My attack on the Virgin Birth in reply to Nick Peters

Nick Peters debated John Richards about the Virgin Birth.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1oPJWCsCWQ

In the comments section, I posted 11 justifications for skepticism toward the Virgin Birth:

Barry Jones

1 second ago

Let's see, the intent of the apologist is never to merely show that belief in the VB can be reasonable. There is ALWAYS a chip on their shoulder, they are ALWAYS trying to prove that skepticism toward the VB could not be reasonable. I advance 11 arguments to show that skepticism toward the VB is reasonable: 1 - Mark's failure to mention the virgin birth is significant. you will say he didn't think it necessary to mention because it was already known, but you don't know how well known the virgin birth doctrine was before the end of the first century. And regardless, Mark mentions lots of stuff that appears in Matthew and Luke, showing Mark's intent to repeat, thus refuting those who pretend Mark didn't wish to repeat things already known. And patristic sources are pretty clear that Mark "omitted nothing" from his account. Therefore what he left out, was not a case of 'omission', but matter that he either didn't know about, or which he regarded as false. Bible inerrancy is a false doctrine, so I have no sympathy for the fools who demand that any theory to explain the virgin birth missing from Mark reconciles Mark with other biblical authors. 2 - Matthew and Luke are the only NT authors to mention the virgin birth, when in fact one hermeneutic used by conservatives is to emphasize a doctrine only in proportion to how often it is taught in the bible. That's why most conservatives can't stop talking about Paul, and why ost conservatives don't have much to say about the VB until somebody presses a skeptical objection to it. 3 - today's fundies would never believe a similar story about some 14 year old girl today. But beacuse the VB is mired in ancient history, fundies seem to think this gives it an aura of verisimilitude, even though they refuse to draw such a conclusion about most other ancient theological statements outside the bible. 4 - Jesus never mentioned his conception or birth, indicating he didn't think such things doctrinally important. In fact, when presented with the perfect opportunity to do so, he rebuked the person who praised his mother: 27 While Jesus was saying these things, one of the women in the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, "Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts at which You nursed." 28 But He said, "On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it." (Lk. 11:27-28 NAU) 5 - Mark 3:21 says Jesus' family thought him insane and sought to arrest him and put a stop to his public ministry. The mother of Jesus in Mark 3:21 does not likely think her son was YHWH manifest in human flesh. If that means Mark is contradicting Matthew and Luke, all the more reason to say the VB is fiction. 6 - John 7:5 says Jesus brothers mocked him and did not believe in him. In the chronology of the ministry, John 7 would be after Jesus completed the first third of his earthly ministry. That is, even after about 1 or 2 years of Jesus running around doing miracles, not only do his brothers persist in unbelief toward him (v. 5), they MOCK the whole idea that he is capable of doing miracles (vv. 1-4). It is very reasonable to infer from John 7:5 that Jesus' brothers did not believe he was anything more special than a con artist. 7 - Supposing Jesus to be god for the sake of argument, we have to wonder to what extent this was or wasn't manifest during his infancy and childhood, in order to account for why his family view him as a loon. Did the child Jesus ever make mistakes? If not, wouldn't that have tipped off the family that he was very special and work against their forming the opinion that he was crazy? Did the child Jesus ever sin? If not, wouldn't that have tipped off the family that he was very special, and work against their forming the opinion that he was crazy? If you and your brother are in your 30s, and your brother never sinned once in his life, wouldn't we be reasonable to assume you'd probably have a very high view of him? And if you told us your brother is crazy and deserves to be arrested and his public ministry halted, meaning YOU don't believe in his claims, wouldn't we be reasonable to assume that you never observed anything about your brother that you thought made him any better than anybody else? If these skeptical contentions are reasonable, then we can be reasonable to use Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to justify concluding that Jesus' family never had any reason to think Jesus was anything supernatural. Apologist trifles otherwise could never have the power to render such skepticism unreasonable. 8 - Jesus defines essential doctrine as his own teachings to the disciples (Matthew 28:20), so since Jesus never taught anything about his conception or birth, not only are those subjects doctrinally irrelevant, Matthew must have thought they were irrelevant. Thus his inclusion of such stories likely only means he agreed with the intertestamental authors, and thought it morally permissible to mix true history with fiction for the sake of edification. 9 - The biggest hurdle, and the one apologists will always stumble at, is how they figure the VB "applies to" believers today. There is no reasonable way to demonstrate that the NT "applies to" today. 10 - Stories of gods impregnating virgins existed before the 1st century, so that it become irresistable to conclude that Matthew and Luke merely took a popular religious motif and gave it a new spin. See Pindar's Pythian Ode # 12, securely dated more than 200 years before Jesus, where Danae is still called "virgin" during and after giving birth to Perseus, the son of Zeus. “And if we even affirm that He was born of a virgin, accept this in common with what you accept of Perseus.: (Justin, Justin Martyr, First Apology, ch. 22, Schaff, P. (2000). 11 - Perhaps most embarrassing to today's apologists, the early church fathers had to resort to a contrived theory of the devil imitating Christ's virtues before Christ existed, in order to "explain" why certain aspects of Christianity and Jesus were found in pre-Christian paganism. If the answer was as simple as "the pagan version didn't exist until after Jesus was born", then the church fathers would not have employed this silly apologetic to 'explain' the parallels. See Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. LXIX. Justin is most explicit in this, in his First Apology:

