Showing posts with label Historical Apologetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Historical Apologetics. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
The Biggest Bubble?
David Marshall made an interesting comment in the latest Apologetics 315 interview:
"I'm not a real big fan of inerrancy, because it's kind of like blowing up a big balloon and then asking the opponent to pop the Bubble, pop the balloon with a pin. Even if the Bible is without error, I wouldn't be a fan of the doctrine because I think it's bad strategy. The materialist, skeptics and atheists, they've blown up the biggest balloon of all and that balloon is materialism. They're saying that not one single miracle has ever happened in the history of the universe. Well I'm sorry but they do happen. And that's another contribution of missions. Working as a missionary in Asia, I found that God did sometimes answer prayer, sometimes the answers changed lives in amazing ways. Now of course there's all kinds of difficulties about proving that, and we can't use the scientific method to test a historical claim, but it's much more fun to make a positive argument for something than to defend against somebody else's attack".
There's two interesting comments here that are worth expanding on so I've highlighted them. One is the nature of historical events. By definition, Historical events happen once. And by definition, Science looks for repeatable patterns. So by mere definition, we can't expect historical events to meet the standards of scientific evidence. Does this mean that we can never have reliable evidence for Historical events? No, clearly not. Not unless you believe documents, writings, archaological findings, eye witness reports and all manner of historical data are all conceptually incapable of providing evidence for something.
The more interesting comment is the first bolded part where Marshall refers to Materialism as "The Biggest Bubble". Marshall is referring to what I call The Problem of Total Denial. To me, this is the single biggest problem for materialism and for naturalism. The problem is this: If they're consistent, Materialists and Naturalists must deny the many reported events and occurences in the world which do not fit into their paradigm. They must take many reports and then either deny that the event happened as it was described, or find a naturalistic explanation for it. I will write about this more in the future as I really want to develop my thinking on the issue. In the books I've read on Philosophy, Apologetics, the Historicity of Jesus etc, this is an issue that doesn't receive nearly enough coverage. It is truly underrated. I'm glad Marshall reminded me of it!
Monday, April 16, 2012
Reason for Faith Festival Q n A Interaction: Resurrection
Tonight I attended a screening of the film Test of Faith, followed by a panel discussion. The event was part of the Reason for Faith festival, a response to the Global Atheist Convention backed by various Christian groups.
After the panel discussion, the audience had an opportunity to ask a question of the panellists. I asked a question which ended up being the most discussed question of the night! My question was responded to, and then I was asked to clarify, then it was discussed again, and finally Jack Scanlan responded to my question again in his closing remarks.
I listen to debates and panel discussions like this regularly, and it is easy to critique the views being expressed from the comfort of my computer, but it is more difficult with a microphone in a room full of people! I keenly await the recording to find out how articulate I was and whether it came out nearly as well as I wanted it to.
My question was asking for Scanlan's thoughts on looking at evidence through a broader lens, and specifically his thoughts on looking at the Resurrection argument accurately, as a Christian might understand it. That was what I was trying to get across. Scanlan is a molecular biology student, and was talking about the Resurrection. He cast the debate as a question of the reliability of historical documents vs the findings of science. His view, if I accurately heard it, was that biology has proven that people do not rise from the dead, and so you would need an unreasonable faith in historical documents to overcome this. On face value this view might appear compelling, but it misses the essence of the Christian claim. What biology tells us is that people don't rise from the dead via natural causes. But here's the issue: Christians aren't making the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead via natural causes. Christians claim that Jesus was raised from the dead by God. So I asked for his thoughts on this.
At first Scanlan fumbled through a response and concluded by saying that he would hope all evidence could be examined neutrally, without having our response impacted by prior beliefs. But this is clearly problematic, primarily because the world just doesn't work like that! Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. If you hear that someone you know has been arrested for a theft, you would be completely surprised....if said person was a well adjusted member of society. If, on the other hand, this person had a violent upbringing, an abusive father, and had a prior record of theft, then you wouldn't be very surprised at hearing about another crime, would you? So the point is this. Background evidence counts. As I wrote about previously, if God exists then miracles are possible. But if, like Graham Oppy, you believe that natural causes are all that exist, then miracles like a resurrection are inconceivably unlikely to you. So it's not as simple as looking at historical evidence on it's own. If you're determining the probability of what happened, you need to look at the big picture and cast your net a little wider. Or at the very least, you need to acknowledge the existence of your own presuppositions and their bearing on your response to the evidence. Scanlan had shown no respect or awareness of this vital issue, hence my question to him.
