Landon Hedrick Blogs

Richard Carrier's Grand Claims

2011-08-16T12:57:00.001-05:00

I want to take some time here to draw attention to the comments that Richard Carrier has blogged about his own chapters in the recent anthology The End of Christianity. The book, as a whole, is a mixed bag. (I think the same is true of the previous anthology The Christian Delusion.) In my estimation, it's worth reading. But some chapters are more worth reading than others.

However, Richard Carrier thinks much more highly of the book. That's an understatement. He doesn't just think the book rocks, he seems to think that the book is absolutely phenomenal. In his review of the book, he boldly claims:

Delusion was an awesome book. End is even better. Indeed, I think the two volumes together amount to a decisive refutation of Christianity. A bona fide litmus test. No rational person can read both volumes and not walk away a skeptic.

Really? Anyone who reads the books and remains a Christian is irrational? My natural inclination upon hearing this is to point out that if a Christian apologist said the same thing about some Christian anthology, we wouldn't hesitate to roll our eyes. And rightfully so. One can just imagine some such apologist saying:

If you read this book and still don't believe Jesus is the Risen Lord, you need to get your head checked! There's no way for somebody who is sane and rational to read these arguments and not be convinced.

It would be bad enough to say this about any book. Worse still to say it about your own book, or a book where you're one of the main contributors. In fact, I wouldn't just think that the claim was absurd. I'd probably get a strong suspicion that the apologist isn't even worth taking seriously. (Yes, I think some apologists are worth taking seriously.) Of course, Carrier may truly believe that the case against Christianity contained in these books is so air-tight that one would indeed have to be irrational to remain a Christian after reading them. And I suppose he might even be right about that, though I doubt it. But I can't shake the feeling that this is just a paradigm case of overstating the value of one's own work.

But there's more. Regarding his own chapters, Carrier has a tendency to say that he has written "a tour de force" on the topic. In fact, he has explicitly said this about four of the five chapters he's written for the two anthologies--as for the other chapter, he just says that it "demonstrate[s], conclusively, that Christianity is very probably false" and that "rejecting its conclusion requires bold-faced irrationality." So he might as well have explicitly called that one a tour de force as well.

Here's the thing. His chapters are all good, in my opinion. Every one of them is worth reading. But who goes around claiming that their own work is a tour de force? I've occasionally seen people say this about another person's work, but I'm not sure I've ever seen somebody say this about his or her own work. And yet here's Richard Carrier saying this about several of his own papers.

Have a look at what he says about his metaethics paper in particular:

The last of these is "Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them)," a formal, peer-reviewed philosophical defense of my moral theory in Sense and Goodness Without God. This shall be for a long time the go-to chapter for arguing and defending my theory of moral facts. It includes deductive syllogisms establishing every key point, and extensive argument and references. There is no room left for any rational objection. To those keen on that issue, I believe this chapter alone justifies the price of the book. As per my usual style, I aimed to make it a tour de force on the subject.

A tour de force in metaethics by Richard Carrier? (No offense intended!) A paper so well-argued that "there is no room left for any rational objection"? I imagine that few people in the field of philosophy would be able to pull off a feat so great. Fewer still would proclaim that those who object to the arguments must be irrational. Carrier must think pretty highly of himself.

My guess is that I could find other instances where Carrier has made grand claims like this. So I'll update this post with other such instances I find, or others that readers alert me to in the comments section.

Let me make it clear that my goal isn't really to castigate Carrier, or to convince other people not to read his work. In fact, I think people should read his chapters--all five of them, in the two anthologies. I'd love to see what philosophers who specialize in metaethics think of his chapter on the topic. So I encourage you to read it, and then to share your thoughts. My goal, therefore, isn't to silence Carrier's contribution to the conversation. Rather, it's to point out the obvious absurdity in speaking so highly of one's own work.

Sense and Goodness Without God

2011-08-04T17:27:00.019-05:00

Atheist historian Richard Carrier wrote the book Sense and Goodness Without God several years ago (published in 2005). The book's subtitle is "A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism," and it has been called a "worldview-in-a-box" kind of book. By all appearances, however, it hasn't gotten much attention from philosophers. Since it is largely a book about philosophy (though it also touches on science, history, and other subjects), and since there haven't been many philosophers who have read it and endorsed its contents, I'll be posting some comments on this blog.

In fact, some of the graduate students here in the philosophy department have decided to read the book and discuss it in a reading group. And some of them may be contributing some written comments for me to post here as well. Keep in mind that these are not meant to be comprehensive "reviews" of the various sections of the book. I personally don't have the time for anything like that, so my own comments will probably read more like the kinds of things I would say to Richard Carrier if he were in the room with me and we were going over the contents of his book.

In my next blog post about this, I'll talk a little bit about the philosophy of language section of the book. But right now, I just want to make some general comments about the book. It is, on the whole, necessarily superficial. (No, I don't mean that the book is superficial in every possible world... or do I?) Carrier is trying to say something about so many diverse topics that he's essentially spreading himself way too thin. That's not to say that a book like this can't still be good. There is, of course, a niche for books which offer a basic sketch of a bunch of different topics. And one which connects them all together into a single coherent worldview should definitely have its place at the table. But we need to recognize that kind of book for what it is. It's not the kind of book where any real headway is made in the particular debates it skims over. It's the kind of book which summarizes some stuff (and sometimes vastly oversimplifies it) for the reader. I can't imagine that Carrier's target audience for, say, the philosophy of language section consists of philosophers of language. But that section might help introduce the reader to some interesting and important philosophical issues. (And I hope such a reader would then go on to read the good work that philosophers have done on the topic--much of which is utterly neglected in Carrier's book.)

So there is a place for this kind of book, in my opinion. Let me make that clear. But it's not the kind of book that really engages much in the ongoing philosophical debate--at least not at the level that philosophers are expected to engage in that debate. There may be a couple of exceptions to this general observation. For example, it might be that Carrier's metaethical theory engages with the scholarly debate sufficiently (and on a sufficiently sophisticated level) to be targeted toward philosophers working in that area. (Note: Carrier also has a paper about this recently published in The End of Christianity.) I'll say more later about the strategy of participating in that debate by publishing your work in a self-published general worldview book and in an atheist anthology.

That said, since the book is not up to rigorous philosophical standards (and by all appearances it just wasn't intended to be), it's not the kind of book somebody should be referring back to as having settled the free will debate, for example. And it probably wouldn't be appropriate to cite Carrier's three-page rebuttal of Plantinga's epistemology as something Plantinga should take seriously and respond to in print. (If Carrier wants to take on Plantinga on epistemology, he should probably do so by submitting quality work to an academic philosophy journal.) Again, that's not to say that there aren't any good ideas in the book, or that it's just worthless. But some of it is just... superficial. That's the only way I can describe it. And I don't necessarily mean "superficial" in a bad way, either. Sometimes a summary is intended to be pretty superficial, since it is, after all, just a summary. But good philosophy rarely gets done by staying at that level of discourse. You have to dig a lot deeper than that.

One of the results of this is that Carrier sometimes ends up saying things that are probably false, and that he would probably agree are false if he were to delve into the already available literature on the topic. Well, that's my prediction, for what it's worth. I guess we'll see if my estimation changes once our reading group makes it through more of the book. I'll try to give some examples of this in my next blog post about the philosophy of language section.

Lastly, I should point out that a book like this, written by somebody who was at the time a graduate student in history, should be pretty modest. By that I mean that the author should probably acknowledge that the debates are deep and difficult (when they are), and that he or she cannot hope to settle any of those issues in this book, but rather merely sketch out which views he or she personally takes. I say this because, although there are some relevant reservations expressed by the author in the book, the overall feel of it might be overly-confident for some readers. I'll try to give some examples of where this worry might crop up as I work through the book.

Mythicists Need Peer Review

2011-08-03T10:41:00.003-05:00

I'm afraid I have to agree with those opponents of mythicism who tell proponents of the hypothesis that they need to publish their views in peer reviewed journals. Usually this is meant as a criticism: mythicists have either tried getting their views published by respectable journals or they haven't. If they have tried, but have failed, then that just shows that their arguments didn't pass peer review. In that case, it's not clear why anyone should take their self-published books seriously. If they haven't tried, then they're trying to bypass that (scholarly) route just like creationists are accused of doing by scientists.

That's how the criticism often goes, and I guess it's fair point. But as someone who has no personal animosity toward these people (e.g. Earl Doherty and Robert Price), and who doesn't find the ideas so implausible, I'd rather encourage them to work on getting some good scholarly publications under their belts. I don't care to accuse them of being like creationists, or to mock them for not having their arguments accepted in scholarly journals. Either way, though, they should work on pursuing these ideas through the proper academic channels.

Now, I don't think that they should start writing papers in defense of mythicism (presenting, for example, a summary of the overall case) for journal submissions. Doing that is bound to fail for the simple fact that you can't make much headway on that topic in a journal article. Consider the fact that Earl Doherty made his comprehensive case in an 800+ page book. A journal article on that broad topic would likely end up being pretty superficial and unconvincing. And besides that, Earl Doherty seems to think that the scholars in charge of peer review wouldn't accept a paper on this topic anyway. So that's not the route I'd recommend.

So my advice would instead be to write scholarly papers on narrow topics which will, if accepted, help support your overall case. All mythicists likely take particular stands on issues which are controversial, so convincing the rest of the scholars that you're right about those things will go a long way toward helping them to see that you're right about the big picture as well. Once they see the individual pieces of your case come together in a series of well-written scholarly papers, they'll be more likely to take mythicism more seriously. And that means they'll be more likely to read your books and interact with your arguments.

Mythicists have every reason to try publishing peer reviewed materials like this. The excuse that "the Establishment won't let anyone challenge the status quo in peer review" is just not convincing. If anything, using that excuse will help blur the line between mythicists and conspiracy theorists. (Unfortunately, this line was already blurred in Zeitgeist when one version of mythicism was presented immediately before the documentary delved into all sorts of wild conspiracies. But let's not throw all mythicists under the bus for that.) It's time to drop the excuses and get down to doing the hard scholarly work. If you're not interested in that, and you'd rather rest content with your self-published books, that's fine too. But then you're playing a different game, and you should recognize that fact.

Let me briefly note that mythicists are not, of course, just a bunch of self-publishing hacks. Well, that's my opinion at least. Robert Price has published some of his work with Prometheus, which is a pretty good publisher. And Richard Carrier, who does have some self-published books, is currently working on quite a bit of scholarly material that will go through peer review. (And, in any case, I have no room to call these guys hacks, as their expertise is generally even admitted by their opponents, who nonetheless think they are wrong.)

Other mythicists should follow suit. That, or they should at least help the project along by listing all of the controversial claims that, if true, would tend to support their theories. And they should also list the controversial claims that, if true, would tend to undermine their theories. This will differ from one mythicist to the next, but listing these things out will have two primary benefits that I can see. First, those who want to engage in the scholarly debate will know what all of the particular disputes are, which will help them (eventually) get to the bottom of things. And second, it will make it easier to see whether your conclusion really does follow from your premises with any significant probability. And while I'm on the topic, those who believe in an historical Jesus should probably do the same thing. List out the things that would support your theory, and the things which would undermine your theory. To everyone in the debate: If your argument depends crucially on the genre of the Gospels, or certain interpretations of a few verses in the authentic Pauline epistles, or the early/late dating of the New Testament materials, or the testimony of Josephus, or anything else like that, then say so.

For what it's worth, Richard Carrier agrees. In an email, he wrote:

Any conclusion that Jesus' historicity is doubtful follows from hundreds of what seem by themselves minor or even trivial hypotheses, such as that no one named Thallus ever mentioned Jesus or that Mark invented the bizarre fig tree narrative as symbolic commentary on the failure and replacement of the Temple cult (and was not, therefore, relying on any sort of actual oral history), or that many ancient cosmologies imagined heaven to be occupied with lands, trees, furniture, even graves. Many of these hypotheses have good arguments and evidence for them, yet have not been properly defended under peer review, yet easily could be, if competently written up as individual research papers. Get them all published that way, and then you can argue Jesus' historicity is doubtful by moving to that conclusion from premises every one of which is established under peer review, which argument could then be a peer reviewed research paper of its own (once all the rest has been done). No one person can possibly do this, the time required would be insurmountable. But numerous scholars working in parallel could. And of course it has to be done, no matter how many generations the project takes to complete, so those passionate about it ought to get started on it now. Every such paper that gets published adds credibility to the mythicist case, without any such paper having to advocate mythicism (and thus prejudices won't block their publication). So to all up-and-coming scholars in ancient history and biblical studies, get on this. Even if you are certain Jesus was historical, there is much you can contribute by pursuing these hypotheses and getting good work published on them.

Interested readers should also have a look at this blog post on the same general topic over at James McGrath's blog, as well as this one by Tom Verenna.

How Not To Argue Against Mythicism

2011-07-28T00:42:00.011-05:00

Regarding the historicity of Jesus, there's a common thing that many anti-mythicists resort to saying when they dismiss mythicism, and I've seen it so many times now that it merits a response. Generally the discussion takes place in an online forum or in the comments section of some blog post, since this debate hasn't gotten much attention among contemporary New Testament scholars and ancient historians (who are of the general opinion that there was an historical Jesus at the root of the Christian religious tradition). And quite often during the course of that discussion, somebody will argue as follows:

I'm an atheist, so I don't buy the Christian story. I don't think there's enough evidence to conclude that Jesus was resurrected or that he performed miracles, so Christianity just isn't a tenable view in my opinion. Nevertheless, I find that mythicists go too far in the other direction. There's simply no need to deny that Jesus ever existed at all in order to deny Christianity. Why not just accept that he was an ordinary (non-magical) person?

