My reply to Bellator Christi's "Three Dangerous Forms of Modern Idolatry"

I received this in my email, but the page it was hosted on appears to have been removed 

===================== 

Bellator Christi Read on blog or Reader Three Dangerous Forms of Modern Idolatry By Tony Williams on November 20, 2024 By: Brian G. Chilton, M.Div., Ph.D. | November 24, 2024 Idolatry is a dangerous and sinful problem for individuals.

Then skeptics might possibly be reasonable to delay obeying the evangelists command to repent and believe the gospel, until they can be reasonably sure the evangelist hasn't created his own idols.  Otherwise, you would be telling us to base decisions about our eternity upon the word of a possible idolater.  But if the evangelist's possible idolatry cannot be anything sufficient to justify delaying to accept his gospel theology, then such idolatry probably isn't sufficiently important in the context of the church to justify your article on it.

The act of idolatry places emphasis on a person, place, thing, or concept on the same or higher level than God.

So when Christians find the words of anybody in the NT outside of Jesus to be at the level of God (i.e, God-inspired speech or writing), they are idolizing that author.  Even if you could show that Paul's theology was "correct", you could never show that his epistles were inspired by God.  And yet all of today's Christians in your conservative of fundamentalist group cannot even hardly imagine any of Paul's NT writings lacking divine inspiration. 

In many ways, as I have often said, idolatry is adultery against God. Just as adultery is the act of a spouse cheating on his or her marital partner, likewise, idolatry essentially cheats on God by placing something greater than Him.

I learned from the Calvinists that if anybody cheats on God, its because God wanted them to.  When you say my spiritually dead condition doesn't prevent me from recognizing heresy, the Calvinists will say spiritual death as taught in the NT is not merely metaphorical, but literal.   At that point I can justify delaying to further consider what you have to say until the Calvinists and Arminians obey 1st Cor. 1:10 and stop having divisions, i.e., the sort of divisions that cause Christians to claim to follow different Christian teachers who teach opposite to each other.

The Word of God thoroughly warns against the sin of idolatry throughout its illustrious pages. The sin of idolatry made it into the Ten Commandments. When idolatry occurs, a person is consumed with whatever becomes the object of worship. And seeing that God is the source of goodness and love, anything other than God will wind up being a grave disappointment.

That fails to explain why many Christians didn't find it a disappointment to leave the faith.  You will say they only left a black and white fundie and false form of Christianity, but if the cosmos ever declared your imperfect theories to be true, I didn't get the memo.  

snip

 

Huxley viewed these three modern idolatries as “a much more insidious and pernicious form of idolatry”[1] than many others. The three forms of idolatry that Huxley warns about are technological idolatry, political idolatry, and moral idolatry. snip With modernity, it is often assumed that technology will save humanity in various areas. For sure, technological advances have extended life expectancy by offering better healthcare. Nonetheless, idolatry comes when people place more value on their devices than God. The psalmist declares, “Some take pride in chariots, and others in horses, but we take pride in the name of the Lord our God. They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand firm” (Ps. 20:7–8, CSB).

But since you cannot make a case that "spiritual" concerns are more important than "earthly" concerns, there is no unreasonableness in a person merely because their lives are completely earth-centered and exhibit not the slightest concern about the afterworld. 

POLITICAL IDOLATRY snip In the same way, we must ask ourselves if we have reached a point where we trust in our organizations, alliances, and parties more than God. That is not to say that we should not stand for what’s right. However, Hezekiah and his confrontation with the prophet Isaiah should remind us that ultimately our trust and reliance should be in God rather than political entities.

I find that to be completely useless banter:  Of course all members of the American Center for Law & Justice or the Moral Majority will say they are trusting in "god", but it would be easy enough to show that they are trusting no less in their political party too.  The fact that trusting god is not sufficient to get anything done is proven by the fact that trusting god can be sufficiently accomplished solely mentally...and yet any fool recognizes that Republicans can look forward to losing in politics if they don't couple their trust in "god" with their purely earth-centered efforts in American politics.  Christianity is very stupid for fostering the type of irrationality that credits business success to god, when the indisputable empirical facts sufficiently explain that success.  If you purchase a candy bar at a store, you are a fool if you give god credit for causing that business transaction to succeed.  Just like if you run an apologetics ministry on the internet and you gather a few fools who regularly donate to your cause, there's no more reason to pretend "god" caused them to donate than there is for thinking the tooth-fairy caused them to donate.  If you have freewill, this logically precludes giving god full credit for your successes.  God did not make the decision to start the business. YOU did.  God's back does not hurt if you dig ditches to earn a living.  YOUR back hurts.  Giving God credit for all your successes foolish because all Christians do it, and yet you'd be quick to insist that in many cases, it wasn't god who caused some ministry to gain popularity.  Any fool can see what the proximate, immediate and ultimate causes for Christian success are in this world.  An invisible entity working behind the scenes in mysterious ways in another dimension is NOT it.

MORAL IDOLATRY Lastly, Huxley warns against moral idolatry. Moral idolatry can involve one’s reliance on one’s ethical ideals and interpretations of morality[7] rather than God and transcendent ethics. This can include a person’s reliance on their own ethical standards to give them hope, happiness, security, and significance.[8]

There is nothing to argue against here because even assuming the bible is the inerrant word of God, there's plenty of evidence that God does not give infallible moral guidance to any Christian who has lived in the last 1900 years.  God never clearly answers for any Christian the question of whether they should get married, have kids, buy a gun, which exact church to attend, where exactly their theological beliefs could use some correction or sharpening, whether they should vote for a secular leader, spend their savings on questionable things like tithing, or which strangers to help, whether to speak against or remain quiet about a church leader that appears to be unqualified for office, etc, etc.  At the end of the day, the faith of the Christian who makes decisions about these matters, is absolutely blind.  You may as well tell yourself that after paying to Abraham Lincoln about marriage and noticing a few coincidences over the next two weeks, you have faith that Lincoln wants you to marry a certain someone.  It doesn't matter if such thinking would edify you, that doesn't mean it must double as a reasonable proof that Lincoln was truly guiding you. Extreme Pentecostals think God wants them to act like unhinged lunatics, and African Bushman think the local witch doctor's "curse" is somehow "real".  

It could be argued that Job’s friends were guilty of moral idolatry since they trusted in their own interpretations rather than God. This could be one of the reasons why God did not accept their responses to Job.

But today there is no such thing as a Christian trusting in "god".  All they can do is trust that their own interpretations of biblical doctrine are what the human biblical authors intended. 

Additionally, it could be said that many of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were guilty of moral idolatry, as well. They trusted in their own interpretations of God’s Law rather than seeking the truth of God’s Word and trusting in the God Who gave the Law.

That is nothing but empty rhetoric, and they would probably have responded that they properly trust in God and show it by constantly concerning themselves with the scriptures and with how the scriptures are to applied to Jews when occupation by Romans forbade them from living out the Mosaic theocracy to its full intent.  When today's Christians act upon their interpretation and application of biblical words, they do nothing different than the Pharisees, who would easily argue that they never add anything to the scripture, they merely show what scripture "requires". 

Likewise, many in today’s church are militantly divided into numerous denominations and focus on various styles of worship, to the point that other variants are seen as unChristlike or even heretical. At some point, we must ask ourselves if such a devotion to denominationalism may, in some part, make us guilty of moral idolatry.

And this gives the skeptic another excuse:  shouldn't he worry about the possibility that the evangelist is guilty of moral idolatry?  The only reason you don't want to say "yes" is because if you said "yes", then obviously the skeptic cannot be rationally expected to reach reasonable certainty on the evangelist's or apologist's moral status before God in two seconds.  If then the skeptic does what is right and investigates such a question, well, that's gonna take a few days at least, likely longer if the "apologist" is some anonymous fool on the internet.  Since he cannot be rational to seriously consider the theology of a possible moral idolater until he can evaluate the evidence for and against, it is not rational to expect him to "accept Jesus" during that period of investigation.  Although this is consistent with Frank Turek's infamous statement that "Maybe God doesn't want an unbeliever to get saved right now", most fundamentalists would bristle at this and insist the skeptic never has an excuse to delay getting saved.  They are wrong:   the stupid person is not the unbeliever who insists on delaying a decision until they can evaluate the relevant evidence for and against any Christians qualification to preach the gospel.  The stupid person is the unbeliever who thinks the generalized agreements of the various conflicting denominations about Jesus and the gospel make the basic truth sufficiently clear to justify god in holding the unbeliever accountable to immediately "get saved".  That is stupid because even if we confine the analysis to just the Trinitarian camp, Trinitarians disagree with each other about "essential" doctrine.  For example, John MacArthur did not cause a storm of controversy within the Trinitarian camp because most of them thought Lordship Salvation was a non-essential.  He created that storm because he thought Lordship Salvation was the only way to get saved, and his Trinitarian opponents made it an essential issue by accusing him of teaching the false gospel of legalism.  Their agreements with each other that Jesus was God and bodily risen from the dead, do not mean that sincere confession of Jesus' deity and his bodily resurrection are all that is necessary to "get saved".  MacArthur's Trinitarian opponents have no problems with these essentials...yet they continually warn the church and unbelievers away from what they perceive to be a legalistic gospel that is incapable of saving anybody.

snip

May we all place our full devotion and trust in the God of creation. Because it is only in Him that we ultimately find our meaning, purpose, and value.

A very useless pep talk since every Christian in creation guilty of any of these forms of idolatry could easily argue that by prioritizing politics or morality, they are in fact responding to these matters as God wants them to.

 

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 Engwer of Triablogue tries desperately to justify an interpretation of those texts that won't attack the VB.  Jason loses. I explain why.  These are my two replies to Engwer's two articles at Triablogue.

At the outset, there are several skeptical arguments that render Engwer's trifles moot.  One is that nobody in the history of Christianity can show that any NT bullshit applies to us today.  Ignoring the bible is about as dangerous as ignoring the Apocrypha.  So skeptics who really hate the bible, need not bother with Engwer's ceaseless trifles.  They can be reasonable to completely ignore the bible.

A Response To Bart Ehrman's 

Webinar Against The Virgin Birth

Ehrman is still citing passages like Mark 3:21-35 and John 7:1-10 as evidence against the virgin birth. See here for a post I wrote a couple of years ago that responds to Ehrman's use of that argument. Remarkably, he claimed in his webinar today that Jesus' brothers didn't know Jesus was "anything special" in John 7 (first presentation, 47:00). That passage comes just after Jesus' miraculous feeding of thousands of people and other highly public miracles, including ones done when his brothers were nearby (John 2:1-12). The "works" Jesus' brothers refer to in John 7:3-4 surely at least included miracles, given the immediate surrounding context and the nature of Jesus' public ministry in general up to that point. So, the brothers (like Mary in Mark 3) weren't objecting to a lack of miracles.

One wonders why Jason is not a presuppositionalist, after all, the bible tells him Jesus did miracles, so that launches Jason all the way past any possibility of suggesting that John lied about some things and told the truth about others.  Well, for numerous reasons we over here in skeptical-land do not accept biblical inerrancy.  Nor do we presume that the testimony of a single witness will always be either lies or truth, instead, we remain open to the possibility that the testimony contains some truth and some lies.

