Jason Engwer fails to defend the veracity of Paul's experience on the road to Damascus

Herein I reply to Triablogue's Jason Engwer on the subject of Jesus' resurrection.  Jason's post was from here.

First, it doesn't matter if Jesus really was the true messiah, I have excellent arguments against the "eternal conscious torment" version of hell (such as that the NT contradicts the OT on the point) and therefore, no apologist can pontificate that I'm irrationally ignoring a danger-alarm when I reject Christianity.  As an atheist I already accept extinction of consciousness as my fate, and since the bible teaches that fate for unbelievers, I'm not ignoring danger signals by ignoring the bible.  I ask myself "what if the bible is true!?" about as often as Engwer asks himself "what if the Koran is true!?"

The Christians feel comfortable that there comes a time when you can draw an ultimate conclusion without worrying about the gainsayers.  So they cannot balk at skeptics who likewise draw an ultimate conclusion without worrying to stay up with the latest in Christian apologetics.

Jason's basic problem is common to all apologists:  Whether he will allow a naturalistic inference from the story depends on whether it coheres with the story. In Jason's fantasy-land of bible inerrancy, all inferences that might challenge bible inerrancy are obviously stupid and fallacious.  If Jason were a prosecutor faced with a criminal defendant whose alibi of being home asleep at the time of the murder could not be positively falsified, he would drop charges.  After all, the guy said he was home asleep at the time of the murder, and nobody is able to positively falsify that statement.  You have no rational choice but to accept that testimony.  And yet we know perfectly well that you can reasonably find such a man guilty even if you cannot positively falsify his alibi.

Jason EngwerMarch 23 ·
It's often claimed that Jesus' resurrection appearance to Paul isn't described as a physical appearance in Acts or elsewhere.

That's because the details of the story forbid classifying Paul as an "eyewitness", for if he truly saw the person of Jesus, the details would not fail to support the point.

But it is described as physical, in Acts and in Paul's letters.

Space aliens are also "described as physical". Doesn't mean the testimony foists the least bit of intellectual compulsion on anybody else. And Christianity evolves like Judaism, so I don't really care if the Paul of the epistles testifies to a physical experience of the risen Christ, all he is doing is embellishing his original experience to make it sound more concrete than it really was.

Acts tells us that Paul saw Jesus, not just a light (9:27, 22:14).

Your trouble is the the alleged eyewitness, Paul, never says he saw this person.  Furthermore, Acts 9:27 indicates Paul's seeing Jesus was merely Barnabas' inference, a person who did not have personal knowledge of this Damascus road experience:

 27 But Barnabas took hold of him and brought him to the apostles and described to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that He had talked to him, and how at Damascus he had spoken out boldly in the name of Jesus. (Acts 9:27 NAU)

Furthermore given the details in the story, it is reasonable to suppose Paul leaped from "all evidence indicates it was Jesus" over to "I saw Jesus".  Your problem is that Luke would hardly tell the story the way he did if Paul had "seen" Jesus.

Luke's story details will not permit Barnabas' inference.  In fact, if the light was "brighter than the noon-day sun" (Acts 26:13) and if it blinded Paul (Acts 22:11) we have the perfect right to assume Paul would have done what anybody does when hit with a bright light, and close his eyes.  And since the light blinded him, we can also assume that he would have kept his eyes closed.   In your arguments you frequently refer to what we can "naturally assume", and Paul's keeping his eyes closed until the light disappeared is a perfectly natural assumption.

Acts 9:8 only says his eyes were open when he got up from the ground, it neither expresses nor implies he kept his eyes open the whole time or most of the time.

If you were being tried for murder and the prosecution's only witness said they saw you pull the trigger, but at no time did they provide any detail that plainly alleged they "saw" you pull the trigger, you'd ask the judge the drop the case for lack of evidence. You would not trifle that because the prosecutor is the only one drawing the inference that the witness 'saw', that's good enough.

That Paul never opened his eyes during the encounter is also strongly implied by Acts 26:14.  If you visited a friend and saw them physically, you would never later characterize their talking to you as "I heard a voice..."  So Paul's phrase is reasonable on the assumption that either his eyes were closed, or that he went blind before he heard the voice.  Either way, you aren't going to demonstrate that the theory of Paul never "seeing" Jesus during this encounter, is "unreasonable". 

What do you recommend skeptics do when apologists cannot show some skeptical theory to be unreasonable?

Paul says the same in his letters (1 Corinthians 9:1).

