The New Passover Plot

When I was redating the last post I found this comment by Ed Babinski:

Secondly, the high priest Ciaphas who condemned Jesus probably couldn't care less what happened to his body, so long as the disciples left town, and got out of his jurisdiction. And to make sure, he could (for all anyone knows) have had the body moved, and had a man in white wait at the empty the tomb to tell the scared ladies that morning, "He has gone before you to Galilee, for THERE ye shall see him." BECAUSE THEN THE JESUS MOVEMENT WOULD BE THE PROBLEM OF THE RULER OF GALILEE.



Charels Freeman argues the probability of just such an hypothesis in his new book, A NEW HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY.


Interestingly, the priests did have white garments, and interestingly the earliest Gospel does mention a young man in white at the tomb telling the women to tell the apostles to go elsewhere to see Jesus (get out of town). And in Galilee they probably had "appearances" as Paul says, and even the ones who didn't actually "see" anything probably said they did because otherwise they would lose status and feel left out. And stories of a physical bodily resurrection with Jesus saying he has "flesh and bone" and "eating," and denying he was a "SPIRIT" at all came LAST in such late works as Luke-Acts, and the Gospel of John.


Interestingly, the earliest Gospel, Mark, has a young man in white at the tomb, and also has a young man following after Jesus at his arrest whom the soldiers try to capture, but who flees away naked into the night. Then a young man appears dressed at the tomb, the first to arrive. This young man thus is the last to leave Jesus at his arrest, leaves naked, then is the first at the tomb, dressed in white. He is probably employed as a sort of ideal follower, an example to Mark's readers. But if Freeman is correct, he's a real person, and the body was moved, and for a reason, to get the apostles and Jesus' followers out of Ciaphas' hair and so others would have to deal with them way off in Galilee.


Note that the later Gospels, the ones composed after Mark all change the young man at the tomb into an angel and even TWO angels! And they also drop the story about the young man following Jesus on the night of his arrest and then fleeing away naked. They drop that story of the young man, and change the young man at the tomb into an angel.

There are a lot of things you can say about Caiaphas. Stupid isn't on the top of the list. Wouldn't Caiaphas have learned from experience that movements that start in Galilee might have a tendency to find their way back down to Judaea? As Bilbo noted on that thread:

Caiaphas et al deliberately start the resurrection story of Jesus in order to get rid of his followers? You think that once Jesus was dead the movement would come to a grinding halt on its own. Was there any indication that the disciples would continue causing trouble? Did they mount an uprising to save Jesus either at his trial or crucifixion? No. Why give them new hope? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose? There's no guarantee that they would stay in Galilee. If Acts reflects actual history, the movement becomes centered in Jerusalem. In Galatians Paul goes to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles. I believe Josephus said that James was killed there.


The only question I have is why Babinski, who does read a lot of modern biblical scholarship, would tout such a theory. Are skeptics that desperate? Why are there so many just awful theories out there to explain away the events surrounding the founding of Christianity? Why not go back to the swoon theory? It's more plausible.

"I will never believe that an error against which so many and various weapons was deemed necessary was, from the outset, wholly lacking in plausibility. All this 'post haste and rummaging in the land' obviously implies a respectable enemy."  -C. S. Lewis, "On Obstinacy of Belief"

Or is the passion for the sensational at work here? The Da Vinci Syndrome.

But, I suppose someone will say "At least he's not saying that the Sky Daddy revived a corpse. I mean, how do you know it wasn't the Flying Spaghetti Monster?"

Of course, skeptics are too sophisticated to say that. No?

Habermas replies to naturalistic theories explaining away the resurrection

A redated post.

HT: Andy Daoud.

The argument from ancient credulity

A popular argument against the New Testament miracle claims is to say that ancient peoples were credulous and would be disinclined to doubt miracle claims in general. Glenn Miller responds, mostly, to Richard Carrier on this point, suggesting that present-day skeptics overrate ancient credulity.

HT: The Infidel Delusion.

Why Bart Ehrman is not a Christian

Bart Ehrman defends the historical Jesus

HT: Tim McGrew.

The Calvinists Strike Back: The Infidel Delusion

I should very quickly point out that, although the authors are all, I think Calvinists and Triabloggers, none of this is about what is at issue between Calvinists and their opponents. From what I have seen, it does make some strong points. See especially Manata's discussion of the Outsider Test. (I'm not going to vouch for the tone of this document, though).

A Sermon by R. A. Torrey

In which he makes use of the Trilemma, some years before C. S. Lewis was converted.

Since a great-granddaughter of Torrey mentioned it, I thought I would redate this post, linking to the sermon.

McGrew on the origins of the Trilemma argument

"In an unrelated web search this afternoon I came upon a post of yours on a secularist blog in which you stated that you hadn't been able to trace the origins of the trilemma, and that you had asked Purtill, Kreeft, and Beversluis for its origin but they did not know. Your conjecture that it was an anti-Arian argument is, I think correct; in this form I have traced it back to the mid 300s. See Marius Victorinus Afer, De Gener. I, p. 1020 c (Migne):

Haec dicens Deus fuit, si mentitus non est: si autem mentitus est, non opus Dei omnimodis perfectum


Roughly, 'If it is not a lie, then he was God as he said: but if on the other hand it is a lie, the works of God are not perfect (or, complete) in every way.'
Tim
--"

Thanks Tim. I had thought I would find a trilemma in Athanasius' De Incarnatione, since Lewis wrote the preface to a translation of it, and was a little disappointed to discover it wasn't there. You have to remember that Lewis never referred to it as the Trilemma, he called it aut deus aut homo malus, Latin for Either God or a Bad Man. The first I ever saw the word "trilemma" used was by Josh McDowell.

The Loser Letters: Screwtape Meets Dawkins

Hurtado on the methods of Steven Carr

HT: Triablogue. Hurtado, who apparently is far from being a fundamentalist, nevertheless reacts harshly to some of Steven Carr's attacks on Scripture. It reminds me of some of the exchanges he has had here on DI.

Theism, atheism, and non-rational motivations

Victor wrote: "And none of us is intellectually pure, in that, emotional reasons are always going to be present no matter what we believe, so long as we care about what we believe."




Ken: I'm a sinner. I don't ever think that any other atheists have any huge advantage in the objectivity department. One can always cite some sources of bias for the opposition. This doesn't mean atheists can't have an edge in objectivity.



A case can be made that the emotional motivations of Christians are stronger than that of atheists and agnostics, so while there is no question about the lack of objectivity of both sides, there remains the question of the degree of which our respective beliefs are determined by our emotions.



On the non-theist side we have elitism, desire for a carefree, sinful lifestyle, and sometimes peer pressure, other times the desire to be different, with the latter conflicting influences depending on the circumstances (such as conforming to a nonconformist ingroup).



On the Christian side, the most obvious are the self-preservation imperative (cultural or personal), widespread indoctrination, desire for good fortune, moral security, moral certainty and conformity.



Of course the more particular motivations of non-theists may also account for their relative scarcity, assuming all other things being equal such as reasoning ability. But if we could distill the objective out of the subjective, we may find that atheism is the modestly more pure position as an initial, very simple assumption.

VR: I suppose we can start analyzing this by looking at non-truth-tracking causes for beliefs. Believing, religiously, what one is raised to believe, for example, doesn't appear to be truth-tracking, since clearly we people are raised to believe various things, and the likelihood of coming with falsehoods just picking your beliefs that way seems rather high. Believing what you wish to believe is in general not truth-tracking, your wishes and your fears come true, for the most parts, in equal proportions.

But how many people in our society have strong Christian upbringings? I don't think most people in America are raised by dedicated Christians. Sure, there are high polling numbers for theism on Gallup surveys, but most households, I think, do not provide anything like a strong indoctrination into Christianity. I grew up in a United Methodist church, but I also spent most of my academic career in atmospheres which were hostile to Christianity.

Also, when you start reflecting on your beliefs, your non-rational reasons for believing somethings start making you suspicious, as opposed to supporting your beliefs. Insofar as I felt myself wanting to believe that Christianity is true, it was a source of doubt rather than faith. I had, after all, read Russell, who told me it was "pusillanimous and sniveling" to give in to the will to believe.

And these non-rational factors are so variable from person to person. While many people fear extinction, C. S. Lewis claimed to have no such fear. He wrote:

"And it remains true that I have, almost all of my life, been quite unable to feel that horror of nonentity, of annhilation, which, say Dr. Johnson felt so strongly. I felt it for the first time only in 1947. But that was after I had long been reconverted and thus begun to know what life really is and what would be lost by missing it."
(Surprised by Joy, Harcourt Brace and Company, p. 117.)

