Ahh the Gilbert Gambit: Namedrop famous believers from history (or simply mention that they were “great thinkers” without specifiying who, or why they believed the inane shit they did, while ignoring nonbelievers) and pretend your work is done. Then act indignant when this doesn’t have the desired effect.
I command thee to be humbled because “great thinkers” disagree with you. Zero attempt to deal with the argument. This is what passes for an argument in conservative circles today.
My understanding of your position is that belief in the resurrection is irrational — where irrationality means believing in spite of, or without regard for, evidence. But many eminent and rational thinkers believed in the resurrection because of the evidence, as they assessed it: the empty tomb, the disciples’ transformation, Paul’s conversion, the early creed, the absence of a plausible motive for fabrication, among others. One may dispute their premises or their inferences (that’s a legitimate debate). But one cannot, without bad faith, call “irrational” a process that is, structurally, reasoning from evidence.
So my point isn’t that you’re wrong to reject the resurrection hypothesis. It’s that rationality isn’t the monopoly of those who reject the resurrection; reasonable people, reasoning carefully, can and do land on both sides.
You are not. It’s much like how creationists expect others to be awestruck when they cite Behe, Meyer or Axe as sources.
No. But it does make me hope all the more that they will show up.
I did not suggest belief in the resurrection is “irrational.” All manner of strange beliefs can be rational—that is a very low bar. It is, however, unreasonable, given the extremely poor quality and the incompetency of the evidence.
So all christians on this site, including its founder, believe inane shit! No doubt they will appreciate.
For a sketch of the argument, see 42. Now please tell us what is your argument for labeling the belief in the resurrection as « inane shit » ?
Please refrain from introducing politics in a conversation that has nothing to do with it.
Well, that’s certainly interesting. @Rumraket points out that the “great thinkers” thing is a failure to deal with the merits of the issue, and you explain to him that the argument on the merits is – ta-da! – the “great thinkers” argument.
And the problem, as your restatement of that argument makes clear, is that the evidentiary foundation upon which these various people believed the resurrection story is woefully inadequate to support a claim of paranormal activity. Mere historical testimony (granting, arguendo, the questionable proposition that we are in possession of actual historical accounts) cannot be enough; it just can’t. If it were, I would, instead of believing no religion, believe all religions, everywhere, inconsistent with one another though they may be.
“So-and-so believed it” is not helpful. It doesn’t matter who so-and-so is, when one can review the evidence so-and-so relied on oneself.
Another counter-example to @Giltil’s ludicrous “Great Thinkers” argument is that Newton also believed in alchemy.
Does that mean that we should likewise accept alchemy?
Of course not!
Just because somebody was brilliant doesn’t mean they don’t believe some unreasonable, and even outright strange, things.
This whole argument is nothing but a fallacious Argument from Authority.
today? I’ve seen it passed for argument for decades, and it’s been used for millennia. Only the list of great thinkers changes.
I’m going to query whether you have anything written by many of those listed that mentions these things. Start with Kepler and Pascal.
It’s even less helpful when we can review evidence so-and-so didn’t have.
This works better for topics that impinge on geology/biology/archaeology, but even for purely Biblical arguments there is evudence available today (e.g. dead sea scrolls) that Newton, Voltaire, Kepler et al didn’t have access to.
The problem with your reasoning is that it presupposes that the evidential support for all religions is equivalent, which is empirically false.
Moreover, you seem to think that the evidential support for the resurrection is only based on historical testimony, but it’s not.
Well, of course, it’s not all equivalent. But the evidence for Christianity is not great, so we aren’t going to find a lot of religions that fail a test that Christianity passes. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, perhaps.
Well, of course, you only mentioned historical testimony. But that may have been because, in sight of @Rumraket’s remark about “inane s***,” you didn’t think it was a great time to bring up your favorite example of IS, the Shroud of Turin. I doubt that any of the “great thinkers” in your list were shroudies, but if they were, it is as it always is with the shroud: (1) the effect of endorsement of that “evidence” is to diminish the credibility of the endorser as an evaluator of evidence, not to enhance the chances of the claim being true, and (2) the desperate act of endorsement of the shroud illustrates, better than almost anything else could, the extraordinary poverty of the evidence.