Chapter LIV.—Origin of Heathen Mythology. But those who hand down the myths which the poets have made, adduce no proof to the youths who learn them; and we proceed to demonstrate that they have been uttered by the influence of the wicked demons, to deceive and lead astray the human race. For having heard it proclaimed through the prophets that the Christ was to come, and that the ungodly among men were to be punished by fire, they put forward many to be called sons of Jupiter, under the impression that they would be able to produce in men the idea that the things which were said with regard to Christ were mere marvellous tales, like the things which were said by the poets. And these things were said both among the Greeks and among all nations where they [the demons] heard the prophets foretelling that Christ would specially be believed in; but that in hearing what was said by the prophets they did not accurately understand it, but imitated what was said of our Christ, like men who are in error, we will make plain. The prophet Moses, then, was, as we have already said, older than all writers; and by him, as we have also said before, it was thus predicted: “There shall not fail a prince from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until He come for whom it is reserved; and He shall be the desire of the Gentiles, binding His foal to the vine, washing His robe in the blood of the grape.”115 The devils, accordingly, when they heard these prophetic words, said that Bacchus was the son of Jupiter, and gave out that he was the discoverer of the vine, and they number wine116 [or, the ass] among his mysteries; and they taught that, having been torn in pieces, he ascended into heaven. And because in the prophecy of Moses it had not been expressly intimated whether He who was to come was the Son of God, and whether He would, riding on the foal, remain on earth or ascend into heaven, and because the name of “foal” could mean either the foal of an ass or the foal of a horse, they, not knowing whether He who was foretold would bring the foal of an ass or of a horse as the sign of His coming, nor whether He was the Son of God, as we said above, or of man, gave out that Bellerophon, a man born of man, himself ascended to heaven on his horse Pegasus. And when they heard it said by the other prophet Isaiah, that He should be born of a virgin, and by His own means ascend into heaven, they pretended that Perseus was spoken of. And when they knew what was said, as has been cited above, in the prophecies written aforetime, “Strong as a giant to run his course,”117 they said that Hercules was strong, and had journeyed over the whole earth. And when, again, they learned that it had been foretold that He should heal every sickness, and raise the dead, they produced Aesculapius.

------------- For all these reasons, every apologist who classifies VB skepticism as unreasonable, is high on crack.

