I’m not sure that this is true Roman. “Someone … taking the existence of a personal Creator, and the possibility of divine action in history, as serious possibilities” need not “begin with a different prior assessment of a resurrection claim than a skeptic.” If they were a believer in Islam, they would believe that Jesus was Allah’s penultimate prophet, and that Allah has no pattern of resurrecting his prophets. They would therefore have no more reason to believe in the Resurrection than a skeptic.
So it is still a special pleading, but more specifically a special pleading for the miracles of their own specific religious tradition.
They are unable to treat their “cherished tradition” as an outsider would, even as an outsider who takes “the existence of a personal Creator, and the possibility of divine action in history, as serious possibilities” would.
One broader point about what I have been trying to do in these exchanges may be worth clarifying. I am not trying here to prove the Resurrection, still less Christianity as a whole, or to persuade anyone to adopt my own religious conclusions.
The recurring question that interests me is narrower: how much does a particular criticism actually establish? A legitimate question, evidential concern, analogy, or counterexample may be important without necessarily supporting every stronger conclusion that might be drawn from it.
Someone may examine the historical evidence and conclude that it is insufficient to justify belief in the Resurrection. My comments do not depend on ruling out that conclusion. But that is distinct from asking whether a particular analogy establishes that insufficiency, whether a specific background belief amounts to special pleading, or whether an unanswered question about transformed embodiment reveals an actual contradiction in the hypothesis.
So my aim in these replies is not to move everyone toward the same conclusion I hold. It is simply to be as clear as I can about how far a particular argument takes us, and what remains a further question.
Faizal, I think the double-slit example is useful, but it describes a different evidential situation. The double-slit results reveal a reproducible feature of nature, so they rightly become part of what our account of the ordinary course of nature has to explain.
The Resurrection Hypothesis, if true, would be making a different kind of claim: not that dead human bodies possess an unknown natural tendency to resurrect under certain conditions, but that a particular event resulted from an act of the Creator. Establishing such an event would certainly force a major revision of our overall picture of reality, but it would not by itself turn resurrection into a new natural regularity. Whether the historical evidence is strong enough to justify identifying the event in that way is a separate question — which is precisely why I think the epistemic and physical questions should remain distinct.
As for beginning with belief in the Resurrection, even if that describes how some believers arrive at their position, the origin of a belief and the quality of an argument offered for it are different questions. A later argument still has to stand or fall on its premises and evidence.
And I agree that Allison’s questions are legitimate. What I am less clear about is which of them the Resurrection Hypothesis actually has to answer. If a missing detail creates a contradiction among properties essential to the claim, or prevents the hypothesis from doing the explanatory work claimed for it, then it matters. If not, an unanswered question may simply mark the boundary between specifying the hypothesis and possessing a detailed physiology or metaphysics of transformed embodiment.
Puck, I agree with the central point of your sunrise example. Calling something a “prior” or a “background assumption” does not make it rationally respectable, and two sets of background beliefs are not epistemically equivalent merely because both can be described as background beliefs. I was not arguing otherwise.
I think our disagreement now lies one step later. You write that people may have “reasons” for theism or divine action, but that those reasons are not supported by competent evidence. That is a further substantive claim. The examples of sleep paralysis and culturally shaped paranormal interpretation show very well that experiences can be misinterpreted; they do not, by themselves, settle the larger question of whether there are any independently defensible grounds for theism.
So I think we have actually narrowed the disagreement. It is no longer whether background expectations matter, or whether all priors are equally good — I agree with you that they are not. The question is whether the particular background belief at issue has independent evidential support, and how much weight that support deserves. If it has none, then your criticism of bootstrapping one unsupported claim with another is exactly right. If it does have independent support, then its evidential contribution has to be judged on the merits of that support.
Tim, one thing I appreciate in your replies is that you are very good at spotting when I have stated a point more broadly than necessary and narrowing it without necessarily rejecting the underlying point. I think your example shows why my earlier wording should have been more precise.
