Friday, December 22, 2017

Demolishing Triablogue: Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

This makes a point which dovetails with a point I've made on more than one occasion. The argument from evil is typically formulated against a very abstract concept of God, a concept derived from some version of classical theism or philosophical theology, rather than a more concrete, specific concept such as biblical theism:
Then I must be doing much better than the atheists you prefer to pay attention to.   Your God causes men to rape women (Deut. 28:30, 63;  Isaiah 13:13-18).  While for most Christians rape's absolute immorality is a non-negotiable, Calvinists like yourself are required to call it just as good as Christian worship of Jesus, since both constitute something God is making people do, and you are more committed to God's acts being good, than you are in common sense, apparently.
Jeanine Diller (2016) points out that, just as most theists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God exists, most atheists have a particular concept of God in mind when they assert that God does not exist.
That's true about me and my atheism.  The gods of the bible , including everybody from Yahweh to Dagon, do not exist except in the imagination.
Indeed, many atheists are only vaguely aware of the variety of concepts of God that there are.
But atheists like me are keenly aware of the fatal problems ensconced in your biblical god.
For example, there are the Gods of classical and neo-classical theism: the Anselmian God, for instance, or, more modestly, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good creator-God that receives so much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion. There are also the Gods of specific Western theistic religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Sikhism, which may or may not be best understood as classical or neo-classical Gods...Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances.
And less informed atheists would be more rational to throw up their hands at all this confused bullshit, than they would be to just carry around a "what if I'm wrong" as a motive to ceaselessly examine every stupid claim possible.
Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify (Diller 2016: 11–16).
Not at all, the argument from religious language:  You cannot define god in a way that "coheres" with known scientific reality, hence your God is an "incoherent" concept and that's alone sufficient to win the debate.  No, you cannot show that any such thing as "disembodied intelligence" exists, even despite anything you might find in “The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters”, J.P.Moreland, Ph.d,  Moody Publishers, 2014.  So the whole idea of your god runs afoul of the evidence that claims the most successful empirical demonstration.  Your god is no more likely to exist in some place I haven't checked, than Vishnu is.
Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities.
Then count me out of the criticism.  The argument against God from religious language is conclusive against ANY life form existing without a physical body.
Nor have they reflected on what criteria must be satisfied in order for a concept of God to count as “legitimate”,
"Legitimate" would minimally require "subject to detection by empirical means".  You couldn't show that criteria to be too demanding without your own resort to empirical means to establish the rebuttal...so apparently requiring empirical confirmation really is reasonable.
let alone on the possibility of legitimate God concepts that have not yet been conceived
Disqualifying YOUR particular god from the race is all I care about.  If in fact there is some god out there not yet known, you run the risk of being in more trouble with him than I.  According to your own bible, misrepresenting god is worse than general disbelief.  Atheists might be "fools", but damnation is assured for those who teach about God wrongly  (Gal. 1:8, James 3:1).  So your own presuppositions counsel that steering clear of "God" altogether are likely the safer route, than would be taking the chance, "accepting Jesus" then flipping a coin to figure out which of the thousands of denominations isn't engaging in the sin of misrepresenting god.
and on the implications of that possibility for the issue of whether or not global atheism is justified. Furthermore, the most ambitious atheistic arguments popular with philosophers, which attempt to show that the concept of God is incoherent or that God’s existence is logically incompatible either with the existence of certain sorts of evil or with the existence of certain sorts of non-belief [Schellenberg 2007]), certainly won’t suffice to justify global atheism
Your "rebuttal" to the skeptical theory of god's incoherence, is something less than frightful.
Nor is it obvious that evidential arguments from evil can be extended to cover all legitimate God concepts, though if all genuine theisms entail that ultimate reality is both aligned with the good and salvific (in some religiously adequate sense of “ultimate” and “salvific”), then perhaps they can. The crucial point, however, is that no one has yet made that case.
Not worried; your bible god causes men to rape women and children, and causes men to to beat children to death.  I plan to have a glorious career successfully motivating Christians to use what the bible says as a perfectly reasonable justification to say the Christian god is a moral monster and thus not likely anyting more significant than the wishful thinking of the biblical authors.