Now, I suppose a skeptic could sit here and play Freud, and argue that this was a piece of disingenuous subtle propaganda to make us think he was really persuaded by argument to believe, when really he wished his way back to Christianity. But on what possible evidence? And couldn't we play that game with everyone, if we some particular theory of why people believe, or why people disbelieve? If I hold the thesis that everyone who rejects Christianity does so out of a desire to engage in sexual conduct that Christianity proscribes, surely I could follow Freud in finding sexual motivations where none appear to be on the face of things.

So, I think we have reason to be aware of the non-rational motivations that might be moving us toward belief or unbelief. But this probably is not going to give us much of an argument one way or another. If anything, I could make the case that the Christian philosophers I know tend to be more conscious of their own intellectual frailties, than most atheist philosophers I know.

Faith, Evidence, and Intellectual Honesty: A Reply to Loftus

This concerns the famous, or infamous Bill Craig claim that the witness of the Holy Spirit provides such a powerful warrant for his belief in Christianity that he would keep believing even if his assessment of all the objective arguments were to turn negatve. I wrote on a thread on debunking Christianity:


VR: OK, here's one from me. Bill has done a lot of good work, but he's shooting himself in the foot with this response.

John W. Loftus said...

Agreed Vic, but what do you make of an earlier question of mine that Bill answered right here with regard to Lessing's Ugly Broad Ditch that historical proofs cannot lead the believer to faith?



Am I wrong to think that Bill is impaled on the horns of a huge dilemma? On the one hand historical evidence cannot lead him to faith, yet on the other hand the inner witness of the Spirit leads him to say what he did here?

VR: Well, I think you are setting up a false dilemma here. I would personally have a lot of trouble continuing to believe based on some inner voice if I really thought the objective evidence for theism or Christianity were bad. But, I believe that part of what the Holy Spirit does in my life is acquaint me with objective reasons as well as subjective feelings. We come to intellectual discussion of the reasons to believe with a set of intellectual predispositions, or what Bayesians call "priors." I don't think you can legislate priors, or require that we retreat from our existing belief system to some neutral position and go from there. It didn't really work for Descartes, so why should it work for me? And none of us is intellectually pure, in that, emotional reasons are always going to be present no matter what we believe, so long as we care about what we believe. What we have to do is our due diligence with respect to the reasons on both sides of the question, and combine that with a trust that God will give us our "daily bread," the means by which to remain faithful to Christ and intellectually honest at the same time. (The intellectual self-canonization of at least some unbelievers, but also of some Christians as well, is an annoying characteristic). For nearly 38 years, God has not disappointed me.

A book on American Theologians including.....me????

I thought I was a Christian philosopher, not a theologian.

Hume, Biblical Criticism, and Wagging the Dog

A redated post. 

 A response to some discussion on Debunking Christianity.

A lot of biblical criticism is done by people who either accept Hume's essay on miracles, or are influenced by people who accept Hume's essay. This goes all the way back to David F. Strauss in the 19th Century. This poses a profound question as to whether the biblical-critical dog is wagging the philosophical tail, or whether the philosophical tail is wagging the biblical-critical dog. This was the point that Lewis was making when he wrote his book Miracles; A Preliminary Study. Preliminary to what? Preliminary to the actual study of the biblical documents. If you are coming to those documents thinking that miracles are maximally improbable, then you get one set of results. Bultmann was the representative figure of a scholar of that persuasion. All Bultmann said was you couldn't live in the modern world and consistently believe in the New Testament miracles. Bart Ehrman is another example of present-day vintage, as are the scholars of the Jesus Seminar.

Now if I want to know whether the New Testament miracles have occurred or did not occur, having the testimony of some expert who has claimed to have "discovered" that they didn't might be a tad suspicious unless I know that this is a scholar who would have accepted the miracle claims had the evidence been there. If we know, in advance, that miracles cannot occur, then perhaps the scholar is applying Sherlock Holmes' maxim: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." However, if the scholar is entering the field thinking that the miraculous is not the impossible, then we are likely to get different results.

In 1990, when I was a junior fellow at Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion, I attended a conference in which a number of biblical scholars got into it with some Christian philosophers, and there it seemed to me that the biblical scholars were on the whole more skeptical than the philosophers, and that they were largely unconscious of the philosophical presuppositions underlying their own work.

I took Critical Introduction to the Bible from two professors at the liberal Candler School of Theology in the mid-1970s. The New Testament professor was Dr. Arthur Wainwright, and his overall conclusion was that you can bring anti-miraculous presuppositions into biblical scholarship and end up like Bultmann, or you can go in thinking miracles possible, in which case you end up believing in the central Christian miracles, as Dr. Wainwright in fact did.

Nothing I have read in biblical studies since has altered the perspective I took from Dr. Wainwright's course.

On believing newspaper reports of lottery victories

In my paper on miracles I presented a typical objection to Hume-style arguments from probability against the acceptance of miracle reports.

But when one attempts to develop this idea into mathematical probability theory, one must avoid untoward consequences, and Hume simply did not possess the mathematical sophistication to accomplish this. If the theory of probabilistic inference he himself presents in "Of Miracles" is taken literally, it has the consequence that if the Arizona Republic were to report that I won the lottery, you should disbelieve the report, because my chance of winning the lottery is less than the percentage of erroneous reports by the Republic. But surely this is implausible.

Or consider reports in the media of one-time events, such as the election of an African-American President, or a landing on the moon. Before those events occurred, we had uniform experience of their nonoccurrence. If you assign those events a probability zero, then that means that whatever evidence we have for their occurrence has to be trumped by their antecedent improbability. This sort of example was pointed out by Hume's 18th century critics, and it looks as if it was even pointed out to Hume when he was writing "Of Miracles," since his treatment of the Indian Prince case looks to me like a response to a critic of an earlier draft.

My Bayesian paper on Hume on Miracles

A  redated post. 

My first published paper, "Miracles and the Case for Theism" replied to Mackie's treatment of miracles in The Miracle of Theism. I discovered a formal error in Mackie's analysis, which violates the Mackie Revelance Principle. The paper came out in February 1989 International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. And, of course, a follow-up treatment of miracles is on Internet Infidels. Someone who wants to defend Mackie's or Hume's position might want to start by rebutting me in those papers.

The McGrews defend the Resurrection

A redated post.

This is a chapter in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology also includes

 my essay on the argument from reason. Tim is a master-strength chessplayer who had the Gambit Cartel column in Chess Cafe for between 2002 and 2005.

Miracles, Singularities, and Moonwalking

Bob Prokop: Early on in George MacDonald's fairy story Phantastes, we come upon the following scene. The book's main character (Anodos) is suddenly confronted by a magical creature, who then speaks to him. Allow me to quote the passage in full:



"Anodos, you never saw such a little creature before, did you?"


"No," said I, "and indeed I hardly believe I do now."


"Ah, that is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of what you consider in itself unbelievable."


That little three line exchange is one of the most profound statements I have ever read about how many people approach the miraculous. Just think about it. Were a person to come across a single lifeform in an otherwise lifeless universe - heck, were he to find a single strand of DNA, he would either refuse to believe it existed, or proclaim it a miracle. But here we are in the real world, surrounded by trillions and trillions of incomprehensibly complex lifeforms, and all too many many people dismiss it all as just “the way things are", or even the product of blind, purposeless chance.

The same thing goes for the Resurrection. Its very singularity is a stumbling block to many skeptics, but the same people will not be bothered for a second by the fact that there are billions of people alive all around them right now. Why should coming to life a second time be any more unbelievable than the first time? (The usual objection is we don’t see it happening every day.) So is it "mere repetition", in MacDonald's words, that makes the starkly incredible fact of one's own existence so casually accepted?

 I believe that MacDonald has hit upon an unexamined (and therefore unchallenged) assumption underlying skeptical thinking. Let me call it The Singularity Problem. (A problem, that is, for the skeptic.) Basically, the issue can be stated quite simply. A main objection to miraculous events raised by skeptics is that they are not common, or even sui generis. Thus, we frequently hear people objecting to Christ’s Virgin Birth because we don’t see such births happening around us as a norm. But why should we? The singularity of the event is definitionally mandated by its miraculous nature. Until we somehow rule out the possibility of one-of-a-kind events on grounds stronger than ruling them out on principle (which, after all, amounts to a "because I said so" argument), we cannot object to their existence on those grounds alone.

I say this underlying assumption needs to be examined and defended, not simply accepted a priori. Otherwise, the skeptic must somehow make the case that we are not quite literally surrounded by countless miracles all the time.

Any inductive inference is an induction from the observed to the unobserved, and proceeds by similarity. So a dissimilarity to what we have experienced in the past is a stumbling-block to belief. But if you make it too big of a stumbling block, you will end up thinking that the lunar landing that Bob and I are both old enough and privileged enough to have seen and heard on televison (one small step....), was really the result of machinations in Area 51.

Anything but a miracle!

From C. S. Lewis's Miracles: A Preliminary Study.