Now, as I said, this is a general kind of argument I have encountered multiple times. It's by no means intended to be a straw man. (To that end, I'll try to update this blog post with actual quoted examples whenever I come across them.)

While I think the person who says this sort of thing is certainly correct--you can deny the Christian story without denying the historicity of Jesus, as many scholars do (e.g. see Bart Ehrman)--this is just hopeless as a response to those who argue for mythicism. If the primary mythicist argument was that we know that Jesus didn't exist because we know that Christianity is false, and the only way for Christianity to be false is for Jesus to be entirely mythical, then this would suffice as an argument. And it would be a pretty decent argument, too. It quite accurately explains that even if there was an historical Jesus, Christianity could still be false. But, of course, that much is already obvious (which means that pretend argument for mythicism was obviously terrible to begin with). And that's why no respectable mythicist would ever argue for his or her view on the mere grounds that Christianity is false.

The problem here is that mythicists offer other kinds of evidence for their view, and the above quoted passage does not suffice as a response to those historical arguments. Consider the case that Earl Doherty has made for mythicism, for example. He argues that the hypothesis that Jesus was never an historical person, but was rather a mythical figure who later got "historicized" by being placed in an historical context in religious writings, is the best explanation of all of the available evidence. The proper response to him is not to just reassure him that he can reject Christianity without being a mythicist. Rather, the proper response to him, if you're going to reject his argument, is to explain why his hypothesis isn't the best explanation of the evidence. To instead declare that he's just gone too far in the other direction doesn't count as a response at all, actually. It merely avoids the debate altogether.

So if you want to argue that mythicism is false, that's fine. But don't assume that it's probably false just because you don't need to accept that view to avoid Christianity.

Of course, people who say this sort of thing in these discussions might respond to what I've said by claiming that I'm misunderstanding their purpose in saying this. I imagine they might claim:

I wouldn't state any of that as a reason to reject mythicism. Instead, it just seems to me that a lot of these internet mythicists are primarily motivated by their anti-Christian sentiments, and they don't even attempt to rationally prove that Jesus never existed, they just seem to take that view because it's a view which rejects the very foundation of Christianity. And to them, I want to say that it's intellectually irresponsible to take such a radical view for those kinds of reasons.

Maybe this is indeed the purpose some people have when they use this kind of argument, but my guess is that in many cases this is not so. My general impression has been that people often use the argument to reject mythicism.

Examples:

A commenter named "Mikail2" posted a comment on a blog post by James McGrath, writing:

I reject evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity, for several reasons, which I believe are legitimate. There are several reasonable criticisms of Christianity, but rejecting or criticizing Christianity because Jesus never existed is a terrible reason for doing so, because the idea that he never existed is bogus. Christianity, especially evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity, is vulnerable in so many places. With so many real weak spots in the evangelical/fundamentalist Christian faith, using mythicism only makes one look really bad.

John Loftus posted a comment on his own blog post, writing:

I'm trying to figure out why there's such a fuss, I really am. We all agree that the Jesus depicted in the Gospels who was born of a virgin, healed people blind from birth, raised Lazarus from the dead, and bodily arose from the dead never existed. For me that's good enough even if I do think there was a historical Jesus, as does McGrath and Baker...

To which Weston Bortner responded:

Because some atheists apparently feel threatened by the very notion that Jesus may have existed, so they feel better in denying it and saying that he didn't. But, as has been said, whether he existed or not doesn't really matter. It's the claim of divinity that matters.

And Tim responded:

I think the fuss is that some atheists think that if you admit Jesus is a historical person, you have to also admit that he was born of a virgin, etc. The problem is that the latter does not follow from the former: all because we say person X existed does not mean they had attributes A, B, and C.

And Weston Bortner later said:

Folks, look, we've already got a consensus of scholars saying that Jesus, though he existed, was wrong about the end of the world and many other things. What more do you want?

Those are just a few examples that I found from some quick searches of recent blog discussions of the topic. I have no doubt that more of the same would be discovered if I read back through older blog discussions. I'll update this post periodically when I find more examples.

Letter to the Editor: Harold Camping

2011-07-13T17:49:00.009-05:00

I don't know why I waited so long to post this on my blog. A few days before Harold Camping's prediction of the rapture failed to come true this May, I had a letter published in the St. Joseph News-Press. I'm going to re-post it here so that I have a record of it:

Come May 22, It's Time to Get Real

Imagine quitting your job, spending the entirety of your life savings, and alienating your family and friends, all while preparing for the imminent end of the world. If your imagination is vivid enough, what you're envisioning is the situation a number of Christians currently find themselves in. It has been predicted by none other than Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster, that the Rapture of the (true) Christians will occur on May 21 of this year, followed this October by the end of the world. Camping predicted the same thing would happen back in 1994. This time, he's serious.

And so, like many Christians before them, Camping and his followers have pushed in all of their chips once again. There is no backup plan; there is no doubt. If you're a Christian who expects to be taken up in the Rapture, you might as well spend your savings now.

It's a wonder that anyone still falls for this stuff. Not only have people been making these predictions for hundreds of years, only to be proven wrong time and again, but this time the man whose "calculations" we are supposed to trust happens to be rather ignorant about the world. He has, for example, pinpointed the creation of the universe to be approximately 13.7 billion years after scientists say it occurred. He does this not on the basis of his own scientific investigations--he hasn't done any; he isn't a scientist. He does it on the basis of his own questionable reading of an ancient book (or, rather, a collection of ancient books). If he's this far off about the beginning of the universe, why should anybody trust him regarding the end of the universe? They shouldn't.

Mark my words: This Saturday, Harold Camping and his followers will not disappear from the Earth. There will be no Rapture. Their elaborate predictions will be falsified, and once again Camping will have to spin a nonsense story about how he had forgotten to factor this or that into his calculations. But Sunday morning, as his followers are reflecting on all of this, I hope that they begin to rethink their worldview. If you want to know about the world, a good rule of thumb is that you can't simply unreflectively trust a bunch of ancient documents (some written anonymously, some forged in others' names), and you can't simply trust a guy who has already adequately demonstrated that he doesn't know what he's talking about. To get to the truth, you're going to have to dig a lot deeper than that.

-Landon Hedrick
Lincoln, NE

New Rule

2011-06-03T12:41:00.021-05:00

If you believe that Jesus walked on water, cast out demons, healed the sick, raised people from the dead, and was himself resurrected from the dead, then you don't get to dismiss the "Jesus never existed" theory as too silly or crazy to take seriously.

Historians and Biblical scholars are in general agreement that there was an historical Jesus--a man who began the religion of Christianity by garnering a following during his lifetime. Among professionals working in the field, very few, apparently, believe that there was no historical Jesus at all. But there are some scholars (professional and amateur) who give credence to this view, called "Jesus mythicism" or just "mythicism." Among the best known these days are Earl Doherty (Jesus: Neither God Nor Man), Robert M. Price (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and Deconstructing Jesus), and Richard Carrier (two forthcoming books). There are some other names that are sometimes mentioned as well. For example, Thomas L. Thompson (The Messiah Myth) is considered a key figure in this debate. And, of course, there's Acharya S, aka D.M. Murdock (The Christ Conspiracy), whose work has been criticized by Carrier and praised by Price. This view is in the minority, and some of the above mythicists I mentioned are dismissed as non-scholars by scholars in the field and by Christian apologists.

Mythicism is considered by many to be completely absurd, not even worth considering. In fact, I had a brief discussion with a Christian philosopher named Trent Dougherty a while back who made that very claim:

And the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist lacks any shred of credibility. The thesis is so implausible it shouldn't even be discussed on a blog of this quality. It is ridiculous in the literal sense. It is not worth two minutes investigation. It's like the thesis that we didn't really land on the moon. It is not worthy of attention. People who advocate such a thesis utterly discredit themselves as capable of paying attention to serious, reasoned discussion.

It should be noted that Dougherty said this in the context of a blog discussion in which he was highly recommending a book by Richard Swinburne (a well-known Christian philosopher) which argues for the resurrection of Jesus. Translation: Mythicism is so crazy that it's not worth thinking about for two minutes, but the supernatural Jesus view has so much going for it that you should read entire books about it.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman will soon be writing a book against mythicism, so apparently he thinks it's worth considering the view for more than two minutes. Yet he, too, finds the view to be unbelievable.

I'm not arguing for mythicism here (I'm not a mythicist). That's not what I'm up to. Nor am I arguing against it. My point is rather simple: as unbelievable a view as it is, you have no room to dismiss it so casually on the basis of its being totally bonkers if you believe in a magic Jesus yourself.

I would have thought this was obvious, but Christian apologists are often the ones dismissing mythicism as crazy. When William Lane Craig debated Richard Carrier on the resurrection of Jesus two years ago, Craig was sure to emphasize in his opening statement that Carrier was a mythicist. He wrote: "Richard takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed--that there was no such person in history. This is a position which is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn't even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship." This seemed to me an attempt to poison the well (to get the audience to think right away that Carrier wasn't at all credible) even though Craig and I had concluded in conversation before the debate that Carrier probably wouldn't even bring up mythicism, since he knows it isn't mainstream and since it's not necessary to appeal to the idea that Jesus never existed in order to argue against the resurrection. Perhaps Craig felt he had to throw that in to preempt the remote possibility that Carrier would appeal to mythicism. Yet for all of the lack of credibility on Carrier's part on the basis of being a mythicist (which is just crazy according to Christian apologists), I'm afraid that Craig has no room to speak here. He believes that after Jesus' death, he was resurrected in an immortal supernatural body, and he lives on to this day. That is no less crazy than the view that Jesus never existed, as far as I can tell.

So let's be clear. If you are arguing for a magic Jesus, you're in a weak position to ridicule mythicism.

I want to preempt two possible responses to what I've said here. First, the Christian apologists might claim: "We're not rejecting mythicism as absurd for no reason at all. It's absurd because there's ample evidence for an historical Jesus!" That point is fair enough. Yet mythicists think they can account for all of the actual data better with the hypothesis that there was no historical Jesus, and they do defend their views at some length in print. They, likewise, would say: "We're not rejecting the magic Jesus as absurd for no reason at all. It's absurd because there's ample evidence that no such supernatural person ever lived!"

Second, one might simply object to my description of the Christian apologist's view as "magic Jesus." Christian apologist David Marshall has made the point in the past that there is a distinction between miracles and magic, and that Jesus wasn't a magician. I don't care to argue about that. My use of the word was for rhetorical purposes.

(In time, I'll post examples below of Christians talking about how ridiculous mythicism is as updates to this blog entry.)

* * *

Christian Philosopher Glenn Peoples writes:

Among ancient historians, the thesis that there literally was no historical Jesus on which the early Christian movement was based is like belief in a flat earth. It's silly, not taken seriously, and there's really no need to so much as acknowledge the fact that such a theory even exists.

Christian pastor and Biblical Studies scholar Jim West writes:

The whole idea that Jesus was invented and the Christianity is laid upon an unhistorical foundation is just so absurd on the face of it that very few scholars have bothered with it.

Christian historian and apologist David Marshall writes:

I'd say evidence for Jesus' historical existence IS on the same plain as evidence for the moon's orbit of the planet earth.

* * *

I should note that Biblical Studies scholar Dr. Hector Avalos is a professed "agnostic" on the question of the historicity of Jesus. In an email (6/8/11), he claimed (contrary to Christian philosopher Trent Dougherty quoted above) that "exploring evidence for the mythicist view is just as legitimate as exploring evidence for the historical view of Jesus."

Religious Music: The Good and the Bad

2011-02-11T21:34:00.003-06:00

One thing I like about Heartland Community Church, which is the church I used to attend in Overland Park, KS, is the great music. Even if you don't believe in God, you can still enjoy the music (and, for that matter, you can sometimes still enjoy and appreciate the sermon). I wish I could remember the songs that they used to play that I really liked. But one example of this kind of song that I (still) enjoy is "How Great is Our God". I wanted to post a version of that song next to an example of a not-so-good song about Jesus. Both are worth watching at least once, but for different reasons.

Bonus: Can you guess who my favorite person is in the second video?

Getting Interested in Genetic Engineering

2011-02-11T00:51:00.004-06:00

This week in the class I'm a teaching assistant for we've been discussing the ethics of genetic enhancement. Apparently, scientists are on the verge of breakthroughs which would allow us to not only be able to cure certain diseases at the genetic level, but also allow us to improve our perfectly normal bodies in various ways. I don't have time at the moment to discuss the potential uses of the technology or the difficult ethical issues surrounding it. But I came across a short video on YouTube (which looks like it might be the preview to a documentary--if so, I'd like to see the whole documentary) that I thought I'd share. Just watching it made me want to study the issue in more depth.

The Coolest Thing I've Seen in a While

2011-02-04T20:28:00.005-06:00

I should blog more of these cool things I see from time to time. Well, I came across this video that I thought other people might be interested in watching, so I'm posting it here. (Though, now that I think about it, if my purpose is to share the video with other people, then posting it on my blog is a hugely inefficient way of doing that.) Anyway, check it out.