He also admits in the next verse that other Christians did not view him as an apostle (v. 2) which only makes sense if they rejected his story about seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus.  Now we have Christians contemporary to Paul who thought his story was bullshit.  but I'm sure that in your happy bubble world of inerrancy, the only testimony that matters is testimony in favor of your own doctrines.

Paul might have said he saw the risen Christ (v. 1), but he's also a self-confessed liar (v. 20-21).  There is no way Paul could have viewed himself free from the law, then pretend to be under the Law when in the company of Jews, and do all this without giving a false impression of his beliefs.  The Jews knew of a rumor that he set aside the Law of Moses in his Gentile preaching (Acts 21:18-24), so we can safely assume that if Paul ever fellowshipped with Jews, they would not be satisfied with external apperances, or his merely going along with their rituals...they would have asked him whether he believes obedience to the law puts one in right standing with God. 

If he truthfully answered "no", they would thrust him out of the Synagogue as an apostate.  So the only way Paul's "be a Jew to the Jew" strategy could possibly work, is if he falsely confessed to believing in the efficacy of the Law the exact same way that his non-Christian Jewish friends understood it. 

How would you like it if your local Satanist became a "Christian to the Christians" whenever he visited your church?  If you found out he denied the faith, wouldn't you subject him to some seriously clarifying questions before allowing him back in your church?  Or would you just shine him on as he joins the others in singing "Old Rugged Cross"?  If he honestly said he only pretends to be a Christian when among Christians, would you allow him back into your church?  DUH. Once again, the only way Paul could believe his "be a Jew to the Jews" strategy could work, is if he lied to them an affirmed he agreed with them about the salvific efficacy of the Law.

Resurrection in Paul's letters and early Christianity in general involves the raising of the physical body that died, so a physical appearance of Jesus would make more sense than a non-physical one in that context.

or maybe like everything else in Judaism and Christianity, Paul's understanding of his Damascus road experience changed during that time he spent in Arabia (Galatians 1:17).  Gee, eyewitnesses never alter their testimony due to the passing of time, do they?

Similarly, the context of the remainder of Luke and Acts and earlier resurrection appearances in general is a context in which all of the earlier appearances were physical ones.

Sorry, the details in the 3 versions of the story of Paul's experience on the road to Damascus will not permit characterizing it as having the same physicality as other alleged appearances. 

So, it makes more sense for the appearance to Paul to be physical than it does for the appearance to be non-physical.

The fact that you have to argue the point proves Luke's data is sufficiently ambiguous as to render the skeptical position reasonable.

But given the fact that the bible doesn't assign to unbelievers a fate any worse than the consciousness-extinction that I already accept as an atheist, I'm not seeing why I should CARE whether Jesus rose from the dead.  I only bother refuting apologists because I feel sorry for those fundamentalists who experience anguish from their cognitive dissonance (i.e., everything the bible says is true, but actual real life disproves many biblical statements).  Some people just have less tolerance for the "god's ways are mysterious" excuse, Mr. Engwer.  You aren't going to change that by ceaselessly trifling about everything under the sun.

But you also forget that Paul was a stupid mystic who couldn't even tell when some of his instances of flying up into heaven were spiritual or physical (2nd Corinthians 12:1-4).  Incidentally, Paul characterizes that dementia with the Greek word for vision, "optasia"...the same word he uses in Acts 26:19 to characterize his experience of Christ on the road to Damascus.

The objective, physical nature of how Paul and his companions heard Jesus' voice, with different people having heard him to different degrees, makes more sense if the voice came from Jesus' body than if Jesus wasn't physically present.

Then apparently you aren't familiar with the absurd mysticism of Acts.  In a "vision" Paul is able to hear the voice of another earth-bound human being who was, at that exact moment, 200 miles away across the ocean. Acts 16:9.

And passages like Acts 22:15 group the hearing and seeing involved together, suggesting that both the hearing and the seeing of Jesus were of a physical nature.

If that's how the prosecutor had to fix the testimony of the only witness, to say they experienced you shooting somebody else, you'd be asking for charges to be dropped for lack of evidence.  Once again, Paul says he "heard a voice..." which is not the way you describe that talk to another person, if the source of the voice had been a physical person you SAW.  The story details are stilted because what actually happened was not clearly a physical experience.  Of course, I'm reasonable to accuse Luke of fabricating most of the account, such as the detail about the traveling companions partially experiencing this thing.

22:14 refers to the voice coming from the "mouth" of Jesus.

That's Ananias, v. 12, and he didn't have personal knowledge of the road experience.  DISMISSED.  It must suck to be you...the only way you can get "physical" out of the eyewitness's testimony is to smoosh it together with the inferences draw by those who came along and talked to Paul at a later time.