“The ordinary procedure of the modern historian even if he admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of “natural” explanation has been tried and failed. That is, he will accept the most improbable “natural” explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucination, hypnotism or unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie — all these are known to be very improbable events: so improbable that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. But they are preferred to the admission of a miracle.” (C.S. Lewis, Miracles, p. 133)

The sounds of silence

I have my differences with the folks over at Triablogue, but some considerable agreements as well. This post, by Paul Manata, drives a well-deserved stake through arguments from silence.

Bob Prokop on Mark and the Resurrection

Bob: I have an answer for those critics who claim that Mark is evidence that the Resurrection was a late idea cooked up by subsequent Evangelists. The usual claim is, because of the unique nature and uncertain authorship of the ending of Mark's Gospel, that originally the Resurrection wasn't part of his story. My reply: Then why does Jesus quite explicitly foretell his rising from the dead to the Apostles, and not once but multiple times, scattered all through Mark. Surely, I ask, you don't think all those passages are also late additions? And these are not isolated, stand alone verses, but woven into the very fabric of the Gospel, with long lead-in and subsequent narratives that hang off of those very predictions. You can't expunge the Resurrection narrative from Mark without doing violence to the entire work.







As to what the actual circumstances were behind the authorship of the ending of Mark, I doubt that we'll ever solve that one.

We Walk by Faith and not by.....

The Apostle Paul contrasts faith with sight, not faith with proof or reason. Sight is a particular type of proof, one that we lack for a lot of things like electrons and dinosaurs.

Timothy McGrew's Argument for the Resurrection

This should provide a helpful structure to resurrection debate.

Tim passed this argument on to me in the context of a bunch of other material. In the context, he prefaces it with the line "If the Gospels were written by people who were in a position to know what really happened" and expressly says that it is an argument that can come into play "once it is established that the Gospels contain authentic apostolic testimony regarding the resurrection." He is fully aware that, in the context of current debates, these are disputed propositions that require independent argument.

Again, this post is an attempt to provide a structure to the discussion, something that the formal structure of the Kalam Cosmological argument also helps to do. By looking at such a formal structure, you can divide criticisms of the argument into two classes: ones that challenge the causal premise, and ones that challenge the claim that the universe began to exist.



1. If the resurrection of Jesus did not occur, as the apostles said it did, then either they knew that Jesus had not risen, and therefore they were deceivers, or they did not know that Jesus had not risen, and therefore they were deceived.


2. If they were deceivers, they were willing to die for something they knew to be a lie, without any expectation of earthly gain for it.

3. People are not willing to die for something they know to be a lie without any expectation of earthly gain for it.

4. If they were deceived, then they were subjected to massive hallucinations involving multiple people, extended across forty days.

5. Massive hallucinations of this sort do not happen.

_____

6. The apostles were neither deceivers nor deceived.

_____

7. The resurrection of Jesus occurred, as the apostles said it did.

Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John invent the novel?

Or were they trying to report the facts? People familiar with ancient myths and legends see a huge difference between the New Testament and ancient myths and legends.

“If [a man] tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, . . . I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage ... pretty close up to the facts ... [o]r else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.” – C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959)

Part of Lewis's chapter on Hell from the Problem of Pain

Without hell, can evil triumph?

First, there is an objection, in many minds, to the idea of retributive punishment as such. This has been partly dealt with in a previous chapter. It was there maintained that all punishment became unjust if the ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it; and a core of righteousness was discovered within the vindictive passion itself, in the demand that the evil man must not be left perfectly satisfied with his own evil, that it must be made to appear to him what it rightly appears to others--evil. I said that Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. We were then discussing pain which might still lead to repentance. How if it does not--if no further conquest than the planting of the flag ever takes place? Let us try to be honest with ourselves. Picture to yourself a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus attained success, uses it for the gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by betraying his own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose further, that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant--a jolly, ruddy-checked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable. We must be careful at this point. The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin. Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man: to prefer his conversion, at the peril of our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to his punishment; to prefer it infinitely. But that is not the question. Supposing be will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him? Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side? And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness--only spite--that prevents you from doing so? Or do you find that conflict between justice and Mercy, which has sometimes seemed to you such an outmoded piece of theology, now actually at work in your own mind, and feeling very much as if it came to you from above, not from below? You are moved, not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow. In a sense, it is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake. Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion. Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself, but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil, or ignorant that the evil is contrary to its nature, "either of which," says the philosopher, "is manifestly bad." (Summa Theol., 1, 11ae,Q. xxxix, Art. 1.) And I think, though we tremble, we agree.

Does the Death Penalty Deter Capital Crime?

Apparently not. The statistics don't support this idea. Quite the reverse.

What Luke got right, and why it matters

Walter: Sounds like you answered your own question. Acts of the Apostles is more than likely a second century document of dubious historical value.




VR: This flies in the face of some hard evidence. Acts contains to much detailed first-century information that has been confirmed by archaeology to be accurate. Luke gets the titles right for the leaders for various cities before whom Paul appeared. This is especially interesting since in some cases the governmental forms changed in the middle of the first century. That was the whole point of my rhetorical "How did Luke research his novel" question I posed to Steven. This information is detailed in F. F. Bruce's "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable. You would have to go around the Mediterranean world getting arrested on a regular basis in order to know that much about the political and judicial systems of the time. And since those changed, nobody in the second century would have had that information available to them.



You can bring up problems with Luke's account that have to be dealt with if you are an inerrantist, but this is not about inerrancy, or calling Luke the greatest historian of the ancient world, or anything like that. All I am doing here is putting a cap on the idea that Acts is a late, legendary product. Luke had to be in a position to know exactly who you deal with in Cyprus, Achaia, Asia, in Ephesus, in Thessalonica, in Philippi, in Athens, and in Malta.



Now, whenever I bring this stuff up, I get told that, of course, Luke could get this stuff right, but the supernatural stuff wrong. Yes, he could. But the evidence takes the "late and legendary" option away from the critic.



A lot of these archaeological discoveries were made by Sir William Ramsay, who had originally subscribed to the late-dating theories of the Tubingen school. He abandoned that position when he found extensive archaeological evidence that confirmed the reliabilty of Luke's account, over and over again.



I'm not saying a supernatural explanation is proved by all of this, but the options for developing a skeptical counter-story are reduced considerably by this kind of evidence.

I am linking to the relevant chapter of Bruce's book.

What martyrdom arguments are designed to show

Back when I first heard Josh McDowell speak on the evidences for Christianity, he said that, of course, many people have died for a lie. What they don't do is die for something they know to be a lie.


Arguments from martyrdom are not designed to establish the truth of the claims in question. They are simply strong evidence that those who died sincerely believed in the propositions for which they were martyred. Yet, I keep hearing the skeptics argue that martyrdom doesn't prove the truth of anything, as if that was how Christians were arguing. This is a straw man. Martyrdom arguments are defeaters for deliberate fraud theories. The fact that the 9/11 hijackers flew planes into the towers doesn't prove that their peculiar version of Islam is true. What it does show is that they really believed that they would go to paradise if the died for Allah in this way.

Second, it's not the actual killing of the person that needs explaining. It's what I call martyrdom risk behavior. Here is a example of it, from Peter's speech outside the gate of Jerusalem:

Acts 2:36 "Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ."

In other words, Peter is telling people whom he believed had the power to engineer a crucifixion, that God had vindicated Jesus and made him Lord and Christ. So you've got a guy who, before the cock crowed, showed shall we say a pretty normal concern for his own life, now telling people whom he believes had gotten somebody crucified, that God had resurrected Jesus.

Now unless this part of the story is legend, it certainly needs explanation. Even if Peter wasn't martyred, he's setting himself up for it here.

I'm not sure Joseph Smith engaged in martyrdom risk behavior, although I am sure he knew that what he was doing was making enemies.

This wouldn't be an argument against hallucination theories. If Peter had had a believable hallucination of the risen Jesus, that would explain why he came to be firmly convinced of the resurrection.

Another reply to Hallquist

Chris Hallquist thought it was weird that I was jumping from talking point to talking point without responding to the criticisms I had raised. Here is my response:

First, I posed two questions. One had to do with what you thought we did have hard evidence for. The second had to do with how you would regard the evidence if it was presented about the life of Rabbi Hillel, a person about whom no supernatural claims are made that I know of. I don’t think I’m just jumping from talking point to talking point, I am first, trying to get a sense of what will count as evidence here, and second, how the supernatural character of Jesus’ claims is affecting the rules of evidence. If this were about Hillel, it seems to me that most of us would be happy with the amount of evidence provided, as opposed to discounting it all because it came from supporters. I would have thought that testimony in the Gospels is at least some evidence, even if that evidence is defeasible.