By “a different prior assessment,” I did not mean that generic theism automatically gives a higher prior to Jesus’ Resurrection. Your Muslim example is a good reason not to formulate the point that way. A person’s assessment depends on the whole relevant background, not simply on belief in a personal Creator.
There is, however, one feature of your example that seems worth keeping in view. Islam itself includes the resurrection of the dead within its picture of divine action. Specifically Islamic beliefs about Jesus may count against the Christian claim, while resurrection as an act of God is not excluded from the Muslim’s background picture. A Muslim and a skeptic can therefore arrive at the same low assessment of this particular claim for importantly different background reasons.
That is also why I am not yet persuaded by the further move to special pleading. If a Christian gives the Resurrection privileged treatment simply because it belongs to Christianity, then special pleading would be a fair criticism. But the mere fact that some relevant background beliefs are specifically Christian does not establish such a privilege. The remaining question is whether those beliefs are independently defensible and whether they are being assessed by standards that are applied consistently.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was sufficient evidence to accept as a fact that Jesus died on the cross and then, three days later, was walking around meeting his friends for lunch and showing of the spear hole in his side.
How do we determine this was the result of “an act of the Creator” and not, instead, evidence of “an unknown natural tendency to resurrect under certain conditions”?
More to the point why, if we assume it would be “an act of the Creator”, would this change what we ought to accept as sufficient evidence to demonstrate that it actually happened? Or would it?
What I find most striking is the decided lack of interest on the part of believers to even address such questions. It emphasizes the degree to which the belief isn’t really treated as a serious hypothesis.
Faizal, I think these are good questions, but I do not think they overturn the distinction I was making. They push the discussion to the next step: how an extraordinary event, if established, should be explained.
If by “determine” you mean determine by natural science alone that the cause was the Creator, then I do not think we can. In the theistic model under discussion, the Creator is not being proposed as another physical mechanism within the universe. Historical inquiry can assess the evidence that the event occurred, while natural science can ask whether there is independent evidence for a relevant natural regularity or mechanism; an attribution to a transcendent Creator would be a broader philosophical and theological inference, and would require grounds of its own.
That also means I would treat your “unknown natural tendency” symmetrically. It is certainly a conceptual possibility. But it does not gain evidential priority simply by being described as natural. We would still want some positive reason to think such a tendency exists — a regularity, a mechanism, comparable cases, or other independent evidence. At the same time, failure to find such a natural explanation would not by itself establish divine action. Neither label does the explanatory work for us.
On your second question, simply calling the proposed cause ‘an act of the Creator’ does not make weak historical evidence strong, and it does not change the standards by which the historical evidence itself should be assessed. Background assumptions still matter to the overall assessment of competing hypotheses, but that is different from lowering the evidential standard merely because the claim is religious.
On Allison’s questions, I would distinguish between asking a legitimate question and showing that the hypothesis must answer that question in a particular way. If bodily identity, interaction with the physical world, or imperishability are essential parts of a particular Resurrection Hypothesis, then they need to be specified clearly enough that the claims are mutually coherent. But that still does not mean we must possess a complete physiology of transformed embodiment.
So if someone claims that a resurrected body must have ordinary digestion, ordinary circulation, or some other specific physiological feature, that claim itself needs support. Conversely, if the hypothesis leaves unspecified something that is actually necessary for its own coherence or explanatory work, then that is a real problem.
That is why I would not infer from a lack of interest among some believers that the hypothesis itself is unserious. It may be a fair criticism of how a particular apologetic case is developed. Whether it is a criticism of the hypothesis itself depends on whether the missing specification is something the hypothesis genuinely needs.
Why not? I know this is a position commonly taken by theists, but what is the argument or line of reasoning that leads to that conclusion?
It is particularly puzzling because these same theists will use arguments like the watchmaker or the fine tuning arguments that explicitly rely on drawing conclusions from empirical evidence i.e. the scientific method. (The conclusions they draw are not actually supported, IMHO, but that is a different issue.)
Agreed. Apologists for the resurrection rarely seem aware of this issue. They seem to think that by demonstrating that a really weird and inexplicable thing happened, divine action is automatically implied, if not entailed. They are wrong.
I guess the depends on what we mean by “serious.” I don’t doubt that believers consider it a serious and important issue. But I remain unconvinced that there is anything inherent to the idea that warrants any more serious consideration than does the story of the cow jumping over the moon. Any distinction is solely the result of the cultural baggage attached to the beliefs.
First, I think that it’s a bit strange to engage in that sort of hypothetical. The book is pretty well closed on evidence for paranormal events unless something new starts happening that changes the evidentiary picture, and that makes the “if” in “if it does have independent support” rather a large “if.” And while there is a great deal of affection in some circles for evidence-free abstract philosophizing that purports to prove the existence of gods via mere words rather than useful probative facts, none of that can be of much use in relation to a question of fact.
And so I am left with the feeling as though Thomas Huxley has observed that something is a matter of lunar politics, yet it is being suggested that we may nonetheless have a productive and insightful conversation about lunar trade policy and how political party dynamics between the Smerg and Flarg parties affect it. The problem as always is that facts come first. A “hypothesis” about the nature of a resurrection surely must begin with a resurrection, in order to be deemed a hypothesis rather than a mere speculation, unrooted in any fact or evidence and impossible to scrutinize in any meaningful sense.
And even if, for the sake of argument, one thought that purely philosophical speculations about the existence of paranormal entities in general were of use, it’s hard to see how those bear much on anything here. Saying that there is a first cause, for example, hardly calls forth the image of a personal god. And saying that there is a creator-god in no way suggests that that creator god shows up from time to time, dances around, lifts a few bodies out of graves, messes with the wine at weddings and shoves demons into pigs. The theological prejudices of Christianity can’t really have any role here until they are shown to be factually based, and while it seems as though people harboring those prejudices regularly assume that a creator-god will have the sorts of attributes assigned to a very specific example of a creator-god in Christian tradition, there’s no reason to assume those things at all.
I recognize that you’re not trying to have an argument about whether there’s a god or not, or whether Christian dogmas or stories are true or not. But surely if one is interested in the nature of the resurrection and wishes to study the question, the first data point is the facts and circumstances of that resurrection – not merely as conveyed to us by a few discordant accounts and countless volumes of theological speculation thereupon, but as fact.
Much fact disappears with time. While the first Duke of Marlborough probably ate breakfast most days, an account of what he ate on any particular day is likely to be absent from our understanding. We make judgments about the nature of such breakfasts from implicit knowledge about humanity and human occurrences. He is unlikely to have eaten, for example, a large quantity of plutonium for breakfast, as the availability of the material, the known dietary proclivities of humans, and the usual consequences of such an act make that highly improbable (though, to the believer in miracles, entirely possible). These are not mere background “assumptions” but background understandings, grounded in experience and evidence. But when a thing that doesn’t happen is said to have happened, and all useful information about it has passed us by a long while ago, the natural and, I think, correct reaction is to say that we can say very little about it other than that similar accounts arise from time to time and are consistently and invariably false. What, then, is left? If we are to contemplate the nature of the Duke’s breakfast of plutonium, and its meaning, and the true physical account of how it was served, whether it was accompanied by tea, and what sorts of physical consequences followed from this event, I suspect that we are to waste a great deal of time and become no wiser in the deal.
I have never had much appetite for the regular habit, in some theological circles, of just dropping the word “mystery” on an unsolvable problem or deeming such things inscrutable. But in the present circumstance, I am not sure there is anything other than that which makes any sense. I cannot see how any “hypothesis” to explain the facts can be meaningfully formulated when even the bare possibility of the facts is contrary to everything we know.
Faizal, that is a useful question, and I should make clearer what I meant by “natural science alone.”