My message to Mike Licona about his daughter's Borderline Personality Disorder

There is a gofundme for Christian apologist Mike Licona's daughter, who suffers from BPD and engages in self-harm and suicide attempts.  Here is the message I sent:

Hello, 

I too suffer from BPD and collect disability for it.  James Patrick Holding is Nick's ministry partner, and as you probably know, Holding specializes in insulting people, including mocking me for my BPD as well as refusing to remove internet posts which he knew caused me to become suicidal, and for which I'm now suing him for libel.   Within your Christian view, I would suggest that you convince Holding to stop insulting and mocking people who have emotional disorders (I am aware that both Licona and Habermas see no spiritual justification, whatsoever, for Holding's intentional verbal abuse), and see if god doesn't bless Peters with a miracle of healing. 

Apologists have failed to debunk the usefulness of ECREE

We skeptics agree with Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (i.e., ECREE).

Christian apologists come along and insist this is fallacious since it's just demanding miraculous proof for the very miracle claims skeptics presuppose are false.

Wrong.

We merely mean that the more a claim departs from the investigator's beliefs about how the world works, the greater quantity and quality of evidence will be required before trust in the claim can be considered rational.

In short, claims of walking on water require a greater quality and quantity of eyewitnesses or videos, than is required for claims that somebody walked to the store.  Only stupid people would say singular self-serving testimony suffice in both cases.

Some apologists also misconstrue the "extraordinary evidence" in ECREE to mean evidence whose form is something more wonderful than the usual stuff like pictures, video, eyewitness testimony, court documents, etc.

That is not the case.  "Extraordinary evidence" only means normative types or forms of evidence, whose authenticity, quality and quantity are greater than what we usually accept as sufficient for routine claims.  If the evidence consists of eyewitnesses, they need to survive cross-examination more clearly than as we'd require for less extraordinary claims.  If the evidence consists of photos, they need to be authenticated more stringently than as we'd normally do.  So "extraordinary evidence" merely means normative types of evidence that are possessed of a greater quality and quantity, than we normally produce to prove more mundane things like our residence address, or what we bought at the grocery store last week.

HOW much more extraordinary must the evidence be?  Again, depends on to what degree the claim departs from normative everyday experience.  The evidence of quality and quantity sufficient to prove that you won a $5 Million Lottery will likely not need to be nearly as strong as the evidence that you can levitate your body through mental concentration alone.

Again, when you produce a photo to prove you went fishing last year, most people wouldn't suspect you of lying unless other evidence indicated you were using the "gone fishing" story as an alibi to defeat a criminal prosecution...while a photo of you levitating while assuming the yoga position, will be justifiably viewed with extreme suspicion by all non-gullible people.  Doesn't matter if the photo is authentic and you really did levitate, the issue is not the truth, but whether you can demonstrate what happened to you, to some other person.  Sometimes the truth is so much stranger than fiction that you cannot blame people for being suspicious of your claims.

Maybe you DID win a secret billion-dollar lottery, the records of which have since disappeared, and its now in a bank account you aren't allowed to access for the next 10 years, in a name not associated with you...but can you blame the outsider who thinks your story is total bullshit?

What follows is my answer to Nick Peter's of Deeper Waters

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The claim revolves the use of ECREE, which is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My problem with this is that the skeptical community has often used it as a conversation-stopper and that in many cases, what is considered as extraordinary is often unclear.

Ok, so I'll make it clear to you, that you might discover that when it isn't being abused, it remains a solid justification for disbelieving in miracle claims which fail the ECREE criteria.  See above.

For the second, I am in dialogue with one atheist now who I am trying to convince that nothing cannot cause something. For me, that is a highly highly highly extraordinary claim based on my beliefs regarding metaphysics.

I second that.  Nothing causing something is a logical impossibility, unfortunately, some dishonest atheists don't really mean "zero" in the sense of absolute nothingness when they say "nothing produced something".