Regan on Animal Rights

2011-02-03T00:31:00.004-06:00

I've been reading some stuff on the ethics of our treatment of animals lately since that's what we're teaching this week in the Introduction to Ethics class that I'm a T.A. for. The class had to read a paper by Peter Singer (who argues that the interests of animals deserve equal consideration) and one by Carl Cohen (who argues that animals have no rights).

In addition to those papers, though, I decided to read a few more on the topic to help me in thinking about the issues. One that I read by philosopher Tom Regan, called "The Case for Animal Rights," made an interesting argument that animals have robust rights that are violated not just by extreme cruelty on the part of humans (e.g. factory farming, useless scientific experiments that harm them greatly, etc.), but by the very fact that we treat them as mere means to our ends. As he puts it:

"The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us--to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money. Once we accept this view of animals as our resources--the rest is as predictable as it is regrettable. Why worry about their loneliness, their pain, their death? Since animals exist for us, to benefit us in one way or another, what harms them really doesn't matter--or matters only if it starts to bother us, makes us feel a trifle uneasy when we eat our veal escalope, for example. So yes, let us get veal calves out of solitary confinement, give them more space, a little straw, a few companions. But let us keep our veal escalope."

It may not be entirely apparent what he's saying here since I've plucked this quote out of context. Essentially, he wants to argue that merely giving factory farmed animals better lives before we kill them does not justify the practice, since what is really wrong about the whole setup is that we are just using the animals for our own benefit, and that violates certain rights he thinks that animals have.

My main reason for wanting to blog about this was because I thought his closing remarks were interesting, and I wanted to share them:

"As for the passion: there are times, and these not infrequent, when tears come to my eyes when I see, or read, or hear of the wretched plight of animals in the hands of humans. Their pain, their suffering, their loneliness, their innocence, their death. Anger. Rage. Pity. Sorrow. Disgust. The whole creation groans under the weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute, powerless creatures. It is our hearts, not just our heads, that call for an end to it all, that demand of us that we overcome, for them, the habits and forces behind their systematic oppression. All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realization of this third stage, adoption, that requires both our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands. God grant we are equal to the task."

Those interested are encouraged to check out the full argument in his book The Case for Animal Rights (though I have not read it yet).

New Letter

2011-01-03T00:51:00.003-06:00

I recently wrote another letter to the St. Joseph News Press after reading a letter in their paper that called for a response. Below is the original letter (12/22/10) followed by my response (12/31/10). (My past letters are collected here.)

Tent City Inhabitants Need Encouragement

Someday soon—and I feel very soon—Jesus is coming back after his people, the church. That is the hope that we believers have. If we have nothing but Jesus we have enough. But oh, what a devastating shock for those who are not prepared for his coming. All of our troubles that we see upon this ol' earth are coming from the fact that man's heart is not right. All over the world there is a thirst for something but most people don't know what it is they are thirsting after. It's not how many presents are under the tree or how much money is in your bank account, it's God they are thirsting for. Where are all the churches taking a stand on moral and social issues? Tent City? On the front page of our newspaper seeing all of those homeless people down by the river looking for a way to stay alive one more day! This is a disgrace.

St. Joseph, where are all the preachers? How about all of you getting out of your comfortable churches and going down by the river and having and old-fashioned spirit-filled revival? Telling all of those down-and-outers Jesus Christ is the answer, that's why he came to set the captives free! God is not waiting to condemn them or judge them, he is waiting for them to receive his mercy and love.

As a Christian, I believe that within every human being there is a hunger for purpose and meaning in life—Christianity teaches that only God can fill that need. As we all know, many events in life seemingly have no answers in the face of evil. But we trust in the assurance that God has given us all. All things work together for good to them who love and live for God. That's what we as Christians can be sure of. God loves us no matter what!

I know there are those of you out there who are saying if God loved the world, why is the world in such a mess? God is a God of judgment.

This Christmas come on back to Jesus, he's waiting to welcome you home. Just as you are! God bless all.

-Dorothy Galpin
St. Joseph, MO

Homeless Need Homes, Not Jesus

Dorothy Galpin recently wrote that St. Joseph's preachers need to mosey on down to "Tent City" to convert some souls to Christianity. Here's a bunch of homeless people trying to survive day-by-day. What's the only thing that can satisfy their deepest hunger? Why, it's God, and his son Jesus, of course!

Nonsense. The deepest hunger of a homeless person is more likely hunger. That's something that can be satisfied with food, not scripture. Given that there is no miracle worker down by the river multiplying loaves and fishes for them, chances are these people could benefit from the charity of ordinary people who (surely) can afford to occasionally make a modest donation.

Ms. Galpin seems to neglect this practical solution in her letter, instead spending most of the time insisting that the poor souls need to find Jesus before he makes his glorious return (which, she has a feeling, is going to be "very soon"). If that were likely, maybe we'd have reason to initiate the "spirit-filled revival" she's calling for. But believing that a 2,000-year-old man is soon to make a lively appearance strikes me as wishful thinking. I suggest we shelve the superstition and rely on a basic moral principle here: Don't let others suffer if you can easily prevent it without much cost to yourself.

-Landon Hedrick
Lincoln, NE

Trouble in Taiji

2010-06-10T14:41:00.005-05:00

Last year a very well-made documentary titled The Cove blew the lid off of the arguably immoral practice of slaughtering dolphins in Taiji. The film records the efforts of (among other people) Ric O'Barry, the guy who trained the dolphins in the Flipper television show back in the 1960s, who has for several decades now worked for the liberation and fair treatment of dolphins. Rather than give a synopsis of the film, I just want to encourage you to get your hands on a copy and watch it if you haven't done so yet.

Today in the news it was reported that nationalist groups in Japan have threatened protests of movie theaters that were planning on airing the film. Many Japanese people aren't even aware of the annual dolphin hunt and subsequent selling of the (toxic) meat in their supermarkets. In response to the threatened protests, some of the theaters canceled their showings of the documentary.

Open Letter to Fred Phelps

2010-05-28T15:21:00.003-05:00

Years ago in an advanced composition class we had an assignment where we were supposed to write a letter to a somebody famous. I chose to write to the infamous Fred Phelps, pastor of the (also infamous) Westboro Baptist Church. I cheated a bit, because I clearly used the well-known "Dear Dr. Laura" letter as my guide and inspiration. Nevertheless, here's what I came up with, in all its glory:

Dear Mr. Phelps,

As an undergraduate college student, I admire the great things you have done for the community over the past several years. You constantly strive to improve our society, and I salute you for that. Without a doubt, your anti-homosexual campaign has had a profound effect on many people. Whenever I hear somebody complaining about your methods of preaching to gay people, I always point out that Leviticus 20:13 says homosexuals should be put to death. At least you aren’t killing them. However, I do have some questions on other matters that you might be able to clear up.

Jeremiah 48:10 says “A curse on him who keeps his sword from bloodshed." Now, I admit, I don’t even own a sword. But if I did own one, exactly who is it that I’m supposed to kill? Should I buy a sword?

Leviticus 20:27 says that we should stone to death any fortunetellers. The problem is, when I try to sneak up on them they always know I’m coming. Do you have any hints or tips on how to sneak up on them or do you find yourself having the same problem I’m having?

Some of the slaves that I own have been getting a little out of line and not doing their jobs lately. Should I point them to Ephesians 6:5 where it commands them to obey their master? I suppose if this doesn’t work I could always follow Exodus 21:20-21 where it says I’m allowed to beat my slaves as long as they survive the beating for a day or two. I’d still like to know how you deal with your slaves when they get out of line.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says that a son who does not obey his father and mother is supposed to be stoned to death by everybody in the town. The problem is, I can’t seem to convince the rest of the town that this is the right thing to do. How can I persuade them?

Leviticus 20:16 tells us to kill a woman if she has sex with an animal. Now, does the type of animal matter or is it simply any non-human? Just checking.

I look forward to your response, Mr. Phelps.

By God’s Sovereign Will,

Landon Hedrick

Blog Index

2010-04-06T00:59:00.011-05:00

On this page I will keep a list of my blog posts by title. In the future I might decide to annotate the index by giving a brief description of the posts. In order of their appearance on my blog, from the earliest to most recent:

(1) Welcome to My Nightmare

(2) "Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?" Craig and Carrier Debate

(3) Letters to the Editor

(4) How Gullible Could the Disciples Have Been?

(5) Democrats at Liberty University?

(6) A Pious Perversion of History (Part One)

(7) David Marshall on Christian Martyrs

(8) Religion and Statistics

(9) Craig-Carrier Resurrection Debate Video

(10) Something New I Learned

(11) David Marshall Responds

(12) Happy Easter

(13) The Mathematical Universe

(14) Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot

(15) Open Letter to Fred Phelps

(16) Trouble in Taiji

(17) New Letter

(18) Regan on Animal Rights

(19) The Coolest Thing I've Seen in a While

(20) Getting Interested in Genetic Engineering

(21) Religious Music: The Good and the Bad

(22) New Rule

(23) Letter to the Editor: Harold Camping

(24) How Not To Argue Against Mythicism

Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot

2010-04-05T22:46:00.003-05:00

I know that I have very few followers on this blog, but for anybody who does read these posts I wanted to recommend my favorite podcast (in fact, the only one I actually listen to). Luke, over at Common Sense Atheism, has a podcast titled Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, in which he interviews various historians, philosophers, and scientists on topics related to religion and morality. Sometime later, I'll probably blog about the other resources on his site which are worth checking out (listing them all now would take too long, since that blog is full of great resources, and is likely the best atheism blog on the internet). For now, I just wanted to encourage those interested to look for an episode of Luke's podcast that looks interesting and see what you think. I haven't listened to them all, but I have enjoyed many of the episodes I have listened to.

And in case Luke needs some ideas for future episodes, I'm listing mine here.

(1) Richard Carrier:

A discussion of his book Not the Impossible Faith.
A discussion of his work on the historicity of Jesus.
A discussion about the resurrection of Jesus, and his debates with William Lane Craig and Mike Licona.

(2) Sam Harris:

A discussion of the dangers of Islam.
A discussion of his views on morality.

(3) Richard Grigg:

A discussion of radical theology, based on his work in books such as Beyond the God Delusion.

(4) David Marshall:

A discussion of the reliability of the Gospels.

(5) Peter Singer:

A discussion of practical ethical issues.

(6) Dennis MacDonald:

A discussion of his thesis that much of the content in the Gospels was intentionally written as a symbolic story to mimic the stories of Homer.

(7) Gary Habermas:

A discussion of the evidence for life after death.

(8) Brian Davies:

A discussion of Thomistic philosophy of religion.

Those are conversations I would really like to hear. Beyond that, though, I think it would be pretty neat to have "dialogues" about very narrowly defined topics between two scholars. Thus, rather than having full-blown debates on CPBD, I think expanding to an area where Luke can bring together two scholars to discuss specific ideas that fit into a larger debate would make the podcast even more awesome than it already is. Let me give a few ideas of the kind of thing I'm thinking of here:

(1) The many-worlds objection to the Fine-Tuning Argument.

This episode would bring together two scholars who have written on the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God and just discuss the merits of a particular objection to that argument. An episode on this which brings together Robin Collins and Elliott Sober would be good.

(2) Examples of mythical and legendary stories in the Gospels.

This episode would discuss certain popular examples of stories in the Gospels that were written for non-historical purposes, and would explore the possible implications of the stories. If Luke could get Richard Carrier and Bart Ehrman together to have a friendly dialogue about this issue, that would likely become one of the most popular items on his blog.

Well, those are my ideas.

The Mathematical Universe

2010-04-05T00:22:00.001-05:00

I came across a neat video a few weeks ago that is worth sharing. I wouldn't be surprised if the idea that the video is trying to illustrate has been used as an argument for the existence of God.

Happy Easter

2010-04-04T01:49:00.008-05:00

On the lighter side of things, keep in mind what Easter is all about. Candy. Baskets full of it. And colored eggs. In case you don't know the official story, I've included a documentary below. Enjoy!

David Marshall Responds

2010-03-25T01:43:00.003-05:00

Several months ago I wrote a blog post about a claim that David Marshall made in his book The Truth Behind the New Atheism regarding the notion that the disciples of Jesus were willing to die for their faith. About a month ago, Marshall posted a response on his website. For those interested, I recommend reading my original post as well as Marshall's response. It's been about a month since I've read it, but I will get around to writing a response of my own when I have some time (if there is much for me to respond to).

Something New I Learned

2009-11-21T13:32:00.002-06:00

I haven't blogged in quite some time--and that's primarily the result of having such a busy semester at UNL and not having anything extraordinary to say. But the other night Tara and I checked our mail and we received a catalog of courses from a local community college, and she directed my attention to a couple of classes that I never thought any college would actually have. In addition to such gems as "Dad's Stylin' Daughter's Dos" (which is an actual class that fathers can take to learn the basics of hair styling) and "The Incredible Egg" (in which a chef teaches you what you can do with eggs in the kitchen--big mystery, I'm sure), there are also a couple of genuinely bizarre classes:

Communicate with the Angels

This class will be enjoyed by anyone who has the desire to meet and communicate with angels. Students will be exploring the many beliefs about angels and how the various beliefs have influenced humankind throughout the ages. You will be guided to meet and interact with your personal angels. Learn how to balance your energies, allowing you to more clearly receive angelic encouragement, message and guidance. Class will also cover angel readings for yourself and others using angel cards and higher intuition. Join us for this fun and inspirational workshop taught by a certified Angel Therapy Practitioner. (Tuition $64)

Work with the Angels

Angels are spiritual beings who desire to bring healing and happiness to your daily life. This class will take an in-depth look at how to work with your personal angels as well as the higher angelic realms to manifest your wishes. You will learn which angels to call on for help in any area of your life such as health, finance, career and relationships. (Tuition $64)

After seeing these, I couldn't help but look through the rest of the catalog to see if I could take a course on casting spells taught by a certified witch, or mind reading taught by a certified psychic. At the very least, for $64, I'd want to learn how to bend spoons with my mind from somebody certified in the arts of psychokinesis.

