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.