Meanwhile, for him, the idea that God created the universe, is highly highly extraordinary, based on the holding of a naturalistic worldview.

It would also be extraordinary given that 'god' is an incoherent concept as it is used and believed in Christianity.

Question. Who needs to provide evidence for their view?

Answer:  anybody who makes a truth-claim, for "he who asserts, must prove" regardless of what position they take.

If you said “Both of you,” move to the head of the class.
 So at this point, I am not saying that I am opposed to evidence. My friend who wrote said that he is not convinced by people saying that they feel Jesus. Something similar can be found in many other religions. After all, Mormons feel the burning in the bosom and thus are convinced that the Book of Mormon is true, but those of us outside the Mormon church who have studied it and its beliefs, just don’t find that convincing.
 Of course, that doesn’t mean that subjective experiences play no part in determining what one believes, but they should not play the only part. Someone can speak about the evidences of God and of the resurrection and then also look at their changed life since becoming a Christian.

But since Christian "heretics" can also demonstrate their change in morality, theology and love after they converted to the "heresy", its probably better to leave subjective experience completely out of the debate. Subjective feelings and "changed life" constitute zero for purposes of demonstrating the truth of one's claim to another person.  If you aren't going to attach any significance to the burning in the heart of the Mormon and their changed life, I won't be attaching any significance to your personal feeling that you have the Holy Spirit and that you have a changed life.

That is entirely valid. (I would prefer them to start with the objective argument first however and have the effects from the subjective experience be a follow-up.)

My friend brings up the idea of someone claiming to have an interstellar spaceship and twenty people making a claim on a stack of Bibles that it is real. Now there are some questions I would have at this point. For instance, it would depend on who those twenty people are partially.

But generally, no, you wouldn't believe the claim of interstellar spacecraft if it was being made by the guy in the coffee-shop and the only evidence for it was his uncorroborated word.  The point is that despite your openness to miracles and things that conflict with our present view of reality, you STILL are initially skeptical of anything that conflicts with reality as it was established previously in your mind.  Skeptics of resurrection are doing nothing different.

If these are twenty people shown on a TV infomercial that I do not know, then I will not give it credibility.

So under your logic, when I see Christian testimony being given on Christian infomercials, I need not give it credibility.  Some would say your rationale here ends up justifying skeptics to deny that which the Holy Spirit really is impelling those Christians to say.

And under your logic, we can reject Keener's voluminous work on miracles too, since that's little different than an informercial, and as you say below, it is ok to reject testimony from those not part of your immediate social circle.  I don't know Keener from Adam (however, the failure of Christian apologists to seriously cite anything from his work as a miracle claim that passes standard tests of scrutiny, justifies my skepticism toward whatever miracle reports he provides).  Licona has mentioned Keener in the context of saying Licona doesn't necessarily deny that resurrections happen today, but seems obvious a guy like Licona would be strongly promoting any miracle claim of Keener, if Licona seriously believed it could pass standard tests of veracity.

If, however, these people are people like my wife, good friends, family, leaders of my church, I’ll start thinking “Maybe I should look into this.”

Ditto.  If one of my atheist friends say they saw some preacher in the Congo raise somebody from the dead, only THEN will I check it out.  The brightness of the coming of the Lord Jesus is truly frightful and blinding for a devil inspired deceiver like myself.

Now I could go and see this supposed ship someone has for sale then and I might think “I need to get my eyes examined. I go and get my eyes examined and I have a clean bill of health. I still see the spaceship. I think I must be hallucinating then, so I get a psychiatric evaluation and again, I’m given a clean bill of health. I still see the spaceship. I at that point have the salesman give me a ride and we travel throughout the solar system and come back. At this point, I must say that I am indeed a believer.

Understood.  So, under your logic, apparently, I can justifiably remain skeptical of miraculous and space-ship claims unless and until I personally experience them myself.  If it is rational to withhold belief until you take a ride in the UFO, it is equally rational to withhold belief until I personally witness a miracle and check for all possible evidence of fraud or mistake.   Can you  point to any miracle claims of Christians that survive YOUR proposed method of inspection?

