Victor Reppert on the No Evidence Charge

My own response to the "no evidence" charge is, I think pretty well known, and it goes like this: 

We first have to define what evidence is. 

I understand evidence in Bayesian terms. For me, X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. By this definition, something can have evidence for it and be false. 

There is a whole boatload of stuff that look to me to be a LOT more likely to exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Some of it's in the Bible, most of it isn't. 

Here's a short list: 

1) The fact that we can reason about the world. The fact that it is even possible to go from evidence to a conclusion. If this isn't possible, then science isn't even possible. But that implies that our acts of reasoning are governed by the laws of logic, as opposed to the laws of physics. But naturalism says the laws of physics govern everything, and the laws of logic are superfluous as an explanation for any event in the universe. 
2) That there are stable laws of nature, so that the distant past resembles the recent past. It's easy to imagine an atheistic world with no stability at all, where the laws keep changing for no reason. Why is that not the actual world? 
3) The we have just the right cosmic constants for life to emerge. 
4) That DNA allows for gradual change, as opposed to being completely static or so radically changeable that it is completely unpredictable. 
5) That monotheism arose against all odds in a polytheistic world in a country that hardly qualifies as a world superpower, and that it persisted in spite of the efforts of the superpowers like Assyria, Babylon, the Seleucids, and the Romans, to get it to assimilate into a polytheistic culture. 
6) That the disciples of Jesus got in the faces of those responsible for Jesus's crucifixion and told them that the Jesus they crucified was Lord and God, and lived to tell the tale and found Christianity. (If they killed Jesus, they can kill you too). 
7) That archaeology has discovered that if Luke was writing a story about the founding of Christianity, it wrote it in such a way that the "research" for his "fictional" story was corroborated centuries later by archaeology, "research" that would have required him to know all sorts of detail from Jerusalem to Malta at just the right time in the first century. 
8) That Christianity became the dominant religion of an empire in spite of getting no help, and intermittent persecution, from the political leaders of that empire, for nearly three centuries.

I can understand concluding, at the end of the day, that this evidence is outweighed by the evidence for atheism. What is beyond my comprehension is the idea that this somehow isn't evidence AT ALL. Repeating "God of the Gaps" fifty times is not a response. 

Ehrman's nonrepeatability argument against the resurrection

Doug Benscoter argues that this argument wouldn't just rule out the Resurrection, it would rule out the Big Bang.

A quote from Swinburne on the Resurrection

For Easter.A redated post.

“It is simply not possible to investigate whether Jesus rose from the dead without taking a view about how probable it is that there is a God likely to intervene in human history in this kind of way. If the reader thinks that all the evidence suggests there is no God of the traditional kind, or that although perfectly good he would not intervene in human history, then the detailed historical evidence about what happened in Palestine in the first century AD is perhaps not strong enough to make it probable that Jesus rose from the dead. And this despite the very striking coincidence that the one prophet in human history about whom there is the kind of life was also the one prophet about whom there is the kind of evidence not too unexpected if his life was culminated by a super-miracle. There is significant historical evidence that Jesus did satisfy the requirements, and the coincidence to which I referred must be taken seriously. If the background evidence leaves it not too improbable that there is a God likely to act in the ways discussed, then the total evidence makes it very probable that Jesus was God Incarnate who rose from the dead.”—Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate

C. S. Lewis on the Hallucination Theory

"Any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention [rather than fact], it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Lk 24:13-31; Jn 20:15; 21:4). Even granting that God sent a holy hallucination to teach truths already widely believed without it, and far more easily taught by other methods, and certain to be completely obscured by this, might we not at least hope that he would get the face of the hallucination right? Is he who made all faces such a bungler that he cannot even work up a recognizable likeness of the Man who was himself?" (Miracles, chapter 16)


A more detailed response to hallucination theory can be found here. 

A Revised Rebuttal of the McGrews on the Resurrection

This is by Jeffrey of Failing The Insider Test. Tim responded here to Jeffrey's original critique.

Komarnitsky's Cognitive Dissonance Theory of Christian Origins

An attempt to explain how Christianity could have been founded without a Resurrection.