My own view is that the supernatural element in these works is going to incline people towards skepticism to varying degrees, depending on the remainder of your belief system. So when I talk about this sort of thing, I am inclined to bracket the effect of the supernatural on one's priors, and ask what kind of evidence is actually there. Is there something that is difficult for the naturalist to explain, setting aside the question of whether a supernaturalist option might be deemed intellectually feasible.
My other point by way of response is taht skepticism about the sources solve the explanatory problems. There is hard evidence for the Persecution of Nero, and there is also hard evidence (Josephus) for the martyrdom of James the Lord’s brother. Martyrdom doesn’t prove the truth of the beliefs in question, but it does prove a high likelihood for the sincerity of those beliefs. So something had to have convinced those people that Jesus was Lord. What could that be? If nothing like the Jesus story was true, and they were all just making it up as they went along, why wouldn’t they head for the exits when Nero started rounding Christians up and killing them? As for James, what would convince you that your brother was the Lord? Why go on missionary journeys where you get arrested time after time unless there was something to convince you that the truth about God was to be found in Christ crucified and resurrected? If we impugn all the sources, then you’re left with a bunch of people butting heads with Jewish leaders, and ultimately with the Roman emperor, but why?

At least a hallucination theory gives you a proposed explanation for why these people have the convictions that they do.

Truncated Thought part II

And this is a follow-up post I did afterwards.

I must admit that Lewis's "it is obvious" response made the issue seem like more of a slam dunk than I would think of it as being. This chapter was written before he encountered Anscombe, when he had underestimated the complexity of the argument, but Lewis just revised one chapter of the book in response to Anscombe, not all of it.

Of course thought is solidly based in the body, but can a complete description of the state of one's body thereby account for what one's thought is about? If we had all the physical facts, would any mental facts follow logically? It isn't just religious people who say that physicalists have problems accounting for the mind. For example's here's naturalist Ned Block:

We gain some perspective on the explanatory gap if we contrast the issue of the physical/functional basis of consciousness with the issue of the physical/functional basis of thought. In the case of thought, we do have some theoretical proposals about what thought is, or at least what human thought is, in scientific terms. Cognitive scientists have had some success in explaining some features of our thought processes in terms of the notions of representation and computation. There are many disagreements among cognitive scientists: especially notable is the disagreement between connectionists and classical "language of thought" theorists. However, the fact is that in the case of thought, we actually have more than one substantive research program and their proponents are busy fighting it out, comparing which research program handles which phenomena best. But in the case of consciousness, we have nothing--zilch--worthy of being called a research program, nor are there any substantive proposals about how to go about starting one. Researchers are stumped. There have been many tantalizing discoveries recently about neuropsychological syndromes in which consciousness seems to be in some way missing or defective, but no one has yet come up with a theoretical perspective that uses these data to narrow the explanatory gap, even a little bit.

Ned Block, ‘Consciousness’, in A Companion to Philosophy of Mind, (ed.) Samuel Guttenplan, (Blackwell, 1994), p. 211.

Or try that infamous Christian apologist Richard Dawkins

Neither Steven Pinker nor I can explain human subjective consciousness... In How the Mind Works Steven elegantly sets out the problem of subjective consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what’s the explanation. Then he’s honest enough to say, ‘Beats the heck out of me.’ That is an honest thing to say, and I echo it. We don’t know. We don’t understand it.

Richard Dawkins, quoted by Varghese, The Wonder of the World, p. 56.

Or how about that raving religious lunatic Susan Blackmore:

How can objective things like brain cells produce subjective experiences like the feeling that ‘I’ am striding through the grass? This gap is what David Chalmers calls ‘the hard problem.’ ...It is a modern version of the ancient mind/body problem – but it seems to get worse, not better, the more we learn about the brain... The objective world out there, and the subjective experiences in here, seem to be totally different kinds of things. Asking how one produces the other seems to be nonsense. The intractability of this problem suggests to me that we are making a fundamental mistake in the way we think about consciousness – perhaps right at the very beginning.

Susan Blackmore, ‘What is consciousness?’, Big Questions in Science, in Harriet Swain (ed.), Big Questions in Science, (Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 29-40.

Now I am not saying these people are anywhere near arguing that the mind is supernatural. Far from it. But what I am suggesting is that the "facts" do not prove the the mind is physical, and that there should be no mystery about it, and that of course we all know that it is true. Rather, the conviction that the mind must be physical is one that is "read in" to the scientific data based on prior convictions about what people think must be true about nature.

And no, Lewis doesn't give you numbered premise arguments. I know of one guy, though, who wrote a book pulling enough numbered premise arguments out of Lewis to choke a horse. I forget his name. I'm not saying you need the numbers necessarily, but I thought asking for numbered premises might be useful in understanding the argument from evil, and so I asked for them. I've found numbered premise arguments a useful tool, but that is it.

Of course, Lewis and others such as myself have detailed arguments for why the mental states are not natural phenomena. To say that the facts prove that it is a natural phenomena is to provide a proof surrogate, not a proof.

What I was trying to do was show how Lewis perceived scientific thought: the right tool for many types of inquiry but nevertheless a "truncated" way to come up with a complete philosophy. Russell thought otherwise. He said "What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know." (I wonder what scientific discovery he based that off of? Unless he wasn't pretending to know it).

The Outsider and the Elephant

Loftus attributes religious belief to sociological conditioning. The elephant in the room is the culture of disbelief that is perpetuated, not by argumentation, but by intellectual intimidation and bullying, which anybody can find at most secular institutions of higher learning. I'm talking about the sort of "nobody believes that anymore" chronological snobbery that makes you feel as if some overwhelming argument was given on the day you were absent. It's the sort of attitude that makes an adolescent feel like a truly independent thinker because he has learned to be critical of his parents' attitudes and has adopted, instead, the attitudes of his peers. The idea that becoming a religious skeptic means transcending sociological pressures strikes me as ludicrous.

How to Solve Illegal Immigration

There are several parts to a solution here. One is border security, and Obama isn't going to get anywhere on his plans if he doesn't increase security on the border more than he has done so far. If he doesn't show seriousness about enforcement, he won't get bipartisan support in the Senate and his reform bill is going to die by filibuster. But, more than that, it's a good idea. Especially if you reform immigration along the path-to-citizenship lines, you need improved security so that the cycle doesn't repeat itself. This border security has to be primarily aimed at the smugglers, drug traffickers, and gun runners. These criminals are a problem for both countries, so part of the "enforcement" operation has to be focused on a cooperative effort with the Mexican government to shut these people down.




I don't know what enforcement-first means. If it means that we have to commit to enforcement if we want reform, then yes. If it means we have to have a perfectly secure border before we make other changes, then that is putting off reform indefinitely, and that won't do.



Second, a system of workplace enforcement where a person's fingerprint could be indexed to his social security number, so that this could be checked at the workplace, and then coming down on people who employ illegal immigrants could become effective.



Third, I do support a path to citizenship for those already here. In a way that's not fair, but I don't think it's possible or economically feasible to deport them all, and leaving people in their illegal status is a worse solution.



Fourth, I think a more rational legal immigration policy that makes legal immigration somewhat less limited is also important. Particularly where this is simply a matter of ineffiency in the process, that has to be addressed. That doesn't mean it should be unlimited, or that quotas are always wrong.



Fifth, we have to re-examine our trade policies, to make sure that we are not encouraging labor exploitation of foreign countries. In particular, we should not be permitting American companies to be running slave labor operations in Mexico or anywhere else. When we get serious about stopping worldwide slavery, we will also produce a demand-side deterrent for illegal immigration.

A debate between Christianity and Islam

HT: Bob Prokop

Another Question for Biblical Skeptics

What do you think we have hard evidence for with respect to the life of Jesus? The crucifixion? The teaching ministry? The existence of Jesus?

Why don't they just come here legally?

Why don't they just come here legally? Here's why. From the Arizona Republic. 

There also are limits based on a person's country of origin. Under U.S. immigration law, the total number of immigrant visas made available to natives of any single foreign nation shall not exceed 7 percent of the total number of visas issued. That limit can make it tough for immigrants from countries such as Mexico, where the number of people who want to come here greatly exceeds the number of people that the law allows.
The estimated wait time for family members to legally bring their relatives into the United States from Mexico ranges from six to 17 years, according to a May study by the non-profit, nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy. It is nearly impossible for a Mexican, especially someone without a college degree or special skills, to immigrate to the United States legally without a family member or employer petitioning on his behalf.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/06/28/20100628legal-immigration-high-demand.html#ixzz0sNmv0Xy4

Were the Gospels Novels? Were the Writers Guilty of Plagiarism?

Steven, you never seem to have answered Bob Prokop's comment, which he has made over and over, that the novel genre didn't exist in the first century.