That terminology normally refers to a portion of the human body.

Terminology that says "I heard a voice behind me..." also normally refers to a portion of the human body, but it is still employed the author of Revelation to describe an experience limited to his mind (Revelation 1:10).

Jesus is a human

That terminology normally refers to a person who lacks the ability to float up into heaven solely by non-physical means. Discover, then, the purely Ad Hoc nature of Christian apologetics.  If a prosecutor had to qualify normal terms in a criminal case as often as Christianity requires qualification of normal terms, he would probably be disciplined by the Bar for bringing charges without sufficient probable cause.  And he'd probably be referred for mental health services.

who was speaking in the context of a resurrection appearance,

There is no reason to characterize Acts 9 as a "resurrection" appearance, except of course for your indefatigable need to make everything in the bible harmonize.  This appearance occurred after Jesus "ascended" in Acts 1.  And don't even get me started on how a god of truth would never act in a way that helps a person confirm the truth of their scientifically inaccurate viewpiont that heaven is physically "up there".

which involves a raised physical body, so the reference to a mouth in 22:14 is most naturally taken as a reference to Jesus' being bodily present during the appearance to Paul.

Except that Paul was the sort of person who sometimes couldn't tell whether an event happened only to his spirit, or also to his body (2nd Corinthians 12:1-4).  Any witness in court who admitted this kind of gullibility could never persuade a reasonable jury, especially if their testimony about an interaction with another person had so conspicuously lacked plain indicators of where the other person was, the way Paul's bullshit story of conversion lacks these.

There's no reason to think that something like an anthropomorphism is involved in 22:14.

There's also no reason to believe the story.  Contrary to popular belief, there is no rule of common sense or historiography that says the objective person will accept testimony as true until it can be positively falsified.  Josh McDowell was lying when telling the world about Aristotle's Dictum.  When a stranger on the bus tells you his real pet snake sometimes talks to him in English, trying to get him to commit a sin, you do not assemble a team of investigators to check out the snake, the man, his friends, his family, his possible credibility supports or problems, and then only reach a verdict after careful deliberation.  You call him a crazy cocksucker, and you'd be "reasonable" to do so even if by some freak space-warp his pet snake really did talk to him.

The passage is most naturally taken to refer to Jesus' bodily presence.

A point you wouldn't have to argue if the original eyewitness had made that clear.  Do you also 'argue' that Jesus was a man?

Furthermore, Paul groups the appearance to him with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5-8),

Yeah, those other appearances that the canonical gospels strangely omit, like the appearances to Peter, then James, then to the 500 at once.  Paul could just as easily be implying he thinks the other apostles' experiences of Christ were similar to his own.  You resist that conclusion by noting the obvious physical nature of the gospel resurrection appearances, but the earliest of these, Mark, said nothing about Jesus being seen by anyone, an argument from silence that is very certain, since if Mark felt anybody saw the risen Christ, he surely would have mentioned it.  James Patrick Holding insists Mark chose to leave the resurrection appearances out of the written version but this is fucking ludicrous.  Shall we think Mark thought the parable of the sower (Mark 3) deserved to be included in the writing, but not the details of the event that is allegedly infinitely more important?

And don't even get me started on how the expectation of the women going to the tomb that Jesus would still be dead on the third day, makes the skeptic reasonable to say they didn't find any of the miracles Jesus did before the crucifixion to be the least bit compelling.

And don't even get me started on how, in light of Luke 24:23, ANY part of the canonical gospel story of Jesus' resurrection might have been a "vision".

and early Christian tradition, reflected in a large number and variety of sources, portrays the appearances to the other resurrection witnesses as bodily appearances.

What are you gonna say next?  The Jews were monotheists, hoping the reader won't read every other page of the NT that shows them being polytheists? 

Sorry, those who denied Jesus' fleshly reality existed in the days of the apostles (2nd John 7), and he says there are "many" such Christians.  Such a movement could hardly have gotten started sufficiently to blossom into "many" or become important enough for John to warn his church against, if denying Jesus' fleshly reality was an obvious stupidity.

Did any heretics deny the fleshly reality of Nero?

Like Paul's writings, the book of Acts portrays Paul as a resurrection witness in the same category as the others (13:31-32, 22:15), and those other witnesses are said to have seen bodily appearances of Jesus.

There is no reason to equate the appearances to the disciples, with the appearance to Paul.