On the use of probability theory in the philosophy of religion

I have a take on the role of probabilistic arguments that might be of help here. Look, when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, a person's decision to accept or not accept the Resurrection is likely to be a combination of the evidence specific to the Resurrection, and a prior assessment of how likely the background beliefs that are behind belief in the resurrection are to be true. We know that people who are thinking about the Resurrection are bound to differ about whether the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is antecedently plausible. There's going to be people who find the fact that something would have to be explained as a divine miracle grounds for giving it as close to a probability of zero as you can get. There are some people who are already committed to some form of supernaturalism, and who are not going to be deterred by the fact that the explanation involves the miraculous. So, how can we carry on the discussion? One way of doing it is to ask merely whether the evidence in more like what we should expect if the Resurrection happened, or whether it's more like what we should expect if it didn't.  In other words, is there anything in the reports coming out of the first-century church that is more like what you should expect if Jesus was raised than if Jesus was not raised. If the answer to that question is yes, then the evidence confirms the resurrection, but it might still be rejected by reasonable people on the grounds that a Resurrection would commit you to the existence of God, or other features of Christianity that you consider to be improbable. Fine, but you can at least say, in response to the evidence, that the evidence directly bearing on the resurrection of Jesus is easier to explain if the Resurrection occurred than if it didn't. In other words, we can isolate one particular piece of evidence from the total evidence we have that bears on the issue and ask whether this piece of evidence supports the Christian claim that Jesus was resurrected or not.

Similarly, we can ask, concerning the fact of pain and suffering, how it impacts the credibility of theism. It could turn out that yes, pain and suffering adversely affects the credibility of theism, but it does not show that anyone who believes in the existence of God is just being delusional.

I understand that some people do Bayesian probability theory to get a correct final conclusion based upon agreed-upon methods for ascertaining probabilities. That's legitimate, but we also might like to isolate the impact of a piece of evidence on the overall plausibility of theism and Christianity. I find Bayes' theorem to be a helpful tool in doing that, even though I do not expect an agreed-upon conclusion concerning the Resurrection after we are done. To me, it's not a misuse of Bayes' theorem, just a different use.

Straw Men Burning: Tim McGrew on Misinterpretations of the McGrews' article on the Resurrection

It's easy to dismiss and discredit an opponent when you don't make any effort to understand what that opponent has written. There is the idea about that the McGrews actually calculated the odds of the Resurrection, or that they maintain the strict and complete independence of the New Testament sources, when in fact they say no such thing. That's life in the blogosphere; in peer-reviewed journals editors and referees are there to at least try to keep this sort of things from happening. Of course, as Lewis pointed out, it is sometimes difficult to understand a position to which you are antipathetic, even if you try to understand it. Anyway, Tim responds here. 


TM: One of the hazards of writing technical philosophy is the risk that someone who lacks the appropriate expertise will attempt to critique it. In the case of the article on the resurrection that Lydia and I wrote for The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, this has already happened. It is hard enough to correct misimpressions of this sort on a relatively neutral topic; when the subject rouses passions of the sort that, as Hume reminds us, religious disputes are apt to generate, then the difficulties are redoubled. 

But one thing that we did not anticipate is that people who are completely clueless would undertake to explain the article to the rest of the world, in the process completely garbling the central claim and shedding absolutely no light on any of the surrounding issues. Since this particular exhibition of aggressive incompetence is now being uncritically rebroadcast by people who are unable or unwilling actually to read the article, it is worth making a few salient points: 

1. Nowhere in the article do we give, estimate, or suggest "odds on the resurrection." Near the outset we explicitly disclaim any attempt to do so, writing:

Even as we focus on the resurrection of Jesus, our aim is limited. To show that the probability of R given all evidence relevant to it is high would require us to examine other evidence bearing on the existence of God, since such other evidence – both positive and negative – is indirectly relevant to the occurrence of the resurrection. Examining every piece of data relevant to R more directly – including, for example, the many issues in textual scholarship and archeology which we shall discuss only briefly – would require many volumes. Our intent, rather, is to examine a small set of salient public facts that strongly support R. The historical facts in question are, we believe, those most pertinent to the argument. Our aim is to show that this evidence, taken cumulatively, provides a strong argument of the sort Richard Swinburne calls “C-inductive” – that is, whether or not P(R) is greater than some specified value such as .5 or .9 given allevidence, this evidence itself heavily favors R over ~R.

The ratio of 10^44 to 1 is a likelihood ratio, not odds. People who do not understand the difference between these two ratios should not attempt to discuss the mathematical parts of the article.

2. We are very explicit about our assumptions. In the online version of the article, on p. 39, we make it plain that our calculation

is predicated on the assumption that in matters other than the explicit claims of miracles, the gospels and the book of Acts are generally reliable – that they may be trusted as much as any ordinary document of secular history with respect to the secularly describable facts they affirm. And where they do recount miraculous events, such as Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, we assume that they are authentic – that is, that they tell us what the disciples claimed. This calculation tells us little about the evidence for the resurrection if those assumptions are false. We have provided reasons to accept them, but of course there is much more to be said on the issue.