Craig-Carrier Resurrection Debate Video

2009-08-21T23:24:00.004-05:00

In my previous blog post about Craig and Carrier's March 2009 debate, I mentioned that the official video recording of the event was still being edited. That was months ago, and I've known for some time that Craig had put the video online at his website. I highly recommend watching this version, as it is much better in quality than the version found on YouTube (recorded by an audience member).

If anybody is interested in hearing what Craig and Carrier had to say about the debate once it was all over with, you can find Carrier's comments here and an interview with Craig on YouTube broken into seven short segments.

Religion and Statistics

2009-06-12T15:33:00.001-05:00

Imagine that while reading Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, you come across a rather bold claim: "As it happens, in Britain, the more educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to be an atheist." Of course, such a claim would need to be supported by some sort of controlled scientific survey. But imagine that Dawkins didn't even provide a citation; he made the claim without any benefit of actual evidence outside his own experience. Would it be a big deal? After all, Britain is his home.

We can be confident that had Dawkins made this mistake, somebody would have noticed and called him out on it. Perhaps that person would have been Christian apologist David Marshall, who has made an effort to debunk Dawkins on several points. (He even has a list of "160 errors" in The God Delusion.) But imagine further that, when confronted with this problem, Dawkins offered the following response:

"Years ago I saw a study conducted in Liverpool which informed me of this correlation, and ever since then I've personally noticed that this is the case throughout the rest of Britain. I don't know where you can find that study, but you can take my word for it. I'm a generally perceptive person, and I wouldn't be making this claim unless I had a wide exposure to British people."

Would you be satisfied? Would David Marshall be satisfied? As it turns out, I don't think Dawkins did make this mistake in his writings, so "his words" above are completely fictional. But it's interesting that David Marshall, in his book The Truth Behind the New Atheism, makes a parallel claim and leaves it unsupported. On page 41 he tells us that "in East Asia, there was a strong positive correlation between education and the Christian faith. The more books you read, the more likely you were to be a Christian." This claim was not followed by a note citing any valid scientific surveys; it appeared to come straight from Marshall's own observations. When I pointed this out to him, here is the reply he gave:

"I would have liked to cite the study of faith and education in Singapore that I mentioned. The numbers were quite dramatic. They also corresponded with what I've seen all around East Asia: the more educated a person is, the more likely to be a Christian. However, I read the paper in Taiwan, and cited it in a paper I wrote in seminary, and haven't seen it since. The reader is free to disbelieve me if he likes, or suspend judgement until hard stats turn up. But I've been involved with Asian Christianity for 24 years, both on the ground and academically; it would be wise to take my opinion on this seriously. (Alternatively, check into almost any Chinese church in America, and see how many people with Phds in science, mathematics, and engineering you can find.)"

Is it alright for Marshall to put this fact in his book if it's merely based on an old study from Singapore (that he no longer has access to) and his own experience with East Asia? Perhaps it would be more responsible of him if he altered his wording to offer the information not as a categorical fact, but as his belief based on his experience.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins offers some statistics (based on an actual study!) of the percentage of scientists that believe in God. Marshall appears to distrust Dawkins' cited statistics, writing that it's "a little hard to jibe with experience," since he sometimes meets devout Christians in church who also happen to be scientists (p. 39).

But consider what Marshall is suggesting to his readers here: that the statistics seem suspicious because he meets Christian scientists in church. Isn't this precisely where we would expect to find Christians (of all professions) on Sunday mornings? Clearly such an observation does nothing to deflate statistics from a properly-conducted survey. When I mentioned this to Marshall, he responded as follows:

"Your complaint about my response to the claim that relatively few scientists believe in God seems overly argumentative. My point wasn't that the data was wrong; only that based on my own experience, it seemed fishy. What I'm offering is a prima facia reason to look more carefully at the data. I didn't say only that scientists who are Christian are in church on Sunday. I said I often find the most committed Christians in many churches are scientists. But later I concede that the incidence of atheism among scientists is probably higher than the general public, and then offer some non-rational reasons why that might be so."

But it's hardly clear how meeting Christian scientists in church constitutes even a prima facie reason to be skeptical of the data. The claim made by Dawkins was not that all scientists are non-Christians; his claim was that a survey reported a particular correlation between being a scientist and being an atheist. Besides, do we need this sort of information in order to convince us that we should carefully evaluate the data?

There is at least one more incidence of this sort of problem in the book. On page 30, Marshall writes that "most atheists in modern times have been Marxists." But again there is no citation supporting the claim, it is just a bare assertion. Elsewhere, I believe he has pointed to the Soviet Union and China as virtual oceans of atheists. But even so, how many of these people were really atheists (by whatever definition of the word Marshall is working with)? And how many were really Marxists? Presumably, it must mean something to be a Marxist (perhaps a belief in some set of doctrines laid out in the writings of Marx himself, or an avid reader of those writings, or even just somebody who claims to be a Marxist). Whatever Marshall means by these words, we cannot simply assume that everyone living in a communist country is or was a Marxist. And even if we could, this still doesn't tell us anything about the number of atheists among these people, or how these numbers compare to non-Marxist atheists in modern times. When confronted with this challenge, Marshall responded:

"You complain that I don't cite the claim that "most atheists in modern times have been Marxists." But later in the book, I describe the role atheism played in Marxist ideology in some detail. There are only some ten million atheists in the United States, but hundreds of millions in communist China, who learned disbelief from Marxist teachers. (How do I know? I've been studying communist history, and talking to Chinese young people about their beliefs, for decades. Take my word for it. Or check my sources.) And many atheists in Western Europe and America during the 20th Century were also Marxists.... And my estimate that most modern atheists have been Marxists, at least in the sense that they imbibed Marxist ideology from the same source that they learned atheism, is almost certainly true."

I responded by pointing out that he still had not provided a study or survey which proved his claim, and that merely living in a Communist country probably does not qualify one as a Marxist. I further wrote:

"If Marshall has some evidence that most people who have claimed to be atheists in modern times have also claimed to be Marxists, he should have cited it when he made his claim. Either we take his word for it, as he suggests (since he's been studying this stuff and talking to some Chinese youngsters for decades), or Marshall can just point us to a study/survey which proves his point. I can't check all of his sources all the way through to see if they may have happened to include such a statistic."

And Marshall offered a longer response:

"A 2007 survey by scholars at East China Normal University of about 4500 people showed that a projected 300 million adults in China have some sort of religious belief. (Reported by BBC, Washington Post, etc.) That would leave some 700 million adults without a religious belief. How many are atheists? Given that atheism is what students have learned in school for the past 60 years, it would seem fairly safe to assume -- quite a few. My own small-scale survey supports this conclusion. When I ask Chinese to pick among a thirteen options (including three forms of Buddhism, two forms of Taoism, two forms of Christianity, Islam, "don't know," "am not sure" "other," and "atheism"), so far about 30% have indicated "atheist," and about the same percent was unsure, maybe agnostic. I haven't surveyed enough people yet for these numbers alone to be a strong argument, but this fits my general impression, in 23 years of talking with mainland Chinese. (Perhaps since before you were born.) Furthermore, religion has been growing rapidly -- before 1979, the percent of those who saw themselves as atheist was almost certainly a majority of the Chinese people.

You'll be hard-pressed to find 300 million atheists in all of the never-communist world. Four percent of Americans call themselves atheists; that's 12 million. About 18% of EU citizens call themselves atheists, according to a Eurostat poll reported on Wikipedia; that's perhaps 70 million. A lot of them are in post-communist countries, or have been Marxists in Western European countries. (French and Italian communist parties often received a quarter or more of the votes; German and other W European communist parties have also done quite well at different periods, drawing of course from atheists in particular.) Marxism in the former Soviet Union created hundreds of millions of avowed atheists over its run.

Atheists probably exist in small numbers in Muslim countries. All reports seem to indicate that atheism is very rare in Africa. Atheists in Latin America are often Marxist, and appear to be few in number. (The World Almanac, according to religioustolerance.org, counts 2.7 million.) As for India, Adherents.com (not always a very reliable site) gives just 2% non-religious OR atheist. Some of those are, of course, communists, which has been fairly strong in India.

Put all that together, and it's clear that in the broad sense of "Marxist," my comment was almost certainly correct. Over the past century, a large majority of atheists in the world have learned their atheism as part of a general Marxist education, and have been "Marxist" at least in that limited sense."

The survey that Marshall refers to, however, apparently measured how many people were religious--not how many were theists. One need not claim to be religious to believe in God (just like one could be a religious atheist). The numbers do not measure what Marshall wants them to, so he is forced to guess that the majority of non-religious people are atheists.

The other point to note, again, is that it's not entirely clear what it means to be a Marxist in Marshall's intended context. The context in his book referred to the "Marxist-Leninist enterprise," but here in his response he generalizes to the broader context of individuals who have received "a general Marxist education" (whatever that might mean).

Is it a virtue for one's book to wallow in such ambiguity?

David Marshall on Christian Martyrs

2009-06-10T02:29:00.001-05:00

Some time ago I began conversing with people on the Amazon.com forums toward the bottom of the web page for Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. At some point I became acquainted with a generally kind, reasonable Christian apologist who also frequented those forums for discussion: David Marshall. Marshall has written a few books, only one of which I have read. (I'll get to that in a minute. First, some background.) After reading a book of his that he recommended, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, I recommended to Reggie Finley (aka Infidel Guy) that he invite Marshall onto his weekly radio show, since Finley was at the time looking for somebody who would be willing to debate Dr. Robert M. Price. I didn't hear anything else about this possibility until, a few weeks later, Marshall began spreading the word that he'd be debating Dr. Price on the show. (For those interested, the show can be found here. Unfortunately though, you'll have to pay $2 to listen to it.)

I also began recommending to Marshall that he pay more attention to Richard Carrier's work (especially his criticism of Christian apologetics). He eventually did take me up on that challenge and purchased Sense and Goodness Without God, though his initial response to one section of that book left much to be desired. I continued encouraging him to read further and he finally did offer some meatier critiques. I may post about some of these later, but for now I'll simply link to what he thinks is one of his best critiques.

Today, however, I want to resurrect some of my old comments on his book The Truth Behind the New Atheism. I informally reviewed the book in Amazon forums, giving it 3.5 stars. But there were still plenty of significant problems with it, in my opinion. His writing was often vague (especially when discussing the issue of the Bible being inspired by God), full of irrelevant comments and needlessly abstract metaphors, and peppered with unwarranted claims. One in particular that jumped out at me was on page 17, where Marshall writes that the disciples of Jesus were given "enough firsthand evidence of his resurrection that they were willing to die for him."

This wasn't the first time I've heard such a claim, as it's been repeated endlessly by Christians who defend their faith. For example, in his book More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell asks "who would die for a lie?" The implication of that question is that, since the disciples were in a position to know whether or not Jesus was resurrected, and since they were willing to die for the belief that he was, then he really must have been raised from the dead.

New Testament scholar Robert M. Price gives an immediate counter-example by referring to Joseph Smith, writing that "non-Mormons believe he had concocted the whole Mormon religion, yet he was willing to die for it. Does that make it true?"

Nevertheless, some sort of deeper analysis of the issue is required. Putting the argument into a logically valid form, it looks like this:

(1) If the disciples of Jesus were willing to die for their belief that he was resurrected, then they must have had good evidence that he was.

(2) The disciples of Jesus were willing to die for their belief that he was resurrected.

(3) Therefore, the disciples must have had good evidence that Jesus was resurrected.

If David Marshall, Josh McDowell, or anybody else could show that (1) and (2) are true, then it would follow that the disciples had good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus--which entails that there is good reason to believe that Jesus was really raised from the dead (since having good evidence for something is a good reason to believe it). Can David Marshall show that the premises of the argument are true?

Regarding (1), he would have to show that it would have taken good evidence to convince the earliest disciples that Jesus really was raised from the dead. Of course, it would take good evidence to convince the scientific community that somebody was resurrected, and I would be impressed if someone like James Randi was given enough evidence that he was willing to die for such a belief. (See this blog post.) But what reason do we have to think that ordinary first century Palestinians would have required good evidence to believe such a thing? Were they generally skeptical people who would have demanded solid evidence before believing extraordinary stories?

The New Testament itself seems to refute this notion. Acts 2:1-42 says that Peter gave a speech to a large group of Jews, and on the basis of what he said, three thousand people converted that day. If it were the case that people, in general, were skeptical of claims about extraordinary events, then why would such a large number of people believe the resurrection merely on the basis of Peter's speech? Historian Richard Carrier writes of this passage:

"Thousands of people, we are told, decided to convert immediately. Not a single one of them checked a single fact. These converts do no other research, make no other inquiry, make no effort at all to interrogate Peter or any other witnesses or check any of the material facts. The authorities are not consulted. No one asks to hear Joseph of Arimathea on the matter, or indeed any other Christian besides Peter. They simply trust what Peter says--which is woefully ambiguous and short on details..." (See here)

Of course, Marshall could claim that Carrier is reading too much into the text here, because it doesn't explicitly say these things about the converts. But as the story is written, it certainly appears as if these people simply heard Peter's testimony and converted. Perhaps later they conducted investigations, looking into the actual evidence for the resurrection to see if it stands up to rational scrutiny--but as Carrier points out, we have no record that they did carry out such investigations, and even if they did, we have no way of knowing that they didn't look at the facts and find them wanting.