PeaceByJesus12/21/2017 9:27 PMIt seems that at least for the militant atheists who make Hitler a Christian but deny atheism had anything negative to do with chairman Mao etc,
I am in agreement with apologists that you cannot judge a belief system merely by what you find its converts doing, since they could very well be acting contrary to their belief systems.
and presume omniscient morally superiority to God when railing against Him to exterminating terminally wicked cultures (when they are not blaming Him for not dealing with the wicked), then it seems that the God they have such animus to may be a supernatural version of their own father, since it can seem so personal. Which is the nature of us after all.
Then count me out;  my reasons for calling your God a piece of shit are strictly biblical, and the fact that most Christians have had problems with the divine atrocities of the bible forbids  you from grounding my views solely in spiritual blindness or some other esoteric bullshit, unless of course you too are a Calvinist.  But if so, then because God predestined me to be blind and I cannot resist it, you'd have to call that act of God good.  Hence, atheism is good because it is an act of God who blinds men's minds.
In any case, this imaginary god is from the devil, who, right from the beginning, presented God (to Eve) as a malevolent tyrant who selfishly kept her from what was rightfully hers, thus making her a victim of injustice by God, who needed to "share the wealth" - not in mercy or grace (which is antithetical to the ethos of the devil), but as a matter of justice.
Your idiot god could have avoided the problem of the Fall by keeping the Tree of knowledge out of their physical reach.  I would advise that your god is rather stupid and mentally ill since he apparently wasn't satisfiied with the way things were going in the pre-creation state, otherwise, he'd have been content thereto and thus would have had no motive to go complicate his life.
And which was an extension of the "share the wealth" demand behind the first "occupy movement," that of the devil presuming to occupy the position of God, not at a matter of grace to an object of mercy, but as his right, as the first of the liberal self-proclaimed elites, who "climb up some other way" (Jn. 10:1) to obtain what God gives in grace in recompensing the obedience of faith, and seduce souls with the idea that they are victims of injustice if they do not have what others obtained by merit. And to such these political psychologists present themselves as saviors, though they typically will not share the plight of their victims, but present themselves as examples of what can be obtained if they are given or maintain power.
Sorry, but fools like you are beyond help, with how blindly you trust in the truth of an ANE story where a snake talks to a woman.  Snip:
I guess i got carried away, but the atheists are apostles unawares of the Evil One.
And your hero Steve Hays, a Calvinist, blames God for their "unawares", and blames God for causing men to rape children, yet inconsistently, despite his calling all acts of God "good", he refuses to say God's act of forcing men to rape children is "good".