Very true. And while the DSS are sometimes oversold as answering the mysteries of that strange time, what they and the Nag Hammadi library do establish is that the middle east of that time was one bigass tornado of crazy. It is, of course, possible that in the midst of the tornado of crazy, one or another of the crazy things was actually the honest truth. But other more plausible hypotheses do suggest themselves.
I can see this thread is quickly headed south, which may require comments be moved elsewhere.
@Gil: I suggest staying on the topic of how to frame such a hypothesis.
@Others: Gil didn’t bring up TSOT this time; he was baited into it.
3 pending comments will be kicked back for revisions.
And so we move from the vacuous appeal to “great thinker” to the equally vacuous appeal to social pressure.
Correct.
We have video footage of Prince Philip, coins bearing Augustus’s likeness, Tut’s tomb, and signed statements by identified authors attesting the Urim and Thummin; but only stories and carvings of Coyote and Xipe Totec, and nothing at all for the beaker-makers’ beliefs.
It seems to me that, as this discussion has developed, at least four different questions have gradually begun to run together. It may help to separate them before asking what a “Resurrection Hypothesis” would actually need to specify.
First, there is a historical question: what do the early Christian sources actually claim, how reliable are those sources, and what can historians reasonably say about the emergence of resurrection belief?
Second, there is an epistemic question: what evidential standard should we require before accepting a claim about an event that, if it occurred, would be radically unlike the ordinary course of nature as we observe it? How should our background expectations about natural processes affect our assessment of the evidence for such an event?
Third, there is an explanatory question: if we speak of a “Resurrection Hypothesis,” what evidence is it meant to explain, and against what alternative explanations should it be compared?
Fourth, there is a physical or metaphysical question: what properties of the risen Christ’s embodied state are actually part of the hypothesis? What must be said about his identity and embodied existence for the claim to be coherent, and what can legitimately remain unspecified?
These questions are connected, but I do not think any one of them automatically settles the others.
For example, the absence of a worked-out physical theory of the resurrected body could become a serious problem if the properties essential to the hypothesis are mutually inconsistent, or if the missing specification prevents us from understanding what the hypothesis is supposed to explain. But the mere absence of a complete physical theory does not by itself make the historical or explanatory questions meaningless. The Gospel narratives portray the risen Christ as bodily present and interacting with his disciples; that tells us something about what those texts claim, but it does not amount to a fundamental physics of transformed embodiment.
The converse is also true. Showing that resurrection is theologically intelligible within Christianity would not, by itself, show that it happened historically or that the available evidence is sufficient. Theological intelligibility and historical warrant are different questions.
So it seems important to ask what degree of specification is appropriate at each level. A historical claim has to be assessed in relation to sources, evidence, and relevant background expectations. An explanatory hypothesis has to be definite enough for us to understand what it is claiming, what it is meant to explain, and how it differs from alternatives. A physical or metaphysical account has to be coherent enough that the properties essential to the claim are not mutually contradictory. But I do not think it follows that, before any historical or explanatory discussion can even begin, we must already possess a complete physical theory of transformed embodiment.
For that reason, criticism seems strongest when it identifies one of three things: evidence that is insufficient given the relevant background expectations; a lack of specification that prevents the hypothesis from doing the explanatory work claimed for it; or a genuine internal contradiction in properties that are actually essential to the claim. The absence of a complete physical account may contribute to one of those problems, but it is not automatically identical with any of them.
Not really a hard question. We all have pretty much the same standard for this, and the question is whether one will engage in special pleading when cherished traditions are in question.
To illustrate: let us suppose that on examining the writings of Napoleon’s known associates, we find that a dozen of them, all men whose honesty is unimpeachable, all state that they knew Napoleon to have a talent for stone-throwing, and that he could regularly knock a bottle off of a fence post at fifty feet. We would almost certainly say that Napoleon seems to have had a high talent for stone-throwing. The talent is unusual but hardly impossible, and we could probably find a baseball player who could do the same.
Now let us suppose that the same witnesses instead said that Napoleon could, with a flick of the wrist, throw a one-pound cobble ten miles, and that they saw him do this. There is nobody on this earth who would believe it. And the sincerity of the witnesses would mean nothing to the question other than that it would raise related questions about the witnesses themselves.
We all have the same standard here. The question is whether we allow the existence of traditional paranormal beliefs to derail us from applying that standard consistently.