The skeptical position is that the reason Jesus' brothers don't believe in him is because they think his miracles are purely naturalistic stunts, i.e., John is telling the truth about their unbelief, but he is lying about Jesus' miracles.  Incidentally, Jesus himself reluctantly admits that his followers were not following because of his miracles, but only because of the free food (John 6:26), which justifies us to suppose those followers did not think the miracles were genuinely supernatural.  There is nothing unreasonable in alleging that some "facts" in the gospels are less consistent with Christian theories and more consistent with skeptical theories.  There is no rule obligating anybody to assume that ancient writers with a theological agenda told only truth, so that the only theories to account for their statements must be limited to theories that uphold them as honest authors.  Engwer continues;

As my response to Ehrman linked above explains, the Mark 3 passage likewise explicitly refers to Jesus' performance of miracles, even his enemies' acknowledgement of some of his miracles. 

But again, when we skeptics say the reason Jesus' brothers thought him insane (Mark 3:21) was because they thought his 'miracles' were total bullshit, we are not violating any normative canon of historiography or hermeneutics.  Jason's defense seems to be that because other things in Mark 3 say Jesus' enemies acknowledged the miracles, today's unbeliever is forced to discard any explanatory theory of 3:21 that says the miracles were fake.  

Sorry, we don't live in Jason's head.  We readily acknowledge that a theory that Jesus' miracles were purely naturalistic would not harmonize with the Pharisees "acknowledging" that Jesus does miracles by the demonic power.  But we don't assume that Mark always tells the truth, and in this we break no established rule of historiography or hermeneutics.  My view is that Mark is simply creating fiction by having Jesus' enemies 'acknowledge' his employment of supernatural power.

We can also go at this from the other direction and ask how absurd it would be to trifle that in 3:21, the brothers merely think Jesus is insane because he is misusing supernatural power.  In other words, Engwer thinks the brothers' attitude was something like "god has given you the ability to work genuinely supernatural miracles, but you are abusing that gift".  Several reasons justify the skeptical rejection of that transparently ad hoc theory:

First, 1st century Judaism was an honor/shame culture, in which personal slurs were taken far more seriously than they are in modern America.  To accuse another of insanity is to accuse them of being possessed by a demon (John 10:20).  If Engwer's theory is correct, then Jesus' brothers and thus somebody whom Engwer thinks later became apostle James, committed the unpardonable sin before Jesus died (Mark 3:29-30).  Nice going.

Second, for them to acknowledge that Jesus' miracles were genuinely supernatural, but to also refuse to believe in him, sounds a lot like the brothers' knowledge of Deut. 13, which says even false prophets could sometimes do genuinely supernatural miracles.  This means the brothers, under pressure to avoid dishonoring Jesus, had decided that because Jesus was teaching contrary to Mosaic law, his doing of miracles either meant nothing, or meant demon possession.  Did Jesus' brothers think Jesus was a false prophet?

Third, it was Jesus himself who clarified that his own relatives refused to properly honor him (Mark 6:4).  So they were probably feeling constrained in that honor/shame culture to defend Jesus against such accusations, but they found the evidence of his dishonesty too overwhelming and decided that interests of honor required that they denounce him.

Fourth, we can be reasonable so assume that in such honor/shame culture, the starting presumption of the family was that Jesus was an honorable person.  So if they took a position that he wasn't honorable, they probably did not merely give in to echos of rumors from enemies...they would have attended a few of his magic shows to verify for themselves whether Jesus 'miracles' were genuinely supernatural or merely staged tricks.  In light of Mark 6:4 and his family becoming his 'enemies', we can reasonably conclude that they only became his enemies because they thought Jesus' miracles were purely naturalistic (i.e., he was a first century Benny Hinn). 

I now respond to Engwer's longer article on the subject:

Michael Shermer And Bart Ehrman On Christmas And Christianity

Michael Shermer recently had Bart Ehrman on his YouTube channel. There are too many problems with the comments made by both of them for me to interact with everything.

Then Jason forfeits the right to complain if counter-apologists think his articles raise too many points so that they won't interact with the majority of such points.  

After acknowledging that the absence of any mention of the virgin birth in Mark's gospel isn't a persuasive argument that Mark was unaware of the concept,

 Then I disagree with Ehrman.  Jesus did not teach about his birth to his disciples, so if Peter is the inspiration behind Mark's gospel, we would not expect Peter to talk about the VB. But if the VB is true, we would expect that Mark, likely not writing earlier than 63 a.d. or 30 years after Jesus died, would have heard the VB stories. The VB would certainly have supported Mark's theory that Jesus is the divine Son of God.  The notion that Mark knew about the VB, thought it true, but merely "chose to exclude it", is transparently founded on a blind presumption of bible inerrancy, in which Engwer simply cannot allow that two biblical authors disagreed on any bit of Jesus' history.  Sorry, Engwer's committment to bible inerrancy does not obligate non-Christians to first exhaust all inerrancy-favoring explanations of Mark's omission of the VB story before we can become reasonable to employ a skeptical explanation for this omission.  It isn't like bible inerrancy is a major tenant of historiography, or demanded by historians.  And i show elsewhere that Josh McDowell and John Warwick Montgomery lied about "Aristotle's Dictum".  So no, there's not even any requirement that we presume the ancient witness is telling the truth until we can prove them wrong.  The more objective procedure when dealing with third-party testimony is to neither believe it nor reject it, but suspend judgment until the veracity of their statements can be evaluated.  Exactly how much evidence that should be, is not up to Engwer.

Ehrman appeals to Mark 3:21-35 to argue that Jesus' family shouldn't have reacted to him as they did in that passage if the virgin birth had occurred. (Ehrman refers to Mark 2, but the passage he has in mind is actually the one I just referenced in chapter 3.) That's a bad argument that's been circulating among critics of the infancy narratives for a long time. It ought to be abandoned. Earlier in Mark's gospel, we read about Jesus' performance of miracles as an adult, and the verse just after the opening one in the passage under consideration refers to those miracles again (Mark 3:22). The passage just cited not only refers to miracles, but also refers to the acknowledgment of those miracles by Jesus' opponents.

In light of 3:21, I hold that Mark's report about the Jews acknowledging the supernatural character of his miracles to be fiction.  If I wrote in a letter to my church that even the barbarians down here in South America acknowledge that I employ genuinely supernatural power, what fool would pretend that this must stand as true until proven wrong?  Answer:  Engwer and other dolts who think Josh McDowell's "Aristotle's Dictum" is a bit of historiographical objectivity.  They are high on crack too.

So, it wasn't a situation in which they didn't think there were any miracles occurring in association with Jesus.

And there you go again, blindly pretending that the only plausible explanations for a comment by Mark are those that presuppose his accuracy and honesty, when in fact we are outsiders who don't know jack shit about Mark's actual level of honesty or credibility, and no rule of historiography obligates anybody to presume truth until something Mark said is refuted.  Does Engwer believe every statement ever made by a stranger, a person whose history of honesty or dishonesty is totally unknown to him?  If the checkable parts of a stranger's story square up with history, does that obligate us to believe the non-checkable parts?  Gee, I didn't know it would be so easy to find a murder suspect innocent in a circumstantial case:  the checkable parts of his story proved true (he was near the store at the time of the robbery), so we are obligated to trust in the non-checkable parts (like his statement that he did not kill the store clerk).

People weren't opposing him because of a lack of miracles.They were opposing him for other reasons (his failing to be the sort of Messiah they wanted, the problems he was causing with the Jewish authorities, etc.).

But as I already explained, in such honor/shame culture, the brothers would have felt compelled to investigate the spectacle Jesus was creating, they would not have simply heard that he did miracles, and then dismissed it as mere misuse of divine power.   

It would be absurd to suggest that Jesus' miracles as an adult didn't persuade these people, but that they would have been persuaded if a virgin birth or some other miracle had occurred a few decades earlier. After verse 22, the passage goes on to refer to Jesus' response to the charge that he's empowered by Satan and some comments he made about the blasphemous nature of what his opponents were doing in dismissing his miracles as demonic. That's the context in which his relatives behaved the way Ehrman mentioned.

Correct:  And Mark was lying when putting the "demonic miracles" excuse in the mouth of the Jews, for all the reasons I've listed, and there was never any legitimate rule of historiography, still less one universally accepted among historians, that says I'm stuck with presuming the truth of an ancient story unless I can prove it wrong.  So if a skeptic chose to completely ignore the bible as opposed to trifling with Engwer about details of Mark's wording, they would be perfectly justified.

You could argue that the relatives were unaware of the miracles the other people in the same passage were aware of (even as far away as Jerusalem, as verse 22 tells us), but that's an unlikely scenario. It wouldn't make sense to claim that people other than Jesus' relatives could oppose him in spite of his miracles, yet his relatives wouldn't. We have reason to think it's likely that the relatives opposing Jesus knew of his recent miracles as an adult, but even if we didn't have reason to believe that, the possibility that they would behave as they did in Mark 3 while knowing of miracles associated with Jesus is more plausible than Ehrman suggests.

 That is total bullshit.  They were obligated in the honor/shame culture to personally check out Jesus' miracles, so when they call him insane, it's likely after they've conducted an examination, and drawn the conclusion that his miracles were purely naturalistic tricks.  That's a good explanation for why his relatives would call him insane...doing non-supernatural tricks to convince people you are the messiah, would have been sufficiently dishonorable so as to explain the specter of Jesus' own family thinking him insane and refusing to believe in him.

If you want to read more on this subject, I've responded to Ehrman's objection at length, as it was formulated by Raymond Brown, here and here.  Shortly after the segment just mentioned, Ehrman goes on to cite John 8:41 as evidence that Jesus' opponents were implying that he was conceived out of wedlock, which allegedly suggests that the author of the fourth gospel wasn't aware of the concept of the virgin birth or rejected it. Actually, if John 8:41 is meant to imply Jesus' illegitimate conception, that would be corroboration of the infancy narratives, which report that the pregnancy was premarital.

No, the Jews in John 8:41 by implying Jesus was concieved outside of wedlock would not have left open an option that maybe his father was God.  They would have meant Jesus was sired by a human being out of wedlock.  But no, Engwer grasps at any straw he can possible trifle with to make it seem like disagreement with his fundamentalist view doesn't leave the skeptic any other option except intentional stupidity. 

You'd expect at least some of Jesus' enemies to accuse him of being illegitimate under such circumstances.

And we don't expect limited stories about Jesus to include every possible accusation that his enemies would have hurled at him. 

It doesn't follow that the author of the fourth gospel was unaware of the virgin birth or opposed the concept.

That's right, and nobody is saying "it follows", rather we argue that our conclusion is reasonable.  It is a very popular mistake in Christian apologetics to misrepresent the skeptic as pretending that his conclusions necessarily follow from the evidence.  Nobody seriously thinks their theory necessarily follows from the evidence...except apologists who live inside their own heads, like Jason Engwer, who thinks his being wrong in his working presuppositions is equally as intolerably foolish as the possibility that God might become an atheist.

Ehrman is interpreting John 8:41 in a way that supports a traditional Christian view of the infancy narratives, yet he's acting as though his interpretation is evidence against such a view. (I'm agnostic about whether John 8:41 is alluding to an illegitimate conception of Jesus. I think the evidence is ambiguous.)

Then you cannot balk if somebody else interprets the evidence differently than you.  But yes, I'd expect you to post 1000 articles about it since you worship the inerrancy of your own mind.  All anybody has to do is Google triablogue and Einfield Poltergeist to see just how fanatically trifling you can get in your eternal quest to always have the upper hand in an argument.  We would be justified to say Jason Engwer deliberately violates Paul's word-wrangling prohibition in 2nd Tim. 2:14.