Demolishing Triablogue: that material in Luke is NOT against his interest

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer entitled


Some examples of how Luke's material on Jesus' childhood is different than we'd expect under skeptical scenarios: 
- Even though so much space is given to discussing John the Baptist, there's no anticipation of his work as a baptizer. Francois Bovon remarks that "The lack of any preliminary announcement of John's baptizing [in Luke 1:13-17] is surprising…
No it isn't.  Not every omission of useful information constitutes a conservative's argument.  But Luke's willingness to try to convince his readers on the basis of some story about angelic vision is sufficient to justify skepticism of his reliability.  If it weren't, Christians would have argued that the revelatory Jesus of Revelation is just as strong of a proof of the resurrected Jesus as the gospels and Paul's writings were.
The Benedictus surprisingly conceals John's primary activity, his baptizing." (Luke 1 [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2002], 37, 75)
Inerrantist R. H. Stein explains "Luke’s readers already knew of John the Baptist and his role in salvation history..." (2001, c1992). Vol. 24: Luke (electronic ed.).  New American Commentary (Page 75).
Bovon goes on to say (75) that there's probably an allusion to baptism in the reference to forgiveness of sins in Luke 1:77, though he acknowledges that baptism doesn't "grant forgiveness" in Luke's writings. It's doubtful that Luke is alluding to baptism. Even somebody who thinks he is alluding to it, though, like Bovon, finds it "surprising" that baptism isn't referred to explicitly anywhere in Luke's material on Jesus' childhood.
Sorry, I'm not seeing why you think a skeptical view of Luke would expect Luke to pay any certain degree of attention to John the Baptist.  Luke's fanciful tale about the conception and birth of John the Baptist is quite sufficient to justify skepticism toward his honesty.
- Not just with regard to baptism, but more broadly as well, Bovon notes that "the Christian traces are minimal in the birth legend of the Baptist" (ibid., 30).
Nobody said a forger has to stuff his narrative to bursting at the seams with Christianity-biased information.  The fact that Luke doesn't tie Jesus into John the baptist at this point is hardly noteworthy.  You don't explain how skeptics are put at a loss to explain this phenomena in Luke.
- The premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy is unnecessary,
The timing of Danae's pregnancy in Pindar's Pythian Ode # 12 was also "unnecessary".  Not enough about Luke's audience can be known to explain why Luke thought having God impregnate a single girl was better than God impregnating a married girl.
a departure from the precedent of Old Testament accounts of supernatural births,
Agreed,  nobody said 1st century Christians were incapable of putting new twists on old motifs.
and highly susceptible to moral objections.
but not in the context of the blindly trusting believers Luke most likely wrote for.  If you include skeptics in Luke's originally intended audience, you turn Luke into an unspeakably stupid historian.
As Raymond Brown wrote, if Luke or his source made up the account, "one must deem it a great religious blunder; for it gave rise to the charge of illegitimacy against Jesus that was the mainstay of anti-Christian polemic for many centuries."(The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], n. 28 on 143)
Not a blunder, early Christians misunderstood Isaiah 7:14 to be speaking of Mary, and were thus required to conjure up circumstances of the messiah's birth that would "fulfill" the prediction that a "virgin" would get pregnant.  Having Jesus' mother be a virgin was required, and the girl most likely to be a virgin is the unmarried girl.
 Bovon refers to the premarital timing of the pregnancy as "shocking" (Luke 1 [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2002], 85).
Not shocking in the least.  Luke needed Jesus' mother to be a virgin because he and other early Christians misinterpreted Isaiah 7:14 to be God giving a sign to Ahaz that wouldn't materialize until 700 years after Ahaz died, and since they falsely thought the sign was the virgnity of the pregnant girl, their story of Jesus' birth had to tell about a literal virgin becoming pregnant, and literal virginity is mostly found in girls before marriage.  Having married get pregnant before marriage was required, not "shocking".
- The Messianic hopes of figures like Mary and Zechariah seem more nationalistic, political, and militaristic than what Jesus' ministry and his movement in general would turn out to be later in Luke's gospel and Acts.
That's correct.  But sometimes Jews and Gentiles can get caught up in stupid fanciful "spirituality" in which all empirical problems melt away in visions and hallucinations.
Bovon goes as far as to contrast the highly nationalistic views of Luke's infancy material with how "at the end of his two volumes, Luke has little hope left for the people of Israel" (ibid., 103).
We also don't know how early Luke wrote, and yet to what degree Christians of his period were already indoctrinated into the subtleties of how the predicted OT physical ruler could be an invisible spirit, cannot be known, but Paul's stupid spiritualistic bullshit might give us a clue as to how esoteric Luke's originally intended audience was.
- The portrayal of Jesus' parents and their relationship with him at the close of Luke 2 is unusually negative.
No, even supposing Luke was telling the truth, they were right to be offended at their allegedly divine son simply disappearing among the people and not telling them where he was.

2:44 says they supposed him to have been traveling with others in the group, and make it seem like they were conmfortable with that assumption, which is unbelievable if we are to accept that they both "knew" on the basis of rather memorable assurances from angels and other matters that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
James Edwards makes a lot of good points on the subject in his recent commentary on Luke (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2015). For example:
 "In the male-dominated temple one would expect Joseph rather than Mary to address Jesus [in Luke 2:48]
Perhaps Luke is telling the truth about Mary confronting Jesus in the temple?  How would that import credibility to the miracle-portions of Luke's story?  Skeptics do not generally hold that where there's a miracle story, the entire matter is 100% fictional.
….She addresses him not as pais (v. 43, 'boy, young man'), but with a more juvenile and subservient term, teknon (v. 48; 'child,' NIV 'Son')…. Her reproach expresses less concern for Jesus than for what he has done to them….
Perhaps she was really pissed at him, which would suggest the prior story about her knowing the boy was conceieved by power of the Holy Spirit, is bullshit.
Mary's distress is a first fulfillment of Simeon's prophecy that a 'sword will pierce her soul' (v. 35)." (94-95)
unspeakably weak argument.
Additionally, Jesus rebukes them in verse 49, and Luke comments on their lack of understanding in verse 50.
So v. 50 gives you Luke's literary reason for having Jesus' parents act in such ways.  No skeptic would require otherwise.
Brown comments that Mary's reproach of Jesus in verse 48 is "all the more startling since Luke tends to avoid reproaches to Jesus by the disciples during the ministry….For instance, in 9:21-22 in reporting Jesus' reaction to Peter's confession, Luke drops the reproach by Peter found in Mark 8:32. The Lucan disciples are more reverential to Jesus." (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], 489 and n. 35 on 489)
Where exactly an ancient historian has fudged the facts is often hard to tell, especially where, as with Luke, there's only his version of the story of how Mary responds to Jesus in a reproachful way.
- John the Baptist is referred to as having had an unusual upbringing in the wilderness (Luke 1:80), reminiscent of Moses' upbringing in the house of Pharaoh and Samuel's upbringing in a sanctuary setting with Eli, for example. But Jesus just grows up in an ordinary home with his parents (Luke 2:51).
Probably because Luke writes for Gentiles, and thinks pitching Jesus to them will be more successful the less Jewish Jesus is.
Luke gives Jesus a less auspicious upbringing than John and makes no attempt to parallel Jesus with individuals like Moses and Samuel, even though we're so often told that the infancy narratives are unhistorical efforts to parallel Jesus to such Old Testament figures.
I'd disagree with any such skeptics.  The infancy narratives are unhistorical for reasons far outweighing any theory that they are trying to make Jesus parallel to OT figures.