I am not saying that empirical evidence is irrelevant to an inference about the Creator. It can plainly form part of the premises. My point is narrower: an empirical description of an event does not, without further premises, identify a transcendent personal cause. To move from “this event occurred” to “the Creator caused this event,” we would need additional reasons for including a Creator among the relevant explanatory possibilities, and reasons for thinking divine action explains this particular event better than an unknown natural process.
That is also how I would understand fine-tuning or watchmaker-type arguments. They may begin from empirical features of the world, but those features do not perform the entire inference by themselves. Further premises are needed to move from the observed features to design or a Creator. That is not peculiar to theistic reasoning; the relevant question is what those additional premises are and how well they are supported. Whether the premises and the resulting inference succeed is, as you say, a separate question.
So I see no inconsistency between saying that empirical evidence can contribute to an argument about divine action and saying that an unexplained empirical event does not, by itself, identify the Creator as its cause.
And on your second point, I agree. If the argument is simply, “we cannot explain this naturally, therefore God did it,” that does not work. An unexplained event is not thereby a divinely caused event.
Where I would disagree is with the stronger claim that any distinction between the Resurrection and the cow jumping over the moon is solely a product of cultural baggage.
If we strip both claims of all evidence and compare only how extraordinary their contents sound, then I do not think the Resurrection deserves any evidential privilege merely because it is religiously important. Cultural importance by itself does not make an extraordinary event more probable.
But actual claims are not evaluated only by comparing how strange they sound. They are also evaluated in relation to the evidence offered for them. In the case of the Resurrection, there is a specific body of historical testimony and source material whose evidential value is being disputed. In the cow example as posed, no comparable evidential case has been supplied.
That does not mean that the evidence for the Resurrection is good or sufficient. It means only that the two epistemic situations are not made equivalent simply by observing that both claims conflict sharply with ordinary experience.
And I would apply that symmetrically. If there were a comparably specific body of evidence that a cow had somehow jumped over the moon, however absurd the claim initially sounded, I think we would have to examine that evidence seriously. Conversely, if the Resurrection had nothing in its favor beyond tradition and cultural importance, those things alone would give us no reason to regard it as historically credible.
So for me the relevant question is not which story belongs to the more culturally serious tradition. It is what evidence actually exists for each claim, what that evidence establishes, and then — as a separate question — what explanation of the event, if any, is warranted.
A more interesting parallel to the Ressurection than a traditional childrens story is perhaps the existence of a vast body of narratives about the ancient Greek gods. A quick search suggests that there are at least 1500 or so individual accounts of purported acts of Zeus, Apollo and all the rest of the Olympic pantheon. This is a far larger volume of reports than what is told about Jesus in the Bible. Yet there are very few people, if any at all, who still think that there is a factual basis for any of the stories. So what is the difference between the Greek gods and Jesus when it comes to believing that their reported actions are historical fact rather than man-made myth? My personal view is that, as so often, the winner writes the history.
These are mere assertions, not arguments. Both points are circular: point (1) assumes the Shroud rests on weak evidence to conclude that belief in it discredits the believer — which only works if you’ve already shown the evidence is weak, which you haven’t. Point (2) just smuggles that same assumption in through a loaded word (“desperate”) instead of arguing for it. Either way, you’re assuming what you need to prove.
Rather, what I am suggesting is that if there were a number of people who strongly believed that a cow had jumped over the moon, and the evidence to support that belief was no stronger than what exists for the resurrection of Jesus (e.g.. 2000 years ago there was a number of people who were absolutely convinced that a cow had jumped over the moon and told each other stories about how that had happened), the typical believer in the resurrection would have no problem dismissing this story as nonsense, simply on the basis that it is physically impossible for a cow to jump over the moon. There would be no tendentious nonsense about “begging the question that miracles don’t happen” or “presuming naturalism.”
Yes, that’s purely a hypothetical. But I have good reason to believe it is true, based on the number of believers who don’t accept, say, the existence of Bigfoot despite testamentary evidence that is orders of magnitude greater than that for the resurrection of Jesus.
That, you may recall, was the initial purpose of my cow jumping over the moon analogy: To illustrate the inconsistency with some employ the accusation that one is “presuming naturalism.”