...Given how much Jesus differed from what many ancient Jews wanted the Messiah to be,

No, how much Jesus differed from the messiah the OT predicted, a military messiah. 

how Jesus and the early Christians were treated by the Jewish and Roman authorities, etc., it's easy to see why many people would prefer to reject Christianity. The same Jews who opposed Christianity in the ancient world also acknowledged Jesus' performance of miracles (which they often dismissed as demonic),

No, we can be reasonable to say Mark was putting fiction in the mouths of the Jews when pretending they acknowledged the supernatural character of his works. 

acknowledged his empty tomb,

Because the bible tells you so.  But the original empty tomb story was nothing more than the women noticing an unidentified man near the open tomb, then running away when the stranger said Jesus is risen and continues on toward Galilee.  So the later 3 gospels with their more detailed resurrection appearance narratives are merely embellishing the earlier and simpler form of the story.

 The fact that the disciples considered the women's story bullshit (Luke 24:11) is a case of first century eyewitnesses who find the story of an empty tomb to be bullshit.  Luke was probably including some truth in that verse, but lying about nearly everything else because there is no rule of historiography that obligates anybody to first believe everything in testimony until some of it can be proved wrong.

Though Shermer and Ehrman make much of Jewish rejection of Christianity, they don't address the fact that the Jewish rejection was anticipated in the Old Testament and predicted again in the New Testament, such as when Paul wrote that "a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" (Romans 11:25). And that's what's unfolded in the history of the world. There's been an ongoing rejection of Jesus among the Jewish people as the kingdom he established has gradually grown in the Gentile world (Psalm 110:1, Daniel 2:35, Matthew 13:31-32).

There you have it folks, Jason Engwer, apologist extraordinaire, knows that something about Jesus is true because the bible tells him so.  But the fact that plenty of Jews rejected Christianity in the first century sufficiently explains why they did later.  How hard would it be for even a stupid ancient historian to predict that a religion that was attacked in his own day would be attacked in the future?  LOL. 

So, we've got a couple of skeptics talking about a Jewish Messianic figure who's had a major influence on their culture, and they're having that conversation during a month-long season of celebrating his birth that billions of Gentiles participate in every year.

And the vast majority of those Gentiles couldn't give a fuck less about the Jesus-component of Christmas unless it happens to be connected to their child's school-play, or a story that somebody reads them. 

They're objecting that this Jewish Messianic figure has been rejected by the Jewish people, something both the Old Testament and Jesus' earliest followers predicted.

And a prediction that even a stupid person could make. 

4 comments:
TheFlyingCouch12/09/2021 9:46 AM☍
"Ehrman goes on to cite John 8:41 as evidence that Jesus' opponents were implying that he was conceived out of wedlock, which allegedly suggests that the author of the fourth gospel wasn't aware of the concept of the virgin birth or rejected it."
And Ehrman's a scholar, right? Is John really not thought to be capable of writing down what opponents thought?

Yes he was, and we are reasonable to assume he doesn't mention the VB because he thought it false.  It would have served his purposes to allege that the Holy Spirit caused the logos to become human. But Christian scholars cannot even agree on whether John was aware of the Synoptic traditions before he wrote.

Is stating what opponents thought only capable of being what John thinks himself, but in someone else's mouth?

No, but again, we have reasons to say John created fictional dialogue.  And that's after I've read everything in Lydia McGrew's "Eye of the Beholder". 

Jason Engwer12/09/2021 10:42 AM☍
There's a lot of bad reasoning during the program on a lot of topics. And Shermer and Ehrman have been prominent skeptics, often interacting with Christianity in the process, for decades.

 And because Engwer is demonstrably too chickenshit to debate those men live  Engwer happily confines himself to the backwaters of "posted blog piece" despite knowing that the vast majority of people prefer a living voice over written argument.

Jason Engwer12/20/2021 1:02 PM☍
Erik Manning has produced a good video overview of the issues surrounding Mark 3 and the virgin birth. It's less than five minutes long, but covers a lot of ground.

 So if the skeptic says he covers too many points, you forfeit the right to balk, since your yourself refuse to answer videos that make a lot of points.

My Response to J. Warner Wallace on the argument from the martyrdom of the apostles

This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace's regurgitating the "they would never die for a lie" martyrdom-argument article entitled

The Commitment Of The Apostles 

Confirms The Truth Of The Resurrection

Many of us, as committed Christians, would rather die than reject our Savior.

That's also true of Christians who deny that Jesus is God. Should I be impressed?

Around the world today, Christians are executed regularly because they refuse to deny their allegiance to Jesus or the truth claims of Christianity.

Which is a sad testament to how easily religion can persuade people to contradict their own natures and prefer death.  What you don't tell your readers is that those executed also include Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, and others who deny the Trinity.

But their deaths, while heartbreaking and compelling, have no evidential value.

God might disagree with you.  God probably thinks that because his enabling grace is the reason they chose death over life, their deaths constitute evidence for God's operating in the world today. 

Many people are willing to die for what they don’t know is a lie. Martyrdom doesn’t confirm the truth, especially when the martyrs don’t have first-hand access to the claim for which they’re dying. But this wasn’t the case for the disciples of Jesus. They were in a unique position: they knew if the claims about Jesus were true. They were present for the life, ministry, death and alleged resurrection of Jesus. If the claims about Jesus were a lie, the disciples would have known it (in fact they would have been the source of the lie). That’s why their commitment to their testimony was (and is) so compelling.

You are assuming the NT gives us their resurrection testimony.  That's mostly false.  First, historians use their best evidence, and the best possible evidence-type for Jesus' resurrection is eyewitness testimony.  The only resurrection testimony that has any hope of coming down to us today in firsthand form is Paul, John and Matthew.  And even then, this is forgetting for the moment all the disagreements Christian scholars have with each other on to what degree Matthew and John contributed to the final canonical form of those gospels.  It's also forgetting how reasonable the arguments are that a prima facie case for apostolic authorship of those gospels cannot even be made.

If we are reasonable to say there is no reasonably reliable way to distinguish apostolic from non-apostolic contributions to those 2 gospels, then the only firsthand testimony you'll have for Jesus' resurrection is Paul, who was a duplicitous liar.  Yes, Paul was declaring eyewitness status in 1st Cor. 9:1, but that is falsified in the book of Acts.  Nothing about Paul's experience of Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9, Acts 22, Acts 26) expresses or implies that he physically saw the risen Christ.  So if the most explicit accounts of that experience do not justify drawing the inference that Paul physically saw the risen Christ, we are well within the bounds of reasonableness to characterize the eyewitness claim in 1st Cor 9:1 as a lie, and deny to Paul the status of "eyewitness".  So if the question is "From the New Testament, how much eyewitness testimony to Jesus' resurrection comes down to us in firsthand form?", we are reasonable, even if not infallible, to answer "none". 

So if it be true that historians insist that historians use their best evidence, then you fail the first evidentiary hurdle.  You cannot make your case from first-hand accounts.  Maybe you should write an article arguing that only the devil wants people to think hearsay is less credible than firsthand testimony?  Which would then obligate you to argue that the devil has been deceiving America's legal system for centuries.  

Unlike the rest of us, their willingness to die for their claims has tremendous evidential value.

Not if we can reasonably argue that the resurrection appearance stories in the gospels are late fabrications.  We can.  We are reasonable to agree with most Christian scholars that Mark is the earliest gospel, and agree with them further that text written authentically by Mark stops with 16:8.  You will trifle all day every day that surely Mark had given a resurrection appearance narrative and it was lost very early.  But we are reasonable to go with the scholars who say there is nothing unnatural about Mark intending to end at v. 8.  The only thing unnatural about it is that when he ends at v. 8, this creates headaches for apologists 2000 years after the fact, who have bible inerrancy on the brain, and who would rather be martyred than admit the tales of Jesus' resurrection are late fabrications. 

And it wouldn't matter if Jesus rose from the dead:  Deut. 13 admits that even false prophets can possibly perform genuinely supernatural miracles.  So Jesus rising from the dead is not the end of the problem but the beginning.

And according to Mark 3:21, 6:4 and John 7:5, Jesus' own family found his miracles so unconvincing that they saw him as crazy and as giving no reason to put faith in him.  If his own family thought his miracles were fake, we are reasonable to agree with these indisputably contemporary eyewitnesses on the point.  So if Jesus in fact rose from the dead, it was a deceptive crazy person who rose from the dead, and likely one of those "the Lord God is testing you with a false prophet" things in Deut. 13:3.

In fact, the commitment of the apostles confirms the truth of the resurrection.

And you are apparently aware that talking all confident about stuff that is out of your league, will cause other tithing mammals to spend their money on your stupid bantering bullshit.

The traditions related to the deaths of the apostles are well known.

They are also late and contradictory, which justifies us to completely ignore them if we so choose.  And you are showing weakness here, since you've now required your readers to go evaluate late and contradictory church traditions about the death of the apostles.  If you seriously held to Sola Scriptura (the bible is alone sufficent for faith and practice), you would not waste your customers' time trying to stuff their heads with non-canonical traditions.  You would regard biblical resurrection testimony as sufficient...then you would act like it was sufficient.  You are not acting like it just now.

According to local and regional histories, all of the disciples died for their claims related to the Resurrection: Andrew was crucified in Patras, Greece. Bartholomew (aka Nathanael) was flayed to death with a whip in Armenia. James the Just was thrown from the temple and then beaten to death in Jerusalem. James the Greater was beheaded in Jerusalem. John died in exile on the island of Patmos. Luke was hanged in Greece. Mark was dragged by horse until he died in Alexandria, Egypt. Matthew was killed by a sword in Ethiopia. Matthias was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome. Philip was crucified in Phrygia. Thomas was stabbed to death with a spear in India. As a detective (and a very skeptical one at that), I don’t necessarily accept all these traditions with the same level of certainty.

Which is puzzling since your commitment to Sola Scriptura means you don't think you need extra-canonical stuff to help your case.  If those post-biblical traditions about the apostles' death are of varying degrees of historical value, then what?  Are you asking your paying customers to become professional historians?  If not, aren't they taking a chance that when they make an amateur judgment about the value of this extra-canonical testimony, they might get it wrong? 

Some are better attested than others; I have far greater confidence in the history related to Peter’s death, for example, than I have in the claims related to Matthias’ death.

But you are forced to think Jesus' account of Peter's martyrdom is the best possible historical evidence on the subject, and Jesus made it clear that Peter would be unwilling to die:

18 "Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to gird yourself and walk wherever you wished; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will gird you, and bring you where you do not wish to go."  19 Now this He said, signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.  (Jn. 21:18-19 NAU)

And if he remained as fickle after Jesus' resurrection as Galatians 2 says, we can be reasonable to infer that Peter in any trial would have denied Jesus like he did before, and similarly to how he denied his true convictions in Galatians 2:12.

Mike Licona, a far greater scholar on the resurrection of Jesus than you, has little confidence in the traditions about Peter's death:

"Clement reports that Peter and Paul suffered multiple attacks and most likely refers to their martyrdoms, although the latter is not without question...I must add that Clement of Rome is of limited use in our investigation, since we have assigned a rating of possible-plus in terms of the strength of this document as a source that reliably preserves apostolic testimony...The accounts regarding the remaining apostles are interesting and may contain historical kernels, but they are anecdotal and cannot be accorded too much weight."