Commentary on the Winger-Dillahunty resurrection debate

 Christian apologist Mike Winger debated atheist Matt Dillahunty on the subject "Is Belief in the Resurrection Unreasonable?".  See here.

I finally was able to watch this whole debate, and I'd offer the following points.  I restrict them to my blog site to preempt any accusations that I'm trying to spam or flood that YouTube channel.  My comments are lengthy.  I don't believe in the "tweet" style of today's attention-deficit internet generation.  I post to educate, not "tweet", unfortunately YouTube's chat boxes aren't really intended to facilitate scholarly-level exchanges.

Since Christians obviously have the burden of proof, and often seek to fulfill it by blindly quoting Psalm 14 as if the words of an anonymous author from 900 b.c., permanently settled the question of an atheist's foolishness, I suppose the debate would have been more fruitful if the proposition had been "Can it be reasonable to deny the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus?".  Winger absolutely denies this possibility, while not all atheists think belief in Jesus' resurrection is unreasonable.  I think both the resurrection of Jesus and the book of Mormon are demonstrably false, but I'd have to examine the circumstances under which advocates of these religions came to believe as they do, before I'd consider calling them unreasonable.  If reasonableness doesn't require accuracy (and it often doesn't), then the mere fact that it is "inaccurate" to believe in Jesus' resurrection, isn't sufficient to show such belief to be "unreasonable".  Most people would say belief in the tooth-fairy is unreasonable, but if the believer in question is a toddler, then "unreasonable" doesn't follow, you can hardly blame a toddler for exhibiting the characteristics of a toddler.

First, the biblical chronology requires the Damascus road event to be dated to around 35-37 a.d., give or take. Most scholars agree that 1st Cor. 15 was written around 55 ad. To me, it seems just a bit unscholarly to use the views Paul expressed had in 55 a.d., to interpret what he experienced 20 years earlier on that road. Would Winger appreciated it if, 50 years from now, the people blindly insist that whatever he believed in 2049 must surely be reconciled with what he believed in 2019? Sure, we wouldn't expect a single person to contradict himself, but then again, lots of people contradict themselves every single day, and more so if you are comparing beliefs they held which are 20 years apart. Nothing is more common than Christians changing their views about Jesus and theology several times within the first 20 years after they get saved. And regular viewers hardly need be told that Paul's assertions in 1st Cor. 15 are convoluted to say the least.

Moreover, Paul had that Damascus-road experience at a time when he considered Jesus' resurrection to be nothing but blasphemy worthy of capital punishment. Additionally, it does not logically follow that if you believe Jesus was raised bodily, then you necessarily believe in the bodily nature of any "appearance" you think Jesus made to you. Mike Licona holds that when Stephen the martyr saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God in Acts 7, this was something different than what Paul saw on the road to Damascus.

So Jesus' being raised "bodily", contrary to Winger, does not settle the question of whether any of his post-resurrection 'appearances' were also bodily.

 Saul the Jew likely believed that spirits could manifest themselves physically (the intertestamental literature and most scholars understand Genesis 6 to be saying the angels took human form in order to copulate with human females, the view expressed in Enoch and other sources.  How else could the angels have gotten human women pregnant?). Finally, the very fact that the Damascus road stories in Acts admit that Saul's traveling companions couldn't see what Paul was seeing, would make it reasonable to view the experience as a "vision", despite the fact that the ambiguity of the details always allows somebody to trifle about other possibilities.

Second, Matt wasn't wrong: "apparition" means "the spirit of a dead person appearing in a form that can be seen" (Cambridge), and according to Luke 24:39, the Jewish disciples obviously believed it was possible fo them to physically view a person that wasn't physical.  Paul himself describes this Damascus-road appearance of Christ as a heaven-based "vision" (Acts 26:19). That is, what he was experiencing was beamed down to him "from heaven". The Greek word in question is optasia, the more rare word for "vision", and the only other time Paul uses it is to describe his being unable to tell, 14 years after the fact, whether his experience of flying into the sky was physical or spiritual (2nd Cor. 12:1-4). Given Paul's obvious view that the exact nature of the "optasia" experiences cannot be nailed down, despite his claims to divine inspiration, and given his intentional ambiguity in Galatians 1:15 about the nature of the Damascus-road experience, it is safe to say that Paul himself didn't even correctly discern the precise nature of his own Damascus-road experience, therefore justifying, if they choose, any skeptic who deems Acts' statements about Paul meeting the risen Christ as too convoluted and ambiguous to be worthy of serious consideration. That's significant, since the accounts allegedly draw from the pen of the "careful historian" Luke who thus would likely have anticipated reader-difficulties arising from his choice of wording...yet he still words these stories in a fatally ambiguous way.  Was Luke just stupid?  Or was he accurately reporting a genuinely ambiguous experience that cannot be very useful for historical purposes?
 