Puck, I think I basically agree with the principle itself. Your example shows well that testimony is assessed against our background knowledge and prior expectations. And if someone simply lowers the evidential bar because the claim belongs to a cherished religious tradition, then I agree that this would be special pleading.
But it seems to me that part of the disagreement begins precisely with those background expectations. Someone who has reasons independent of the Resurrection argument for taking the existence of a personal Creator, and the possibility of divine action in history, as serious possibilities will begin with a different prior assessment of a resurrection claim than a skeptic.
That does not make weak evidence strong, and it does not establish that the Resurrection occurred. But then the question is not only whether we are applying the same evidential standard, but also how well justified the background assumptions are that each of us brings to the evidence.
Yes, those are interesting questions.
I don’t know is that quite pertains to the current discussion. When such an event has been observed (e.g. the results of the double slit experiment) we have typically adjusted our understanding of what “the ordinary course of nature” is. Those who believe in the resurrection, however, will not do so for theological reasons. That, as I see it, is another problematic aspect of their position.
It seems to me these are not questions typically raised by the believers in the resurrection. Rather, they are starting from the belief that the resurrection occurred, and then trying to convince others (and maybe themselves?) that this belief is supported by evidence in the same way that our every day beliefs are.
This reminds me of questions raised by Bible scholar Dale Allison who, while a believer in the resurrection, seems skeptical that this belief can be demonstrated thru evidence. I am paraphrasing, but he raises questions like “Does the resurrected Jesus have bowels? Does he eat? When people don’t see him, what is he doing? Hiding in the weeds?”
Again, I don’t really see much effort by those trying to convince us the resurrection happened to address these questions.
I think it is exceedingly problematic to assign belief in poorly-evidenced or non-evidenced phenomena to the category of “prior assessments” or “background assumptions.” That postmodernist tilt, where there aren’t really any true or false things, only stories which people tell and retell according to their own personal proclivities, isn’t a good model of reality. It reminds me of all the creationists I meet who, when they can say nothing substantive, start talking about “worldviews” as though facts in their realm are incommensurate with facts in mine.
The problem is that while people do have “reasons” they do not have reasons supported by competent evidence, and so those other un-evidenced claims really do not provide a foundation for bootstrapping additional un-evidenced claims into plausibility. Yes, human neural makeup is interesting, so there are lots of people who believe they’ve had a demitasse with the divine; I’ve had people with clear cases of sleep paralysis narrate lengthy tales to me of their encounters with Christ and with demons. And then there’s divine action “in history,” as you say: in other words, MORE things to which the individual cannot attest and for which historical evidence is incompetent.
Now, ordinarily, assigning these things to people’s prejudices and to the things they learned before they understood much about critical thinking is the sort of thing one does to explain why people believe strange things, but it’s not a way to buttress those prejudices and preconceptions. In speaking of these things as “prior expectations” and “background assumptions” and the like, there is some verbal obfuscation of the point, but it’s still the same thing: yes, people who harbor intense prejudices in favor of particular paranormal phenomena being real will view the various un-evidenced things they believe in as mutually corroborative. But that’s a bad thing, not a good thing.
The implicit claim in this sort of obfuscation is usually that somehow, postmodern-style, everybody is running around so heavily laden with prior assumptions and “worldviews” and whatnot that the contrary case is just as corrupted with rotten thinking and no judgment about evidence can ever be sound. But I don’t think that that’s actually so. Wanting Uri Geller to show that he can ACTUALLY bend spoons with his mind is not a mere prejudice to be classed with a childhood belief in gods and devils. Wanting claims of extraordinary real physical phenomena to be attested by something other than ancient folkloric accounts is not just a point of view, a festering pit of “prior expectations” which can be regarded as being on the same level with other sets of prior expectations.
The man who expects the sun to come up tomorrow and the man who does not may both be accused of harboring prior assumptions, but there is no equivalency: one is founded in the regularity of ordinary observation and the other requires some great disruption in the order of things. When our beliefs in the paranormal are not at issue, we readily see that the one man is more reasonable than the other and that this cannot be shuffled off with words about prior assumptions. Surely the paranormal, weird though its claims may be, is more a cautionary tale about the importance of making evidence-based judgments, not a grand exception to all evidentiary caution.