Second, your use of the word plagiarism is highly anachronistic. At the present time, we are concerned about intellectual property rights, and so we have copyright laws and plagiarism regulations. But in that time, there was no such thing. If I have to grade someone's paper, then I need to know what in the paper is the writer's own idea, and what came from sources. But Luke, for example, isn't writing his gospel for a grade, and he's not trying to take royalties away from Mark. And although some people have made claims on his behalf as a historian, he's not trying to compete with Thucydides. He's trying to get the story out that he believes to be true.

In our century, we are accustomed to reading books in which the writer learns a lot of factual details so as to provide a realistic setting for the work, but the work itself is a work of fiction. So, if you were going to write a novel about someone who was going around, say, the Far East committing crimes, getting arrested, and escaping, then you might, to make the story realistic, go to the various places in the Far East, and visit the police headquarters and court buildings to find out what their police and court procedures might have been, to put in your story. You would find out how they do things in Bangkok, in Rangoon, in Hanoi, and in Ho Chi Minh City, in New Delhi, in Mumbai, in Singapore, and in Lhasa. Of course, if you were doing this today, you'd have the benefits of planes, trains, and automobiles, none of which existed for poor old Luke.

So, if the Gospel of Luke and Acts were both novels, how did he research his novel? In the words of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.

Determinism and the case of Jamie Bulger

HT: Sarah Kramer.

Is there a universal, common-sense, belief in free will?

What the argument doesn't mention, of course, is whether this belief in free will can be construed in compatibilist terms. I don't think it captures the underlying intuition, myself.

Just so you know, I am not claiming that this disproves Calvinism.

A question for biblical skeptics

Suppose, surviving from ancient times, we found four manuscripts about the life and teachings of Rabbi Hillel. These works were all written within, oh, say, 70 years of the main events of Hillel's life. They are similar in a number of ways, although each written from a somewhat different perspective, with some differences of detail. They are all written by people who were clearly from the School of Hillel, by people who wanted others to accept the teachings of Hillel. However, they claim no miracles at all. Manuscript evidence shows goes back into antiquity and assures us that what we have today is very close to the original autographs.

Would we say "Gosh, we really do know a lot about Hillel here. There are a lot of things we can be reasonably sure of about him, especially where the accounts coincide." Or would we say "Just propaganda. We need some independent sources, from people who weren't from the School of Hillel. Then we'd have some real information."

It's hard to imagine the Bart Ehrmans and Rudlof Bultmanns of the world being so skeptical if the Gospels were about a non-miracle-working Hillel, rather than a miracle-working Jesus.

Are illegal immigrants acting immorally?

People like Governor Brewer often say that we are a nation of laws, and that is why we must make a strong stand enforcing our immigration laws. Are people who insist on a strong stand against illegal immigration gratuitously assuming that persons who enter the country illegally are acting immorally?  If the only way to support your family was to enter another country illegally, wouldn't you have a moral obligation to break the law, since you have a moral obligation to support your family which trumps your obligation to obey the law?

I'm not drawing any strong conclusions from this, necessarily. Recognition of this is compatible with strong enforcement strategies such as SB 1070. But I don't even hear this point mentioned or acknowledged by defenders of strong enforcement. 

Reply to Hallquist on historical evidence

My claim is that there is more to explain for Christianity than for Mormonism or Islam. Unlike Craig or McDowell, I don’t say that the only rational conclusion is that Christianity is true. The “verdict” that the evidence demands depends on your antecedent probability. Still, I think you have some facts that are more likely to have occurred if Christianity is true than if Christianity is not true.




A critical point is that Luke, who also wrote his gospel and Acts, (both of which contain miracle claims throughout) has been shown to be exceedingly accurate about governmental systems before whom Paul appeared. This may seem trivial, but it makes it implausible that a long time passed between Paul’s journey’s and Luke’s writing. And his is not the first gospel written, Mark’s was. Maybe the miracles didn’t happen, but the journeys almost certainly did. So you have it written down within a third of a century of the crucifixion, if that.



You don’t have maybe one or two central miracles claimed, (the Qu’ran or the gold plates) you have a lot of them, and they are placed in public places. And there is no argument against them saying “We never heard of this guy.” In fact, the early Jewish anti-Christian polemic attempts to explain an empty tomb, not deny it. You have people engaging in very high-risk behavior on behalf of this upstart Jewish cult. You have them meeting on a day not the Sabbath, you have them saying the Jewish God was incarnate, and you have them getting martyred at least as far back as James the brother of Jesus (if not the stoning of Stephen–do skeptics think that that was fiction?). Something has happened to these people, and all I am claiming is that it takes a lot more explaining to figure that out than to explain the growth of the Mormon church.



I had someone on my site, Ken Pulliam, agree with me that the case for Christianity is better than the case for Islam or Mormonism historically, but that he found it more reasonable to suppose that Christianity was also not true.



So I guess I differ from Craig and McDowell in that I set the bar a whole lot lower for myself than they do. But I think I did clear it (or perhaps, can do so with a bit more explanation).

Mark Shea's defense of the Resurrection

HT: Bob Prokop.

A Catholic blogger defends the Resurrection.

Comparing the Book of Acts to the Book of Mormon

It's what I thought. There's no comparison.

What does "I have a right to my belief" mean?

What does the "right to believe something" amount to? Does it simply means that some powerful people, like the government for example, or the Spanish Inquisition if it were still around, have an obligation not to use force to make me believe something? I am not sure much of anybody is in the business of taking that kind of a right away, anyway, so to say that sort of thing almost seem trivial.




If it means more than that, then what does it mean? Does it implicitly involve a refusal to reason, and to consider the views of one's opponents seriously? If I think you are making a serious mistake, (and if belief or unbelief in God is a mistake, it's a serious mistake), don;t I have the right to try to convince you of the error of your ways, at least until you tell me to go away?



Is the attempt to provide reasons for rejecting a belief you currently have an example of trying to shove your beliefs down someone's throat? Perhaps what "I have a right to my belief" means is that we have an obligation to desist from debating a subject if we are asked to desist. Perhaps the "right to believe what I believe" is an article of conversational decorum.



What does not follow is that no belief is more justified than any other. It does not mean that there aren't well-supported and defensible beliefs and poorly supported and indefensible beliefs.

A Ray of Sunshine in a lousy season

The Diamondbacks' Edwin Jackson throws a no-hitter.

The Diamondbacks are the only Phoenix-area franchise to win it all, staging the famous Rally Against Rivera in 2001, concluding with Luis Gonzalez' bloop single against the New York Yankees.

Steve Lovell comments on the Outsider Test for Faith

SL: I followed some links on your recent thread to do some reading on this. I find myself very much in agreement with your approach. Loftus wants to restrict the test to only religious matters, but this seems completely arbitrary. Moral beliefs would surely fail this test too. Or would they (I have chapter 3 of the Abolition of Man in mind)? If they wouldn’t we have a first premise of the moral argument.



Like you I also think it’s very unclear what the test really is and that Loftus seems to have a pre-theoretic commitment to the outcome. Unfortunately for Loftus I think he’s on very dodgy ground historically and sociologically. I assume he thinks atheism survives such a test? But atheists make up a very narrow slice of the population both currently and historically. If Loftus had been born 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago ... or in another culture etc, etc. Being such a narrow subset of the global-historical population it seems much more likely that these atheistic beliefs are a product of cultural oddities. Theistic views have flourished in many cultures in many epochs, and therefore don’t seem especially tied to cultural mores.



Now what I do think is that our normal idea of knowledge is that it should be something which “tracks” the truth; It should be in some way sensitive to the facts. (I think these ways of putting it are Nozik’s.) The outsider test doesn’t provide a reason to think belief is not sensitive to the facts ... the basis of our beliefs would be different / non-existent were the central tenets of Christianity false, and then we wouldn’t hold the belief. This is the line I take when I defend the AfD from the genetic fallacy. If God didn’t exist, we wouldn’t desire him, and wouldn’t believe in him. That is true and relevant even if we don’t reason from the desire to God, but the desire is merely an occasion for the belief. At least, if we accept some appropriate form of reliabilism/proper-function account.



A rational system of belief must be able to account for the existence of its adherents in a way that positively relates the truth and the belief. Similarly it must be able to account for the existence of its detractors without requiring such a positive relation to the content of their beliefs. The OTF brings attention to the possibility that this positive relationship may not exist. Fine. We can doubt that, but when we investigate the relevant evidence, it looks good to us ... what else are we being asked to do?



Only my first thoughts. If I have any more, I’ll let you know.

More on comparing the evidence for Christianity to other religions

For starters, there seems to be a lot of archaeological confirmation of, especially, some of the details in the book of Acts. Whoever wrote it knew precisely what forms of government were in place when Paul was supposed to have gotten to those cities. So that really places the author of the text close to the time and place of the events, because actually, those forms of government changed from time to time.