After clarifying my question (how effectively I'm not sure!) Dr Bruce Yabsley commented about the uniformity of nature. Modern science, going back to Newton, shows that nature is uniform, he said. This puts the sting in the tail of the argument that Resurrections simply do not happen. And this is a fair point. But unfortunatly Dr Yabsley didn't follow up those comments by acknowledging that the resurrection cannot be expected to conform to those regular patterns. If a resurrection did happen, then it happened once and at the command of a God who controls the universe and all the physical laws within it. It is not an event that we should expect would be repeated. The test tubes and telescopes may tell us that in every case ever recorded, Science shows that X, Y or Z happens this way or that way. That's all good and well. But if there is a lawgiver behind those laws then there is no reason why things cannot happen differently on one occasion. So again, the prior philosophical question of whether there is a God will have a direct bearing on how we interpret the historical evidence and the interaction of science with that historical evidence.
In his closing comment, Scanlan said that if there was good evidence for the Resurrection, he'd more easily believe that aliens did it than God. In one sense this response merely supported my argument about the need to understand your own presuppositions! Aliens, if they exist, are presumably natural entities rather than immaterial, supernatural beings, and, if you believe that life on other planets is probable (as Scanlan may or may not), then you might be inclined to believe this. For me, this idea is discounted by the fact that Jesus didn't ever mention "aliens". There is a historical context in which Jesus lived and into which he spoke, such that if there was good evidence, you would need to interpret the good evidence within that context. In short, there is historical evidence that Jesus was a Jew who claimed divinity as the Messiah appointed by God. Thus, if there was good evidence for a resurrection, you'd consider that God might have done it, rather than posulate an entity who has no prior connection with the context or the historical evidence whatsoever.
After the panel discussion, the audience had an opportunity to ask a question of the panellists. I asked a question which ended up being the most discussed question of the night! My question was responded to, and then I was asked to clarify, then it was discussed again, and finally Jack Scanlan responded to my question again in his closing remarks.
I listen to debates and panel discussions like this regularly, and it is easy to critique the views being expressed from the comfort of my computer, but it is more difficult with a microphone in a room full of people! I keenly await the recording to find out how articulate I was and whether it came out nearly as well as I wanted it to.
My question was asking for Scanlan's thoughts on looking at evidence through a broader lens, and specifically his thoughts on looking at the Resurrection argument accurately, as a Christian might understand it. That was what I was trying to get across. Scanlan is a molecular biology student, and was talking about the Resurrection. He cast the debate as a question of the reliability of historical documents vs the findings of science. His view, if I accurately heard it, was that biology has proven that people do not rise from the dead, and so you would need an unreasonable faith in historical documents to overcome this. On face value this view might appear compelling, but it misses the essence of the Christian claim. What biology tells us is that people don't rise from the dead via natural causes. But here's the issue: Christians aren't making the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead via natural causes. Christians claim that Jesus was raised from the dead by God. So I asked for his thoughts on this.
At first Scanlan fumbled through a response and concluded by saying that he would hope all evidence could be examined neutrally, without having our response impacted by prior beliefs. But this is clearly problematic, primarily because the world just doesn't work like that! Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. If you hear that someone you know has been arrested for a theft, you would be completely surprised....if said person was a well adjusted member of society. If, on the other hand, this person had a violent upbringing, an abusive father, and had a prior record of theft, then you wouldn't be very surprised at hearing about another crime, would you? So the point is this. Background evidence counts. As I wrote about previously, if God exists then miracles are possible. But if, like Graham Oppy, you believe that natural causes are all that exist, then miracles like a resurrection are inconceivably unlikely to you. So it's not as simple as looking at historical evidence on it's own. If you're determining the probability of what happened, you need to look at the big picture and cast your net a little wider. Or at the very least, you need to acknowledge the existence of your own presuppositions and their bearing on your response to the evidence. Scanlan had shown no respect or awareness of this vital issue, hence my question to him.