Mike Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus:  A New Historiographical Approach (IVP Academic, 2010), pp. 367, 369, 370.  Possible-plus?  Well gee, I have no rational option but to throw dust and ashes on my head, amen?  Why don't you just honestly admit that if it weren't for Sean McDowell's ph.d thesis that deals exclusively with the deaths of the 12 apostles, you wouldn't have been able to write this article?

You want people who are not professional historians to make judgment calls on disputed matters of history that not even professional historians agree on?  What are you gonna do next?  Demand that your customers decide which accounts of the battle of Troy are reliable and which aren't?

But I am still confident these men died for their claims, even if I may be uncertain about precisely how they died. Here’s why: There were two quick ways to end the upstart Christian religion in the first century (and both the Jewish and Roman leadership would have been eager to accomplish this task). First, the enemies of Christianity could simply have dragged the body of Jesus through town to demonstrate he was still dead. Second, they could have forced the alleged eyewitnesses to recant.

You are assuming the apostolic preaching was considered by the secular authorities to be something demanding their attention.  I don't think the book of Acts is anywhere near as historically reliable as you think it is.  I say it is lying in nearly everything it says because it was intended less as historically reliable and more as edifying fiction.  And yes, I say this after having read Sir William Ramsay's The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (1915).  

Neither of these two things ever occurred.

Probably because the ruling secular authorities did not view the Christian preaching with anywhere near the panic that Acts says they did.  The issue is not whether YOU can be reasonable to characterize Acts as the equal of videotape.  The issue is whether SKEPTICS can be reasonable to say Acts is full of lies.  We can.  If a witness's story contains nuggets of historical truth, you still don't know if that means honest author, or if it means dishonest author who is trying to make a false story "ring true".  Yet you and all conservative Christian apologists simplemindedly insist that the presence of historically accurate details automatically necessitates the conclusion of honest author.  Sorry, you lose.  

You may not be aware, but we do have ancient accounts of recanting on the part of Christians. Pliny the Younger was Roman lawyer and magistrate who lived from 61-113AD. He served as the governor of Bithynia-Pontus (now located in modern Turkey) under Emperor Trajan, and he conducted trials against those who had been identified as Christians. In a letter he wrote to Trajan in 111-113AD, he said the following: “…in the case of those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have observed the following procedure: I interrogated these as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed. For I had no doubt that, whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished… Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with statues of the gods, and moreover cursed Christ–none of which those who are really Christians, it is said, can be forced to do–these I thought should be discharged. Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years. They all worshipped your image and the statues of the gods, and cursed Christ.”

So his basis for killing some Christians wasn't a hatred of Jesus or attempt to snuff out their religion, but that "I had no doubt that, whatever the nature of their creed, stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy surely deserve to be punished..."  Pliny cares less about what exactly they are preaching, and cares only to suppress stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy.

What you don't tell the reader is Trajen's response, which forbade Pliny from seeking out Christians: "They are not to be sought out."  See here.  It is reasonable to conclude that this important ruler didn't perceive the spread of Christianity to be a significant threat.  The larger point is that you are misleading your readers by talking about what the ruling authorities could have done to put a stop to Christianity.  You falsely assume the spread of Christianity caused the ruling authorities to panic and try to suppress this growing cult.  They generally didn't.  So if they aren't putting Jesus' corpse in a wheelbarrow and then going on an expensive first century tour through Rome and Palestine, its not because they couldn't, but because they didn't think Christianity was sufficiently significant to justify spending resources on.

Really now, Mr. Warner, how much effort have you put into refuting any heretical miracle claims you think are false?  What shall we say about the Protestant christian apologist who never gets around to providing reasons why some Catholic miracle claims are false?  Shall we assume you don't make such efforts because you know the miracles are true?  Or should we assume you don't both exposing such error because you simply don't give a fuck? 

Not every early Christian was willing to die for his or her beliefs. Here we have excellent evidence of second generation Christians recanting their claims to stay alive in the Roman Empire.

That effectively counter-balances any historical evidence that select leaders of the movement, likely with an agenda to make the world a better place, were willing to die. 

One thing is certain: The Roman authorities recognized the importance of their efforts to obtain denials from early Christians. Pliny’s work in this regard (recorded very early in history) are evidence of this.

And Trajan's response, which you didn't quote, forbids Pliny from seeking out Christians.  Whatever "importance" they thought there was in suppressing Christianity, it wasn't as extreme as you pretend. 

Many second generation Christians (who were not eyewitnesses of the Resurrection) recanted their membership in the Christian family to stay alive. Yet there isn’t a single ancient document, letter or piece of evidence indicating any of the Christian eyewitnesses (the apostolic disciples) ever changed their story or surrendered their claims.

But Galatians 2:9 is reasonably interpreted as evidence that the original apostles disobeyed the risen Christ's Great Commission in Matthew 28:19.  Is there a significant difference between disobeying the risen Christ, and recanting one's resurrection testimony?  No, because you would argue that by seeing the risen Christ, they were "amazingly transformed".

You also have another problem:  You act as if Jesus' resurrection is supposed to be some unprecedented act that, if true, would have blown the socks off of Jesus' followers.  Sorry...Matthew 10:8 has Jesus requiring his disciples to perform resurrections during one of the missions.  If that is true, then it doesn't make sense to pretend that Jesus' own resurrection was deemed by them to be an unexpected game changer.  It is senseless to pretend that disciples who had themselves performed resurrection miracles, would later become so utterly mesmerized by Jesus' own resurrection.  Perhaps that explains why they disobeyed the risen Christ's Great Commission.  And Matthew 28:17 says some of those who saw the risen Christ "doubted".  I've examined the arguments of the fools who pretend this only means "hesitant", and I maintain that "doubted" means they didn't think what they were seeing was a truly resurrected person.  There is no rule of historiography that obligates anybody to harmonize Matthew's account with John's story of doubting Thomas.  So it doesn't matter if you can be reasonable to attempt that harmonization anyway, the question is whether skeptics can be reasonable to refuse such harmonization scenario.  They can.  You lose. 

Given the reasonable expectation of this Roman effort and the evidence from history confirming the trials of Christians, it’s remarkable none of the eyewitnesses ever changed their claims.

What's more remarkable is your gullibility in leaping from "we have no evidence they changed their stories" over to "none of the eyewitnesses ever changed their stories".  Do you seriously think that if any of the apostles had changed their stories, the burgeoning Christian church would have desired to preserve this embarrassment for posterity?  Gee, how often do religions preserve testimony prejudicial to their cause...and how often do religious get rid of testimony prejudicial to their cause?  Aren't you curious as to why letters from the Judaizers were never preserved?  Or will you insist that no such letters ever existed?  You are required by the book of Acts 15:23 to believe that the leaders of the Judaizers thought sending letters was an acceptable way to deal with the problem of Paul.  And I'm pretty sure you are aware that between the 1st and 2nd centuries, various leaders demanded the destruction of Christian works they deemed "heretical".  And from Paul's lament that his entire Galatian church had apostatized and adopted the Judaizer gospel (1:6-9), we can be confident that they didn't achieve this solely by word of mouth, but also by letters to each other critical of Paul.  Paul's own example of letter writing indicates it was consistent with zealous Judaism to send letters to address local church problems. So yes, we are reasonable to say the lack of 1st century sources critical of Christianity is not due to their never existing, but due to their being destroyed.  You are a fool to leap from "we have no evidence the apostles ever changed their story" over to "the apostles never changed their story".  Apostle Matthew was the author of the Great Commission in 28:19.  If Galatians 2:9 is true, we reasonably infer that he changed his story and stopped telling the world that the risen Christ required him and the orignal apostles to evangelize the Gentiles.  If Peter as resurrection eyewitness was as fickle as Galatians 2 says, then he most definitely changed his story, likely several times, at least when facing persecution.  If he feared "they of the circumcision" despite their presenting no threat of death, how likely would he fear "they of Rome" who were much more likely to execute him?

Our willingness (as non-witnesses later in history) to die for what we believe has no evidential value, but the willingness of the first disciples to die for what they saw with their own eyes is a critical piece of evidence in the case for Christianity.

So sources that are late, contradictory and are assigned widely varying levels of historical value by professional historians, are "critical" pieces of evidence in the case for Christianity?  LOL

The early tradition of the Church related to these deaths is bolstered by the lack of any ancient record of apostolic denial,

then you need to phone Lydia and Tim McGrew.  They are conservative Christian apologists who burn in effigy all fools who argue from silence.  Nice to know there's no end to the divisions in the body of Christ. 

especially given there exist other ancient accounts of public persecution and denials by early Christians.

Which are late, contradictory, and subject to widely varying value judgments from professional historians. 

The commitment of the disciples to their claims is compelling.

But not so much as to render those who reject the gospel unreasonable. 

Unlike the rest of us, their willingness to die for what they witnessed has tremendous evidential value.

Paul was not an eyewitness, and yet that apostle's resurrection testimony is the only one the NT passes on to posterity in firsthand form.

Jonathan McLatchie's fallacies in explaining away Divine Hiddenness

This is my reply to Dr. Jonathan McLatchie's article at crossexamined.org entitled

GRAPPLING WITH DIVINE HIDDENNESS: WHY DOES GOD NOT MAKE HIS EXISTENCE MORE OBVIOUS?

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2021

By Jonathan McLatchie

One of the most challenging objections to the existence of God is the problem of divine hiddenness. Closely related to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness asks “Where is God?”; “Why doesn’t God make His existence more obvious?”; “Why does God leave any room for doubt?” Surely God, if He existed, would not need apologists to make the case for His existence — couldn’t He have made it more immediately apparent? Related to these concerns is the problem of unanswered prayer. Why do so many peoples’ prayers go unanswered, often despite years of persistent prayer? The problem is even connected to the problem of evil, since one may ask why God apparently fails to show up to put an end to evil and unjust suffering in our world. These are indeed difficult questions that deserve to be taken seriously and thoughtfully considered.

So if your article doesn't persuasively refute the hiddenness objection, we can reasonably deduce that even after you tried your best, you couldn't show the alleged fallaciousness or illegitimacy of the hiddenness objection.

The Biblical authors also recognized and grappled with divine hiddenness. For example, the Psalmist asked “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Ps 10:1). Another Psalm likewise says “Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Ps 44:23-26). One could continue in a similar vein for some time.

Which is why you Christians are accomplishing nothing if and when you quote something in the bible in response to the divine hiddenness objection.  The biblical authors offered nothing more serious than the persistence of their faith.  Gee, God really exists, because nothin's gonna stop us now?  LOL. 

The problem of divine hiddenness is, in my judgment, one of the best arguments against the existence of God.

You are a 5-point Calvinist who says presuppositionalism isn't biblical.  Your presuppositionalist brothers in Christ think you are sinfully deaf to the Holy Spirit, because neither the bible nor god will allow that some atheist arguments are "better" than others.  Is there a reason why you don't just say "you can't account for the pre-conditions of intelligibility" and then wait to see the world come to a grinding halt?  That's what your friends Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, James White, Jeff Durbin and Sye Bruggencate do.  Does God want you all to disagree on how robust some atheist objection is?  Does God want his followers to disagree with each other on whether presuppositionalism is biblically justified?