Cold Case Christianity: Christmas is Christmas Because Jesus is God

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

79As we approach Christmas in just a few days, I’ve been thinking about what separates Jesus from other great religious figures of history. Many faith traditions lay claim to famous religious leaders and founders, but Jesus is different.
Correct.  Most religious leaders don't have half the self-contradictory and absurd descriptions as are given to Jesus.  Blame the stupidity on Philo and the Council of Nicaea.
Jesus claimed to be more than a good teacher or leader. Jesus claimed to be God. Some deny this truth about Jesus’ teaching, but the New Testament leaves little room for doubt: Jesus claimed to be God and taught this truth to His followers.
 He Spoke As Though He Was God
He also spoke as if he wasn't god.
While all Biblical prophets of God made statements on God’s behalf, they were careful to preface their proclamations with “This is what the LORD Almighty says,” or “This is what the LORD says,”
No, it is not always possible to distinguish the prophet from God.  Remember the story of God telling the Israelites how to use the bathroom?
 12 "You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there,
 13 and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement.
 14 "Since the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy; and He must not see anything indecent among you or He will turn away from you. (Deut. 23:12-14 NAU)
In describing God as "walking among you" and in teaching that God cannot see feces after it is buried in the ground, the author is ascribing limits to God that normally aren't admitted.  This is likely because God's presence among the Israelites constitutes nothing more than Moses' presence, in in that ancient context, such confusion of identities was accepted as something profound.

Otherwise, you'll have to explain how the omniscient all-seeing all-knowing creator of the universe can be prevented from seeing feces merely by burying it in the ground.  Stop pretending as if the only correct interpretation is the one that "makes sense".  You don't have the first fucking clue whether the author intended to "make sense" in the first place.  But you presume such anyway because you care more about impressing the Christians whom you mostly write for, than you do for the scholarly skeptics who continually refute your nonsense.
but Jesus never used such a preface. Instead, Jesus always prefaced his statements with, “Verily, verily, I say to you,” (KJV) or “I tell you the truth,” (NASB). Prophets spoke for God, but Jesus consistently spoke as God.
So then apparently it was a schizophrenic god who cried from the cross "why have you forsaken me"  Mark 15:34?  You will say Jesus only said that from his human nature not his divine nature.  But "nature" is not something that can be implicated or avoided.  If it is your "nature", then it is implicated in ALL that you say or do, it cannot be avoided.  So assuming for the sake of argument the logical absurdity that Jesus had "two natures", BOTH of them would be equally implicated in whatever he did, which would then mean you cannot allocate Jesus' cry of the Father's abandonment to just Jesus' human nature.   Therefore if Jesus said this, he also said it from his divine nature and not merely his human nature.
He Claimed the Title Used by God
Faithful Jews recognized the fact that God identified Himself to Moses as the great “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Yet Jesus (in referring to Himself) told the Jewish religious leaders that “before Abraham was born, I AM”. They immediately recognized that He was identifying Himself as God and were so angered by this ‘blasphemy’ that they “picked up stones to stone him.”
But Jesus' attempt to use Psalm 82 to justify his claim to deity in John 10 strongly suggests that he was only claiming to be god in the same sense that Psalm 82 says human judges of the OT were sometimes referred to as Elohim.  If Jesus was God by nature and not by mere association or label, he would hardly use the humans-are-also-called-gods argument of Psalm 82 to convince the Jews that his claim to be god was accurate.
 30 "I and the Father are one."
 31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him.
 32 Jesus answered them, "I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?"
 33 The Jews answered Him, "For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God."
 34 Jesus answered them, "Has it not been written in your Law, 'I SAID, YOU ARE GODS '?
 35 "If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken),
 36 do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God '?

 37 "If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me;
 38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father."   (Jn. 10:30-38 NAU)
It is Jesus' fault if I misunderstand his nature, since, allegedly as God, he could have made far more clear his relation to the Father, than he did with this controversial citation to Psalm 82.