The reported events took place in public and involved leading figures of the time like Pontius Pilate. The Book of Mormon is about things that happened centuries before in the Americas, and archaeology is an embarrassment to Mormonism, but mostly helpful to Christianity. http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/11/teresa-nielsen-haydens-critique-of.html

You have several people writing the accounts of the whole thing, as opposed to just one persons statements. You have evidence of people engaging in extremely risky behavior to support these beliefs.

The events are more public, there is considerable more archaeological support, and you also find people taking martyrdom risks almost from the beginning and making fundamental changes to a time-honored religion based on what happened to Jesus.

And you find a lot of failed attempts to explain it all away. I mean, what's up with all these swoon theories, and theft theories, and wrong tomb theories, etc. You don't find that in Islam.

So even if you reject Christianity, I think it puts up more difficulties for the skeptic than does the founding of Islam or the founding of Mormonism. These are just a few things off the top of my head, but I think they suffice for my purpose.

Some More Notes on the Outsider Test

It might surprise some people to know that I actually bring up the Outsider Test when I am teaching classes, especially when I run across people who are fideists. I also bring up the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the same context. If it is a way of helping us to reflect on our beliefs, to not believe them arbitrarily, to see if they really can stand up to a rational test or not, then the OTF is fine.

However, I think the wayLoftus uses the test is slanted against religious beliefs in an arbitrary way. First, I think there are limits on the extent to which we can expect intellectual neutrality or objectivity from people. I don't think we can just throw away our priors and be neutral, nor do I think we should.

For example, I really do think that Christianity has an evidence base that other religions don't have, such as Mormonism or Islam. There are things that make me skeptical of those religions which are not present in the case of Christianity. In other words, if Christianity was a delusion, I think the case against it is a lot trickier to make than the case against other revealed religions. (Eastern religions typically don't make the kinds of divine revelation claims that Christianity does). If I thought that Christianity was in the same shape as those other religions, it would cause some cognitive dissonance.

I also don't think that the step from noticing a sociological influence to doubting the belief in question is as easy as John makes it out to be. In a way, this kind of reminds me of adolescents who think they are being nonconformists and really independent thinkers when their ideas differ from those of their parents. Of course, what they don't notice is how much their beliefs and attitudes conform to the people they care about most, their peers. The academic community puts a huge amount of intellectual peer pressure on religious belief in general and Christianity in particular. You escape one set of sociological influences when you reject your religious beliefs, but you become subject to all sorts of other sociological influences.

C. S. Lewis once called materialism a "boy's philosophy," and in my book I said I cringed when he said it. But I think that nonbelief as a certain adolescent appeal to a lot of people.

Why the founding of Christianity is far more difficult to explain than Mormonism or Islam

I talked about this in an earlier thread. With Islam, you have to take Muhammad's word for it that he was touched by an angel. Same with Mormonism and Joseph Smith. With Christianity, you have a pre-crucifixion story where Jesus is supposed to have performed miracles in public. Did these miracles happen?  The disciples, at least, are convinced by them, and that's why we find them dropping their nets and following. You also have Jesus making remarkable claims about himself. Trilemma considerations come into play here. Even if there are possible alternatives to liar, lunatic, or Lord, are the plausible ones? Then, you have the death and resurrection events, again, a public execution, and a resurrection claimed to have been seen by lots of people. Hallucination? Theft? Swoon? Wrong tomb? Evil twin? What happened?  And then you have such things as the preaching of Peter and the missionary journeys of Paul. With the missionary journeys you have a story of a series of encounters with government officials in those localities, and at least the facts about local government have been verified by archaeology. So what was Paul doing that got him hauled up before government officials on a regular basis? Just preaching peace and love, brother? The Book of Acts says that there were miracles at this stage, too.  And then he appeals to Caesar, when failure to do so would have gotten him released?


If you can understand the psychology of Muhammad or Joseph Smith, and that seems easy to do, more so for Smith than for Muhammad, then you can see how those religions started. With the founding of Christianity you have a long public history involving lots of kinds of people. There are no far-fetched theories designed to avoid the conclusion that Smith and Muhammad were true prophets.

In Islam and in Mormonism, you have those religions forming a government around their leaders. Muhammad goes military, and the Mormons move out to Utah and set up territorial government run their way. Christianity expands with no help from the government until 313 and Constantine.
So I think the founding of Christianity is far more difficult to explain than Mormonism or Islam.

The Number One NBA Franchise

Here's an article by a sportswriter which, I expect, will be banned in Boston.

Getting the skeptical story straight

Of course one can deny the truth of Christianity without having a good theory as to how the movement started. One can appeal to the improbability of the resurrection story itself, and using broadly Humean reasons, maintain that even though you don't know what did happen, it couldn't have been a resurrection. Even if you were a theist, you could dodge the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected. That wasn't my point.




My point was that skeptics seem to lack a story about the founding of Christianity that makes sense. I said that if they had one, it would make Christianity seem less You had swoon theories, theft theories, hallucination theories, going to the wrong tomb, etc. In fact, skeptics in the 19th Century actually attacked one another's naturalistic theories of the origin of Christianity. Skeptics about the founding of Christianity still have pretty widespread disagreements as to how it all happened. One plausible story from the skeptical side has yet to emerge. That, to me, is an interesting fact that supports, but of course does not strictly prove that Christianity is true.



Anyone who believes a world-view has to live with some difficulties. This is a difficulty for every world-view except Christianity.

The Skeptical Viewpoint

What books would I recommend that reflect the perspective of religious skepticism?

1. Bertrand Russell's "Why I am Not a Christian," in Why I am Not a Christian and other essays. Actually the whole volume is helpful.
2. Russell's "The Value of Free Thought," in Understanding History.
3. J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism.
4. Antony Flew ed. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Contains the famous Falsification Challenge.
5. David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion."
6. David Hume, "Of Miracles," from "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
7. Keith M. Parsons, "God and the Burden of Proof"  (Prometheus, 1989).
8. Keith M. Parsons, "Why I am Not a Christian," published originally by the Atlanta Freethought Society but available here.
9. Keith M. Parsons, "Seven Common Misconceptions about Atheism,"
10. Louise Antony, ed. Philosophers without Gods, (Oxford University Press).

Does evolutionary biology give us a case against racism?

I don't know that Darwin's theory really provides a case against racism. Darwin himself wrote:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [2]

2]  Charles Darwin, "The Descent of Man", 2nd edition, New York, A L. Burt Co., 1874, p. 178

But, on the other hand, most people in Darwin's time thought blacks were inferior, including Lincoln. And the guy who wrote "All men are created equal, and were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights," owned slaves.

A modest proposal to start the gay marriage debate

Perhaps the first question to ask in the gay marriage debate is this: Why is the government in the marriage business at all? Why does it care? Couldn't we just privatize marriage, just like the Republicans wanted to do with Social Security? Then whatever religious or non-religious groups want to recognize or not recognize will be a matter to be determined by those groups, and the state backs out and minds its own business. Southern Baptists will require heterosexuality, the Metropolitan Community Church will marry the gay couples, and the government stays out of it.

Why are all the naturalistic explanations of the founding of Christianity such nonstarters?

I'm not going to make confident assertions about what would change my mind. There are too many factors. But I can tell you something that would, in my eyes, decrease the probability that Christianity is true.




One thing that would hurt the probability of Christianity for me would be if skeptics could come up with a halfway convincing story about how Christianity arose. Swoon theory? Come on. Jesus stripped on 100 pounds of grave clothes, pushed that gigantic stone out of the way, and put a flying tackle on the Roman guard, after being left for dead because of a crucifixion? Hallucination theory? Lots of problems. The disciples stole the body? Why? So they could get martyred for something they knew was false. Legendary development? Why does Luke know so much about all the city governments in the Mediterranean world? Jesus never even existed? How come nobody has come up with the theory that Socrates never existed? Jesus' evil twin took over after he was crucified? Getting desperate aren't we?



Of course, I know all about the Humean argument that anything's better than accepting a resurrection. Yes, rationally, one could be a skeptic about the supernatural origin of Christianity while admitting that there isn't much out there in the way of naturalistic explanations of the founding of Christianity. But why do all those theories have such ghastly problems?

Prohibition, moral obligation, and immigration reform

Would a "Prohibition argument" be relevant to the amount of immigration we should permit? Here's what I mean. Many people could argue the downside of alcholic beverages, as every woman who has been beaten by a drunken husband can attest, as every mother whose son was killed by a drunk driver can attest. Yet the illegality of alcoholic beverages did more harm than good, and most historians would say we rightly repealed Prohibition. We tried to prohibit something that couldn't rationally be prevented by legal prohibitions.




The restrictiveness of our quotas concerning immigration may be helping to cause a problem with illegal immigration. Prohibition empowered the Capone gang, the attractiveness of illegal immigration empowers the coyotes and drug cartels. Somehow, the situation in which we find ourselves makes breaking the immigration law desirable and attractive.