It has its most articulate and erudite defense, to my knowledge, in the work of Canadian philosopher John L. Schellenberg (see his book The Hiddenness Argument — Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God).[1]

The problem is particularly difficult on an emotional level. Schellenberg draws the analogy of a friend describing his parents: “Wow, are they ever great — I wish everyone could have parents like mine, who are so wonderfully loving! Granted, they don’t want anything to do with me. They’ve never been around. Sometimes I find myself looking for them — once, I have to admit, I even called out for them when I was sick — but to no avail. Apparently they aren’t open to being in a relationship with me — at least not yet. But it’s so good that they love me as much and as beautifully as they do!”[2] This analogy should give a sense of the impact of this argument, rhetorically and emotionally.

The analogy indicates that the only way you are ever going to justify pretending some "god" wants a "personal" relationship with us is if you radically redefine "personal", when in fact your solitary basis for doing so is to avoid having to admit the Christian religion is false.  You know?  This is sort of like radically redefining "billionaire" so a homeless destitute man can still "plausibly" claim to be financially secure.

While it may be admitted that the argument from divine hiddenness is one of the most perplexing issues for the theist to come to terms with, especially emotionally, the real question that needs to be addressed is that of whether it offers sufficient ground to overhaul the powerful cumulative positive reasons to believe that God exists and that He has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ. I will argue in this article that the answer is ‘no’.

Then you missed the forest for the trees.  If God does not do what would fall within the parameters of "desire a personal relationship with us", then his existence is rendered irrelevant.  A man with a bright orange hat no doubt truly exists somewhere in Sudan right now.  But his mere existence is hardly sufficient to justify inferring that he wants to be in a personal relationship with you.  Some neo-evangelical fuckheads will say the "personal relationship" stuff is merely the fruit of apostate Christianity, and true discipleship consists solely of prayer and obedience.  But we call victory if we can justify ignoring the most popular version of theism/Christianity.

A Lack of Obviousness Does Not Mean Poor Evidential Support

Yes it does.  The more obvious something is, the more evidential support there will be.  The less obvious something is, the less evidential support.  It is far from obvious that Bigfoot is a genuine cryptid, there is a remarkable lack of evidential support that this thing being a real animal.  Your statement might be reasonable if you are talking about just any evidence that might blow in from any direction.  But if you are talking about seriously "authenticated" evidence, then your maxim is most certainly false.  How much of the evidence in favor of Bigfoot being a genuine cryptid, is seriously "authenticated"?  The vast majority of BF fanatics are not willing to assert their claims under penalty of perjury, and one might be reasonable to say such unwillingness means the evidence in question is not properly authenticated.  We might have higher standards of evidence than the average fool on the internet, but so what?  Having high standards of evidence only means you are forced to come up with a seriously good case, it doesn't mean we are being "unfair".  Otherwise, any guilty criminal suspect could complain the standard of evidence he is being forced to meet by the prosecutor's grilling questions on the stand is "unfair" and the standard "should be" lower.  Not on your life.  Furthermore, it is precisely the failure to have a higher standard that is responsible for many people being defrauded and conned.  When we are dealing with an unknown and thus a possible fake, the only people who complain that our standards are too high are the fools who cannot justify their own lower standards.

Why does God not make His existence more obvious?

We say it is for the same reason the tooth-fairy doesn't make her existence more obvious.  The only difference is that one is clearly limited to children, the other appears to be a fairytale intended for adults. 

The first point I will make in response to this question is that God’s existence not being obvious does not entail that it is not well evidentially supported. We know from physics, for example, that a physical object like a table or a chair is comprised of mostly empty space. This is not at all obvious (in fact it would seem to be almost obvious that it is not the case) and yet we have good evidential support that it is so.

This means that "obvious" may be grounded in mere perception, or study.  Before the age of enlightenment, a person would have been reasonable to think a chair was a "solid" object and to insist that the theory of the chair being mostly empty space lacked evidentiary support.  Similarly, before the age of enlightenment, a person might have been reasonable to attribute certain natural phenomena to "god".  What's "obvious" reasonably depends on the current state of knowledge.

One may reply that whereas we know scientifically that the chair is mostly comprised of empty space, we nonetheless still live our lives as if though it is not — our day-to-day choices and beliefs are not based on how we scientifically understand things to be, but how we experience them in our daily lives. However, I can think of counter-examples where we do act against what we feel in accord with the available evidence, even when we are putting our lives on the line. For example, despite being a frequent flyer, I get anxious about being on an airplane. Even though I know rationally that flying is the safest way to travel (statistically, your odds of being involved in a fatal plane crash are less than 1 in 12 million), flying – especially in turbulent conditions – just doesn’t feel like it is safe to me. Nevertheless, I frequently overcome my fear of flying by stepping onto an airplane, often for very long distances. In that case, I am literally committing my life to what my rational faculties tell me, and disregarding what my emotions and feelings tell me, because I know that generally my rational faculties are a more reliable gauge of what is actually true than my feelings.

Statistics don't tell you what is actually true, that's why they change all the time.  All they do is highlight trends.  You've heard the expression "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics".

Someone recently asked me why God cannot be more like the force of gravity, which we experience directly. However, while we do have direct experience of the effects of gravity, it is not immediately obvious what causes things to gravitate towards the ground.

The point is not being able to figure out the mechanism, but being able to prove that some such mechanism must obviously be present to account for the phenomena.  God could cause severe headache or body ache to all persons when they are 1 minute away from committing a crime.  We would then notice that those who wish to commit crime exhibit this trend, and we could deduce a moral creator from it even if we couldn't fully explain how the non-physical god manages to influence the movement of physical things like neurons.

The law of gravity was not articulated before Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Indeed, in attempting to explain why unsupported bodies fall to the ground, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle put forward the idea that objects simply moved towards their ‘natural place’, the center of the earth (which in Aristotle’s cosmology was the center of the Universe), and that objects fall at a speed proportional to their weight. So perhaps gravity is less ‘obvious’ than one might think (though something which nonetheless enjoys strong evidential support). I would argue that the evidence of God is all around us, so we do in a sense experience God in a similar way to how we experience gravity. Just as we observe the effects that gravity has all around us but do not see the gravitational force that actually causes those effects, we also see the many things that God has made all around us, even though we do not see the being who actually caused those things to exist.

Not at all.  Science continues coming up with sufficient purely naturalistic explanations for phenomena previously unexplainable.  Abiogenesis is next on naturalism's hit-list.

One may still object here that it should not take us a lot of work to discover that Christianity is true. Rather, the truth of the gospel, granting what is at stake, should be readily apparent. I shall return to this objection in due course. However, I will note here that I do not think God requires more than it is reasonable for a serious enquirer to give to an issue of this much importance.

Then because I can reasonably justify ignoring the gospel, that is the point where your apologetics break down, and thus the point where you walk away defeated. 

Some enquirers are better placed than others, and God looks for us to exert ourselves according to the light we have been given.

You must be talking solely to Christians, you cannot just sneak in what you think is a biblical "truth" (we are accontable to God based on how much "light" he has allowed to us) and expect it to be found persuasive by a non-Christian. 

I have heard, for instance, many stories of Jesus revealing Himself to people in dreams and visions in Muslim-majority countries, presumably since those are parts of the world where it is harder for people to otherwise hear the gospel. In the west, we have ample access to the gospel and to the tools needed to do our due diligence in investigating its claims.

But visions and dreams are more persuasive than historical evidence.  How many people would be denying Christianity if God gave a Jesus-vision to everybody? You lose.

I think we have to trust the goodness of God,

Yup, you have no intention of addressing unbelievers at that point.

 since presumably God, in his omniscience, knows what every person would have done had they had more evidence — i.e. whether they would have chosen to enter into a relationship with God or to reject Him. 

So because Matthew 11:21 has Jesus saying earlier civilizations surely "would have" repented had they been allowed to see the miracles Jesus was doing for 1st century people, we are forced to the conclusion that even when God knows that more evidence "would have" resulted in more being getting saved, God will still withhold that evidence, i.e., God does not wish to save everybody, i.e., totally consistent with your Calvinism...thus making everybody wonder why the anti-Calvinist Dr. Frank Turek would ever let a person like you represent his crossexamined.org ministry.  Maybe you are one of those "Calvinists" who think God wants to be surprised and find that several non-elect people managed to get saved anyway? 

We know from plenty of Biblical examples that not everyone who is presented with conclusive evidence for God (whether by miracles, predictive prophecies, or direct manifestations) submits to Him.

Then Matthew 11:21 is a serious problem for you.  Jesus said those earlier civilizations "would have" repented had they seen the miracles Jesus was doing.  There is no "maybe" in Jesus' dogmatic words there. 

If God knows that a given individual is not going to enter into a good, lasting relationship with Him, then why would God ensure the person believes?

But if God is all-powerful, he can cause the most incorrigably stubborn unbeliever to become a believer.  The strongest biblical case in point is Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus.  Paul had not previously repented, he was still whole-heartedly persecuting Christians when God allegedly decided to give him both theological barrels right to the face.  If the biblical god is serious in his boasts that "all things" are possible for him (Matthew 19:26), then spiritually regenerating a determined atheist would be a piece of cake...just like keeping safe the toddler who refuses to move from the middle of the street is a piece of cake, because the power we have as their caretakers is greater than their stubbornness.  Love requires that we force them against their wills when we reasonably foresee that allowing them to have their way will likely result in disaster.

Furthermore, Scripture also indicates that people are judged in accordance with the amount of light they have rejected (e.g. Mt 11:21-22; Jn 12:47-48).

Another proof that you are not addressing atheists or unbelievers, so that you cannot complain if such groups find your arguments pathetically weak. 

Even many contemporary public atheists have essentially said that no amount of evidence could change their mind. For example, Richard Dawkins was asked in a conversation with Peter Boghossian what it would take for him to believe in God. Dawkins said that not even the second coming would be enough evidence. When Boghossian asked him whether any amount of evidence could change his mind. He replied, “Well, I’m starting to think nothing would, which, in a way, goes against the grain, because I’ve always paid lip service to the view that a scientist should change his mind when evidence is forthcoming.” It could, therefore, be seen as an act of mercy for God to withhold from them more evidence if they were going to reject it anyway and thereby bring upon themselves greater judgment.

But if God foisted on Dawkins that efficacious telepathy God boasts of having in Ezra 1:1, Dawkins would no more likely resist doing what God wanted than pagan idolator King Cyrus would resist conforming to what god wanted.   Maybe we should change Romans 1:20 so that it says "God is without excuse, because when he really wants to, he can cause even the most stubborn unbeliever change their mind and become willing to obey the divine intent".

This adds yet further plausible motivation for God not to ensure that everyone had greater access to evidence for His existence, which would thereby render them more culpable.

Except that Jesus in Matthew 11:21 assured us that prior civilizations "would have" repented if they had seen more evidence.  So from a biblical perspective, God is not withholding evidence because he wants to lessen their culpability...he is withholding evidence because he doesn't want them to repent. 

This point has been independently made by Travis Dumsday in a paper in the journal Religious Studies.[3]

He is trumped by the word of God.  That's enough to convince you.

This last point may be challenged by the skeptic by pointing to the existence of non-resistant non-believers. As Schellenberg puts it, “If there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.”[4] However, I would contest that there is such a thing as long-term non-resistant nonbelief. My own view is that the evidence for Christianity is such that anyone who is fully informed and takes it upon himself to impartially examine it — with a heart open toward accepting God as Lord — will, in the long term, come to find Christianity to be true and well supported.

