my reply to Ty Nienke on Jesus' resurrection

Ty Nienke tries to argue the resurrection case in his YouTube video here.

I was apparently the first to reply, and I replied as follows:

Barry Jones

Not sure why it would matter whether Jesus rose from the dead:  making Jesus relevant to modern people requires you to do something biblical authors never do:  make the NT "apply to" modern day people. 

I don't see how any Christian has any hope of showing the bible's applicability to modern people, to such a degree that it would render today's skeptics foolish.  The bible doesn't talk about itself and doesn't talk about what people living 2,000 years after the authors wrote are supposed to do.  Yet today's Christians fallaciously put just as much stock in a non-biblical claim like "the bible applies to us today" no less than they put stock in clear biblical claims such as John 3:16 (!?) 

A skeptic could cite Christianity's in-house debates about dispensationalism, to justify saying not even spiritually alive people can be reasonably sure whether anything in the NT "applies to" people today, thus they are being unreasonable to 'expect' spiritually dead unbelievers to recognize biblical "truth". 

If Jesus' miracles are supposed to mean he was approved of by God, why don't today's apologists stay consistent with that reasoning, and insist that if miracles happen in any modern church, god is similarly manifesting his approval of that church's particular theology?  Does the bible provide criteria for knowing when the working of a true miracle signals god's approval of the miracle-worker's theological viewpoint, and when the working of a true miracle leaves that question unanswered? 

I overcome the "early" nature of the 1st Corinthians 15 "creed" with  Mark 3:21 and John 7:5, which under the conservative view are facts that occurred before Jesus died and thus are far earlier than the Corinthians "creed", supra.  According to Mark 3:21 and John 7:5, Jesus was incapable of working genuinely supernatural miracles.  If your brother or son was running around town raising people from the dead, what are the odds that your disagreements with him about points of theology might blind you to the obvious implications of God's working through him in such an undeniable way? 

No, if Jesus' family found him decidedly unconvincing, it wasn't because he dashed their dreams of a military messiah, it was more likely because they checked out his miracle claims and found them false, and therefore began to view him the way most people today view Benny Hinn and other faith-healers....a very popular charismatic charlatan. 

And why did the original eyewitnesses to the empty tomb expect it to continue being sealed three days after Jesus died?  Can we be reasonable to deduce that these women must not have found Jesus' prior miracles very convincing, and therefore didn't put a lot of stock in his prior predictions that he would rise after three days' being in the grave?  

Skepticism of Jesus' resurrection is very reasonable, and in actual daily life, reasonableness always trumps  accuracy.  

screenshot:

My request to Dr. R Scott Smith, a Christian scholar/apologist working at Biola University

On March 7, I read the following written by R Scott Smith, PhD, c/o Biola University, at his blog https://rscottsmithphd.com:

Summary of the Survey
We have surveyed major ethical options for what our core morals are, including:
Are they how we happen to talk?
Are they physical things? Perhaps evolutionary products?
Are they ways of behaving or moving our bodies?
Are they results of a utilitarian calculus?
Are they emotive utterances?
Are they particulars? (nominalism)

But, at least since Hobbes, I’ve argued that none of the views can preserve our core morals of murder and rape being wrong, and love and justice being good.
What Are These Core Morals?

For one, they seem to be objectively real. They seem to exist independently of us as moral principles and values. They also simply seem to be intrinsically valid, and not due to anything else (like, the consequences). That is, they seem to have an essential moral nature. Moreover, they cannot be just physical things or particulars, as we’ve seen. Instead, they seem to be a “one-in-many” – each one is one principle (or value), yet it can have many instances/examples. In sum, they seem to be Platonic-like universals.

That raises many questions, however. Earlier, I remarked that Christine Korsgaard rightly observed that it’s hard to see how such things could have anything to do with us. While she thinks people are physical, it still applies if we are a body-soul unity. Why should these abstract objects have anything to do with us? On Plato’s view, they exist in a heavenly realm of values as brute features of reality.

What makes justice and love character qualities that should be present in us? Why is it inappropriate morally for us to murder or rape? These are normative qualities, not merely descriptive. As we’ve seen, it is hard to see how we can get the moral ought from what is descriptively the case. Yet, that problem could be overcome if humans have an essential nature that makes these moral values appropriate for them, and these acts inappropriate.

Earlier, I argued that the soul as our essential nature provides a sound explanation for how we can be the identical person through change. Body-soul dualists affirm that the soul is our essential nature, and it sets the boundary conditions for what is appropriate for us. For instance, it is inappropriate for us to grow a cat’s tail due to our nature, and it is inappropriate for us to murder due to our nature.

We also saw another reason for the soul’s existence. We do in fact think and form beliefs, yet these have intentionality, which I argued is best understood as something immaterial and having an essence. Now, it is hard to conceive how a physical brain could interact with something immaterial, but that problem does not seem to exist for an immaterial soul/mind.

Moreover, why should we feel guilt and shame when we break these core morals? That doesn’t make sense if these morals are just abstract objects that are immaterial and not located in space and time. Instead, we seem to have such responses in the presence of persons we have wronged morally. Also, retributive justice doesn’t make sense if we repay an abstract principle or value. But it would make sense if a person should be repaid.

There is another explanation we have seen for the grounding of these core morals: they are grounded in God. That helps solve the question of why we feel shame when we break one of these morals. But, that also raises questions, such as: are they good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good (i.e., the Euthyphro dilemma)? Also, which God would this be?

I will start to tackle these in the next essay. But, first, there is another option for properties besides universals (realism) and nominalism. It is divine conceptualism; properties just are God’s concepts. Justice in us is God’s concept. Yet, concepts have intentionality, but virtues do not. When we think about people being just, we don’t mean they have a concept of justice (though they could), but that they have that virtue present in them. So, offhand, divine conceptualism seems to trade on a confusion.
For Further Reading

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 12

So on the same day I sent him the following message through his blog "contact me" page https://rscottsmithphd.com/contact-us/

Hello,

I would like to ask you a few questions raised in my mind after I read your "Making Sense of Morality: Where Do We Go from Here?", located at https://rscottsmithphd.com, which I read March 7, 2022.

I never seem to get a straight answer from Turek or others who try to argue that the common human repugnance toward murder and rape is more reasonably accounted for by positing "god put his laws into our hearts" than by any naturalistic explanatory mechanism.

I can ask you the questions by email or we can discuss at your blog, or wherever.

Barry

A screenshot of that message is: