Cold Case Christianity: THIS is why missing data in the gospels justifies skepticism

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity:

How Can I Trust the Gospel Accounts When Some Are Missing Important Details? 

Posted: 20 Mar 2019 01:56 AM PDT 

A visitor to ColdCaseChristianity.com wrote recently to express her concerns and growing doubts about Christianity.

Or maybe you are concerned about a criticism I wrote against one of your beliefs, and you are just pretending the concern originated in what this unnamed Christian said.  We must consider all options.  You are a sinner, your honesty is far from deserving of presumption.

Raised in the Church, she finds herself questioning the reliability of the Gospel authors because some of them failed to mention important events in the life and ministry of Jesus.

 Congrats to atheist bible critics like me, because such a concern likely wouldn't originate from within her faith or her church.  It was likely a skeptic who motivated her to grant legitimacy to the argument from silence.

Why does only one Gospel writer mention the Raising of Lazarus?

Given that John has no problems lying about what Jesus said and did, the other 3 likely didn't mention it because it never happened.

Why does only one writer mention the dead people who rose from the grave at Jesus’ crucifixion?

Christian apologist and inerrantist Dr. Mike Licona credits this to the Matthew-author's desire to mix history with fiction.



See here.

You can hardly blame skeptics for agreeing with him. Unfortunately, Matthew also explains the empty tomb in spite of the guards, with a dramatic tale of an angel with appearance of lightning frighting the guards into comatose state (28:4).  That easily qualifies as "apocalyptic imagery" no less than the zombie resurrection. Gee, when did the average evangelical fundamentalist Christian ever learn in church that just because the gospels report something in a manner that looks like historical reporting, doesn't necessarily mean it was actual history?  NEVER.

There are many examples of singular, seemingly important events mentioned by only one of the four Gospel authors. Shouldn’t all of the alleged eyewitnesses have included these events, and doesn’t the absence of information in a particular Gospel cast doubt on whether or not the event actually occurred?

 Since you are so quick to use American law to analyze the reliability of the gospels, you'll be disappointed to know that American law allows the jury to interpret a witness's omission or silence to be the logical equivalent of a positive denial:

"Impeachment by omission" is a recognized means of challenging a witness's credibility. "A statement from which there has been omitted a material assertion that would normally have been made and which is presently testified to may be considered a prior inconsistent statement." State v. Provet, 133 N.J.Super. 432, 437, 337 A.2d 374 (App.Div.), certif. denied, 68 N.J. 174, 343 A.2d 462 (1975); see also Silva, supra, 131 N.J. at 444-45, 621 A.2d 17; State v. Marks, 201 N.J.Super. 514, 531-32, 493 A.2d 596 (App. Div.1985), certif. denied, 102 N.J. 393, 508 A.2d 253 (1986). This principle is widely accepted. Jenkins v. Anderson, 447 U.S. 231, 239, 100 S.Ct. 2124, 2129, 65 L.Ed.2d 86, 95 (1980) ("Common law traditionally has allowed witnesses to be impeached by their previous failure to state a fact in circumstances in which that fact naturally would have been asserted."); Kenneth S. Broun, McCormick on Evidence § 34 (7th 784*784 ed. 2013) ("[I]f the prior statement omits a material fact presently testified to and it would have been natural to mention that fact in the prior statement, the statement is sufficiently inconsistent."); 3A Wigmore on Evidence § 1042 (Chadbourn rev. 1970) ("A failure to assert a fact, when it would have been natural to assert it, amounts in effect to an assertion of the non-existence of the fact.")

 from Manata v. Pereira, 93 A. 3d 774, 783-4- NJ: Appellate Div. 2014

That is cut and pasted from my more in-depth article that shows how the basics of American jurisprudence render the gospels unreliable and inadmissible.  See here. 

Wallace continues:

My experience working with eyewitnesses may help you think clearly about these issues and objections. You can trust the Gospel eyewitness accounts, even though some are missing important details:

 Then you are already contradicting modern laws of evidence.  Wallace...you are not allowed to automatically assume that any possible "how-it-could-have-been" scenario you conjure up to explain an eyewitness's silence, is the only reasonable way to interpret said silence.  We the jury shall make our own decision whether the witness was silent because she thought it false, or merely "chose to exclude" it for her own unknown reasons.

Eyewitness Accounts Vary Based on Their Scope

When I interview an eyewitness, I am very careful to set the parameter for the testimony before I begin.

Something you obviously cannot do with ancient written testimony whose authors have been dead for 2,000 years.

I usually frame the interview by saying something like, “Please tell me everything you saw from the moment the robber came in the bank, to the moment he left.”

A request you don't know the gospel authors were intending or not intending to fulfill , in their motive to write.  I'd really like to ask Matthew "please tell me everything the risen Jesus told you during those 40 days of appearances which Acts 1:3 says you experienced, not merely the 15 second snippet you limited yourself to in your last chapter."

Unfortunately, such a request for greater quantity is useless in light of the death of the gospel authors.

If you believe in the power of prayer, why don't you ever tell your followers to ask God to fill out for them the factual details they wish the gospel authors would have included?  Or do we all recognize that nothing fails quite like prayer?  If the gospels are divinely inspired, such a prayer to God would be perfectly reasonable.  Yet you've never dared embark on such a futile undertaking as that.

I make sure to set the constraints the same way for each and every witness.