God apparently loves us so much that whether we fry in hell forever depends on whether we can properly decipher his fortune cookie bullshit.
(Jesus also identified Himself as the great I AM in Mark 14:62, John 18:5-6, 8:24, and 8:28).
No, in Mark 14:62, Jesus is only saying "I am" in reply to the question "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One", which no more shows a claim to deity than if you say "I am" when somebody says "are you the owner of this car?":
 61 But He kept silent and did not answer. Again the high priest was questioning Him, and saying to Him, "Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?"
 62 And Jesus said, "I am;
and you shall see THE SON OF MAN SITTING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF POWER, and COMING WITH THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN."
 (Mk. 14:61-62 NAU)
In John 18:5-6, there's a "he" following "am", in which case, Jesus is simply admitting to being a specifically named person:
 3 Judas then, having received the Roman cohort and officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.
 4 So Jesus, knowing all the things that were coming upon Him, went forth and said to them, "Whom do you seek?"
 5 They answered Him, "Jesus the Nazarene." He said to them, "I am He."
And Judas also, who was betraying Him, was standing with them.
 6 So when He said to them, "I am He," they drew back and fell to the ground.
 7 Therefore He again asked them, "Whom do you seek?" And they said, "Jesus the Nazarene."
 8 Jesus answered, "I told you that I am He
; so if you seek Me, let these go their way,"
 9 to fulfill the word which He spoke, "Of those whom You have given Me I lost not one."
 (Jn. 18:3-9 NAU)
In John 8:24 and 28, is the same, except for Jesus saying "I do nothing on my own initiative", a thing God the Father would never say:
 23 And He was saying to them, "You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.
 24 "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins."
 25 So they were saying to Him, "Who are You?" Jesus said to them, "What have I been saying to you from the beginning?
 26 "I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and the things which I heard from Him, these I speak to the world."
 27 They did not realize that He had been speaking to them about the Father.
 28 So Jesus said, "When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.
 29 "And He who sent Me is with Me; He has not left Me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to Him." (Jn. 8:23-29 NAU)
You will say that the "I do nothing on my own initiative" was spoken solely from his human nature, but as I argued above, "nature" is not something that can be selectively implicated.  Whatever your nature is, is necessarily implicated in ALL that any person says and does.  So if Jesus had two natures (an absurd supposition on its own anyway), BOTH natures would be equally implicated in what he said or did, in which case it was also his divine nature implicated too, when he said he didn't do anything on his own initiative.
He Claimed the Home of God
Every time Jesus was asked about where he came from, He told His listeners that He came not from Bethlehem or Nazareth but from the same realm where God abides.
Which could just as easily be claimed by Enoch, Elijah or angels.
Jesus claimed to come “from above”. He repeatedly said that He was “not of this world” (John 8:23-24) and even told Pilate that he was a King whose Kingdom “is from another place” (John 18:36-37).
Apparently Jesus toned down his kingship claims when on trial.  Nothing in the Synoptics teaches that Jesus is anything less than the earthly King for his followers.  So when he says at trial "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36), he is clearly trying to pawn off on the Roman authorities (i.e., he was answering Pilate there) an interpretation of his purpose that would show no threat to the Romans.   Quite a dumbing down from his extroverted in-your-face claims to the contrary in Matthew 4:17.  Matthew 11:12 implies Jesus' kingdom was presently on the earth.
He Claimed Equality With God
Jesus said that God’s angels were His angels and that God’s Kingdom was His Kingdom (Matthew 13:41). Jesus even said that the judgment typically understood to be reserved for God was actually Jesus’ judgment to make (Luke 12:8-9). Jesus told His followers that when they saw Him, they saw God; if they knew Him, they knew God, and if they loved Him, they were loving God (John 14:6-9 and John 14:23).
He Saw No Distinction Between Himself and God
Finally, Jesus simply and plainly told His followers that there was no distinction between Himself and God the Father. When talking about the manner in which saints are selected for Salvation, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:29). He did not mean that they were ‘one’ in purpose or power, but that they were one in identity. His hearers understood what He was saying and picked up stones again to stone him “for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God” (John 10:33).
Once again, you obviously don't give one holy fuck about answering skeptics, you write solely to make money helping other Christians feel better after the fact.  John was written last, all scholars acknowledge that in John there is a greater theological reflection going on than can be seen in the Synoptics, in which case you don't really know whether John is quoting Jesus in the way newspapers quote politicians, or if John is putting in Jesus' mouth a reworked version of what Jesus originally said.