I have no problem with this and based on the kind of claim that it is, that is the kind of evidence I seek. An important consideration to keep in mind is that we evaluate claims based on the kinds of claims that they are. Suppose you want to know if Jesus rose from the dead. The improper way to do that, as would be found at some skeptical web sites that want to say Jesus never even existed, would be to pray and ask Jesus to heal everyone in the world of every disease and if that doesn’t happen, well then history obviously must demonstrate that Jesus did not rise.

Agreed, this is not a responsible way to test the claim of Jesus being resurrected.

No. The way to evaluate the claim is to look at the historical evidence that we have. If you find it to be faulty, on what grounds?

Jesus lied about how soon he would effect his second-coming.

The most explicit accounts of Paul experiencing Jesus show he is not an eyewitness.

The identities of the gospel authors cannot be known with sufficient certainty to permit reasonable inquiry into their general credibility.

The gospel authors show willingness to modify history for the purpose of supporting theology.

The true form of Christianity disappeared from earth before the 5th century.

Generously granting apostolic authorship of the gospels (despite how easy it is to dispute this), there would be only 3 testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus which come down to us in first-hand form, the rest are second-hand, vision or worse.  Some would argue it is reasonable to require something more than 3 disputable eyewitnesses and their hearsay corroboration before one plunges into that hopeless bottomless chasm of trying to figure out which church is the right one.

It is more reasonable to explain Jesus' hiddenness from those he allegedly loves, as a case of his remaining dead, and less reasonable to suppose this hiddenness is because his ways are mysterious.

The Book of Acts contains strong indicators that the canonical gospels are lying about what Jesus really taught.

The virgin birth stories in Matthew and Luke make it nearly perfectly certain that gospel authors had no problems inventing fictions about Jesus to promote their religion.

Are they historical grounds or philosophical grounds or some other grounds?

Historical.  Philosophical grounds would be the argument to atheism from the incoherence of religious language.

Suppose you accept the bedrock of Habermas and Licona for instance and say “I agree that Jesus was crucified, that the tomb was empty, that the apostles had experiences that they claimed to be that of the risen Christ, and that James and Paul, two people hostile to the message prior, became strong Christians.” Well and good. You then reply “But I don’t believe the resurrection happened.”
 You are certainly entitled to that opinion, but I would then ask on what grounds do you dismiss it?

Jesus' own brothers did not believe his claims at least during the first year of his ministry, John 7:5.  It is more reasonable to explain this disbelief of those most intimately familiar with Jesus, under the theory that Jesus' miracles were fake, than on a theory that their disbelief was grounded in something faulty like misunderstanding, obstinate refusal to see reality, or sibling rivalry.

For instance, Stephen Patterson in a debate with Mike Licona has said that the reason he rejects the resurrection is that he is a modern man. He believes that by resurrection it does not mean that God raised Jesus from the dead physically. Miracles just do not happen. He has to explain the data another way, and indeed he does attempt to do so. Whether someone finds his explanation to be sound or not is up to them. Does his explanation best account for the data?
 Note that Patterson’s problem is on philosophical grounds.

That's not a problem, otherwise, we could reject God because of the stupidity of Turek and other apologists who foolishly try to prove God from the argument for objective morality.  Their philosophical blunder doesn't mean their main points are false.

His belief is that miracles cannot be historically verified if they even happen at all.