Jan Brewer likes to remind us all that we are a nation of laws. Of course we are. But the rule of law doesn't even guarantee that all violations of the law are morally impermissible. It could be argued that if someone comes across the border and does so intending to work for a living, pay taxes, and apart from the immigration law, to abide by the law, they may be doing what is at once illegal and morally obligatory. Unless you accept a moral theory that says it is always morally wrong to disobey the law, you have to consider this possibility. That is, we have a prima facie obligation to obey the law, but we also have an obligation to care for our families which may transcend the obligation to obey the law, and in the case of some illegal immigrants, they might have done what is illegal but morally obligatory. (Brewer thinks they're mostly here to run drugs and commit violent crimes, but what is the hard evidence for this claim? Why are they all in front of Home Depot looking for work, if they can get their money through crime?)



You know the old Emerson and Thoreau story? Thoreau went to jail for not paying taxes that would support what he took to be the unjust Mexican War. Emerson asked "Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau answered "Waldo, what are you doing out there?"

Reply to Loftus on faith and evidence

John Loftus wrote: What would proof look like to an outsider?



I have already said what would convince me Christianity is true.


Now YOU be reasonable. What would proof look like for you to reject your adopted faith due to the accidents of birth? I was reasonable in that link. Be reasonable with us.

I don't think accident of birth carries a whole lot of weight here. I'm a Bayesian subjectivist: we come into our thinking lives with a set of antecedent probabilities, and we adjust them as the evidence allows.


It is an accident of birth that I grew up in a Methodist family, but it is equally an accident of history (unless God was in on it), that I encountered good, strong, defenders of Christianity who took the relation of faith and intellect seriously, who took my questions with the utmost seriousness, and showed a kind of intellectual integrity that I thought was often lacking in the sort of glib unbelief I encountered in the academic community.

If my reading of Bertrand Russell had not convinced me of the value of free thought (though maybe not quite as he defined it), how would my thoughts be different today? If Russell had made more of an effort to understand the Christian beliefs he attacked, how would my beliefs be different today? If Craig Bustrin from my home church in Phoenix had not introduced me to the writings of C. S. Lewis, how would my beliefs be different today? If Bob Prokop (an occasional commentator here) and the late Joe Sheffer had not talked me through my period of disaffection as an undergraduate with Campus-Crusade style literalism while remaining a profoundly orthodox Christian, how would my beliefs be different today? If Keith Parsons had not moved in to the same house with me when I was in seminary and challenged me from a skeptical standpoint, how would by beliefs be different today? I don't know, and neither do you.

Your own experience with Christianity and with Christian thinkers was different from mine, but it is just as laden with historical accident as mine was.

I am trying to counter a simplistic picture in which believers all believe "on faith" (even if they have apologetic pretensions) and unbelievers, quite rationally, are waiting for PROOF which is not forthcoming. I would like to substitute a different picture for this one, one in which we enter with intellectual predispositions which we cannot fully avoid, but which we can and must modify in response to the evidence. It's called critical rationalism, and it is to be contrasted with fideism and strong rationalism.

In the original post I was responding to people who make heavy weather out of the fact that religious believers don't have PROOF for their position, by asking what proof would look like if we had it.

At the same time, changes in belief are cumulative, and big paradigm shifts need big evidential shifts in a various areas of thought. That is just how life is when we think. If you read the life of serious converts and de-converts, you don't find ONE BIG THING that PROVES Christianity, or atheism, or what have you. It's always a lot of things.

Chesterton wrote:

But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

The Jewish Scholar Pinchas Lapide accepts the Resurrection

A redated post.

Can one accept the Resurrection of Christ without accepting the Lordship of Christ? Apparently this is the position of Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide.

This is sort of a companion post to the Heather from Glendale post, where someone far less sophisticated accepts, or appears to accept the resurrection of Christ while declining to be a Christian.

Bobby Fischer to be exhumed

For the purpose of a paternity investigation. I suppose they won't be lending his brain out the lab to study what makes someone a chess genius.

Simon Tolkien on the death penalty

Simon Tolkien is J. R. R.'s grandson. He might have used a quote from his grandfather, which I have always thought relevant to the question of the death penalty:

"Many who live deserve death, and many who die deserve life, can you give it to them? Then be not to quick to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for you own safety, not even the wise see all ends." -J.R.R Tolkien

Arizona SB 1070: A Legal Nightmare

Two immigration attorneys agree that this law will overwhelm the court system with lawsuits.

This law is popular with conservatives. But I always thought conservatives hated judicial activism and "the trial lawyers." The trial lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.

Every law raises some issues which are going to be open to interpretation, and which have to be settled by the courts. This law was written in a deliberately ambiguous way, which in my view is irresponsible.

FAIR (the organization that wrote the law) also has attorneys who file lawsuits. Gee, do I detect a pattern?

Dennett Debates D'Souza

This debate seems pretty interesting.

Heather from Glendale, CA that is

A redated post.

A lot of debate on this site is between people of one world-view and those of another. People like Keith Parsons have a naturalistic world-view, people like myself have a Christian theistic world-view. We tend to think that this is the great debate of our culture. But is it? There seem to be a lot of people in our culture today who seem to make no effort to develop a consistent world-view, and grab from here, there, and everywhere to meet their needs until next Friday night. How many of you run into people like this, say, in undergraduate classrooms? This is from an essay entitled Babel Undone by Richard Mouw.

This syndrome was brought home to me in a poignant manner a while back when I was a guest on a radio talk show. It was during a time when two major newsmagazines had just run feature articles about "the historical Jesus," and the host was quite eager to discuss the topic. My fellow guest was a church leader of liberal bent, and he expressed strong skepticism about the reliability of the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus—an assessment with which I strongly disagreed. When we opened the discussion to questions from our listening audience, one of our callers was a young woman who was identified as Heather from Glendale. "I’m not what you would call, like, a Christian," Heather began. "Actually, right now I am sort of into—you know, witchcraft and stuff like that? But I agree with the guy from Fuller Seminary. I’m just shocked that someone would, like, say that Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead!"

Now this has to be Glendale CA, not its namesake in AZ, where no one (I hope) is that confused. This sort of thing, of course, often leaves us philosophers, atheist or Christian, tearing our hair out. Is there something that the Richard Dawkinses and William Lane Craigs of the world have in common (wow!) which is being lost be the culture at large?

The Celtics take the lead

The Lakers, in the last game, looked like a one-man team. If this continues, then no matter how well Kobe plays, there will be another championship banner hanging from the rafters in Boston.

Anybody know why is sell-tics and not kel-tics?

Four objections to same-sex marriage

Objection 1: Same-sex marriage violates biblical standards for marriage.

Reply: The problem with Bible verses is that our society is supposed to be a society for everyone regardless of religion, so while the Bible might give religious people a reason not to have same-sex marriages, it doesn't really offer a reason why the secular government might not have other reasons for sanctioning same sex unions for governmental purposes. You have to keep in mind that many heterosexual marriages fail to meet biblical standards, see especially Luke 16: 18. Is the government wrong to allow marriages which were initiated in an adulterous affair? Legally, if you have an affair with the Playboy centerfold, then file for divorce, you can marry the centerfold legally. Biblically, that's not marriage, it's adultery. So, if you want to impose biblical standards on the government, you can't logically stop with homosexuals, you have to de-legitimize all adulterous marriages.

Objection 2: Same-sex relationships are morally unacceptable.

Reply: The state is concerned about what relationships to recognize when, say, end-of-life decisions are made. Should these be made by a lifelong gay partner, or should other family members who were less close to the terminally ill person have the say in what end-of-life decisions this person should have made on his behalf? That the state sanctions a marriage does not imply that the state morally approves that marriage, for the reason cited above.

Objection 3: Same-sex relationships do not produce children.

Reply: Should couples who intend to be childless be allowed to marry? Should women long past menopause be allowed to marry? These marriages will produce no children.

Objection 4: Legalized same-sex marriage will lead to the legalization of every other kind of relationship, including man-boy love relationships.

Reply: Slippery slope arguments are considered a fallacy. Just because we could go further in legitimizing relationships doesn't mean that we should. In the case of relationships with children, the children are thought not to be consenting partners. So we have a principled reason for rejecting, say, a man-boy relationship while accepting same-sex relationships so long as they are consensual.

These are just some things that can be said against the typical arguments against state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. (Church-sanctioned same-sex marriage is another matter). Are there better arguments against SSM?

SB 1070 is chasing law-abiding citizens out of the state

"The immigration law creates a difficult situation for both legal and illegal residents," said Jay Butler, director of realty studies at Arizona State University. "Some illegal residents may have planned on leaving the Valley anyway because they can't find jobs. But I have talked to young Hispanics who are residents and so are their parents and grandparents. And those Hispanics plan on moving to other states because they don't want to be perceived as second-class citizens."

