although Loke has distinguished them from suicide bombers specifically , it is unclear that they can be distinguished from all martyrs-for-some-cause (a wildly varied group).

  • Why does it matter for my argument to distinguish from all martyrs-for-some-cause? What I explained in pages 81-82 would suffice where the argument for Jesus’ resurrection is concerned.
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