After clarifying my question (how effectively I'm not sure!) Dr Bruce Yabsley commented about the uniformity of nature. Modern science, going back to Newton, shows that nature is uniform, he said. This puts the sting in the tail of the argument that Resurrections simply do not happen. And this is a fair point. But unfortunatly Dr Yabsley didn't follow up those comments by acknowledging that the resurrection cannot be expected to conform to those regular patterns. If a resurrection did happen, then it happened once and at the command of a God who controls the universe and all the physical laws within it. It is not an event that we should expect would be repeated. The test tubes and telescopes may tell us that in every case ever recorded, Science shows that X, Y or Z happens this way or that way. That's all good and well. But if there is a lawgiver behind those laws then there is no reason why things cannot happen differently on one occasion. So again, the prior philosophical question of whether there is a God will have a direct bearing on how we interpret the historical evidence and the interaction of science with that historical evidence.
In his closing comment, Scanlan said that if there was good evidence for the Resurrection, he'd more easily believe that aliens did it than God. In one sense this response merely supported my argument about the need to understand your own presuppositions! Aliens, if they exist, are presumably natural entities rather than immaterial, supernatural beings, and, if you believe that life on other planets is probable (as Scanlan may or may not), then you might be inclined to believe this. For me, this idea is discounted by the fact that Jesus didn't ever mention "aliens". There is a historical context in which Jesus lived and into which he spoke, such that if there was good evidence, you would need to interpret the good evidence within that context. In short, there is historical evidence that Jesus was a Jew who claimed divinity as the Messiah appointed by God. Thus, if there was good evidence for a resurrection, you'd consider that God might have done it, rather than posulate an entity who has no prior connection with the context or the historical evidence whatsoever.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Bolt and Dickson on Biblical contradictions and Historical Errors
Conservative political journalist Andrew Bolt ventures onto writing about the Bible and John Dickson responds.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Lewis's Trilemma
C.S Lewis's Trilemma is probably the most famous argument in Christian apologetics.
The argument is thus:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."[5]
The logic appears sound. It is hard to imagine someone going around claiming to be the Son of God, whilst just being a regular human male, unless they were either 1. totally deluded and suffering from seriously bad mental illness or 2. A complete liar.
But as with most arguments, the value of the argument depends on who it is addressed to and the underlying assumptions that are brought to the table.
The "trilemma" on it's own can only be addressed to people who already accept all of Jesus's teachings as being historical words that the historical Jesus actually spoke. In other words, the argument doesn't address the possibility that Jesus did exist but that he didnt say everything that was attributed to him OR that he didn't exist at all. Before you can use it, you need to either 1. assume or prove that Jesus made his various claims of divinity , or 2. you need to know that your audience already accepts this. Having said that, there are good historical reasons to suggest that Jesus did make claims to divinity- therefore once you've done that groundwork, then the argument may be put to use and could be effective to some degree, to a wider range of people than those who Lewis was originally addressing.
The argument is thus:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."[5]
The logic appears sound. It is hard to imagine someone going around claiming to be the Son of God, whilst just being a regular human male, unless they were either 1. totally deluded and suffering from seriously bad mental illness or 2. A complete liar.
But as with most arguments, the value of the argument depends on who it is addressed to and the underlying assumptions that are brought to the table.
The "trilemma" on it's own can only be addressed to people who already accept all of Jesus's teachings as being historical words that the historical Jesus actually spoke. In other words, the argument doesn't address the possibility that Jesus did exist but that he didnt say everything that was attributed to him OR that he didn't exist at all. Before you can use it, you need to either 1. assume or prove that Jesus made his various claims of divinity , or 2. you need to know that your audience already accepts this. Having said that, there are good historical reasons to suggest that Jesus did make claims to divinity- therefore once you've done that groundwork, then the argument may be put to use and could be effective to some degree, to a wider range of people than those who Lewis was originally addressing.
Lewis claims that people "often" say that Jesus was just a teacher, but his argument still isn't wholly effective even to that target audience. Many people in that category would have the objection that they simply can't accept any supernatural stuff- and that is why they stick to the moral teachings. I think that kind of objection requires philosophical arguments against naturalism per se, in addition to a historical argument such as the Trilemma. For someone who has a strong naturalist outlook that they bring to bear on the Jesus question, and who believes they have good independent reasons for believing naturalism, it is difficult to imagine them being convinced of Jesus's divinity merely by the Trilemma, even if they already accept the historicity of Jesus's claims to divinity. However in this instance, the Trilemma could form a part of an overall argument or set of arguments.
With the above qualifications in place, we can see that the Trilemma can have some value in showing that Christianity is reasonable.
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