Or look at all of the other examples from Acts that Carrier provides in the above link. The author of Acts records numerous conversions where people hear a speech, see some sort of healing miracle, and are convinced that Christianity is true (i.e. that Jesus rose from the dead). Carrier writes:

"Never once does Acts report anyone checking any facts pertinent to the Resurrection before converting. To claim they did such checking, but that Acts simply doesn't say so (not even once), is circular reasoning... Indeed, Acts rules out any such tactic, since Acts says again and again that conversions are won on the very same day the gospel is preached--there are rarely any delays of days, weeks, or months, as would be required for evidence to be gathered, witnesses sought out and questioned, and letters exchanged. And even when any such duration is mentioned, there is still no indication that any such efforts were engaged in that time. None at all." (See here)

It is hard to believe that Marshall would want to claim that the disciples were paradigm examples of skeptical thinkers--and I don't imagine he would actually claim this (though he does seem to think that there is good historical evidence that they were pretty skeptical). I am assuming for the sake of this discussion that there was no substantial difference between the uneducated disciples of Jesus and the other uneducated people of the day (in terms of how skeptical or gullible they would be). Regarding the sorts of things the ancients believed, Carrier writes:

"An analogy can be drawn from ancient astronomy: the real cause of eclipses was well-known and thoroughly understood among the scholarly elite of the Roman period. The Emperor Claudius even had this cause described in a public inscription in order to fend off superstition among the masses. And there are many examples where those in-the-know were able to educate an ignorant public on appropriate occasions. So to discover the true cause of eclipses (lunar and solar) was relatively easy for anyone who cared to ask. Any library, any elite scholar, and at least one known public inscription would have provided the answer. It was as easily ascertained as any specialized historical fact (such as who held a particular office at a particular place and time). Yet a large portion of the populace never bothered to check, but simply continued believing the myth that eclipses were the work of magic or gods." (See here)

Surely Marshall knows that there have always been people who will believe things without good evidence. Some of the most confident Christians I have encountered cite nothing other than the scriptures (and, sometimes, the inner feeling of the Holy Spirit) for their belief that Jesus conquered death. And people in the ancient world were no different. If anything, they were even more gullible, and less skeptical. So even if it is true that the disciples were willing to die for their faith, that does not entail that they had good evidence for it.

Biblical scholar Hector Avalos confirmed this to me, writing:

"There is a lot of evidence that people did believe in resurrections with very little evidence, and one is in Mark 6:14-16 where it states that Herod was convinced that John the Baptist had resurrected. Note how little evidence he needed to believe that. Apparently, Herod just "heard" about miracles, and witnessed nothing himself."

Robert M. Price, in a private communication, revealed another important point:

"One must keep in mind the great power of "cognitive dissonance." History has shown that there is pretty much no extreme people will not go to in defending that which they have a great stake in. If you had spent decades defending the proposition that Jesus rose from the dead, even if you had originally merely surmised or guessed it, even had you made it up, you might well give your life than back down from the claim, to save face, because otherwise your life would be revealed as one big joke, and some people simply cannot live that down."

Elswhere, Carrier concludes:

The actual evidence from the first century does not support the conclusion that martyrs needed, much less had, what we would consider reliable evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.

But this undercuts premise (1) of the above argument, because it shows that even if the disciples were willing to die for their belief that Jesus was resurrected, they didn't necessarily need good evidence for his resurrection to thoroughly convince them. This is also true for most Christians today who are certain that Jesus rose from the dead.

What about (2)? Does Marshall have good evidence that the disciples really were willing to die for their belief in the resurrection? In 2006, Christian apologist William Lane Craig and New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman debated the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. In the debate, Craig made a claim similar to Marshall: "the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief." Ehrman pounced on this:

"And an earlier point that Bill made was that the disciples were all willing to die for their faith. I didn't hear one piece of evidence for that. I hear that claim a lot, but having read every Christian source from the first five hundred years of Christianity, I'd like him to tell us what the piece of evidence is that the disciples died for their belief in the resurrection." (Transcript here)

Hector Avalos sided with Ehrman, writing:

"Bart Ehrman is correct. There is not a single piece of evidence from the first century that any Christian was martyred for believing in the resurrection. The NT does mention persecution of Christians but not for the specific belief in the resurrection."

In his essay "Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story," Richard Carrier writes:

"The only martyrdoms recorded in the New Testament are, first, the stoning of Stephen in the Book of Acts. But Stephen was not a witness. He was a later convert. So if he died for anything, he died for hearsay alone. But even in Acts the story has it that he was not killed for what he believed, but for some trumped up false charge, and by a mob, whom he could not have escaped even if he had recanted. So his death does not prove anything in that respect.... The second and only other "martyr" recorded in Acts is the execution of the Apostle James, but we are not told anything about why he was killed or whether recanting would have saved him, or what he thought he died for. In fact, we have one independent account in the Jewish history of Josephus, of the stoning of a certain "James the brother of Jesus" in 62 A.D., possibly but not necessarily the very same James, and in that account he is stoned for breaking the Jewish law, which recanting would not escape..." (See essay here)

Marshall might respond to Carrier's claims in a number of ways, and I invite him to do so. But what is relevant here is a particular issue: whether or not the disciples died for their belief in the resurrection. What evidence do Christian apologists have in mind when they say that the disciples were willing to die for that belief?

In his essay, Carrier goes on to write:

"As far as we can tell, apart from perhaps James, no one knew what the fate was of any of the original eye-witnesses. People were even unclear about who the original eye-witnesses were. There were a variety of legends circulating centuries later about their travels and deaths, but it is clear from our earliest sources that no one knew for certain."

Are Christian apologists (Marshall, Craig, etc.) basing this assertion on later legends, or good history? Robert Price seems to agree with Carrier:

"In fact we do not know that the earliest preachers of Christianity were martyred for their faith. The New Testament does not tell us for sure.... Our earliest "information" comes from unreliable second- and third century documents, starting with the anonymous but so-called First Epistle of Clement, which says, vaguely, that Peter and Paul "witnessed" to their faith in Rome (apparently implying their martyrdom) because of "jealousy." This in turn seems to be a reference to the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, Andrew and others, which have the apostles martyred at the instigation of jealous pagan husbands whose wives, having been converted to Christianity, would no longer sleep with them. These Acts abound in legends, such as Paul baptizing a talking lion. Tertullian (late second century) says the Apostle John survived being boiled in oil. Thus we have no real reason to believe the earliest preachers, whoever they may have been, were martyred for their faith."

Other New Testament scholars offered their opinion on this issue. Dennis MacDonald wrote:

"The claim that the "original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief" not only is misleading, it is risible. People are willing to die for all sorts of causes, and martyrdoms or executions of people often have nothing to do with particular beliefs. Of the twelve disciples, we know of martrydoms of only three of them (Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, though to this one might add the death of James, Jesus' brother), but in no case do we know why they died. What I find even more baffling is the notion that the only reason we know that they believed Jesus had risen from the dead is because they were executed. Such apologetics disguised as solid historical judgment deserves no serious consideration."

Craig Blomberg, a Christian historian and apologist, had this to say:

"There are some traditions such as that of Peter's martyrdom that are fairly probably historically but others that come from quite late sources, the reliability of which are very hard to determine. So it is good not to overstate this claim about all of the apostles (save perhaps John) having been martyred. Of course, even if only some were the argument holds that they knew they were dying for a lie if Jesus were not bodily raised from the dead. But to insist that we know for sure that it was true of eleven of them outstrips the actual evidence."

The only comment in his response that seemed to support Marshall's (and Craig's) assertion was that the argument does not depend on having evidence that all of the apostles were martyred, because "even if only some were," "they knew they were dying for a lie if Jesus were not bodily raised from the dead." And as it happens, the one statement that supported Marshall is actually false (as already demonstrated). The earliest Christians could have believed that Jesus rose from the dead even if he hadn't, so there's no need to assume that they knew their message was a lie.

* * * * *

Perhaps Marshall will want to say that he never claimed (1) or (2). After all, what he really says is simply that the disciples were given "enough firsthand evidence of his resurrection that they were willing to die for him." He does not explicitly say that it was good evidence, only that it was enough for them to be willing to die for Jesus. If he tries this tact, then his point becomes irrelevant, because for all we know they didn't require very much evidence (or very good evidence).

He also does not explicitly say that the disciples were willing to die for their belief in the resurrection, but that they were willing to die for Jesus on the basis of the evidence for the resurrection that they had. But what sense can we make of this? Perhaps if Marshall says this, he can elaborate on his point and explain why it is at all relevant to the question of whether or not Jesus was resurrected. Or he could emphasize that he merely said that the disciples were willing to die, not that they actually did die. But again, what evidence is there that they were willing to die?

Until Marshall answers these questions and provides good evidence, this passage in his book is merely an unsubstantiated claim.

* * * * *

Addendum on Craig's Evidence

In his email to me, Hector Avalos considered one line of evidence that Craig has adduced in favor of his claim that the disciples were willing to die for their belief in Jesus' resurrection. I'll reproduce Avalos' criticism below:

"Craig states: "We learn from Josephus that James was eventually martyred for his faith in Jesus Christ during a lapse in the civil government in the mid 60s." (Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, eds. Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? [Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000] p. 190).

What Josephus actually says is:

"Ananus thought he had a favorable opportunity... And so he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned." (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XX.200-201. Edition and Translation of L. H. Feldman [Loeb Classical Library: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965] p. 106-109).

In other words, Josephus does NOT say that James was "martyred for his faith in Christ" but for transgressing the law, which can mean a lot of things (e.g., not observing the Sabbath---see Exodus 31:15).

Moreover, as I have pointed out in The End of Biblical Studies, Josephus is not always a good source for the first century because ALL manuscripts of Josephus are from the Middle Ages, and so we have no way to know whether Christians have not added material to the original text of Josephus."

A Pious Perversion of History (Part One)

2009-06-03T14:17:00.001-05:00

This title sums up my feelings regarding the writings of certain authors who argue that the United States was in some sense founded as a "Christian nation" by devoutly Christian men. This topic is far too complicated for me to completely delve into on this blog, but as I am currently researching and writing a paper about it, I'd like to be able to share some instances of what I think is bad history being written by people who seem to be advocating the Christian nation position.

In conducting my research, I made the unfortunate mistake of actually purchasing some of these books on Amazon.com instead of having my university library find and borrow copies of them for my use. One of the books I bought was America's Christian Heritage by Gary DeMar. The book intends to be a short history of the founding of the United States of America with an emphasis on the importance of God and Christianity to the project. When I ordered it, I wasn't expecting to receive some substantial scholarly book; the Amazon page says it's a mere eighty-eight pages long, far shorter than decent histories of the time period. When the package came in the mail, I was somewhat surprised to find out that it is put together very much like a children's book. The pages are approximately 8.5" x 11", and nearly every page has at least one picture. Even so, I still assumed that DeMar could make his case in that kind of a book, so I thought it would be fair to read what he has to say and evaluate his arguments. I'll evaluate some of his arguments in my paper, but for now I'd like to point out just one detail that caught my attention.

In Chapter 1 DeMar discusses the importance of Christianity for the early colonists. It's common knowledge that many devout men and women came to America in the early years of colonization in order to create a new society with Christianity as its focal point. Of course, there were other motivations for coming to the New World, but this was an important factor for numerous people. This is all interesting information, and DeMar seems to tell the story with as much emphasis on Christianity as he can muster.

But he seems to want to go beyond merely claiming that the Christian God was important to the colonists; from what I can gather, he wants to make the more bold claim that God actually played an active role in helping things along. This was a view held by the colonists (and even many of the Founding Fathers in the eighteenth century), men who often referred to "Divine Providence." Regarding the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, DeMar explains that the men "were not suitably prepared to handle the hardships that would confront them" (15). However, "their Christian faith saw them through." On this point, he writes: "The Jamestown colonists suffered great hardship. At a time when they were nearly out of food, with their original colony down to about fifty from the original 104, God provided sustenance from an unlikely source." That source consisted of Indians who brought food.

The story has been drastically understated by DeMar. It is common knowledge that the colonists faced enormous hardships in the early years of Jamestown's existence. Historian Howard Zinn, talking of these early times, writes: "The first settlement had a hundred persons, who had one small ladle of barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less food. Many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground..." (24).

Death was an all-too-common phenomenon for the early Jamestown settlers, who, as DeMar rightly noted, weren't really prepared to start a successful colony. The men were notoriously lazy, and they also suffered quite a bit from disease. Historian Virginia Bernhard writes: "From May to September that first year, fifty men had died. Sickness--malaria, dysentery, typhoid, ship's fever--had plagued Jamestown from the beginning" (615).

They (perhaps unreasonably) had the expectation that the Indians would help sustain them by providing food. But the colonists and the Indians didn't always get along. So even though it might have seemed like a miracle from God when the "savages" provided food for the hungry Englishmen, such feelings must have evaporated when the Indians turned their bows on them.