Puck, I agree that a first cause does not by itself give us a personal Creator, still less specifically Christian divine action, and that any background belief has to earn whatever evidential weight it receives. But “facts come first” seems to do more work in your argument than that. If a Resurrection Hypothesis can be considered only after the Resurrection itself has already been independently established as fact, then the very event posited by the hypothesis must be established before the hypothesis can even be compared with alternative explanations of the evidence. That is more than a high evidential standard; it makes prior establishment of the event a condition for explanatory comparison.
There is also a tension with something you said earlier in this thread:
That matters here, because “dead people stay dead” establishes an extraordinarily strong empirical regularity about what happens under the natural processes we know. It does not, without an additional premise, establish that no external agent could ever bring about a singular event of a different kind. Whether any such agent exists, and whether the evidence gives us reason to invoke one here, are of course separate questions. But if the stronger claim is that such an explanation is not even meaningfully available, that additional premise has to be defended rather than folded into “everything we know.”
Your plutonium-breakfast example therefore strongly supports an extremely low probability given our background knowledge and a correspondingly high evidential burden. What it does not establish by itself is that the hypothesis is meaningless. The historical question is still whether the surviving evidence is strong enough to overcome that initial improbability, and whether rival explanations account for the evidence better. You may conclude that the evidence fails badly. That would be a substantive historical and epistemic conclusion. But it is different from saying that the hypothesis cannot even enter the comparison until the event it proposes has already been independently established.
So I think this is the point at which I still do not see the inference. You write:
and later conclude:
I can see how your argument gets you to an exceptionally high evidential burden. I do not see how it gets you from there to either of these stronger conclusions. That further step still needs an argument.
I agree, but I would like to point out (as Dan did) that Giltil wasn’t the one who brought up the Shroud on this thread. I already rejected another post for this thread that was only about the Shroud, and any other off-topic Shroud posts will also be rejected.
Faizal, your clarification is fair. My previous reply did not fully address the role you intended the cow analogy to play, and in its conditional form I largely agree with your point.
If we stipulate, as your thought experiment asks, that the overall evidential support for the cow claim is genuinely comparable to that for the Resurrection, I do not think I would be entitled to dismiss it simply by saying, “cows do not do that.” Our background knowledge of physics and bovine biology would count very strongly against the claim, and I might well reject it in the end. But I would still have to ask what the evidence actually was rather than treating the ordinary regularity itself as a conclusive prohibition. And I agree with the broader epistemic point: giving “dead people stay dead” very substantial weight against the Resurrection does not, by itself, amount to assuming that miracles are impossible or that naturalism is true.
Where I think another step is needed is your claim about what the “typical believer” would actually do. Even granting for the sake of argument that there is vastly more testimonial material concerning Bigfoot, that gives some support to the observation that believers, like other people, may reject extraordinary claims despite a large amount of testimony. But it does not yet tell us why they reject Bigfoot, which is what the double-standard argument requires. Bigfoot does not conflict with ordinary physics in the way your cow example does. Someone might reject Bigfoot reports because they judge the testimony unreliable, because expected physical evidence is missing, or for other reasons. So the example does not yet show that the same evidential consideration is being applied to an outside claim and then suspended for the Resurrection.
So I think your cow analogy establishes a good conditional test of consistency. If a Christian dismisses a comparably supported extraordinary claim solely because it conflicts with the ordinary course of nature, but then accuses a skeptic of “presuming naturalism” merely for giving the same consideration strong weight against the Resurrection, I agree that there is an asymmetry that needs justification. I would not defend that double standard. My only reservation is the further empirical claim that this is in fact the typical pattern among believers. Your Bigfoot example gives some reason to investigate that claim, but does not by itself establish the particular double standard at issue.
We can set up another Shroud thread if you like. I’m actually trying to be fair to you and Gil since Shroud threads have inevitably devolved into incessant pouncing on the two of you (whether that’s justified or not).