Yet you run around acting as if the gospel of John was the equal of video tape despite many of your own conservative scholar brothers refusing to go that far.  Your blindly trusting proof-texting guarantees you intend to market to a gullible audience.

Like I said, you don't write to refute skeptics.  You write for the same reason most Christian con artists write, to use the Jesus-scandal to make money off of his gullible followers.

Tough Questions Answered: Why Don’t the Synoptic Gospels Recount the Raising of Lazarus?

This is my reply to an article at "Tough Questions Answered" entitled

Some critics have cast doubt on the veracity of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel because it is not recorded in the other three Gospels.
That's perfectly reasonable given that both historiography and rules of evidence in American courts have prescribed the conditions under which the argument from silence will have force.  Only stupid people insist that all arguments from silence are necessarily fallacious.  Though I admit that this particular argument from Synoptic silence isn't exactly forceful, which is precisely why I don't use it myself.
John’s Gospel is believed to be the last Gospel written, so the critics allege that John invented the story to further his particular agenda.
Because, among other reasons, Clement of Alexandria said John knew the Synoptic authors already published the "external facts", and not wishing to duplicate their efforts, instead wrote a "spiritual gospel".  The way Clement sets "external facts" apart from "spiritual gospel", certainly justifies the interpretation that he meant that John wished to give the reader something "deeper" than mere "external facts".

While that need not require that he invented the resurrection of Lazarus, rules of historiography don't require one interpretation to be "required" before one can be reasonable to hold it.  Otherwise, 99% of all Christians are unreasonable, given their differing views on all biblical matters, since the numbers of disagreements and willingness of Christians to change their minds seems to indicate they don't hold their current interpretations to be "required" except on basics.
Andreas Köstenberger, in The Gospels and Acts (The Holman Apologetics Commentary on the Bible), argues against this viewpoint. 
This critique is part of a larger argument against the historicity of John’s Gospel based on its omission of many events found in the Synoptics and its inclusion of material absent from the other Gospels. However, this critique is ultimately unconvincing. For no matter one’s theory as to how John composed his Gospel, it is apparent that he had a large amount of material from which to choose. If John was aware of the Synoptics as he was writing, which is probable (see Bauckham 1997a, esp. 147– 71; Köstenberger 2009, 553– 55), then he could reasonably be expected to assume much of the material they contain.
I don't see how imparting to John a knowledge of the prior Synoptic gospels, does anything to weaken the argument from silence that says the Synoptic authors didn't know Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, because they surely would have mentioned such a strong supporting proof for their theory that Jesus was God's Son, had they known about it, or believed the story to be true.

It his unlikely that they would have known and believed such story but yet "chose to exclude" it from their gospels nonetheless.  This whole idea that the gospel authors "chose to exclude" ANYTHING they believed God did on earth in the person of Jesus, just doesn't make sense.  If the gospel authors seriously believed Jesus was the divine Son of God, they would more than likely have found it best to record as many of his words and deeds as they could possibly remember.  Choosing to exclude some of these is what we'd expect only if they viewed Jesus as something less.

Other Christians agree that John's gospel is far more complicated than the "external facts" that average Christians think that gospel provides.  It is far from certain John is talking about real events when describing something Jesus said or did.
On the other hand, if John wrote without knowledge of the Synoptics, then it is likely that at least some of the differences can be attributed to the large amount of material from which he had to choose.
Since I late-date John, I need not worry about the possibility of John being ignorant of the Synoptics.
This corresponds with what John later writes: ‘Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book’ (20: 30).
The author felt compelled to admit he wasn't giving a full record.  Obviously, he was a truth-robot, incapable of lying. Please excuse me while I go consign the rest of my life to investigating biblical inerrancy.
Craig Blomberg rightly notes, ‘Any two ancient historians’ accounts of a given person or period of history differ from each other at least as much as John does from the Synoptics, when they do not rely on common sources for their information’ (Blomberg 2007, 207).
The issue is not John "differing" from the Synoptics, it is the Synoptic silence on the resurrection of Lazarus, and the argument that they surely would have mentioned it had they believed it true, that justifies skepticism toward John 11, even if such argument is not a "smack-down".  Christ knows apologists don't have any "smackdowns" themselves.
In addition, it stands to reason that John had his own theological emphases and unique perception of the significance of the events surrounding Jesus, not to mention his own individuality, style, interests, and distinctive eyewitness recollection from which to draw.
Doesn't matter, the resurrection of Lazarus ranks high on the scale of proofs that Jesus was the divine son of God, so it doesn't matter if it is true that the Synoptic authors believed it true but chose to exclude it for their own literary reasons from their own productions...the claim that John's gospel is historically reliable is a claim implicating historiography, which is an art implicating probability theory, which is a science implicating discussion of the argument from silence, which is an argument whose force depends on how likely it is that the author, whose silence is in question, would have mentioned a thing, had the author known of the thing.