Is there a reason why Christianity's top resurrection apologists never argue that the stories are Paul's experience on the road to Damascus qualify as compelling historical evidence?

Third, history tells us exactly nothing about what the men traveling with Paul did after they escorted the blinded Paul, making it reasonable to suspect that these traveling companions did not find this experience sufficient to justify switching religions, otherwise, their doing so would have been deemed by the Acts-author as beneficial to his cause and worthy of inclusion in his book given his goal of supporting an apostle Paul who seems to encounter violent Jewish resistance wherever he lands. Since arguments from silence aren't automatically fallacious, there's enough here to render this particular argument from silence "reasonable", even if not "infallible". You can play the part of the trifling defense attorney and trifle that no argument fron silence "necessarily proves" a contention, but this is about what's "reasonable" to believe, and reasonableness can exist even if the theory in question is false. Do you think every jury that convicted an innocent person of a crime, was necessarily unreasonable in their appraisal of the evidence?

Fourth, Winger's attempting to support the historicity of Jesus being stabbed on the cross, by Quintilian's statement, did nothing of the sort. According to Winger's logic, if the person on the witness stand says things that are proven true by independent sources, then everybody on the jury is intellectually compelled to either believe everything else the witness says about the event, or consent to be labeled fools. Winger was violating common sense here: doesn't he know what all professional liars know, that surrounding your false version of events, with nuggets of historical truth, is the best way to make the lie seem more convincing? According to Winger's logic, everybody who testifies to having been eating at McDonald's across town during the time the murder was committed, is telling the truth, because eating at McDonalds's is part and parcel of the American way of life, therefore "the testimony is plausible". Yet this is foolish, as any liar knows that making the lie sound more convincing necessarily requires surrounding it with more plausible sounding statements. So Winger cannot simplistically wipe the option of "the gospel authors were liars" off the table of reasonableness by merely noting that some of their assertions are independently corroborated by disinterested sources.  To put it tersely, you really aren't gaining much toward the goal of making evidence 'compelling' by merely proving that what was asserted, was "independently corroborated".

One person saw the sun dance around in Fátima, and this was corroborated by multiple thousands of independent eyewitnesses, yet I highly doubt Winger, already against Catholicism, would admit that such extensive independent corroboration therefore renders foolish anybody who tries to defend a naturalistic explanation for this "miracle".  So the fact that you move approximately 1/64th of an inch toward "proof" when you show that one person's statement is independently corroborated, doesn't say much about the force of Winger's argument at this point.

If Winger finds it impossible to come up with criteria to distinguish when ancient sources are using historically accurate details to spruce up lies, and when they are using historically accurate details because their authors are being honest in general, welcome to the obvious fact that historiography is an art, not a science, and at the end of the day, you cannot mechanically apply the rules of historiography so that proving the skeptic wrong is as easy as proving wrong somebody's answer to a math problem. Did Winger not know that Licona admitted that historians disagree with each other about which rules of historiography are good, and further disagree with each other about how to apply them?  If he knew that, then why was he acting as if correct application of the rules of historiography was as easy as applying the rules of math to a math problem? 
Winger got nowhere near tipping the scale in favor of the resurrection of Jesus.

Fifth, since Winger started out decrying the fact that internet atheists continually mock Christianity, as if such name-calling put up unnecessary barriers to objective communication, I'd like to know what he thinks of internet apologist James Patrick Holding, whose reputation for constantly mocking and insulting anybody and everybody who disagree with him, often in foul-mouthed ways, is well known.

What does Winger think of Holding's belief that today's Christians have biblical and spiritual license to insult and belittle those who publicly criticize Christianity? Would Colossians 3:8 or Ephesians 5:4 possibly help inform the discussion here? Does the filthy language of Ezekiel and the harsh insulting rebukes from Jesus to the Jews and Paul to his critics automatically justify today's juvenile delinquent know-nothing anonymous fundamentalist internet troll Christians in acting the same way toward critical outsiders? I'm guessing "no" based on Winger's display of patience and maturity in this debate.

For all these reasons, I found precisely nothing in Winger's good-faith attempt to show the reasonableness of believing in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.   His often commenting about how Dillahunty was not open to evidence sounded more to me like a frustrated apologist who had no argument and felt that a dose of rhetoric might help prevent his supporters from becoming too suspicious that something is very very wrong here.