Perhaps your desire to continue believing in such a blind hopeless way about unbelievers explains why you reject a lot of debate invitations from them, like when you rejected mine for reasons that were outrageously irrelevant to the merits, see here.

In any case, human psychology, particularly at the subconscious level, is so complex that I doubt that it is demonstrable that any nonbeliever is completely nonresistant.

Your first concern is your bible, not human psychology, and there, God apparently wants people to think that his sovereignty over the choice-making abilities of human beings is aptly illustrated by the analogy of hooking a fish and forcing it to go in a direction it didn't wish to go.  See "hook in your jaws" in Ezekiel 38-39.  What is so unreasonable in taking that metaphor to mean God not only has the capability of forcing people against their will, he is also willing to actually do it?  Bible inerrancy is rejected by most Christian scholars, so you can hardly pretend that an unbeliever is under some type of obligation to presume that the only interpretation of a bible verse that can possibly be correct is the one that harmonizes with everything else in the bible.  There' nothing the least bit unreasonable in concluding that Ezekiel's hard determinism contradicts what other biblical authors believed. 

Couldn’t God Have Given Us Stronger Evidence?

A related objection is that it is possible for the evidence for Christianity to have been stronger than it in fact is. Surely, if God existed, He would have given us the strongest possible evidence. However, I do not think that we need expect something that goes beyond perfectly adequate evidence for the serious inquirer.

I have no patience for this type of red-herring.  We are not asking you whether the evidence available to the modern day atheist is "sufficient" to justify holding them accountable on Judgment Day.  We are asking whether God could have provided more and better evidence.  The answer is yes, and Matthew 11:21 ensures that God knew prior civilizations would surely have repented had they been given more evidence.  But a better rebuttal would argue that your god's problem is not whether he could provide better evidence, but why he refuses to foist on today's idolators that coercive telepathy that he foisted on King Cyrus to ensure he would obey the divine will, Ezra 1:1.  Whenever the bible asserts that God made somebody willing, or "stirred up their spirit", they ALWAYS do exactly what he wants them to do.  Yes, we need to change Romans 1:20 so it says "god is without excuse, he could avoid any need to bitch about people about sinning by simply preventing them from sinning". 

Many atheists are under the mistaken impression that God wants people to believe in Him no matter what they are going to go on and do with that knowledge.

No, you are creating a completely fabricated problem: If God foisted his saving grace on everybody, they would not merely get saved...they would also use that knowledge in whatever way God wanted them to.  God is without excuse. 

It is never contended anywhere in Scripture that it is a commendable thing to believe in God yet reject a relationship with Him.

And it is never contended anywhere in Scripture that God might cause somebody to believe in him but still reject a relationship with him. The power that cause belief also causes willingness to enter a relationship.  God is without excuse. 

In the Old Testament, the Jews had no doubt that God existed – they had seen many miracles performed before their eyes – and yet they went off time and again into idolatry.

That analogy doesn't work with atheists, because we deny that such Jews ever saw any miracles in the first place.  That's why they found it impossibly difficult to fear YHWH enough to stay separate from the Canaanites. 

Even those who saw Jesus’ miracles before their very eyes didn’t believe in Him (e.g. John 12:37) and wanted to put Him to death – e.g. see the reaction of many after Jesus raised Lazarus (John 11:45-53).

The bible correctly reports that some people thought Jesus' miracles were total bullshit...but it incorrectly reports that those miracles were genuinely supernatural.  In this I violate standard of historiographical convention no more than does the jury who decides that some portions of a witness's testimony are truthful and other portions are lies. 

The eighteenth century lawyer and Christian thinker Joseph Butler (1692-1752), in his Analogy of Religion, put forward the idea that our time on earth is a period of probation.[5]

You are a Calvinist.  You think God's foreknowledge is exhaustive and infallible.  In that case, there can be no "probation" because God is not waiting to see what we will do.  If God doesn't think we are capable of doing anything other than what he infallibly foresees us doing, then our internal sense of unpredictability and autonomy is genuinely illusory...there was never any "if" about it in the first place, and therefore, putting us on "probation" in this life would be about as sensible as putting a toddler on probation in front of a trigonometry textbook to see "if" they will get the right answers.  Only a fool would expect obedience when by other means he already infallibly knows it will never happen.  Most Christians will agree with me that there is straight up irreconcilable contradiction between Calvinism's doctrine of God's revealed will and Calvinism's doctrine of God's secret will.  Nothing is more dishonest than the Calvinist bitching at people for sinning, because Calvinism says their sins were in perfect conformity to God's will (secret will).  The utter stupidity of such a God is clear from Paul's inability to coherently answer that problem in Romans 9:20. 

For some people in particular the form that that probation may take is a form of testing whether they are willing to engage in the intellectual inquiry that is necessary to give themselves a fair examination of the evidence.

"whether"?  If God already knows infallibly how they will react to the test, then its not really "probation", is it?  If you know infallibly that an imprisoned man will rape soon after being put on probation, then your releasing him isn't really "probation", is it?  Probation only makes sense when the person in charge has hopes that we will pass the test, and cannot the outcome beforehand.

An objection I sometimes encounter is that, if God exists, then there should not be any reasonable arguments against His existence at all. However, this complaint, it seems to me, boils down essentially to the dubious claim that, if Christianity is true, there cannot be any puzzles that require mental effort to work out.

The objection is wise, it shows that if God exists and yet it isn't obvious, then this God apparently prioritizes toying with people above seriously wanting them to avoid spiritual disaster.  If God is playing hide and seek with us, either we are not in spiritual trouble, or this God is sadistic, because it is precisely this game that causes some people to allegedly endure eternal conscious suffering in an afterworld. Had God been a bit more serious, there wouldn't have been any hide and seek, God's will would have been as obvious as the existence of trees, and we have no right to pretend that the level of sin in that world would still be equal to the level of sin in the present world where this god desires to play hide and seek.

Another point to bear in mind is that many people are not even presented with these as puzzles that seriously compromise the evidence that they already have. For some people, working through the problem of evil is part of their probation here in this life.

Some would argue that insulating a child from rape is more important than some adult's "Probation" in this life.  The only reason any fool insists that "God is an exception" are those who refuse to give up belief in god's "goodness". 

And if they are diligent, they will work through it.

This is blind denial of the obvious truth that many Christians are diligent and yet don't work through it, and often de-convert. 

Even if they cannot find adequate and satisfying answers to why there exists so much suffering in the world, they can learn to trust in the goodness of God, and find in the problem of evil insufficient ground to overturn the positive confirmatory case for Biblical theism.

We aren't using evil to disprove theism.  We are using evil to disprove the doctrine of God's "goodness". 

Either they will find adequate answers, or they will find enough positive evidence to make the fact of their inability to find those answers not, in the end, sufficient to undermine their faith.
Why Does God Require of Us So Much Work?

Again, you address only Christians.  The unbeliever would never concede that god requires anything of anybody.

I often hear the objection that in order to really be compelled by the evidence for Christianity, one has to take a very deep dive into esoteric scholarship. Surely, if God were real, the truth of the gospel should be a lot more self-evident. Indeed, this is actually also an objection to my epistemology that I frequently encounter from some Christians as well – namely, that my hard line evidentialism implies that Christians cannot be rational in believing the gospel unless they become an academic and invest hundreds of hours in the study of the evidences for Christianity. Since not everyone has the aptitude and access to resources necessary to undertake such deep study, so the objection goes, this cannot be God’s normative way of imparting rational confidence to believers that the gospel they have entrusted is indeed true.
However, I want to be careful here to draw a distinction between what I call an explicit rational warrant and what can be called an implicit, or tacit, rational warrant for Christian faith.

Mere reasonableness of the Christian view cannot itself displace or disprove the reasonableness of the atheist view, because two opposite viewpoints may possibly be equally reasonable.  It's the reason why not all equally reasonable people on a jury will agree, so that they end up in deadlock.  Reasonableness does not work the way accuracy does. 

Every Christian, I would argue, can have at least an implicit rational warrant for believing that God exists and that He has revealed Himself in the Bible. Romans 1:20 teaches that God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” The Greek word translated “without excuse” in this verse is ἀναπολογήτους (literally, “without an apologetic”). Furthermore, the Psalmist wrote that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” (Ps 19:1). I do not think the Scriptures are envisaging people having to do PhDs in astrophysics or molecular biology, or master probability theory, in order to see the hand of God revealed in nature. Every time we step outdoors and behold the things that God has made – especially living organisms – we intuit that things have been made for a purpose, even if we couldn’t explicitly express why that is the case. Indeed, throughout history, the vast majority of people who have lived have been theists.

And the vast majority of people in human history lived before the age of science.  The progress of science is precisely why church attendance dwindles every year and Christians come back from college with liberal or no faith.  If the internet had existed in the first century, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.  

This implicit or inarticulate sense of the case for theism explains, I think, why some people come to believe that there must be a God when they hold their newborn child in their arms for the first time – they see the incredible design and elegance that is inherent in the process of development from a fertilized egg to a new born infant. They recognize, even if only implicitly and intuitively, that this is a process that required a high level of foresight to bring about – since it involved a high-level objective – which points to the involvement of a conscious mind in the programming of developmental pathways.

And the vast majority of people who behold their newborns, lack advanced education in abiogenesis and philosophy.  

Those with an implicit rational warrant for belief in God may not be able to hold their own in a debate with a learned atheist scholar. This is why we hear so many ill-formulated attempted arguments for God that are along the right lines but not sufficiently nuanced to pass for sound argumentation.

But at least they tried.  You?  You don't even dare tangle with somebody who directly challenged you in a scholarly polite manner. 

But I would argue that they nonetheless have sufficient rational warrant for their belief that God exists. Over time, as a believer matures, I would argue that the rational warrant for belief that was in the first place implicit should become more and more explicit and articulate.

Unfortunately, that cannot be the case, with all these older mature Christian apologists running around, who do not have cases for theism any more mature than the implicit warrant arguments you just mentioned.  Turek's typical I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist lectures do little more than confirm to me that Christianity's best efforts cannot survive scrutiny.  Although I have massive respect to him for being willing to answer random questions during Q&A.

In fact, even a biologist as staunchly atheistic as Francis Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of the double-helical structure of DNA) said that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,”[6] Richard Dawkins similarly said at the beginning of The Blind Watchmaker that “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose,”[7] Dawkins then spends the remainder of the book trying to argue, in my opinion unsuccessfully, that this design is not real but only apparent.

I have a tougher version of atheism.  I don't argue God doesn't exist.  I argue that God is irrelevant.  By taking that position, not only do we spare the audience 90,000 pages of pointless ID back-and-forth, we jump right to the one thing that you couldn't prove even if necessary to save your life...that god is relevant.

People also have a moral compass and have an implicit sense that there are objective moral norms and duties in the world – something which makes much better sense if theism is true than if atheism were true.

Probably because most of them have not engaged in the study of moral philosophy.  They are totally caught off guard by the "why is child rape wrong" or "why is causing sexual pain to a child wrong" questions and blindly commit to the notion that only "god" can explain why it is wrong. 

Besides general revelation (i.e. what may be known about God from the created Universe), this sense of objective moral norms and duties also provides people with an additional witness, even if only implicit, to the existence of God.