This is precisely what happened in the infamous winter of 1609-1610, often called the "starving time" of the Jamestown colony. At the time there was, in the words of William M. Kelso (Head Archaeologist of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project), "serious animosity between the Indians and the English" (38). A number of Indians besieged Jamestown and "withheld even their occasional food deliveries" (39). As a result, the vast majority of colonists died that winter and spring--many from hunger. Howard Zinn confirms this, writing that the colonists who were "crazed for want of food... died in batches" that winter (24). Archeological finds reported by Kelso suggest that Jamestown colonists were forced to eat horses, dogs, cats, and even rats (92-93). Historian Alan Taylor summarizes Jamestown's situation like this:

"[T]he colonists died in droves from disease and hunger. Of the initial 104, only 38 were alive nine months later. Despite shipping hundreds of reinforcements annually, the Virginia Company barely kept ahead of the continuing deaths at Jamestown. In December 1609 there were 220 colonists; after an especially deadly winter, only 60 remained alive by the next spring. One starving colonist killed and ate his wife, for which he was tried, convicted, and burned at the stake." (130)

Virginia Bernhard comments that "this woman's story is one of the grisliest events in early American history" (617-18). Colonist George Percy describes the event with a little bit more detail: "one of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river, and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food."

Regarding the "starving time," Zinn quotes a 1619 document from the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia:

"...driven thru insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian, digged by some out of his grave after he had lain buried three days and wholly devoured him... one among them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head..." (24)

George Percy further tells of the lengths the colonists were driven to in order to sustain themselves. After explaining that some men were forced to eat their boots and other leather products, he writes:

"Some were enforced to search the woods and to feed upon serpents and snakes and to dig the earth for wild and unknown roots, where many of our men were cut off of and slain by the savages. And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which has fallen from their weak fellows."

If these early reports are accurate, then the colonists were in such dire straits that some felt it was necessary to drink human blood and eat dead people.

The suffering of the Jamestown settlement did not end after the infamous winter of 1609-1610. The men, women, and children struggled to survive in the following years in some of the worst living conditions imaginable. Zinn quotes an early document drafted by colonists who were "complaining against the twelve-year governorship of Sir Thomas Smith" which paints a picture of life in Jamestown:

"In those 12 years of Sir Thomas Smith, his government, we aver that the colony for the most part remained in great want and misery under most severe and cruel laws.... The allowance in those times for a man was only eight ounces of meale and half a pint of peas for a day... mouldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and not fit for beasts, which forced many to flee for relief to the savage enemy, who being taken again were put to sundry deaths as by hanging, shooting and breaking upon the wheel... of whom one for stealing two or three pints of oatmeal had a bodkin thrust through his tongue and was tied with a chain to a tree until he starved." (24)

It is no surprise that Jamestown was not a very successful financial venture. Eminent historian Sydney Ahlstrom writes:

"The cost of the experiment was high. The company lost over £200,000 in the enterprise, and finally collapsed in bankruptcy. By 1616 some 1,600 colonists had been sent from England; but only 350 were still alive. By 1618 the population had grown to about 1,000, yet in 1623, despite the immigration of 4,000 more, the population still numbered only 1,200. Ravaged by Indian massacres, pestilence, misgovernment, sloth, avarice, disorderliness, and neglect, the Jamestown settlement all but expired." (105)

If the colonists at Jamestown were helped along by a loving God who wanted to ensure their survival by giving them food to eat, he sure had an interesting way of making his presence known. One wonders whether the colonists, before bringing the human or rat flesh to their lips, had the courtesy to thank God for the sustenance.

* * * * *

A word of caution is in order. Technically, DeMar's words could be read to merely imply that the colonists believed that God had provided sustenance when the Indians showed up with food, not that he (DeMar) believes God was involved. So although the common sense reading of the passage is what I attributed to him above, he is welcome to clear the matter up for himself.

For my part, I recently contacted him via email to confirm that this was indeed the meaning of the passage in question, but our correspondence consisted of him providing ambiguous responses to my questions (which I took to be evasive). After asking him the question three times and not getting a straight answer, I simply told him that I would assume this is what he meant. For those interested, I'll post my questions and his responses in order:

(1) You make much of the fact that the Christian God was centrally important to the colonists (even those in Jamestown). On p. 15 you discuss some of the hardships that they had in Jamestown, and you write: "God provided sustenance from an unlikely source." (i.e. Indians with food). Do you mean to say that the colonists thought God was providing sustenance--as some of them did--or is it your belief that God really did play a role as provider there?

These Christians were great believers in God’s Providence. The word is used often in their writings. The “Indians,” even though heathens, were still under God’s Providential care and direction.

Since I still wasn't clear about his answer, I rephrased the question in my next email:

(2) I know that some of the colonists in Jamestown believed that God was helping them when the Indians arrived with food, but in your book are you saying that God really was helping? This presupposes that God exists and intervenes in human affairs, obviously. So in your opinion, did God really send the Indians there with food to help the colonists? That's what your book seems to say but I wasn't sure if you meant to write something else.

The colonists believed in God’s providence, good or bad. All that happened in their lives was the result of God’s providence.

And since even this response could be read both ways, I asked him one final time:

(3) Do you, Gary DeMar, believe that God really does exist and really was intervening in human affairs to help the hungry colonists in Jamestown when the Indians arrived with food?

Of course I believe God exists. You need to study the doctrine of Providence.

* * * * *

Sources Consulted

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Bernhard, Virginia. " 'Men, Women and Children' at Jamestown: Population and Gender in Early Virginia, 1607-1610." The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Nov., 1992), pp. 599-618.

Kelso, William M. Jamestown: The Buried Truth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. "Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown." The Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Jun., 1979), pp. 24-40.

Morgan, Edmund S. "The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18." The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jun., 1971), pp. 595-611.

Percy, George. A True Relation. London, 1624. Excerpted here.

Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperPerennial, 2005.

Democrats at Liberty University?

2009-05-27T10:12:00.009-05:00

Many of you already know that Liberty University is an evangelical Christian school founded by the late Jerry Falwell. Its website boasts that it is "the largest and fastest growing Christian Evangelical university in the world" and "the largest private university in Virginia." The school's mission statement reads that its purpose is:

"To develop Christ-centered men and women with the values, knowledge, and skills essential to impact tomorrow's world. The mission is carried out for resident students through a rigorous academic program and structured social environment."

It's always interesting to learn how far-reaching the implications are when an evangelical school has a hand in structuring the social lives of its students. Recently in Ohio, a student at a fundamentalist Baptist school was suspended for attending the prom of his girlfriend's high school. According to a news story, the student's school "forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing."

It's no surprise, then, that a private university such as Liberty would have a strict list of rules for student conduct--what is generally called "The Liberty Way." Students there are also not allowed to attend "social dances." In addition, they cannot watch R-rated movies, drink alcohol or use tobacco products, or enter the bedroom of a member of the opposite sex (except on a special designated day once a semester). According to one source, students must perform "20 hours of Christian community service every semester" and must regularly attend prayer meetings and convocation services. The Wikipedia article says of Liberty's dress code:

"In the summer of 2005, the university announced it was slightly relaxing its in-class dress code to allow flip-flops, capri pants, jeans, and other casual articles of clothing (but not shorts) to be worn in the classroom as long as the clothing did not have holes in them. Rules such as collared shirts for male students still apply."

But something that happened recently has, in the opinion of many people, further revealed the school to be anything but a bastion of liberty. The university felt obligated to shut down the local chapter of College Democrats (founded last October, before the presidential election) because, in the words of Jerry Falwell Jr., "over the last eight months, they've supported a lot of candidates that were not pro-life, not pro-family."

Translation: "We will not sanction an official university group which appears to be okay with the pro-choice opinions of others."

It's no surprise coming from an institution which attempts to control almost every other aspect of its students' private lives. Why not try and control their political activism as well?

How Gullible Could the Disciples Have Been?

2009-05-21T17:54:00.007-05:00

Something that I've been wondering about lately is how skeptical the early followers of Jesus would have been regarding his miracles and resurrection. The best documents we have regarding these individuals are the Gospels, which were anonymously written decades later by people who had a vested interest in promoting their religion; thus, I don't think we have anything which we could confidently trust to give us an accurate picture of how the disciples really reacted to Jesus' miracles. For example, even if it were the case that there is a kernel of truth in the so-called "appearance narratives," we cannot be sure that any skepticism displayed in the stories by a character reflects actual skepticism to the resurrection tale by an actual disciple. As such, we cannot conclude that the disciples would have been extremely critical investigators who would have carefully evaluated the evidence for the resurrection.

This leaves open an important question: If we cannot confidently say that the earliest Christians were skeptical and critical thinkers, how gullible might they have been? What I've posted here are two videos in which James Hydrick (a man who claimed to have psychic powers) somehow moves objects without touching them.

In the first video, after Hydrick does his trick he is challenged by James Randi to put his powers to a simple scientific test. Randi offered to pay Hydrick $10,000 dollars if he could pass the test.

The next video briefly describes how James Hydrick was further exposed as a fraud, and finally confessed that he did not have psychic powers:

Would the disciples have reacted to similar phenomena with awe and amazement, or would they have thought that the performer might be tricking them? And even if they did think there was a chance they were being duped, would they have reacted like James Randi did in the first video, or would they have merely said "hey, wait a minute, let me see that again" and watched more closely?

The fact is, ordinary people can and are tricked all the time, and they often end up believing all sorts of things. Faith healers manage to convince thousands of people that they can summon the Holy Spirit to cure diseases--so much so that people shovel their money over. If James Randi were to watch Benny Hinn "heal" somebody, there's no chance he would convert before putting Hinn to a valid scientific test. Can we say the same of the earliest Christians?

Letters to the Editor

2009-05-08T00:16:00.016-05:00

Some of you have already seen these before, but for those who haven't, I've decided to post the letters of mine that have been printed in the St. Joseph News Press (St. Joseph, MO). On numerous occasions I've been struck by something somebody wrote in their published letter, and in a few of these instances I've had the desire and motivation to write some sort of response. What follows, then, are snippets of newspaper conversations.

* * * * *

God and the Constitution

Over the years, I have heard more and more of our so-called educated judges in the courts come up with "constitutional" or "unconstitutional."

By this letter, I will tell those educated, liberal devil's advocates, our founding fathers explicitly wrote the Constitution with the Lord God in mind and forefront.

Even more so, the Constitution was directed by biblical teaching and fully intended that the Bible and godly laws and principles were implemented in American society.

In the last 20-plus years, America has become as the days of Noah, which were ungodly wicked, rebellious to the Lord, his Commandments and biblical laws.

For your information, Christ Jesus did not abolish the law but fulfilled it. Another point for your information, Jesus did not come into the world to bring peace but to bring a division to those who are truly his and those who are not Christ's.

Furthermore, the war on terrorists is definitely not Bush's war, but rather the survival of America opposed to Osama bin Laden and his terrorists which, by the way, are rogue Islamic anti-Christian Muslim terrorists who want us dead.

Are you people so dumb and destitute of the truth you believe the liberal devil's advocates' lies and deceptions?

-Rodney R. Bruns
Troy, Kan.

Have you read the Constitution?

On March 29, Rodney Bruns claimed that the Constitution was written with God in mind, and that it was intended to establish a Christian order. I can only wonder which Constitution he is reading, if any at all.

In reality, the U.S. Constitution contains no mention of God or Christianity. It says nothing about the virtues of Christian ethics or “godly laws.” Breaking from the status quo, the Constitution didn’t even mention a generic “Creator” (as did Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence), a “Supreme Being,” or anything of the sort. In fact, this very absence caused an uproar among many Christians at the time. They complained that the document was irreligious and some even proposed (without success) adding religious phrases before ratification. As a popular story has it, when Alexander Hamilton was asked why God and Christianity were missing from the Constitution, he simply replied “we forgot.”

It’s genuinely puzzling to me how Mr. Bruns interprets the absence of God and Christianity from the Constitution to mean that the Founding Fathers were intending to create a Christian government. His position is clearly out of touch with history.

-Landon Hedrick,
Maryville, MO

A local named Bobby Despain wrote a follow-up letter commending the original letter by Bruns. He specifically wrote:

As for the letter to the editor by Rodney R. Bruns, I want to say well-written and job well done. I also want to add that liberals are destroying this country. Since God is slowly but surely being taken out of everything this country was founded on, this country is definitely falling apart. Haven’t people noticed the disasters in this country have gotten worse over the last several years? Unless we get this country back to serving God, I would say they are only going to get worse and more terrible. I hope people will think about this before it is too late.

* * * * *

Later in the year, as election day was approaching, letters were pouring in to the newspaper urging people to vote for this or that candidate or based on some particular issue.

Morality should be our No. 1 concern

Our liberal media keeps telling us that the top concern among voters is the economy when it comes to choosing a presidential candidate. It shouldn't be.

Our No. 1 concern should be the moral principles of each candidate and what they believe. Otherwise, our choice will not matter. God will remove his hand from our nation, if he hasn't already, and the disasters we have experienced these last few years will pale in comparison to what we will experience in future months and years, until we return to the Christian heritage our nation was founded upon.

-B.L. Martin
Trenton, MO

Consider the issues

B.L. Martin argued in a recent letter that when we vote Tuesday we should not concern ourselves with the candidates' economic policies, but instead, with their morals and religious beliefs. If we don't heed his advice, Martin has a good feeling that God will bring destruction to our nation.

It's time to stop pretending that we know who the creator of the universe wants us to vote for. The decision before us needs to take into account important issues including the war in Iraq, health care, climate change and, yes, the economy. However we decide to rank the issues in order of importance, it should be clear that our intuitions about the political desires of an ancient deity ought to be at the bottom of the list.

Martin, Missouri's very own prophet, predicts that if we vote on the basis of actual political issues (and the candidates' positions on them), God will either cause or allow unprecedented disasters to befall us. I wonder how he knows this. After all, what reason could we have to believe that he has access to the mind of an infinite being? I won't hold my breath waiting for any evidence to surface, and neither should you.

-Landon Hedrick
Maryville, MO

Another somewhat relevant letter was published directly next to mine in the newspaper that day:

Choose life

This letter is addressed to all the “Christians” out there. Are you a Christian? Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God? Have you asked him to be your Lord and Savior? If so, does this affect the way you will be voting in the upcoming election? These questions should be the most important ones you consider before voting. Democrat, Republican, independent, whatever! The only issue that will make a difference for eternity is how you vote based on God’s word. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So Choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendents.” (Deuteronomy 29:19 NAS)

All the major candidates have made their stands very clear for us. Consider this and choose life.

-Beth Downing
King City, MO

* * * * *

Early this year I read an interesting letter in the newspaper written by Bobby Despain (already mentioned above):

What about our rights?

I want to let Charles B. Larson know that I thought his letter in the paper the other day (Dec. 28) was great and I really enjoyed reading it. I also read an article in the paper the other day that really said it like it is. The secular movement is trying to get Christianity completely out of this country. It is time for the Christians to start letting the government know that we have our rights too and that this nation was built and founded on God’s word.

I know now why they call Christians the far right and the seculars and liberals the far left. It is because as Christians who follow Jesus Christ Lord God Almighty, we are by far on the right side. The seculars and liberals who don’t believe or like Jesus Christ are by far going to be left behind when the rapture happens.

I really think it is time for Christians to start letting the liberals and seculars know that we aren’t going to let them intimidate us anymore.

I want to give the nonbelievers something to think about: If you have children and you love them and are teaching them not to believe in Christ, you are leading them down the path of destruction that leads them straight into an eternity of the agony and torment of hell. I really hope you think real hard about this and find Jesus Christ is real. God loves you and wants you to be in heaven with him, but it is your choice to make. All you have to do is give your heart to him and ask him to forgive you and cleanse you of your sins — only he can do that. I hope I will see you in heaven.

-Bobby Despain
St. Joseph, MO

The letter I wrote in response to Despain was too long, so parts of it were taken out before it was published. As I later thought about it, I didn't really have a problem with the editor removing most of the material that was removed, so I'll post the letter here in the form that it was published (adding one line that I wish they'd retained).

Religious inaccuracies

The “letters” section of this newspaper is often overflowing with the pious opinions of various Christians, some of whom apparently have no qualms with letting non-believers know that they will be condemned to an eternity of pain and suffering by a loving God. One such Christian is Mr. Bobby Despain, who in a recent letter (Jan. 15) made a number of interesting claims.

In the first place, Mr. Despain asserted that “this nation was built and founded on God’s word.” This claim can be interpreted in a number of ways, but ultimately, it is either false or irrelevant. If what Mr. Despain is saying is that the U.S. Constitution is grounded in biblical teaching, then it is simply false. One need look no further than the Constitution itself to verify this fact: there is no mention of God or Christianity to be found there, nor is the Bible anywhere quoted. The Founding Fathers did not mention in the Constitution that God’s word was to serve as any sort of standard or guide for posterity.

Secondly, it was claimed that non-Christians are going to be “left behind” when the rapture occurs. Historically, those who have made predictions of any sort of rapture have a perfect record of getting things wrong. People have spent many years of their lives preparing for the imminent return of Jesus all to no avail. If history is our teacher, then we can reasonably expect the same trend of failed predictions to continue in the future.

Lastly, and most disturbingly, Mr. Despain declares that non-Christian children will be punished with “the agony and torment of hell” for eternity, so we had better teach our children to be followers of Jesus. Needless to say, there is no evidence for any supreme being who condemns children to an eternity of suffering. And even if there were evidence for such a monster, it’s hard to see why he would be deserving of our praise. In the words of a close friend of mine, I must say: I think God is bigger than that.

-Landon Hedrick
Maryville, MO

Despain later offered a brief response to my letter:

You have a choice

This letter is in response to two things. First, I want to thank my church family for their show of love and kindness to my wife and I during our recent illnesses. They called and offered their help in any way they could help and sent cards, and I really appreciate them and their prayers.

Second, I want to respond to the letter by Landon Hedrick in the paper on Jan. 23. I didn’t say there was anything in the Constitution about prayer or the Bible, but I did say this nation was founded on God’s word. Our Founding Fathers put God first in everything. It isn’t what is written down on paper that counts, but what comes from the heart. This was a great country until the ’60s crowd started tearing it apart with their evil ways.

The rapture will happen one day whether you believe it or not, and the nonbelievers will be left behind. Once children reach the age of knowing the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, then they will have to choose which way they will travel life’s roads.

-Bobby Despain
St. Joseph, MO

* * * * *

I later came across a letter by a woman named Laurel Evans and one by Timothy Meinecke and briefly responded to both:

Don’t knock religion

Religion, especially Christianity, has taken a licking in “It’s Your Call” recently. Christianity has been accused of “teaching hate,” “being bullies,” “being a con game” and teaching the false doctrine of life beyond a “dirt nap.” Callers have proclaimed their right to “not have religion forced on us.”

I can’t help but wonder what caused such bitter denunciations of something that has been a component of the culture of the world since the beginning of time. From the outset, there has been a sense of a force beyond our natural lives. This gave rise to religion in some form by even the most primitive civilizations.

Christianity has been a part of the world scene for more than 2,000 years, and has permeated the society of the United States since it was founded, mainly by people seeking religious freedom from intolerant European theocracies.

I would like to know why the callers believe as they do. Are the many millions of people who embrace the Christian concept wrong? Do those who don’t accept it have a book to validate their claims? Why are they so offended by things Christian? Do they not realize they are just as powerless against the forces of faith as Christians are against secular society’s insistent claims? That the Constitution grants everyone the right to free speech? And also the right to practice their religion without fear of repression?

Although the secular side tires to shut us up, we may “take a licking, but we will keep on ticking” for as long as God gives us breath.

-Laurel Evans
Stanberry, MO

The illusion of neutrality

I agree wholeheartedly with the “Don’t knock religion” letter by Laurel Evans (Your letters, Feb. 3), and I would like to reinforce this matter with my own letter.

I believe that much of today’s hatred toward religion, Christianity in particular, stems from an influx of postmodern philosophy coming out of the academic arena. If you are a student or a professor who enjoys kicking religion around, here are a few points you can ponder:

The necessity of coherency is often challenged, and yet a coherent answer to the challenge is expected. The existence of absolutes is challenged, and yet students are graded by a set of absolutes laid down by those who grade their work. Those who belittle religion have begun with a narrow starting point. Religion is a type of something larger. The larger whole is worldviews. How do we justify discriminating against religious worldviews? The answer cannot be found in plurality, for plurality, when promoted, is a worldview in and of itself. If plurality is promoted above all others, how can it then escape the claims of “exclusive” or “bigoted”?

Plurality and relativism necessitate inconsistency among the components of which it is comprised, therefore these inconsistencies among the various parts are an absolute in and of themselves when viewed on the level of the whole, as opposed to the component level view. Those in our academic settings who belittle religion do not cater to the freedom of choice within the marketplace of ideas, but rather seek to clone themselves by promoting their own ideologies, which is the very taboo of which they accuse persons of religious persuasions in the first place.

Keep on chasing that illusion of neutrality. Truth is exclusive by its very nature. All one has to do is disagree with that statement, and in so doing, they have proven it to be correct.

-Timothy L. Meinecke
Trenton, MO

Burden of proof

On Feb. 3, Laurel Evans asked if “the many millions” of Christians are wrong, and whether or not non-Christians “have a book to validate their claims.” Timothy Meinecke followed on Feb. 7 by claiming that much of the attacks on religion and Christianity are rooted in postmodern philosophy.

I wonder if Ms. Evans finds it hard to believe that millions of people could be wrong. Surely as a Christian (which she presumably is) she would deny the claims of Islam, but are all those millions of Muslims simply wrong? Judging by the claims being made, a significant portion of the world’s population must be wrong. And non-Christians do not need a book to justify their non-Christianity. This would place the burden of proof on non-believers, when clearly it is the believers who must shoulder the burden. It is for this reason that non-astrologers do not need to justify their non-belief in astrology.

As for the notion that the attacks on Christianity are rooted in a flawed postmodern philosophy, I have noticed a different trend. Many people are stating, in no uncertain terms, that God does not exist and Jesus was not raised from the dead. Richard Dawkins triumphantly declares that God is a “delusion,” and Dawkins et al are not postmodernists. What is really needed is a strong positive case for Christianity, not a rebuttal of postmodernism.

-Landon Hedrick
Maryville, MO

Timothy Meinecke later published a response:

In response to Landon Hedrick's letter, Burden of Proof (Feb. 25, 2009) I am finding a careful choice of words, strategically positioned views, and outright dogmatic assertions. Mr. Hedrick stated, "non-Christians do not need a book to justify their non-Christianity." However, he avoids denying that atheists have such books. The majority of sacred religious texts are consolidated volumes. For example, the word Bible literally means "a book full of books."

On the other hand, postmodernists, secular humanists, and atheists all draw upon a variety of books written by others who share their views. Mr. Hedrick proves this in his letter when he stated, "non-astrologers do not need to justify their non-belief in astrology." This line is taken directly from well-known atheist and author Sam Harris's book Letter to a Christian Nation. The fact that these types of reference books have not been consolidated into one volume by any particular worldview is secondary to the undeniable fact that atheists and other non-Christians do indeed use written works to justify their non-belief.

Those who use these books resent being categorized, rather preferring to remain elusive and their views held unaccountable. However the fact remains that non-religious persons of all types do represent other worldviews, and they do have literature that they use in defense of those views, as well as using it to justify their disbelief of other views contrary to their own. Postmodernism, secular humanism, and atheism are different ideologies, however they are very often intertwined. So while well-known atheists such as Richard Dawkins may not be postmodernists, they do fit into at least one of the other two categories.

(Note: If anybody knows where in the book Letter to a Christian Nation Sam Harris uses that line, please let me know. It's possible that I used Harris' words without knowing it, but I certainly didn't flip open his book and intentionally plagiarize. I haven't had an opportunity to search through the book and find that line, and I suspect it isn't even there, but if anybody finds it I'd be interested in getting a page number.)

"Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?" Craig and Carrier Debate

2009-03-31T21:09:00.027-05:00

Now that the debate is finally over with I think it would be fitting to give a final report of everything, beginning to end. What follows is a somewhat lengthy account of the debate beginning at the planning stages, running through negotiations and preparations, and finally ending with my own review of the debate. I’ve labeled these main sections so you can skip whatever doesn’t interest you and read what does.

The Beginning

Everything began way back in the fall semester of 2007 when I had the idea of contacting some well-known scholars to see what it would take to bring them to my school (Northwest Missouri State University). My first choice was Sam Harris, an author who writes enjoyable books and essays about religion, whether you would classify him as a “scholar” or not. But when I contacted a representative, I was informed that it would cost—brace yourself—a whopping $26,000 to get him to come speak on campus. Our largest comfortable auditorium holds a little over a thousand people, so I did the math and determined that we could purchase a thousand copies of The End of Faith and a thousand copies of Letter to a Christian Nation (his two books), give them away to students, and we’d still be spending about $6,000 less than we would spend having him come visit. I was reminded of a line in Harris’ first book: “The philosopher Peter Unger has made a persuasive case that a single dollar spent on anything but the absolute essentials of our survival is a dollar that has some starving child's blood on it." (The End of Faith, p. 141) With this in mind, I didn’t think there was any way I could morally justify spending twenty-six thousand blood-soaked dollars on a couple of hours with Sam Harris.

I next considered Richard Carrier, since his website said he would do this sort of thing for free, given that his expenses are all paid. I was impressed by the work of his that I had read and considered him a worthy opponent for contemporary Christian apologists, so I also contacted Dr. William Lane Craig’s speaking representative to see if he’d be interested in a debate. I was surprised to learn not only that the two of them would be willing to debate, but that the event could be pulled off for a substantially lesser amount of money than Harris alone would have charged.

I asked Carrier what topics he would like to debate with Craig and he told me that he was not really interested in debating the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus, since he had come to believe that both of those topics are too large to cover in a short oral debate. Nevertheless, he gave me four other options: (1) Do We Need God To Be Moral?, (2) Are Moral Facts Evidence of God?, (3) Does God Care About Us?, and (4) Are The Gospels Historically Reliable? After eliminating the first topic I passed the other three along to Craig and of these options he chose to debate “Are Moral Facts Evidence of God?" This would have been a fitting debate, since Craig has published widely on the topic already and has even debated it with some well-known scholars (see Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? for example). Carrier has written and lectured on the same topic (see Sense and Goodness Without God).