3. We are quite aware that the assumption of independence is critical, and we discuss this matter extensively on pp. 40-46. It is wearying to see commentators who have not bothered actually to read the article confidently proclaiming that we have overlooked the possibility of dependence.

Readers are of course free to disagree with our actual conclusions. It would be cheering, however, if they would first take the trouble to understand what those conclusions are.

Chris Hallquist debunks the resurrection in one page

The Barker-Horner Resurrection Debate

Two Sides of the Bayesian Analysis of the Resurrection

I see two major issues with respect to the Bayesian analysis of Resurrection history. One has to do with the left side of the theorem. Is there some way of showing that everyone ought to go into the discussion with such a low prior for any miracle that we can virtually guarantee that nothing coming out of the ancient world will be sufficient evidence.

The usual approach to getting that result is via some form of frequentism. There have been 96,100,000,000 persons who have ever lived, there has only been a very few resurrection reports that have so much as surface credibility, so therefore the one in 96.1 billion, and therefore resurrection has to lose even to the swoon theory. But these lead-footed methods don't work for various reasons that have been pointed out quite often. Earman is, I think, the guy you have to get around if you think you can prove something like this about the prior for miracles.

If you say "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," (which invariably implies evidence that you're never going to be able to get out of the ancient world), then you have to figure out how do define extraordinary in this context. Does it mean historically unique? In that case you have Indian Prince worries, and there's even a problem believing media reports that Obama won the election. If you think it means contrary to the laws of nature, then why do you presume that every event has a natural cause? Doesn't that beg the question from the beginning? Whether a miracle-working God exists is part of what's at issue here. The skeptic needs an account of extraordinariness that doesn't beg the question and pins an unmanageable prior on all miracle claims for everyone.

The other issue looks at the right side of the theorem, and asks if the evidence surrounding the resurrection is more like what we should expect if the miracle happened or more like what we should expect if it didn't happen. My approach on this is to say that prior probabilities on the matter are certainly going to vary, and that nevertheless we can see if the evidence confirms the miracle story of disconfirms it. Unless you have an argument that shows that no one should have a manageable prior for miracles, you can and should ask this question.

Now notice that I have nowhere said that there is some definite conclusion that everyone will come to, that it is 94% likely that the Resurrection happened based on historical evidence. I am interested in whether the case for the Resurrection confirms it, even if many unbelievers fail to find such evidence "extraordinary" enough.

Was the McGrews' article on the Resurrection Not Even Worth Citing?

Richard Carrier thinks so, calling it "crappy." Rumor has it that Tim and Lydia disagree. I will tell you this much. If I could get Richard Carrier or anyone else to raise their probability for the resurrection from 1% to 10%, I'd consider it an enormous accomplishment.

ECREE and Antecedent Probabilities

There is a sense in which I agree with the ECREE thesis, it is just that I don't believe that there is any objective way of proving that one set of antecedent probabilities is rational and another is not. So what is "extraordinary" is just what your antecendent probabilities tell you is improbable.

I think that as you pull at the story of the founding of Christianity, as you play out the various scenarios all the way through, you end up thinking that none of the scenarios for what might have really happened fit the facts very well. They run into factual brick walls of one kind or another. The Christian story, IF you can get over the initial antecedent improbability of the miraculous, makes more sense of it that any other story does. I think there is no logical proof that a miracle cannot happen, since it is possible that God exists, and God is omnipotent. Further, I think that this miracle is one that God would have a fairly understandable reason to perform. So, given my prior probabilities, the evidence lifts the case for the resurrection  at least over 90%. But I can't prove the someone else that they shouldn't have priors so low for the Resurrection that it never gets above 10 for them. Both can be rational, and that's just life in the big city. (I also don't think salvation is a matter of passing a theology test). If you don't believe in the Resurrection, then I think there are a bunch of inconvenient facts out there that are hard to make sense of. But I think every philosophy has to deal with inconvenient facts.

Keith Parsons would probably call this Bayesian Balkanization.

Some discussion of the historicity of the empty tomb

Based on Dale Allison's book.

David Wood debates a Muslim on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus

Reply to Loftus on miracles and prior probabilities

I argue that when it comes to miraculous claims yesterday’s evidence no longer can hold water for me, for in order to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for me, I must already believe the Christian framework (i.e., the Bayesian priors) that allows me to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for Christianity.