Which hasn't accomplished much more in the world than causing Christians to disagree about abortion, gun control, mandatory minimum prison sentences, whether god wants Christians to transform the government into a Christian form of control, whether god still wants gay people to be executed, and the worst moral problem facing Christians:  the immorality of adopting heretical theology, and Christians, even those limited to the Trinitarians, constantly point the finger of heresy at each other, no need to involve the Jehovah Witnesses or Mormons.

People can have a similarly implicit rational warrant for believing that God has revealed Himself in the Bible. This is not something that you need a PhD in Biblical Studies to discover.

I fail to see the point.  The fact that all Catholics, Calvinists and KJV Onlyists believe in God does precisely nothing to dissuade them from condemning each other. 

I think for many believers they read through the Bible and encounter the cumulative force of various prophetic passages like Isaiah 53, recognizing Jesus in them.

Sorry, the "servant" was nobody living 700 years later, it was Israel itself.  Read all the passages from Isaiah 41 through 56.

They might not be able to express the argument explicitly enough to debate a learned Rabbi. But they nonetheless, I would argue, have an implicit rational warrant. Likewise, they might read through the New Testament accounts and perceive implicitly some of the hallmarks of verisimilitude, such as the criterion of embarrassment,

Yes, the NT statements that Jesus' biological family thought his miracles were purely naturalistic (Mark 3:21, 6:1-4, John 7:5) fulfill the criterion of embarrassment while staetments that Jesus did miracles do not, thereore, we have an objective basis to grant more historical weight to the skeptical position than to the believing position. 

or unexplained allusions, or undesigned coincidences.

Will God protect me from dying and going to hell while I take the next year to sort through Lydia McGrew's wordy gossipy screeds? 

They might begin to recognize the evidential value of the testimonial evidence we have in the New Testament in regard to events such as the resurrection.

Not if they previously concluded that Jesus' own family being skeptical of his miracles has more historical weight than testimony of resurrection "eyewitnesses". 

Many of those categories of evidence are actually not at all hard to grasp and may be perceived through common sense.

This is what, I suspect, many Christians in fact are talking about when they say that they just know that Christianity is true. I think often-times Christians can confuse an implicit rational warrant for belief in Scripture (which is based on evidence) with some sort of mystical inner-witness that Christianity is true. For example, one may have an inarticulate sense of the power of the whole case for Christianity without realizing that it is, in fact, a rational response to a cumulative case argument.

So, where am I going with this? I would argue that discovering evidence for God is not actually that hard. Rather, it has been made artificially hard by bad scholarship and poor standards that insist that the simplest answer cannot actually be the correct answer.

"God" is not the simplest answer.  If God is "infinite" then the "god" answer is the most complex possible answer, and must always violate Occam's Razor more than any purely naturalistic explanation. 

This is true in science as well as Biblical scholarship. A lot of the ink spilled on these issues, therefore, is ink spent answering really bad arguments that should never have gotten traction to begin with but, because they provided an excuse for unbelief, they have become widely accepted and highly esteemed, even among academics who should know better.

If academics who should know better are deceived by such reams of spilled ink, that justifies the non-academic unbeliever to disregard those reams of spilled ink, whether those reams originate with unbelievers or Christians.  I would like to know what book god wants me to read next, but how stupid would it be to seek the will of God from a person who doesn't have the first clue? 

Where is God?
A common objection to God’s existence is that, if the God of Scripture exists, then He would be reasonably expected to still be working in the world today. The skeptic reasons, then, that the failure to observe God working in a tangible and detectable way in the world today should be taken as not merely evidence against Christianity but, more than that, as a defeater of any evidence that may be offered from ancient documents.

You fallaciously presume that because the ancient documents exist, unbelievers are forced to make a decision about them one way or the other.  But that is your claim, and you cannot establish it. 

I wonder though what sort of evidence the skeptic would accept as sufficient reason to think that God is still working in the world in a tangible way.  Would it need to be a direct personal experience, or would he or she accept reliable testimony from others that they had the sort of direct personal encounter that he or she is seeking for?

Easy:  either god doing today the same miracles as recorded in the bible (there would be far less skeptics if God did for them today what God did for Saul on the road to Damascus), or, I don't need evidence because God has simply chosen to change my attitude solely by coercive telepathy (Ezra 1:1).  Apparently, apologetics is only "necessitated" because God is refusing to use his telepathic abilities to remove unbelief.  Blame it on God, he could have done better. 

Testimony, popular atheist protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is a valid form of evidence.

But there is no rule of historiography, heremeneutics or common sense obligating anybody to give a shit about matters solely limited to 2000 year old testimony.  So when we disregard the resurrection testimony in the NT, we cannot possibly be unreasonable, as we aren't breaking any applicable rules.  

And whether testimony is "valid" evidence is not decided by you, it is decided by the authentication standards of the person who bothers to listen to the testimony.  Christians are forever disagreing amonst themselves as to just how authenticated the resurrection testimony is.  Most Christian scholars refuse the fundamentalist believe that Matthew and John are the sole creators of the canonical gospels now bearing those names.  Arguments that Mark 16 surely had an original  resurrection appearance narrative have less to do with serious evidence and more to do with speculative trifling.  Nothing in Acts indicates Paul was an eyewitness of a risen Jesus. 

When any person makes a claim to have witnessed an event, there are three – and only three – categories of explanation for that claim. Those are (a) they deliberately set out to deceive; (b) they were honestly mistaken; and (c) their claim was actually correct. I think those broad categories of explanation are mutually exhaustive (though I can imagine some situations in which they might be at work in combination). As either one of the two former claims becomes less plausible as a result of the evidence one adduces, this leads to a necessary redistribution of the probabilities, leading to option (c) becoming more probable than it was previously.

Fair enough. 

This, then, provides evidence confirming scenario (c). The greater the extent to which options (a) and (b), in any given case, are disconfirmed by the evidence, the greater support is enjoyed by option (c). This method can be applied to modern claims just as well as it can be applied to ancient ones. An individual’s track record of habitual trustworthiness and reliability can count as evidence against the hypothesis that they were deliberately setting out to deceive.

Except that you don't know the extent to which Matthew and John are responsible for the canonical text of the gospels bearing their names.  So if you notice that they never made any historical mistakes, you don't know of that trend is a result of their own honesty, or the result of very early scribes correcting the mistakes similarly to how most Christian scholars think Matthew and Luke corrected Mark.  And since dishonest deceptive people realize that surrounding their lies with nuggets of historical truth will cause most people to infer that the story "rings true", you cannot automatically deduce "honest author" from nuggets of historical truth in the gospels.  This could also be a dishonest author who includes those nuggets to make led verisimilitude to the lies. 

The plausibility of the hypothesis that they are honestly mistaken will depend on the particulars of the case.
I am not talking here about testimonies of healing that are easy to explain by some kind of sensory illusion or sleight of hand, or that plausibly would have gotten better anyway. I am talking about cases that seem to defy naturalistic explanation. Dr. Craig Keener has compiled a two volume set on claims of such miraculous occurrences.[8]

And I've already exposed what Keener wanted and didn't want to achieve in publishing that book.  See here. 

To take one example, he discusses a friend of his, Leo Bawa, the former director of research at Capro, a prominent Nigerian missions movement. One intriguing miracle (of several) that he told Dr. Keener about is that “among some tribes in Adamawa and Taraba State, I had instances where no interpreter was available and the Lord gave me understanding and ability to speak the people’s languages, a feat I never performed before or since after that incident.”[9] Keener notes that “Other accounts of this phenomenon exist, though many of these are secondhand”[10]. In a footnote, Dr. Keener elaborates[11],
“I have direct accounts in which others recognized the languages from Dr. Derek Morphew (Nov. 12, 2007); Pastor David Workman (Nov. 12, 2007); Pastor David Workman (April 30, 2008); Dr. Medine Moussounga Keener (Aug. 12, 2009, secondhand about Pastor Daniel Ndoundou); my student Leah Macinskas-Le (April 25, 2010, regarding her Jewish mother becoming a believer in Jesus because she understood the Hebrew prayer of an uneducated pastor’s prayer in tongues); Del Tarr, personal correspondence, Sept. 30, 2010 (noting three cases he has witnessed, including a recent one involving Korean; cf. also Oct. 5, 6, 2010).”

And all Christians who identify as Cessationist cry "foul".  And the skeptics remind you that if theological accuracy is so critically important to us avoiding eternal concious torment in an afterword, then it is not for you to decide how high their standard for evidence "should" be. THEY are taking the risk.  THEY are the only persons who can properly pontificate on how high the standard should be.  You will balk at a very high standard that would make it almost impossible for any bit of Christian evidence to be good enough, of course, but can you be too careful when the risk is as high as today's fanatics insist it is?

I have heard about this sort of phenomenon from others as well, and it does not seem to be the type of thing that could be explained naturalistically.

Keener disregarded my challenge to make his best case. 

I trust Dr. Keener and I presume that he trusts his sources since these are personal contacts of his (the fact that the phenomenon is multiply attested helps as well). So, it seems unlikely in these cases that Keener’s sources are all lying to him, and these also seem to be phenomena about which it would be quite hard to be honestly wrong.

I say they are all lies.

Now, one might object at this point that in this case the testimony is coming from someone whom they do not know personally. With public figures such as Dr. Craig Keener, though, one can, to a certain degree, evaluate whether this is someone who is likely to make stuff up.

He's a Pentecostal. He naturally seeks to justify modern day miracle claims.

This is true especially of high-profile scholars such as Dr. Keener since one can get a sense, through careful reading of their academic work, whether they are careful and reliable in their reportage of information.

Catholics are careful in their miracle reports...do you insist the bible is correct when it teaches taht God's doing a miracle through somebody means God is approving of their theology (John 10:37-38)?

You are also avoiding Deut. 13:1-5, which warns that even false prophets can do genuinely supernatural miracles.  So if we cannot deny the miraculous element of some bit of miracle testimony, how much effort should we put toward trying to figure out whether the miracle-worker is holy or unholy?  Should we cancel plans to take a child to a birthday party just so we can make more time to Google this bullshit?  The answer would seem to be "yes" if Jesus was serious in saying spiritual blessings awaited those who gave up custody of their own kids just to make more time to follow him around (Matthew 19:29). 

Dr. Michael Brown (another public figure and Biblical scholar) has also told me (on public record) about similar events to those described above, both that he was a witness to and testimonies of friends of his (including one individual, who was a cessationist and therefore not predisposed already to believe in miraculous events, who reported the incident to Dr. Brown in shock). The fact that this sort of occurrence is multiply attested by different credible sources leads me to think that something miraculous is indeed going on here.

And since it could still be from the devil, skeptics can be reasonable to just completely ignore it the way they completely refuse to personally handle very old unstable dynamite. If you can guarantee it won't blow up in our faces, we'll handle it.  Deal?  And yet you cannot make that deal.  Paul was responsible for most of the Galatian Christian converts, and yet they apparently concluded that Paul's gospel blew up in their faces because they apostatized (Galatians 1:6-9).

I chose this particular category of miracle claim as an illustrative example since this is one type of phenomenon that seems to defy naturalistic explanation and also seems to be something that it would be very difficult to be honestly wrong about having witnessed.