This remained the planned topic for over a year until further negotiations convinced Carrier to reconsider the possibility of debating the resurrection of Jesus. He really wanted to debate “Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?” before debating the resurrection, since he thinks that topic has to be settled first—before we attempt to infer any “facts” from the Gospels. But he said that he’d debate the resurrection as long as Craig made it clear that he was in fact turning down the Gospel debate and gave some explanation why. (Carrier’s criticism of Craig on this point can be found here and Craig responded to that criticism on his website he re.) Needless to say, I was pleased that they agreed to debate the resurrection, since that was the debate I think most people wanted to see.

Preparations

I had actually been preparing for the event all throughout the negotiation stages by contacting people here at the university to find out about the funding and venue. We secured half of the funding from Student Senate (when I appeared at one of their meetings and talked about the planned event) and the other half from a Culture of Quality grant. We were also lucky to be able to secure the Mary Linn Performing Arts Center on a date that worked for everybody (March 18).

To advertise the debate, I contacted several Christian organizations on campus and local church leaders to let them know that it would be taking place, and to encourage them to help spread the word. I was definitely satisfied with the responses I got from these individuals and was thankful for their help. But as the news of the debate spread around the internet I began receiving numerous emails asking for details and asking me to reserve seats, something I was willing to do for out-of-towners. All told, these communications comprised hundreds of emails, and we had about fifty people drive in from places like Kansas City, Omaha, St. Louis, and even Columbus, Ohio (if that person ever showed up). And these were just the out-of-towners who had emailed me to reserve seats. I personally knew several other people who drove quite a distance to be there.

My friend Brett Henggeler generously volunteered to make posters for the event. When he emailed his designs to me I was stunned at how great they were. In fact, everybody who commented on them (including both Carrier and Craig—and the faculty here) mentioned how sharp the posters looked, which is all a testament to Brett’s great artwork. As it happened, I had several posters left over after the debate ended and a number of people asked me if they could get one, so I gave them away until I ran out. Brett told me that any time I need posters designed for an event I should contact him, and this is something I'll definitely take him up on if I ever plan another one.

One other thing we needed to do to prepare for the debate was hire somebody to record it. I contacted the Department of Mass Communication here at Northwest and discussed our options with them. We finally decided to hire them to record the debate with two cameras and edit the footage together afterward. (The footage, by the way, will probably be made available by Craig and Carrier at some point in the relatively near future, once the video editing is finished.) I was recently amused, looking through the comments on the debate in a discussion forum, to see somebody write: “Anybody wanna take bets that the video will be "drunk-teen-using-cell-phone" quality?" Let’s hope this person was wrong, and that the video turns out to be of much better quality than the unauthorized one currently posted on YouTube.

The Week of the Debate

On Monday, March 16 Craig was slated to debate Dr. Wes Morriston on the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I was particularly interested in seeing this debate, as I had heard that Morriston’s critiques of Kalam are the best to be found in the literature, and I know that Craig is the best defender of Kalam to be found. So great are Morriston’s critiques of the argument that noted atheist John Loftus suggested on his blog that Craig might have chosen to not mention Morriston in his popular book Reasonable Faith because he didn’t want people to know about his devastating arguments! That, of course, is just speculation, but it generated enough interest in my mind to want to attend the debate. Since I was planning on driving Craig up to Maryville on Tuesday morning anyway, I decided to make the four hour trip to Fulton, MO to watch the Monday night debate and stay at the Holiday Inn Express.

When I arrived at the debate that evening I had Loftus’ new book (Why I Became an Atheist) in hand, having just read through his treatment of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I was considering asking Craig about his theory of time during the audience Q&A session, as Loftus quotes scholars who criticize Craig for accepting a theory that is rejected by most physicists. Instead, when my opportunity came to ask a question, I simply asked Craig to respond to one of Morriston’s arguments that he didn’t have time to respond to during the debate. But before the debate even started, as I sat in the fourth or fifth row, Craig came in and started talking to some of the students in attendance so I went over and introduced myself. He told me that he had been spending all of his time preparing for his resurrection debate with Carrier and hadn’t spent much time at all planning for Morriston. This was interesting, since I had heard that Morriston was the best and assumed Craig would have some major obstacles in the debate. I told Craig that some people have been saying that Morriston’s critiques are the best to be found and he responded something like this: "Well if that’s the best case to be made against the Kalam argument, then I think it’s in pretty good shape!"

The next morning I picked Craig up from the place he was staying and we immediately began discussing the debate with Morriston (I had thought Morriston made a pretty good case regarding many of the arguments). Over the course of our four hour drive we discussed many things: Kalam, Craig’s moral argument for God’s existence, and the resurrection of Jesus stand out most in my mind. In particular, regarding the resurrection, much of the conversation centered on Richard Carrier, whom Craig seems to not trust to fairly and objectively evaluate the evidence for Christianity. I suspect that feeling is probably mutual; Carrier probably believes that Craig is too biased in favor of Christianity to make a fair assessment. One topic that I intended to bring up during that car ride was Craig’s (in my opinion) poor argument against abortion that he offered some time ago on his website. By the time I remembered that I wanted to talk to him about this we were already eating lunch in Maryville, and I thought it might be a bit distasteful.

That evening, Craig, Carrier, Dr. Field (a philosophy professor here—and sponsor of the Philosophy Club), and a few of us philosophy students were able to dine together and talk about various issues. Carrier discussed his dissertation, Craig mentioned the philosophical issues he has been researching of late, Dr. Field told some entertaining stories of old students, and the rest of us talked about work we’ve been doing this semester and our plans for the future.

The next morning Craig lectured on God and morality to Dr. Field’s Introduction to Ethics class—a group of students that were seemingly so unresponsive that they might as well have been listening to music on their iPods. After the short lecture, when the floor was opened up for questions, only one student in the entire class actually asked questions. The rest of the questions came from myself, my friends Ukpong Eyo and Darrin Rasberry (graduate students in Iowa who drove down for the occasion), and Dr. Field. Shortly after this session ended, Carrier gave a talk over three of his books: his dissertation, Sense and Goodness Without God, and On the Historicity of Jesus Christ (which he hasn’t finished writing yet). Darrin and Eyo also attended this, and after the talk the four of us went out to eat lunch and talked about Carrier’s work.

After more hanging out with Carrier, I took him back to his hotel and spent the rest of the day making sure everything was prepared for the debate that evening. As I was checking over everything in the Performing Arts Center, the guy who manages the auditorium told me that we’d be lucky to get a few hundred people to come, and at most we would have five hundred. Since the auditorium has over a thousand seats, he was suggesting that it would be half-empty for the debate. Those who attended can attest to the fact that he was certainly wrong, as there were hardly any empty seats, and at least a thousand people there. I was definitely happy with the turnout.

Review of the Debate

Part of me was expecting Craig to win this debate, but I also wanted Carrier to give him a run for his money, since I think Carrier is one of the best critics of the resurrection writing today. Craig is extremely talented as a speaker and debater, so everybody was expecting him to give a good presentation. But he’s not just a good speaker; he’s also one of the best contemporary scholars defending the resurrection of Jesus. Since he rarely loses his debates (especially his resurrection debates, from what I’ve seen), the assumption was that he would find some way to beat Carrier. And, I suppose, that’s exactly what happened—at least in a way.

There are two issues here that are often mistakenly wrapped into one: (1) which of the debaters “won”? and (2) which of the debaters presented the better arguments? The first issue is often judged based on how polished a debater was in his presentation, and how rhetorically convincing he was. In this respect, Craig certainly came away with the win, as Carrier was too disorganized during rebuttals whereas Craig seemed to know exactly what he wanted to say and said it forcefully. But the more interesting question is the second one: who presented the better arguments? I can’t make a very informed judgment here, but I’d say that if Craig won on this score as well, he did so by a significantly smaller margin.

Carrier’s arguments, if they are correct, are devastating to Craig’s apologetic for the resurrection. By arguing that the authors of the Gospels intended to write symbolic myths rather than record history, Carrier is taking a position on an issue that is widely disputed among current New Testament scholars. He presented some very intriguing parallels that I do not think were adequately addressed during the debate, and this leads me to think that his conclusion is at least somewhat reasonable, though I'm not completely convinced. However, in trying to show that the Gospels are myth, Carrier was forced to present only a portion of the evidence. If he is able to make a convincing case in On The Historicity of Jesus Christ and begin to get more scholars on his side (even though there already are a number of them) then it's possible that people like Craig will have to take the issue more seriously. Craig's argument rests on the idea that you can extract certain historical facts from these documents, so if it is shown that the authors weren't writing with the intention of recording fact but instead with the intention of telling a meaningfully symbolic story then that will give us sufficient reason to presume that the crucifixion and resurrection stories are themselves symbolic myths (thus making it difficult for Craig to extract historical "facts" from the Gospels).

I won’t go through the entire debate and comment on every detail, but there are a few specific things I want to discuss. First, whether you call it a “fallacy” or not, I feel like Dr. Craig poisoned the well in his opening statement. He explained to the audience that the position he (Craig) takes is mainstream among New Testament scholars whereas Carrier doesn’t even believe that Jesus ever existed, a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement. Before the debate Craig and I had talked about Carrier’s position on the historicity of Jesus and we agreed that Carrier would most likely assume for the debate that Jesus existed and then argue from that assumption that there is not sufficient historical evidence to conclude that he was resurrected. So I was somewhat surprised that Craig thought it necessary to mention this, since we both thought it would be irrelevant to how the debate would play out. But, in mentioning it, Craig was (intentionally or not) turning the audience off to anything Carrier would say during the debate, since he was basically painting him as a radical historian out beyond the fringe, endorsing a position that no legitimate scholars accept. Now, as I said, I don’t know what Craig’s intention was here, but that’s the way it came across. And Craig may not realize it, but this strategy could have easily backfired on him. Carrier could have stood up for his opening statement and said something along the lines of: “Craig does not merely accept the reasonable historical hypothesis that Jesus was a profound religious figure who garnered a following in the first century, he actually believes that Jesus had magic powers! He thinks Jesus performed all sorts of miracles and even died for a weekend before coming back to life in a gloriously indestructible body and then flying into the sky to heaven. Further, he believes that these historical documents we’re dealing with are absolutely inerrant, a position that’s so extreme that virtually no credible New Testament scholars accept it." Carrier could have said this, but he didn’t, which means he either didn’t think of it or didn’t want to play that game.

There were times that I think Craig may have been a little too harsh. For example, I think he claimed that Carrier was a “crank” (or else he referred to Carrier’s “crank exegesis”). I’m not sure if this sort of accusation is necessary (or even appropriate) in an oral debate. He also said something like “Carrier needs to learn to read the lines before he can read between the lines,” which is a very clever turn of phrase, but again came across as more of an insult than an actual rebuttal. Of course, the vast majority of those in attendance sided with Craig, and that was clear throughout the evening as statements such as these by Craig caused eruptions of applause and laughter. Most of the people I talked to after the debate (even my Christian friends) felt sorry for Carrier and were even apologetic about the rudeness of the audience. Some of these same people I talked to were disappointed that Craig "stooped" to this sort of behavior. I had a good discussion with a professor a couple of days later and when I asked him if he learned anything from the debate he explained at length that the only thing he learned was that some people are more interested in pompous displays of their intellectual superiority than in actually educating the audience.

Then again, I had friends who were simply disappointed in Carrier’s performance. Many of these complaints had little to do with his arguments but were valid critiques nonetheless. Carrier really does need to be more polished if he’s going to continue debating, but this is not something we can expect him to already be good at, since he just doesn’t have the debating background that Craig has. Yet some of my friends even criticized Carrier for arguing that Jesus should have appeared to everybody in the world, and that the fact that he doesn’t somehow falsifies Christianity. I may blog about this topic later, but I think the confusion here is that it only falsifies some forms of Christianity and not others. And many people were turned off by Carrier’s claims that the early Christians hallucinated. One of my professors seemed to take Carrier to be saying that his own religious experiences were hallucinations, and because of this he didn’t seem to much appreciate what Carrier had to say.

One peculiar thing happened during the debate that some people have been mentioning in their online reviews of the event. After Carrier's first rebuttal, a large number of students stood up and made their way out of the auditorium while Craig was standing at the microphone waiting to begin his next rebuttal. It's been claimed by some of Craig's supporters that these people left because Carrier was just god-awful, but it should be pointed out that such an inference is pure speculation. It's much more likely that these people just had somewhere else to be and didn't realize that the debate was going to be so long. In any case, if they left because Carrier wasn't good enough to keep them interested, this means that Craig also wasn't good enough to keep them interested in the conversation (since they also didn't stick around to see what else he had to say).

Overall, though, I think this was a great event. It was a real treat to be able to host these two individuals (both of whom I have a great deal of respect for), and it was satisfying to finally have the two of them debate this topic (as I’m sure many others will agree). I eagerly look forward to a possible future debate between them.

Welcome To My Nightmare

2009-03-27T16:22:00.004-05:00

Okay, I obviously ripped that title off of Alice Cooper, but I thought it sounded better than "Welcome To My Blog" or even "Welcome To My Mind." In any case, welcome, and thanks for visiting! People have asked and encouraged me for some time now to start a blog and share my thoughts, so after much delay I finally got around to it.

I'm an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy and history at Northwest Missouri State University, and my busy schedule will likely only permit me to post things periodically. Being an undergraduate (or, soon to be a grad student), I don't expect many people will care much for what I have to say. That's fine. But if you like anything you read, feel free to leave a comment letting me know. If you have questions, criticisms, problems, etc. you should also freely post those. Just be sure to keep the comments civil and appropriate.

Check back for more.