He is exactly right and so was Hume. And what Hume said has proven true up to the present:  there is no miraculous event that is testified to by such a good quantity and quality of eyewitnesses, that their deceiving would be more unlikely than the miracle they speak about.  For all miracles I can locate, they depend on fuzzy photos, unverified healings, unverified medical conditions, doctors who are not available, or involve witnesses who didn't see what the others say, etc.  And it wouldn't matter if Jesus really did rise from the dead, since truth is not the issue, but whether what you claim can be demonstrated true to another person.  Sometimes things happen in your life that are true, but which leave behind so little evidence that there's not enough to convince others of such truth.  That's why Patterson and Ehrman are constantly telling you that historiography is often not adequate to justify concluding that a miracle happened.  Probably does not derive from the "truth", but rather from the evidence.

At that point, one can go to philosophy and demonstrate that miracles are at least possible.

Not really.  You'd have to define miracle in a non-question-begging way, and you cannot do that when dealing with skeptics who deny miracles.  But if you seriously believe that "act of God" is the proper definition of miracle, then honesty requires that you use that definition despite your knowledge that it will get you exactly nowhere fast when dealing with an atheist.

While demonstrating them as actual is best, we can at least get to possible.
 The problem with ECREE at this point is just simply saying that in the face of contrary evidence that it just isn’t extraordinary enough without really explaining what is there. Now I am not saying that someone has to immediately give in to a lot of evidence. By all means, go out and study the information that you’ve been given for yourself and see if it’s valid and see if there are any valid criticisms of it.

You are here helping atheists feel good about taking their time to investigate, when according to your religion, if they die in a car wreck on the way to the library to check out your Savior James Patrick Holding's books, they will go straight to hell, no second chances.

Methinks you need to modify your instructions to atheists so that the way you instruct them with regard to further research, aligns more perfectly with your belief that they are always just a heartbeat from the gates of hell.  That might entail telling them to forego research and just hurry up and repent/believe, and that might be more consistent with the biblical message, but then you won't be taken seriously in this modern American culture where investigating things seems to be the god of the moment.

My friend also included in the message information on homeopathic medicine. I do not claim to be an authority on this so I will not act on one, but I do agree with him that if homeopathic medicine is valid, then we should certainly see some results in the laboratory, and I say the laboratory because this is in the area of science and therefore it is fitting to study it scientifically. (Since some atheists who seem to think that every truth claim can be tested by science) We can supposedly explain some recoveries by the placebo effect. Does that mean we close the door on research? I wouldn’t say that. However, there needs to be more than what can be explained by the placebo effect.

If you are a true Christian, you won't need anything more for healing sickness than what the bible gives you, James 5:14.  If James's assurance that the prayer of faith "shall" save the sick shouldn't be taken in an absolute sense, you open Pandora's Box:  I wonder how many other absolute-sounding statements in the NT likewise shouldn't be taken in an absolute sense?

I also like at the end that my friend stated that extraordinary evidence is really simple evidence that is probable given the truth claim. That is much better since he has given criteria. The atheist who is expecting that to believe Jesus rose from the dead, he has to have Jesus appear to him manifestly I do not believe will be satisfied, especially since God gave him a brain to use to study claims for himself.

False, you think God gave the 12 apostles brains to study claims for themselves, yet you think Jesus appeared bodily to them alive after he died.  Your God has a serious problem:  he doesn't do his "best" to save us, while yet pretending to be warning us of an unspeakably horrific eternity of suffering he'd rather spare us from.  When a person refuses to do their "best" to save somebody else from serious danger or harm, you have discovered the alleged savior's limit of love toward the endangered person.  But because this god is allegedly "eternal", then his love for sinners must be as well.

I'm sorry, Nick, but it really is that simple:  Your God does NOT do his "best", so he cannot possibly love children more than the parents who always do their "best" to save the child when she is in serious immediate horrific danger.  Nothing new here:  go read Deuteronomy 28:15-63, Isaiah 13 and Hosea 13, and discover for the first time in your life that if God DOES "love" humanity, that love is so utterly beyond anything remotely resembling human love, that you are a fool to try and "reason" about it with skeptics.

You can skip this whole problem by admitting that God's "love" for humanity is far more limited and stranger than as the vast majority of conservative evangelical scholars say.