And since miracle claims have helped motivate people to stay within heretical beliefs like Catholicism, there is so much risk involved in investigating this bullshit that it becomes reasonable to just avoid it completely.

There are also accounts from sober-minded people whom I trust of radical experiences of the presence of God (e.g. see this one from Paul Washer).

I'm not going to consider that unless God promises to protect me from dying and going to hell for the time it takes for me to investigate Washer's claim.  Will God make that promise, and if he did, how would I know?

My question, then, to the skeptic is, as I said above, is the only type of evidence that may be admitted for God acting in the world today a direct personal encounter, or would one be prepared to accept testimonial evidence from other people?

I've already justified disregarding ancient testimony, and I've also proven that how high the evidentiary standard for miracles "should" be is nobody's call except the person who has chosen to investigate a miracle claim.  Their standard might be higher than what typical historians recommend, but the risk of being wrong about the War of Troy is far less than the risk of being wrong about Jesus.  Since you can never be too careful when the stakes are possible eternal conscious torment in the afterlife, the tougher standard is likely to be more reasonable. 

If one is only prepared to accept a direct personal encounter but not testimonial evidence, I would argue that that is not a rational approach.

How rational is the approach that says I will change my mind and obey the divine will just as soon as God foists his attitude-changing telepathy on me like he did with pagan idolater Cyrus in Ezra 1:1?  Would expecting god to use his abilities be so unreasonable? 

On the other hand, if one is willing to accept testimonial evidence that such encounters do indeed exist, then I would ask what the qualitative difference is between the testimonial evidence that is available in the present day and that which is present in the 2000 year old documents we know as the New Testament. Presumably the same principles of evaluation would pertain to those.

I've already explained the problems and risks of bothering to become involved in trying to figure out which miracle testimonies are reliable and which aren't. 

What About Unanswered Prayer?
As for unanswered prayer, this is a recurring thing that comes up in my conversations with ex-Christians – that is, that answered prayers do not seem to be distinguishable from chance and the act of prayer often feels like talking to the wall or the ceiling.

Exactly.  Nothing fails quite like prayer.  You'd achieve statistically similar results if your prayers had been directed to a barbie doll.  You ask about enough things enoug times, you are going to eventually find yourself in circumstances that "answer" that prayer.

This feeling during prayer is something I can relate to myself experientially, so it is not simply a theoretical issue for me. If Christianity is true, however, this entails that prayer is legit. Our belief in prayer should not be predicated on our evaluation of our feelings while praying or on our later examination of the result of prayer.

Which is about as stupid as saying conclusions should not be reached on the basis of an examination of the evidence.  When prayers fail, that counts. 

To do this is not to evaluate prayer in a manner consistent with what Scripture teaches us concerning prayer.

You are definitely not addressing skeptics here, so you would be irrational to expect skeptics to find your worries about staying within biblical parameters the least bit convincing. 

Nowhere in Scripture are we promised that prayer will be accompanied by an internal sense of being heard.

On the contrary, according to Mark 11:24, all prayer arising from confident trust and belief will be granted, and praying for God to give you an internal sense of being heard is certainly a reasonable prayer request, and cannot be likened to the idiot who prays for a really expensive car.

Rather, prayer is supposed to be accompanied by a conviction that our prayers are heard in Christ, since it is through Him that we have access to God.

But prayer in Mark 11:24 is about getting things, so you cannot circumnavigate around the problem of unanswered prayer by pretending that prayer is primarily about trusting in God.  

We are also not in a position to determine whether something is providentially caused by God or not.

That's probably another reason why your Calvinism is laughed at by real Calvinists like James White.  True Calvinism requires that all human choices were providentially caused by God. 

The Biblical view is not to look around for obviously miraculous causes and give God credit for those only, while presuming non-miraculous events would have happened anyway. Rather, we should view God as sovereign and credit Him with providential control over all things. So greatly has a twenty-first century naturalistic bias permeated our thinking that we in fact often fail to give God sufficient credit for His daily providence.

Then your god has providential control over all things...one example being the "thing" we call sinful human choicemaking.  The speed metal group Deicide already told you this years ago, but apparently, you need to be reminded of the obvious:  blame it on god. 

Prayer, then, should not be evaluated on the basis of a mystical sensation of being heard, or our impression of miraculous divine action in response to prayer. To do so is to judge prayer by a criterion which we were never given by God. How, then, should we evaluate the validity of prayer? We should evaluate it by the validity of the work of Christ and our faith in Him.

Then don't expect to ever notice when a failed prayer constitutes a valid reason to deny the possibility of divinely answered prayer. 

If we are trusting in Christ then we have true and valid prayer.

You are making valid prayer much more narrow than Jesus did in Mark 11.

There is more that can be said, of course, about limiting our appreciation of prayer to when God says “yes” to a request, but my point here is simply that evaluating prayer by these standards is a problem from the start. Our belief in prayer stems from our beliefs in Christ and the two should never be separated. If we believe in Christ because of the evidence for His resurrection, then we are being inconsistent to fail to believe in prayer.

Tell that to the 8 year old Christian girl whose prayers for the rapist to stop raping her go unanswered.

Another thing I will say about prayer is that there is, I think, what I would call an epistemic asymmetry when it comes to prayer. An epistemic asymmetry is where making an observation might be strong confirmatory evidence for your hypothesis but not making that observation is only weak, or even negligible, evidence against it. To take an illustration, imagine I see a spider crawling along my desk as I sit here and type this article. That would be excellent evidence for the hypothesis that, somewhere in my apartment, there is a spider. But suppose I do not see a spider in front of me. That is only very weak, even negligible evidence, that there is no spider in my apartment (since there are many other places where a spider might be). That is an example of what I call epistemic asymmetry.

We break the epistemtic asymmetry by noting that we've been challenging Christians for centuries to come up with prayer answers that more reasonably imply the divine than some naturalistic cause, and you keep coming up short.  There are billions of theists in the world.  The law of large numbers is alone sufficient to explain why, if you go looking long enough, you will find a case of prayer that was answered in a very unexpected or "lucky" way implying "god".

So, how does this relate to prayer? I would argue that specific answers to prayer are relatively strong confirmatory evidence but apparently unanswered prayer is only comparatively weak disconfirmatory evidence.

If a little Christian girl is paying or God to make the rapist stop raping her, and that prayer goes unanswered, then we return to my main point that God is irrelevant.  Normal people simply insist that rape is never justified, period, end of story. Only mentally deranged fools insist that rape can be justified is God is allowing it for the sake of a greater good.

The reason for this is that there could be many explanations for why your prayer went unanswered. Perhaps God, in his omniscience, said ‘no’ because He knows (better than you do) that what you asked for is not good for you.

Like, maybe it would be bad for the little girl if her rapist stopped raping her just as soon as she wanted him to. 

Or perhaps there is unconfessed sin in your life. Both the Old and New Testaments teach that sin can hinder our prayer life. For example, Proverbs 28:9 says, “If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.”

So raise the age of the raped girl to 12, which is safely past what most consider the age of accountability.  In this case, maybe God isn't answering her prayer to make the rapist stop immediately, is because she had sinned in the past, and the punishment via rape is not yet complete. 

1 Peter 3:7 says, “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” There could thus be any number of reasons why your prayer was not answered and it is not necessarily particularly improbable that, if Christianity is true, many of your prayers will not be answered in the way that you desired.

Leaving the raped little girl not a lot of reason to give a fuck about Jesus anymore than she gives a fuck about a mother who sometimes does and sometimes doesn't rescue her from danger. 

We have plenty of Biblical examples of prayers going unanswered. David’s prayer for the life of his illegitimate child by Bathsheba was unanswered (or answered negatively, depending on how you prefer to classify it).

And your irrational god tortured David's baby for 7 days with a very painful condition before allow it to die.  2nd Samuel 12:15-18.  Why don't you just conclude that because God is a just god, the reason he tortures babies to death is because he thinks they "deserve" it, the way he thinks they "deserve" to be born stained with original sin?  If God's ways are infinitely mysterious, can you really put it past god to place culpability where no human would dare?  If God punished Jesus despite Jesus not "deserving" it, I think your moral goose is cooked, buddy.

The same is true of Jesus’ prayer that the cup might pass from him in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Right...the second person of the Trinity requesting to avoid doing the will of the first person of the Trinity.  Matthew 26:39.  Is it sin or not sin when you know the Father's will and you still ask to be excused from it? 

In the latter example, Jesus’ prayer included the qualifier “If it is possible…” And the answer was, “No, that can’t happen.” It would probably be classified as the most spectacular unanswered prayer of all time by the atheists, except for what happens afterward with Jesus being raised from the dead.

If Jesus knew the prayer could never be granted, why did he bother making that prayer?

The answered prayers, on the other hand, depending on their level of specificity, can in principle be relatively strong confirmatory evidence for Christianity. Even if you cannot point to specific examples in your own life, there are writings by other people that would potentially document such examples (presuming them to be accurately reported). For example, George Müller (1805-1898) was a Christian evangelist and the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England. There was a time when the orphanage at Bristol had run out of bread and milk.[12] Müller was on his knees praying for food when a baker knocked on the door to say that he had been unable to sleep that night, and somehow knew that Müller would need bread that morning. Shortly after, a truck carrying milk broke down, directly in front of the orphanage door. There was no refrigeration. The driver begged Müller to take the milk, which would go bad if it were not consumed. It was just enough for the 300 children in the orphanage.

When you give me all the evidence pertaining to that story, I'll evaluate it for reliability.  Deal?  Or did I miss that bible verse that says the unbeliever has an obligation to investigate every answered-prayer allegation that comes down the pike? 

Conclusion

To conclude, while the problem of divine hiddenness is, on first inspection, a thorny issue, further analysis reveals it to be not as weighty a concern as it first appeared. Given the existence of plausible explanations of divine hiddenness (e.g. God’s knowledge, in His omniscience, of how different individuals will respond to the evidence of His existence), I would argue that the problem of divine hiddenness, though a complete answer eludes us, is not sufficient to overturn the extensive and varied positive confirmatory evidences of Christianity.

Dr. Jonathan McLatchie is a Christian writer, international speaker, and debater.

And he rejects scholarly politely worded challenges.  See here.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree (with Honors) in forensic biology, a Masters’s (M.Res) degree in evolutionary biology, a second Master’s degree in medical and molecular bioscience, and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. Currently, he is an assistant professor of biology at Sattler College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Christians believe Jesus told them everything they need to know to get saved and grow spiritually at a rate acceptable to God.  Jesus never expressed or implied that he wanted any of his followers to use any of God's time in their lives to achieve educational prominence in the study of earthly phenomena.  Think of all the preaching and discipling McLatchie could have done if he had foregone worldly pursuits and had become content to just preach and teach 'da bable.

Dr. McLatchie is a contributor to various apologetics websites and is the founder of the Apologetics Academy (Apologetics-Academy.org), a ministry that seeks to equip and train Christians to persuasively defend the faith through regular online webinars, as well as assist Christians who are wrestling with doubts. Dr. McLatchie has participated in more than thirty moderated debates around the world with representatives of atheism, Islam, and other alternative worldview perspectives. He has spoken internationally in Europe, North America, and South Africa promoting an intelligent, reflective, and evidence-based Christian faith.

That's exactly why I have high hopes for my own future public counter-apologetics tours.  If McLatchie can so eaisly miss the forest for the trees, I suspect it is because a better justification for divine hiddenness cannot be made.