Are these your prior probabilities, or are these priors everyone else is supposed to have? If the former, that may be true. But if that's all it is, then you are going to have trouble getting irrationality charges off the ground. I am not in the business of making irrationality charges. I don't think that the evidence for the Resurrection is sufficient by itself to rationally compel belief. I just think there is a lot that is hard to explain about the founding of Christianity that makes more sense if the supernatural is admitted than if the supernatural is not admitted. I realize people like McDowell say it's irrational to be skeptical, given the evidence, but it's beyond my powers to make such a case. In other words, I am engaged in what Steve Davis calls soft apologetics, although I also maintain that the Resurrection evidence is a cumulative case role-player in a case for theism. (You haven't read my two papers on miracles, have you?)

The problem is that no amount of philosophical thinking alone will produce the conclusion that any event actually took place in the past, much less a miraculous resurrection. So on the on hand, in order to establish the Christian faith believers must use historical evidence at every juncture. But on the other hand, in order to see that evidence as evidence we need to have good reasons to do so. Where do those reasons come from? Not from any “background knowledge” or “priors” of theirs. They cannot use their so-called “background knowledge” or their “priors” to help determine whether the evidence shows Jesus arose from the dead until they can first show that he did. Christians must independently establish that the resurrection took place in history before such a belief can be placed into their bag of "priors."  


If we can't use our priors, whose priors do we use? My claim is you have lots of people out there, from people who think Christianity very antecedently likely, to people who think the central events of Christianity might or might not have happened and are looking at the evidence to see if it did, to people who think Christianity is absurd and wouldn't believe if Jesus were to sit down across from them at lunch. The subjectivist theory of prior probabilities says that rather than find "correct" priors and argue from those, we simply have to use our own priors and adjust our confidence as we look at the evidence. How do we look at the evidence? We ask if the evidence, such as we have it, is more likely to be the way it is if the Christian story is true than if the Christian story is false. Now suppose I successfully show that the evidence that comes down to us from the first century is more likely to be the way it is if the Christian story were true than if the Christian story were false. Well, then we Christians would have grounds for having more probabilistic confidence in our Christianity, people sitting on the fence would become Christians, but those who have strongly skeptical priors would remain skeptics, but they might scratch their heads a little bit of how this could possibly have happened the way it did. AS C. S. Lewis said.

Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”
by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224

That hard-boiled atheist never converted, but he nonetheless accepted the fact that the founding of Christianity was "rum" from the standpoint of his atheism. And maybe that's all we can expect from the argument.

But we can look at the facts and see if they are more likely given Christianity than given not-Christianity. That is a comparison we can make regardless of our priors. We have no logical method that I know of for determining what our priors ought to be, and certainly no argument proving that the prior for miracles ought to be vanishingly low.

This problem is fatal for anyone who wishes to believe Jesus bodily arose from the dead in history. We can even grant the existence of Yahweh or a creator god and the possibility of miracles and it changes nothing. For what needs to be shown is that Yahweh did such a miracle here in this particular case and the historical tools we have available to assess whether he did are inadequate for the task. 

The reason why our historical tools are in some sense inadequate is that we have to live with a situation where prior probabilities differ widely. So historical evidence will probably not be sufficient to allow us to pin irrationality charges on our opponents. But guess what. YOU are the one making the irrationality charges, which means YOU have to prove them. I believe that we can determine, historically, whether the evidence is more likely to exist given a supernatural theory of the founding of Christianity, or whether it is more likely to exist as it does given a naturalistic theory of the founding of Christianity.

I like Bob Price who says that even if God raised Jesus from the dead there is no way we can know that he did.

Depends on your understanding of knowledge. If what we mean is that the evidence is sufficient to persuade all reasonable persons, then no. If what we mean is that we can have good reason to suppose that the historical evidence confirms the supernaturalist hypothesis, that it is more likely to exist as it does given supernaturalism than given naturalism, then yes, I think we can have a justified, true, belief that Jesus rose from the dead if, indeed, Jesus did in fact rise from the dead.

THAT is the case and only practically brain dead people refuse to acknowledge this.

There you go again, with this irrationality charges, for which you need proof, and for which you have provided none. You are claiming that no reasonable person can believe in the miraculous origin of Christianity. You have to demonstrate either that the historical evidence, such as we have it, is more likely given naturalism than supernaturalism, or show that everyone ought to have very low priors for the Christian miracles. Good luck with that.

Some further exchange between McGrew and Babinski

The title link goes to Babinksi's response to McGrew at his own site, this is Tim's response.  Tim's new comments are in blue, those from Ed are in black.