The Synoptic authors' agenda was to provide literary evidence that Jesus was the divine son of God.  Sorry, but only stupid people "choose to exclude" the most dramatic evidence underscoring their case.  One has to wonder why the gospels authors picked and chose as they allegedly did, when in fact any Christian fool today can conceive of far more persuasive ways the gospel authors could have made their case.  Such as comprehensively indexing each and every miracle of Jesus, names of eyewitnesses, obtaining their testimony, and recording how Jesus' brothers answered the question of why they refused to believe in him during his earthly ministry (John 7:5, Mark 3:21).  It is to the gospel authors' detriment that far more efficient and accurate means of arguing gospel truth were available to them, than the sorry 4 productions we now call canonical.

And the more you attempt to trifle that the Synoptic authors wished to prove their case only implicitly, the more you get crushed under the wheels of the the Transfiguration; Matthew 17:2, Mark 9:2, Luke 9:29.  The Synoptic authors were not likely to hold back from giving the reader knowledge of the more dramatic proofs Jesus gave of his divinity.
If the raising of Lazarus really did occur, why would the other Gospel authors fail to include it in their biographies? Surely an event of this significance would necessitate inclusion, the critics argue.  Köstenberger disagrees:
 Why does an event require multiple attestations in the Gospels to be considered historical?
It doesn't.  The rule is the more attestation, the more likely true, the less attestation, the less likely true.  No, genius, we don't "just" believe singular testimony from ancient sources until a skeptic can prove it false, otherwise, since protestants cannot prove false the many allegations of Marian apparitions and healings in Fatima and Lourdes, they are obligated by their own reasoning to accept those accounts not just as true, but as also establishing the Catholic version of Christianity to be true.  
Throughout the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus performs a host of miracles, including raising people from the dead (an admittedly rare feature), so critics certainly cannot legitimately argue that Lazarus’ resurrection fails to comport with the general Synoptic portrait of Jesus.
The Synoptic evidence of Jesus raising people from the dead is scant and not very convincing:

They give a general report that Jesus raised people from the dead (Matthew 11:5 / Luke 7:22), but a detailed analysis justifies skepticism toward this generalization.

Jesus specifies that Jarius' daughter was not dead but rather asleep (Matthew 9:24).

The parallel from Mark 5:39, by having Jesus specifically wonder and inquire why the people would be so upset when she hasn't died, confirms that it was literally true that he hadn't died.

The parallel in Luke 8:52 also has Jesus specify that the girl wasn't actually dead, but only sleeping.

In Luke 7:11-18, it is specified several times that the person on the coffin whom Jesus raised back to life had actually been dead.  This weakens to some degree the skeptical argument that the Lazarus story in John 11 is fiction due to Synoptical silence on it.  But because this particular story is found only in Luke, Luke's credibility is at issue.  Luke's report of the Council of Jerusalem spends 98% of Acts 15 telling about the apostolic arguments, and about 2% recording short summary statements of the Judaizer opinion, so Luke's bias is sufficiently high in favor of his own party that skepticism of his honesty is justified.  Most scholars agree Luke depended to a significant degree on Mark, which makes Luke a liar for saying in his Preface that he drew from eyewitness testimony, leaving the false impression that eyewitness testimony is ALL he used.

But that Jesus' miracles during his earthly ministry were likely fake is justified on the basis the unbelief of his own family members in John 7:5, a point in time about a third of the way into his earthly ministry.

Matthew 11, John the Baptist sends from prison a question to Jesus about whether he is the messiah.  Jesus asks his disciples to answer John the Baptist by mentioning that among the miracles, raising people from the dead is something Jesus has already done at that point:
 1 When Jesus had finished giving instructions to His twelve disciples, He departed from there to teach and preach in their cities.
 2 Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples
 3 and said to Him, "Are You the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?"
 4 Jesus answered and said to them, "Go and report to John what you hear and see:
 5 the BLIND RECEIVE SIGHT and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the POOR HAVE THE GOSPEL PREACHED TO THEM. (Matt. 11:1-5 NAU)
Luke 7 is the parallel:
19 Summoning two of his disciples, John sent them to the Lord, saying, "Are You the Expected One, or do we look for someone else?"
 20 When the men came to Him, they said, "John the Baptist has sent us to You, to ask, 'Are You the Expected One, or do we look for someone else?'"
 21 At that very time He cured many people of diseases and afflictions and evil spirits; and He gave sight to many who were blind.
 22 And He answered and said to them, "Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the BLIND RECEIVE SIGHT, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the POOR HAVE THE GOSPEL PREACHED TO THEM. (Lk. 7:19-22 NAU)
It thus appears that about a third of the way through his earthly ministry, Jesus had raised people from the dead, and yet it is about a third of the way through his earthly ministry that John says is the point at which his "brothers" were still refusing to believe in him, John 7:5.

