That seems perfectly reasonable to me. The former hypothesis — mass hallucination — is scientifically implausible. The latter hypothesis — resurrection — contains the auxiliary hypothesis that the resurrectee is omnipotent, which renders it immune to any conceivable test. Though in fact I’m never quite sure what scientism is in any particular case.
But any omnipotent being that can cause a resurrection can also cause a group of people to have a mass hallucination of the same thing at the same time. So the only way to determine one is more likely than the other is to determine what this omnipotent being will and won’t do. How does one decide that?
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That would be a third hypothesis, one that nobody has ever advanced.
It has to be made part of the hypothesis. We can agree that a deceptive God’s actions are not testable, but those of other sorts of Gods might be, depending on their hypothesized natures.
Is it as third, independent, hypothesis, or merely a logical extension of the contents of the second hypothesis?
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I would say the latter. It is not a hypothesis, in the sense of being something I think actually happened. Rather, it is an attempted internal critique of the believers’ argument. When a skeptic of the resurrection points out that science and everyday human experience shows that dead people stay dead, a typical response is that if an omnipotent god exists then this is not necessarily true.
But if we assume the existence of such a god, then literally anything can happen. This god could have caused the disciples to have simultaneous hallucinations of the risen Jesus. Or he could have created the universe last Thursday and included people who believe a man named Jesus lived 2000 years ago. Etc. etc. I do not find “But that’s not what we believe happened” to be an adequate response.
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That’s a puzzling question, since the third hypothesis is a rejection of the second.
That’s not what a hypothesis is, so no problem there.
It’s true that any hypothesis involving an omnipotent being must, in order to be properly formed, contain additional hypotheses about the nature of that being and what it would or would not do. We must assume in the present case that God is not deceptive, i.e. not doing one thing while providing evidence of something quite different. The problem with testing the hypotheses advanced here isn’t necessarily in their form but in the lack of data.
Not really, no. It, rather, points out a logical consequence of the 2nd hypothesis. i.e. that if one accepts that Jesus could have risen from the dead because there exists an omnipotent god, then that opens up a limitless number of other alternative possibilities that are inconsistent with a resurrection. It is not that a resurrection is rejected. Rather, a resurrection is just one among many other, equally likely options.
One problem is that, if we accept the story of the resurrection as true, then it is an undeniable fact that God is deceptive. I mean, he convinces his friends, families, followers and all other loved ones that he has died an excruciatingly slow and painful death right before their eyes, and is dead and buried. Then, three days later, he just pops up, hale, hearty and healthy, saying. “Psych! I have the power to rise from the dead! Oh, sorry, I didn’t tell you that? LOL!”
That aside, I don’t see why we have to take any position on whether this particular god is deceptive. The defense of the historicity of the resurrection typically involves only omnipotence. If they want to add the additional stipulation that he also cannot deceive, that is just another post-hoc condition included for no reason other than to protect their claim.
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“Inconsistent” is the important word here. Hypothesis 3 is not a logical extension of hypothesis 2. Perhaps we mean different things by words, but I don’t see a reasonable alternative meaning here. One might say that hypothesis 3 is in some sense modeled on hypothesis 2, but that’s something else. We can agree that hypothesizing an omnipotent God, with no other characteristics, renders everything attached to that untestable.
Only if you interpret the story in a bizarre way. As described, the suffering and death is real. Reconciling that with omniscience and omnipotence is a problem, leading to arguments over trinitarianism and homoiousianism. Arians have it easier.
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I think it’s compatible with omniscience and omnipotence (a god with maximal knowledge and power could, for some reason, allow themself to suffer and die). But it’s much more difficult, indeed impossible, to reconcile with the concept of divine immortality and the classical theistic notion of impassibility.
Yes, I think that is good way of putting it.
Not if you consider the main feature of the second hypothesis to now be the introduction of an omnipotent perceived-resurrectee (in that this is the feature doing all the heavy lifting), rather than that the perceived resurrection being real.