Ed has taken the time to explain some of his thoughts on the first couple of points of our initial exchange, and I have, today, a bit of time to respond. Since the semester has begun and I have various other commitments, I cannot promise to keep up an exchange in a timely fashion. I say this, not out of a desire to avoid discussion, but to give fair warning that it isn’t something I anticipate being able to carry on indefinitely. I would not want to give anyone a pretext for inferring anything from silence.

EB [FURTHER REPLY]: What does the word "appeared" mean exactly? I read in Carnely's book on the resurrection that the term can apply to something less than physical.

Ophthe comes from optanomai, which means simply “to appear.” Further shades of meaning cannot be squeezed out of lexical entries alone; we must look at the context, both textual (how does such a claim function in a creed?) and socio-cultural (what would a Jewish audience have understood by a resurrection?). The suggestion that an early creed would be taken seriously if its point were that lots of people had experienced purely subjective “appearances” is bizarre; in the Jewish context, Jesus’ rising again could only have been understood as a physical rising again, a point argued in extenso in Licona’s forthcoming book. To read ophthe here as “to have a purely subjective appearance-experience with no objective physical correlate” is, in face of these considerations, insupportable.

As for appearing to Peter first of all, that's not in the Gospels. Neither is a lone appearance to James. (Neither is an appearance to over 500. But more on that below.)

This sounds like an argument from silence in the making. In any event, though an appearance to Peter is not described in the Gospels, it is alluded to in Luke 24:34.

Let's say that Jesus' core group of initial followers returned to Galilee, mourning the loss of their leader, and Peter had a post-mortum appearance-experience (not unheard of), and the rest of the apostles WENT ALONG with it, saying, "Oh yes, the Lord appeared to Peter and the rest of us also." And perhaps by saying such a thing they originally only meant that THEY BELIEVED that the Lord had appeared to Peter and he was their leader? And suppose other followers of Jesus tended to view James as a leader at least equal to Peter, and they saw how the notion of an "appearance" to Peter rallied the Jesus movement round him, and so a story arose that James saw the Lord too--"and then the apostles," just as in the case of Peter, making them equal. In other words I'm suggesting that an early story grew, prompted by questions of leadership. As for the idea of miracle stories growing, an examination of the NT itself provides prima facie evidence of the addition, growth and change of miracle stories over time. If TM wishes to disavow my case and instead conduct his own based on harmonizing tales, that's his prerogative. But I'd say from my perspective that the prima facie evidence and each question raised by such evidence, comes first.

This chain of perhapses and supposes is pure fabrication; I cannot imagine why you think that it is supported by the evidence of the texts. There is no power struggle recorded between Peter and James. Most of the conditions requisite for this sort of post-mortem experience are missing. Any misunderstanding of an initial claim to have believed that Peter hallucinated something would have been easily quashed by those who had made the initial claim. To suppose that the misunderstanding arose and took over in the first years, to the point that the truth had disappeared within five years of the events of Easter and the creed reported only the misunderstanding, is not credible.

The simple explanation for why there are no more details in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is that this is a creed, not a Gospel. Virtually all scholars agree that it was composed and circulated at a time when the majority of the principals were alive, in the 30s. The suggestion that because this creed, which is by its very nature streamlined and structured for easy memorization, does not contain further details, none were known, is extremely puzzling. Does anyone seriously maintain that an inquirer in Jerusalem who had heard the claims in this creed and came to the disciples asking what had happened would have been sent away no wiser than when he first came? Or that he would have been told only stories of “pneumatic ecstasies”?

As for the helter-skelter nature of the resurrection reports we have, I think any candid reader will agree that it is just the sort of evidence we might expect if events happened more or less as they have traditionally been thought to have happened. We have a good number of accounts, narrated by different persons, of different appearances in different places, complete with the loose ends that accompany all sincere eyewitness testimony. By far the simplest explanation for this is that the first Christians had complete conviction that Jesus, after His resurrection, had been seen so often and by so many persons that there was no real dispute about the central fact of the matter. The discrepancies in the accounts are no greater than—indeed, rather less striking than—those in the accounts of the death of Callisthenes, or Caesar, or Caracalla.

Dr. Robert M. Price also notes that a host of questions have been raised by theologians concerning the above passage in 1 Cor.  [A long quotation from Price follows.]

