That seems quite obviously wrong to me. A natural explanation that renders the supernatural account redundant is that the resurrection stories are not true. The people with whom those stories originated were either mistaken, lying, or did not intend them to be taken as true stories.
I see. So, your position is based on the presumption that miracles happen, but only if they serve a “higher purpose.”
On what do you base that presumption? It seems to me simply an arbitrary rule you made up, rather than one based on anything entailed by the concept of a miracle.
And can you demonstrate that it actually applies to all the miracles a Christian might believe happened? How is the miracle of Balaam’s talking donkey any less silly than a cow jumping over the moon? Especially the part where Balaam talks back to the donkey and starts arguing with him, as if this is an everyday occurrence? What more was accomplished than if Yahweh had just let Balaam see the angel in the first place?
So many questions…
I will also reiterate that my personal rejection of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is not based on any presuppositions regarding whether naturalism is true or miracles occur.
Yes. That’s why I made clear that this is not an argument I would make. At least, I thought I had made it clear.
I don’t think you actually answered the question you were responding to, which was “What distinguishes the belief in the resurrection of Jesus from the belief that a cow once jumped over the moon, such that it is fallacious in the first instance, but not the second, to point out that the claim violates the laws of nature as we understand them?”
(It may appear that this question assumes naturalism to be true ,but it does not.)
And as far as we know that is because the evidence is so lacking that we can’t know what happened. Which does speak to the impact of the event.
I think you would have to assume Christianity before it makes sense for Jesus specifically to be brought back to life. We can also say that it was not a sign that a general resurrection was imminent.
But it’s a belief that seems very much disconnected from any actual events. About twenty years later we have a codified list of people who saw Jesus (in some sense) after his death - and within twenty years or so (maybe noticeably fewer) that list would be largely ignored in favour of other stories. Stories that quite likely arose well after the events. It doesn’t seem that there’s any need of an actual resurrection at all to account for the stories or the belief.
I find myself in agreement with you to a surprising degree here, with the caveat that the second-to-last sentence makes the importance of the last sentence rather less than it would otherwise be. One might discredit the accounts of the resurrection by showing, say, that the accounts were riddled with inconsistencies. But the greatest reason to discredit them as history is, as I think @Faizal_Ali is saying, that they DO recount a paranormal occurrence of a type which we have very good grounds to believe does not happen.
History can’t disprove a one-off. Nor, strictly speaking, can science. Do monkeys, now and again, fly out of someone’s butt, somewhere? There is no contradiction in terms involved, and so one cannot say, a priori, that it’s never happened and can’t happen.
But that it makes excellent philosophical and theological sense for monkeys to fly out of someone’s butt, really, cannot be of much help to anyone interested in discovering the truth of the matter. Scholars have acclaimed the grand theological significance of the monkey-flight. Theologians agree that the monkey-flight is central to Monkeyism, without which we would not have monks, and surely monks have transformed the world. Cows jumping over the moon and resurrections sound frivolous, to be sure, but the monkey-flight ex anus does not suffer that disability. Nonetheless, and in the face of the scorn of Monkeyists around the world, I have to say that this still leaves the proponent of the monkey-flight proposition without much of a basis on which to proceed.
I think, in all fairness to the Monkeyists, that there is an answer to that, but that it’s not an answer upon which they will wish to hang their tails. The answer is that the truth of the proposition must be supported, if at all, by foundational facts which demonstrate that the powers and principalities by which the monkey-flight was accomplished do, in fact, exist, and do, in fact, act in this world. Demonstration that the Wicked Witch of the West does indeed exist, and that she has the power to enable monkey-flight, would go a long way in that direction, leaving only the proctological, rather than the theological, questions to be answered. But absent a wicked witch, I will remain a skeptic.
No I did not, because I did not consider this example to be relevant to the point I was making – that the fallacious nature of the claim was contextual, and applied regardless of its truth.
Whether “to point out that the claim violates the laws of nature as we understand them” in the context of “the belief that a cow once jumped over the moon” would be fallacious, would probably depend on the exact contents, and structure, of that belief. Lacking that context, I can’t comment.
We can distinguish this from the Resurrection case, in that we do know that it is in the context of one side explicitly entertaining the possibility of miracles that violate the laws of nature as we understand them. QED.
That is irrelevant to my objections, because I have made explicit that I also entertain the possibility of miracles that violate the laws of nature.