I'm going to keep appealing to the documentary 9500 Liberty until somebody watches it and tells me what is wrong with it. In that documentary, it was indicated that Prince William County suffered a lot of collateral damage, especially where the foreclosure rate was concerned, which increased at a rate far in excess of the other counties in Virginia. Foreclosures were already a problem in Arizona, and I am convinced it will get worse thanks to the new law.

Goetz on naturalism and libertarian agency

What would proof look like if we had it

Could one ask an atheist, "What would proof look like if you had it?" Anything that you used as proof could be doubted, couldn't it, if you were really bound and determined not to believe. Water into wine? A good magic trick. Walking on water? He knows where the stones are. Loaves and fishes? The catering truck is parked where you can't see it. Resurrection from the dead? A hallucination, or maybe we only thought he was dead. Maybe the stars in the sky should spell out "TURN OR BURN!! ATHEISTS REPENT BEFORE I COME BACK AND IT'S TOO LATE."

Thanks once again, Keith Parsons, for that one.

Some confusions about truth and religion

A redated post.

I think I am seeing people fall into some common confusions about objectivity, subjectivity, absolute truth, provability, and faith.

First, something can be absolutely true without it being provably true. Let's take the Jack the Ripper murders in England during the last century. There is an absolute truth about who committed those murders. There was an individual or group of individuals who killed those girls. However, we can't figure out who the perpetrator was. There are still books being written about it today to try to solve the murders. It's unprovable by us, and we probably never will know, yet there is someone who committed those murders.

With respect to the question of God, there have been attempts to prove that God exists and attempts to prove that God does not exist. I have studies these arguments, and I happen to think that neither side has such a stong case that every reasonable person ought to be convinced. However, there are reasons to believe and reasons to disbelieve, and I think that the claim that God does exist has stronger support than the claim that God does not exist. However, if we define God as an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, then either God exists or God does not exist, and if God does exist, then the people that believe that God exists are correct, and the people that do not believe that God exists are mistaken. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then the people who believe that God does not exist are correct, and the people who believe that God does not exist are mistaken. The idea that if you truly believe in God, then God exists for you, but if you don't believe in God, God does not exist for you, is nonsense. God is not Tinkerbell, the fairy in Peter Pan who continues to exist so long as people believe in fairies.

With respect to religion, there are plenty of claims made by these religions which have to be either true or false, and about which it is possible to be correct or mistaken. (I like saying correct or mistaken better than saying right or wrong, simply because I don't want to make any moral judgments concerning the people, but I only want to talk about whether they believe, or fail to believe, the truth).
Judaism claims that there "The Lord your God, the Lord is one." So if atheism or polytheism is true, then Judaism is in error.

Christianity claims that Jesus was resurrected by God from the dead. He was either resurrected or he was not resurrected. Paul says if he wasn't resurrected, the Christians, of all people are most to be pitied.

Islam claims that Muhammad is the final prophet of Allah and that the revelation he presented is the final, perfect revelation of Allah. They've either got that right or they don't.

Hinduism says that we are all on a cycle of birth and rebirth, and that I am the reincarnation of a person who lived and died before I was born. I either was, or I wasn't.

Buddhism says my sufferings are caused by cravings, and if I stop craving, I will stop suffering. That is either true or false.

Atheists say that God does not exist. They either have that right, or they have it wrong.

Etc., Etc. Etc.

To believe that one's beliefs in the area of religion are true and those that contradict it are false is not to be dogmatic are intolerant. It is simply to understand what it is to have a belief. A belief is something you think to be true. And to believe that something is true is to believe that the contradictory is false. If I say "I believe in Christianity, but I don't believe that its claims are absolutely true" is not to be tolerant, it is to contradict oneself.

Faith is not belief in the absence of evidence, although perhaps it requires the absence of overwhelming evidence.

C. S. Lewis: I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in.

From C. S. Lewis's The weight of Glory

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

Who is a real Christian? A Scriptural answer

Biblically, the term is used by hostile outsiders. So in the Bible, you qualify as a Christian if you get people who hate Christianity to call you one, as this Wikipedia entry indicates.

Did the Bush Administration Perform Unethical Experiments on Terror Detainees?

According to Physicians for Human Rights, yes.

Does the name Joseph Mengele ring a bell, so to speak?

What Price Enforcement? Another reply to Vallicella on SB 1070

   Let's try to generate a racial profiling scenario to see what is wrong with it. Profiling can take on different levels. Local law enforcement is expected to be a main player in the fight against illegal immigration. What that results in, is that anyone who looks like a lower-class Hispanic is targeted for what I call "fishing expeditions." Being Hispanic, perhaps along with evidence that the Hispanic is lower-class, is considered sufficient for "reasonable suspicion." People who look like lower-class Hispanics are pulled over on "tickytack" violations, other groups are not. When there is a loud music call about white people playing the Stones too loud, the police ask them to turn the music down. If the music is in Spanish, and the people look like lower-class Hispanics, papers are asked for. Whites get that 10 mph cushion with the speed limit, Hispanics are pulled over if they are so much as 1 mph over the limit. Everyone knows the police don't pursue every possible offense; they pick their battles. But in the hope that they will be able to get an illegal immigrant deported, they pick their battles with Hispanics differently from the way they pick their battles with the rest of us. "Legitimate stops" are generated on other ostensible grounds, but their real purpose is to ask a Hispanic about his immigration status.
      What this means is that, not just the immigration laws, but many other laws are enforced differently depending on the whether or not a person looks Hispanic. Or, perhaps only those police officers who harbor anti-Hispanic prejudices will enforce the law in this way, but citizens will have no protection against that kind of special treatment. That's the sort of thing I'm concerned about. I'm not willing to pay THAT price to enforce the immigration law. We are entitled equal protection under the law, and there should not be different rules for different racial groups or social classes. Can you agree that the above scenario would be a bad one? The fourteenth amendment guarantees equal protection under the law.
           Please note that I am concerned about how our citizens are treated. One group of citizens will be treated differently because of the color of their skin.
           Now, remember that Brewer says that the bill will be enforced without profiling, so I take it she thinks that there is such a thing as profiling, and that 1070 won't involve that. We are still waiting to see the specifics on how the law will be enforced. The question I have is whether the law won't result in a whole lot of undue litigation, whether it will be interpreted in such a way as to avoid the above scenario, and if it doesn't involve profiling, will it be an effective law at all, or just a symbolic gesture.
       Yes, some of the worst fears about the law are generated by its opponents, and that has resulted in the departure of some people. Whether those people are only illegals, or whether Hispanic citizens have left because they fear unequal treatment by law enforcement, is not completely clear. However, that doesn't make the law effective. Assuming that the law is implemented in a way consistent with the Constitution, will it continue to be effective?
          I have no problem with the immigration law being enforced at the border, where it should be enforced, and at the workplace, where some sort of workable ID will be more effective. I just hate the idea of a whole class of people, most of whom are law-abiding citizens, being treated differently by law enforcement because of the color of their skin.

A definition of religion

A redated post.

“Religion is constituted by a set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both personal and corporate, organized around the concept of an Ultimate Reality which inspires worship or total devotion.”

From Peterson, Basinger, Reichenbach, and Hasker, Reason and Religious Belief 4th ed. Oxford University Press, (2008).

Based on this definition, is secular humanism a religion?

Why people don't like talking religion and politics at the dinner table

The reason why these topics get so sensitive is that we transfer our discussion of the issues, which can be difficult, to a discussion of the people who hold the positions in question, which is easier. It is easier to talk about Democrats than it is to talk about Democratic policies, it is easier to talk about believers (or unbelievers) rather than beliefs. But when people take this "easier" path, we find that the conversation takes on a personal tone that is missing when we just talk about the issues. It is easier to say "Atheists just don't want to believe in God" or "religion is a crutch" instead of seriously considering the reasons why one should, or should not believe in God. But to say that religion is a crutch, or to say that atheists just don't want to acknowledge God, is to go beyond saying that the other side's belief is false to actually insulting the person on the opposing side.




If we could all learn to avoid what in logic is called the ad hominem fallacy, we could discussion politics and religion at the dinner table without raising the hair on the back of anyone's neck.

Give me your tired, your poor

And if they're very, very lucky, they can come to America. This is from Forbes Magazine.

Some argue that they are only opposed to illegal immigration and that those who wish to move to the U.S. should go through the legal channels. I'm afraid this is a dodge: American immigration law is cumbersome and wasteful; further, most of the people who wish to move here stand no chance of being allowed to (Reason offers these handy directions to legality). Perhaps you're proud that your ancestors "came here legally." I'm pretty sure they would be denied entry today.

Without just advocating open borders, it seems to me that we can ask whether they should be more open than they in fact are, and whether our immigration policy is rational.