It does seem reasonable to suppose that the creed was composed to give a list of prominent males in the early church who could give testimony to having seen the risen Lord. Price’s question about the absence of an explicit Gospel reference to the 500 is actually awkward for him, since he must then try to argue that it wasn’t present in the original text of 1 Corinthians 15. I am deeply unimpressed by such arguments from silence.

Another paragraph from Price follows; the only portion that could be construed as a gesture toward an argument is this:

“[I]f such an overwhelmingly potent proof of the resurrection had ever occurred it would have been widely repeated from the first.”

There are multiple problems here. If the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 was, as most scholars grant, circulated in the 30s, then it was widely repeated from the first, and we have it, in the very words in which it was repeated. Paul, in quoting the creed to the Corinthians, reminds them that this is what they received at the first—reminds them, that is, of their own catechesis. The suggestion that it wasn’t widely known unless it was mentioned twice is absurd; the assumption that it must post-date the Gospels is just another argument from silence and deserves no further notice.

Regarding that line in 1 Corinthians 15 and the description of Pentecost in Acts 2, Price writes:

In fact, would it not be far more natural to suppose that if any connection existed between the two passages, the relation must be just the opposite? That, rather, an originally subjective pneumatic ecstasy on the part of a smaller number at Pentecost has been concretized into the appearance of the Risen Lord to a larger group on Easter? But then we are simply underscoring more heavily the apocryphal character of the result. Lüdemann unwittingly confirms this: "The number 'more than 500 brethren' is to be understood as 'an enormous number', i.e., not taken literally. (Who could have counted?)" It is just this sort of detail that denotes the fictive character of a narrative. It is like asking how the narrator knew the inner thoughts of a character: he knows them because he made them up! No more successful is the suggestion that the appearance to the 500 be identified with Luke 24:36ff. The same question presents itself: if there were as many as 500 present on that occasion, how can the evangelist have thought this "detail" unworthy of mention? And if we suppose he did include it, what copyist in his right mind would have omitted it?

In a word, no. It is not more natural to suppose that the appearance to over 500 brethren at once is a legend growing out of Pentecost, for many reasons, one of which is that no appearance of Jesus is even hinted at in Acts 2. As for the question about counting I hope that we can get beyond the sort of chronological snobbery that suggests ancient people could not or would not count. Price’s attempt to parlay the numerical reference into a piece of evidence that the story is fictional looks suspiciously like an attempt to affirm the consequent.

The argument from silence regarding Luke 24:36 would be worth puncturing if it were not for the fact that the hypothesis that there were 500 people present at that time is not itself particularly plausible (see verse 33). Matthew 28:16-20 is a better candidate; here we simply have another argument from silence, and Price has not provided any compelling line of argument for the inclusion of that detail. If anyone feels a need for a further explanation for Matthew’s brevity, I have already remarked on the fact that Matthew’s final remarks are quite condensed, a fact that has led competent commentators (e.g. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, p. 698) to suggest that, like Josephus in Contra Apion 1.320, Matthew was running out of scroll. The omission of a detail in writing that could be supplied by a living witness to anyone who asked is not a serious ground for erecting an elaborate theory of legendary embellishment.

I cannot for the life of me see why anyone should take the view that the reference to the 500 is an interpolation seriously. And, in fact, apart from Price, virtually no scholar does. There is no shred of textual evidence against its authenticity, and it makes (pace Price) perfectly good sense in the context. I am deeply suspicious of the kind of historical fantasy that would permit us, if it were not reserved exclusively for the Scriptures, to deconstruct all history.

For literalists, let me add that when Paul states that Jesus "appeared" to "over 500 brethren at once" (1Cor. 15:6), that would have been to a greater number of "brethren" than were mentioned at the time of Jesus' alleged bodily ascension into heaven because Acts 1:9,14-15,22 mentions only "120 brethren" meeting together in Jerusalem just prior to Jesus' bodily ascension. Acts also limits the number of people who saw the body of Jesus ascend into heaven to just the apostles (Luke 24:49-53 & Acts 1:2-9 ). But I don't want to rush to discussing Luke-Acts since we still haven't discussed Mark and Matthew's tales of the post-resurrection Jesus yet, which most scholars would admit were probably composed sometime between 1 Cor. and Luke-Acts.

Here we have another argument from silence. The bulk of Jesus’ ministry was in Galilee, and it is widely acknowledged that he had a larger body of followers there than in Jerusalem. So the reference to 120 brethren gathered together in Jerusalem does not cast any doubt on whether Jesus appeared to over 500 people at once. It is generally and, I think, reasonably conjectured that the reference to the 500+ is an allusion to the same event as the one mentioned in Matthew 28:16-20.