That being so, it remains the case that there are things called “laws of nature” and, typically, we consider treat these as inviolable. When regarding the possibility of a cow jumping over the moon, a Christian and an atheist will generally agree that this is a claim that ought to be dismissed out of hand because it violates the laws of nature as we understand them.
The question, IOW, becomes an epistemological one. If the Christian is justified in rejecting the possibility of a cow jumping over the moon on the basis “the laws of nature”, then why is it begging the question when the atheist rejects the resurrection of Jesus on the same basis? The atheist could contend that a cow jumping over the moon would be a miracle, and also accept the premise that the possibility of miracles cannot be absolutely ruled out. He could still conclude that a cow actually jumping over the moon is so improbable that it is, for all practical purposes, impossible.
Is that reasoning fallacious? If not, then why is it fallacious when he applies the same reasoning to the resurrection of Jesus?
Neil, I think that is a fair point. By “the Christian worldview,” I did not mean that all Christians share one detailed picture of reality. Clearly they do not.
A more precise version of my question would be this: are there recognizably Christian ways of reading Genesis that do not require rejecting the modern scientific account of the history of the universe, evolution, and humanity?
If there are, that is enough for the more limited point I was trying to make. I am not claiming that every Christian worldview is compatible with modern science. My point is only that incompatibility with modern science cannot be attributed to Christianity in general without specifying the particular theological and hermeneutical position in question.
Of course, this does not establish Christianity as true. It only removes one possible intellectual barrier: a conflict between a particular reading of Genesis and science is not, by itself, enough to rule Christian faith out of serious consideration, including its central historical claims about the Resurrection.
I grew up in a Christian society. I became a Christian at around age 11. My pastor encouraged me to read the Bible, which I did.
On my reading, the Adam & Eve story could only be an ancient fable or Hebrew folk lore. And I saw the Noah story and the Tower of Babel story in much the same way. And this way of seeing them did not require that I reject the scientific account.
I have since left Christianity, mainly because so many people who consider themselves to be Christian fail to live up to the teachings of Jesus.
I sort of think that this is where the old bit about extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence comes in. Epistemological and proctological concerns aside, there is a practical nature not to the abstract question of what is “possible” but to the more rough-and-ready question – which is what people are really trying to answer – of “does stuff like this sometimes happen”?
And, you know, when that’s the question, one has to ask what quality and quantity of evidence would suffice. I have an old friend whose cousin used to regularly appear on Bigfoot documentaries – this fellow is absolutely convinced that he saw one. It seems to me that the practical person doesn’t dismiss that out of hand but he does, having no ability to directly examine the experience this fellow had, ask what sort of evidence would be convincing. So long as it appears that there just aren’t any sasquatches out there, it is an understatement to say that the eyewitness evidence is hardly compelling. But find me a sasquatch, or even a clump of strange hair on a patch of Pacific Northwest trailing blackberry which, when examined, turns out to have DNA which can only be that of an unknown ape species, and I’ve got to start giving the eyewitness testimony very serious consideration.
It’s this way with the resurrection. The premise is that there are some sorts of paranormal beings which act, from time to time, to affect things in our universe. The supposition is that such beings have enormous power, and that these powers include the raising-from-the-dead of humans. Any account of such a resurrection is very like the Bigfoot sighting. Without the existence of those things and forces being demonstrated, confronted with a man of undoubted honesty, mental stability and character, who says he saw a resurrection, we simply wouldn’t believe it. If we know almost nothing about the man and he wrote in a rather superstitious time and foreign culture long ago, we would believe it even less. But go find that sasquatch – go find that paranormal being that has the power to do such things, and show that it really does them – and the whole picture changes.
But, so often, the argument being made is in full reverse. The argument becomes, “one can see that God exists, because he raised his Son from the dead after three days (well, two days, as we count, but who’s counting)!” This is like dismissing the need for that clump of sasquatch hair by saying, “yeah, but my cousin SAW one!”
I think that we tend to be blind to just how barking-mad this is. In this culture we grow up knowing the Christian story. If we hear that Quetzalcoatl, or some such fella, was raised from the dead, we apply our natural and ordinary skepticism. But stories that managed to sneak in before we formed any kind of critical faculties have a way of being grandfathered in, exempt from even the slightest real scrutiny according to ordinary evidentiary standards.