From this I deduce that his brothers likely had good reason to believe whatever miracles Jesus was doing, were not likely to be authentically supernatural.  John 7:5 passes the criteria of embarrassment, so that verse deserves our trust more than other parts of John.

And because the circumstances of how exactly the brothers of Jesus named James and John rose to positions of leadership in the post-resurrection church are never stated in the bible, we have justification to believe that they obtained those positions more because of their relation to Jesus and less because of any theory that they believed Jesus risen from the dead.

Indeed, there is no evidence Jesus' brothers did ever believe, until after Jesus died.  So his brothers apparently stayed in unbelief throughout the entirety of Jesus' earthly three year ministry...(!?)

You lose, no matter what theory you fantasize about.  If you say Jesus' brothers during his earthly ministry were just stupid idiots would couldn't get the point if they sat on it, then you lay a good ground for skeptics to say their resurrection testimony lacks credibility.  If you were falsely accused or murder and facing a prosecution witness on the stand whose credulity soared the same heights as those of Jesus' brothers during his earthly ministry, you'd be screaming your head off about how absurd it is to believe willfully blind idiots like this.

If you say Jesus' brothers didn't believe him in spite of the miracles because they had good reason to believe those miracles were fake, then such fakery justifies skepticism of Christianity in general.

The desire of John and James to allocate the entire Gentile ministry to Paul while they themselves would confine their ministry solely to Jews (Galatians 2:9), constitutes their disobedience to the resurrected Jesus' alleged mandate that they, and the original 11 disciples, evangelize the Gentiles (Matthew 28:19-20).

Therefore, we are justified to believe that if John and James got to high positions in the church after Jesus died, they likely did so through sheer politics in spite of their less-than-amazing experience with the allegedly resurrected Jesus, which means they carried around unbelief toward their messiah brother despite his alleged doing of miracles during their lifetimes where they could have checked the facts very easily.

This problem of the unbelief of Jesus' brothers during Jesus' earthly ministry either justifies rejection of Christianity in whole, or justifies viewing the resurrection testimony of these dolts as more credulous than believable.  God gave Adam and Eve freewill...it's your choice.
Although it is impossible to know for certain why a given author selects or omits particular material in his or her account, one possible reason for the omission of the story of Lazarus in the other Gospels is their focus on Galilee (the raising of Lazarus takes place in Judea). Also, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Bauckham (2006, 184– 87) cites favorably G. Theissen’s theory of ‘protective anonymity,’ according to which the evangelists sought to shield individuals who were still living from persecution by not naming them.
So the gospel authors did not agree with the author of Acts, that suffering for the name of Christ was a blessed thing about which one should be happy.  Acts 5:41.  Another reason to think Acts has, at best, white-washed history.  Nobody said truth is required to create a spiritually edifying story.
If Lazarus was still alive when the Synoptic Gospels were written, but died in the interim between their publication and the composition of John’s Gospel,
Sorry, John 11 contains a shitload of evidence that Lazarus' raising was to teach "resurrection", not "reviving", and as such, if he was "resurrected", honesty requires that he was raised in a resurrection body that cannot die.  Skeptics have everything in John 11 on their side, Christians (who say Lazarus died again) have NOTHING in John 11 on their side to support their theory.  
this, likewise, may account for the Synoptic non-inclusion of the account and John’s inclusion of it. Lazarus’s death would have meant he no longer needed protection from persecution, so that John was free to include the account of his raising from the dead by Jesus.
Sure, skeptics who push the argument of the Synoptic silence on Lazarus, aren't giving the world's most powerful argument, but that criticism plagues Christian apologists equally well.

I believe that the argument from John 7:5 is conclusive against any trifles of gospel miracle details any apologist can bring up.




Jason Engwer doesn't appreciate the strong justification for skepticism found in John 7:5

Bart Ehrman, like thousands of other skeptics, uses Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to argue that Jesus' virgin birth (VB) is fiction.  Jason Eng...