TM: It isn’t the point of a creed to give a lengthy description of all that Jesus did and said after his resurrection. This one circulated in the 30s; one of the purposes, plainly, was to list the people of whom one might inquire.

EB [FURTHER REPLY]: The point is not that it was an "early creed," the point is HOW CAN WE KNOW FOR SURE HOW SUCH A CREED ORIGINATED? We can't know, we don't have any evidence BUT this early creed. And it is sparse evidence indeed. So unless you are assuming a harmonization stance to begin with, you don't know either. My view considers the evidence in chronological order, and the most obvious questions that come to mind -- prima facie evidence of what appears to be legendary additions, growth, changes in the story over time. For further reading along such lines I suggest:

I await any account of its origin apart from the obvious one—that people who were convinced they had seen Jesus alive again after his death set down a compact record of notable witnesses—that is remotely plausible. Regarding priority, I will just note en passant that Joachim Jeremias, who agrees that the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is very early, argues that the report in Luke 24:34 represents a tradition that predates that creed. (“Easter: The Earliest Tradition and the Earliest Interpretation,” in New Testament Theology (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), p. 306) Dodd and Bultmann also note the connection between Luke 24:34 and 1 Corinthians 15:5.

A bump in the road

Let me get back to my central thesis here. I am trying to argue a couple of things. One I am simply assuming, which is that there is no good argument that everyone ought to have strongly naturalistic priors about miracles. That doesn't mean that there's something wrong if you do have strongly naturalistic priors, only that there is no good argument, a la Hume, to suppose that I ought to have strongly naturalistic priors.

My second central thesis is that there is something very puzzling about the founding of Christianity, which makes all naturalistic accounts of its founding unbelievable. This is centered around the Resurrection as the central miracle, but really it's the whole story that just doesn't fit together very well unless the miraculous character of the whole thing is presupposed. My claim is that if you try, in a serious way, to put the historical jigsaw puzzle together without a resurrection, the pieces don't fit. You end up having to strain the facts to make them fit the theory. Now if you have strongly naturalistic priors, I suppose that is what you must do, or you can even say "I don't know what happened, but whatever it was, it wasn't a resurrection." On the other hand, it seems absurd to say that there is something self-contradictory about the idea of an omnipotent being who can resurrect someone from the dead. But your priors are what they are.

C. S. Lewis, in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy, encountered an atheist who reached just such a conclusion, who, nevertheless, remained an atheist. He wrote:

“Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole outline of Christian history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought-I didn’t of course say; words that would have revealed the nonsense-that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.” But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”


by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224

For this atheist, this hardest boiled of all atheists, the evidence for the miraculous nature of the founding of Christianity was a bump in the road. For Lewis, it helped to push him toward conversion. What I have been trying to show, is that the bump is there.

Reply to Loftus on my historical evidence project

Vic, you've got it wrong here and you don't realize what you're doing.



On the one hand you find the philosophical arguments against the probability of miracles to be weak (note, probability not possibility).

Yes, of course Hume's argument is an argument against the probability, not the possibility of miracles, though he slips at one point in the essay and talks about the absolute impossibility of miracles. My claim is that we cannot normatively establish that all rational persons must begin their investigations of the miraculous presuming the probability of the miraculous to be vanishingly low. There is no objective, non-objectionable method that can establish that it must be vanishingly low. That is the conclusion of my work on Bayes' theorem and miracles, which was done under the direction of atheist philosopher of science Patrick Maher, and it is also the conclusion of University of Pittsburgh philosopher of science John Earman, also an atheist.

What I do not claim to have shown is that no one should have vanishing priors for miracles. In my posts recently, I have been bracketing the question of prior probabilities. I have been trying to show that there is a surprising amount of evidence in support of miracles like the Resurrection. Whether you find it sufficient or insufficient will depend on your priors.

On the other hand you dive right into the arguments for the resurrection without first looking at the Bible as a whole. Once you look at what biblical scholarship as a whole you will learn not to trust the Bible just because something is stated in the Bible.

For the sake of debate concerning Christian origins, I don't need modern scholarship to keep me from doing that. The simple logic of not begging the question will do that. If I could argue "It says in the Bible that Christ was resurrected, therefore he was resurrected," then there wouldn't even be a debate, would there? No, what the Bible provides is preserved testimony to certain events. We have to talk about how close to the events the testimony is, whether it comes from eyewitnesses or people who spoke to eyewitnesses, etc.