You can then reparamaterise it as main-hypothesis/sub-hypothesis:
2: Omnipotent ‘resurrectee’ with:
2.1: Real resurrection
2.2: Divinely created mass hallucination
2.3: Universe created post-resurrection, with everybody created with memories of their life, including of the resurrection
(And probably a number of other sub-hypotheses.)
My point is that restricting the outcome of (2) to (2.1) would appear to be arbitrary, and to have the appearance of a Special Pleading.
Sure. If you change everything around, everything changes. Let me repeat:
This would seem to be undercut by a significant body of Christian opinion that God (the omnipotent being under discussion in discussing the Resurrection) is often inscrutable, and moves in “mysterious ways”. This also seems to be the implication of Job 38-40.
How can we know that God would not have a good reason for deceiving us?
The usual response is that God must not be deceptive, either by choice or by nature. If otherwise, God could be deceptive about the Resurrection, which would be game over for Christianity.
Somehow this doesn’t stop YECs from making the Omphalos Argument on a regular basis.
Of course you’ve hit on a contradiction in theology. But that’s not my problem. I repeat, for the third time: you have to assume that God wouldn’t deceive us in order ot make the hypothesis testable even in principle. You can of course come up with many nonsensical versions of any hypothesis by changing it in various ways.
This would appear to be a circular argument. (Resurrection is real because God omnipotent and not deceptive, God not deceptive because Resurrection is real.)
It would also appear to be another Special Pleading – in that they are claiming that God could have good reasons for doing ‘bad’ things are not knowable by mere mortals, except that we can know that he wouldn’t have done this ‘bad’ thing – because it would be ‘bad’ for Christianity.
But if we have to make an arbitrary assumption in order for your hypothesis to be testable, even in principle, it is not clear that it is less nonsensical.
Hypothesis 1. There was no resurrection, facts can be explained naturalistically
Hypothesis 2. God (non-deceptive) raised Jesus from the dead
Hypothesis 3. A deceptive god caused a mass hallucination to make people believe Jesus had been raised
Once we allow for hypothesis 2, how can we reasonably exclude hypothesis 3? It seems that allowing for supernatural hypotheses, in either history or science, ends up devolving into nonsense, since any number of incredible hypotheses could explain the data.
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The respected Biblical scholar, Dale Allison, acknowledges most of the arguments against the resurrection and concedes that one of the greatest weaknesses of the resurrection belief is that for almost any explanation the skeptic might offer to explain away the resurrection, at least actual documented example can be found. That does not apply to resurrections. He, nonetheless, believes in the resurrection on the basis that weird things are often reported, and maybe some of them are true, who knows?
My daily walk led to me conteplating ideas outside my previous ‘box’ (as happens not infrequently).
Let us, as John asks, assume a non-deceptive omnipotent being.
Yes this will, of necessity, raise the probability of a real Resurrection (as the probability is zero, lacking supernatural intervention). However, the Resurrection cannot be viewed in isolation.
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Within the scope of the Bible, it is one story out of many. The degree our assumption raises its probability, would therefore also depend on how consistent these stories are with the assumption. An argument could be made that the command for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and the treatment of Job, were deceptive, and that the inclusion of a number of stories of (at best) questionable historicity would likewise seem to be problematical under this assumption. There is, after all, nothing in this assumption that states that the assumed non-deceptive omnipotent being must be the God of the Bible.
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We would also have to give non-zero probabilities to all the stories of other religions that likewise postulate a non-deceptive omnipotent being. These stories are (i) likely to be mutually exclusive with the Resurrection and (ii) may (or may not) have higher probability under this assumption than the Resurrection itself does.
So I’m not sure that even this assumption gets us that far.
Assuming a non-deceptive omnipotent being, that is the God of the Bible, would get us further – but moves us that much closer to simply ‘Begging the Question’.