I mean, what is "biblical scholarship as a whole?" It includes, I should think the Bible faculties of evangelical seminaries like Talbot and Trinity. But suppose your marginalize them. Are you going to marginalize Roman Catholics like Fitzmeyer and Brown and Luke Timothy Johnson? There's a considerable group of moderates like Joachim Jeremias and Oscar Cullman, Richard Bauckham and Anthony Thistleton. Are they marginal? And N. T. Wright, where does he fit in? Is he too "evangelical" to be a real biblical scholar? Was F. F. Bruce a real biblical scholar? Are they all people who haven't looked at biblical scholarship as a whole, while you, John Loftus, have looked at it as a whole? I smell the "no true Scotsman" fallacy once again.




Apart from my own WIBA I highly recommend you read Thom Stark's book when it comes out (I don't know when). In my opinion when it comes to understanding biblical scholarship the phrase "educated evangelical" is an oxymoron.

Yeah, if those danged evangelicals would just read the right books they'd come out with their hands up waving a white flag. Sounds like the young evangelicals who think that if their skeptical friends will just read Josh McDowell, Francis Schaeffer, and C. S. Lewis, they'll all get down on their knees forthwith and pray the sinner's prayer.

If Tim McGrew is right, skeptics need to read some books of 18th and 19th Century apologists, who in some ways defend the reliability of the NT with greater sophistication even than those from the 20th and 21st Centuries. So maybe the McGrew Challenge can be a response to the Debunking Christianity challenge. I mean, we can go on with dueling challenges all day long until somebody gets tired.


Until then what Bob Price said applies to what you're attempting to do lately.

Well, here's what Bob Price said.

"What evangelical apologists are still trying to show...is that their version of the resurrection was the most compatible with accepting all the details of the gospel Easter narratives as true and non-negotiable...[D]efenders of the resurrection assume that their opponents agree with them that all the details are true, that only the punch line is in question. What they somehow do not see is that to argue thus is like arguing that the Emerald City of Oz must actually exist since, otherwise, where would the Yellow Brick Road lead?....We simply have no reason to assume that anything an ancient narrative tells us is true." The Case Against the Case for Christ, (pp. 209-210).

Nonsense on stilts. Of course these people agree that you have to start from the presupposition that what we have is ancient human testimony to miraculous (and non-miraculous) events. Apologists sometimes slip and presume something like inerrancy, but the proper method is to look at these texts as ancient evidence. How good? Well, I would argue that in the Gospels we have four books written by people who at worst were in a position to talk to those who had seen and known Jesus, and who claimed to have seen him resurrected. They may have had theological aims, but they did their work with a concern to correctly preserve the facts  concerning the life, death and resurrection of Christ. There are, of course, four such records, and as such if they agree with one another that something happened, that is at least some evidence that it indeed did happen. Evidence, mind you, that we might end up having to reject, but evidence nonetheless. Of course, the idea that the Gospels represented an attempt to get things right, as opposed to being a record of some out-of-control legends, will have to be argued for, but it is a conclusion I think is supported by the evidence.

The idea a piece of testimony becomes worthless once it becomes part of Scripture strikes me as just bizarre. Unless this is the Kooks and Quacks argument all over again, where you dismiss everything because of the time period it comes from. (As if there are no kooks and quacks today). Testimony to an event, all things being equal, is more likely to occur if the event occurred than if the event didn't occur. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, it is evidence for the event. It may not be good enough evidence, but it is evidence. The claim that there is no evidence for the Resurrection strikes me as nonsense, and based on a misunderstanding of the very idea of evidence. And yes, I do think there is evidence for alien abductions. That doesn't mean I believe that anyone was abducted by aliens, I would not use the "no evidence" mantra for alien abductions either.

These founding events of Christianity brought about a massive change in the religious landscape of the Roman Empire, a change that resulted in Christianity becoming the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. For this to happen, a lot of people have to do a lot of surprising things. How do we explain it. My claim is that the founding of Christianity involves a set of events that are strange and difficult to explain unless Christ rose from the dead. What you do with that conclusion once I get you to draw it is up to you.

What would evidence look like if we had it?

Before entering, however, on this examination of the incidental allusions or secondary facts in the New Testament narrative, it is important to notice two things with regard to the main facts; in the first place, that some of them (as the miracles, the resurrection, and the ascension) are of such a nature that no testimony to them from profane sources was to be expected, since those who believed them naturally and almost necessarily became Christians; and secondly, that with regard to such as are not of this character, there does exist profane testimony of the first order.

George Rawlinson, The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records (Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1860), p. 180.

HT: Tim McGrew