 And since you do nothing of the kind when restricted to documents authored by currently dead witnesses, as is the case with the gospels, all you are doing here is sounding intellectual without actually being intellectual.

Without these parameters, the resulting testimony would vary wildly from person to person.

So since you cannot impose those parameters on the 4 gospel authors, you are required to conclude their testimony varies widely from author to author for reasons not controlled for by your "parameters".

Some would include details prior to or after the robbery, some would include only the highlights, and some would omit major elements in the event.

 That's also because the eyewitnesses didn't all see the same thing or hear the same sounds.  That being the case, why do you automatically reject conservative Christian scholar Dr. Craig Evans' skeptical explanation for the John 11 raising of Lazarus being omitted by the Synoptics (Evans denies that we'd hear Jesus talking the way John's gospel presents, if we cold go back in time and listen to Jesus for ourselves, see here)?  How the fuck would you know whether the people who authored the Synoptics did or didn't know about that event?

But the skeptical solution (i.e., that assuming eyewitness gospel authorship, Matthew would surely have seen Jesus raise Lazarus, and with his desire to use apocalyptic fiction in his resurrection narrative anyway (Matthew 27:53, the zombie-resurrection story Licona denies the historicity of), and in light of the fact that Matthew alone has the risen Christ require his apostles teach the Gentiles "all" of the pre-Cross teachings (28:20), Matthew is especially likely to have mentioned the raising of Lazarus, were this a truely "historical" event).  So his omission reasonably implies he either never knew about it (suggesting it never happened), or he thought the story false (goodbye bible inerrancy). We are not limited to just picking an explanation that supports gospel reliability. 

If I want to be able to compare the testimony of two or three witnesses later, I’m going to have to make sure they begin with the same scope and framework in mind.

Something you cannot control for when dealing with documents authored by witnesses who have been dead for 2,000 years.

Furthermore, I object to your constant resort to "witness" and "eyewitness" in this analysis, as there are numerous cogent arguments that the gospels are at best a tangled pastiche of late Christian tradition and a few things Jesus really did say.  John Meier, Christian scholar, author of the comprehensive 4-volume "Jesus: A Marginal Jew", says that numerous times in the Synoptic gospels, a story about what Jesus said or did is in reality something created by Christian Jews, for example:

 See here.  I think this is where you try to do god service by exclaiming that just because a scholar more competent than you in the gospels, disagrees with you, doesn't necessarily mean he is in the right.  Well he doesn't have to be.  You can hardly label as irrational the skeptic who says the odds of who is right favor Meier far more than they favor you.

The Gospel authors clearly did not testify with the same initial instructions. There was no unifying investigator present to set the framework for their testimony, so their responses vary in the same way they would vary today if the scope of their testimony was not established from the onset. Mark, according to Papias, the 1st Century Bishop of Hierapolis, “became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said and done by the Lord. For he had not heard the Lord, nor had followed him, but later on, followed Peter, who used to give teaching as necessity demanded but not making, as it were, an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles, so that Mark did nothing wrong in thus writing down single points as he remembered them. For to one thing he gave attention, to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to make no false statements in them.” More concerned about accuracy of individual events than the order in which they occurred, Mark offered details like many of my witnesses who are interviewed without a unified parameter. Mark is simply recording the preaching of Peter, and Peter only referred to portions of Jesus’ life and ministry, making no effort to order them for his listeners.

Your uncritical acceptance of Papias' comment that Peter is Mark's source, is found faulty even by conservative evangelical standards.  Guelich says in the evangelical Word Biblical Commentary:

How is one to accept Papias’s testimony? On the one side, the preponderance of scholarship over the centuries has accepted this witness in total. It has its defendants among critical scholars today (e.g., Cranfield, 5; Kürzinger, BZ 21 [1977] 245–64; Hengel, Studies, 47–50). On the opposite side, many contemporary scholars have totally rejected Papias’s views (e.g., Niederwimmer, ZNW 58 [1967] 172–88; Kümmel, Introduction, 97; Körtner, ZNW 71 [1980] 171). Somewhere in the middle are those who accept Papias’s identification of the writer as Mark but question his explanation of Mark’s material as reminiscences of Peter’s preaching (e.g., Pesch, 1:9; Ernst, 21; Lührmann, 5).

Without doubt a close examination of Mark’s material will show that the evangelist did not simply write his Gospel based on his notes or memory of Peter’s teachings. The amazing similarity in language, style, and form of the Synoptic tradition between the Markan and non-Markan materials of Matthew and Luke (cf. John’s Gospel) hardly suggests that Mark’s materials were shaped by one man, be he either Peter or Mark. Furthermore, the Commentary will demonstrate the presence of multiple traditional milieus (e.g., the two Feedings), stages in the development of traditional units (e.g., 5:1–20), and the thematic combination of units into collections (e.g., 4:1–34) within the Markan materials that point to a more complex traditional background than mental or written notes of another’s preaching. Therefore, while Papias may accurately identify the author as Mark, his description of Mark’s source and content is oversimplified at best.

Guelich, R. A. (2002). Vol. 34A: Word Biblical Commentary : Mark 1-8:26.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page xxvii). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

 I'm not saying you lose merely because I can find Christian scholars who disagree with your simplistic uncritical trusting acceptance of patristic testimony.  I'm saying you incorrect to charge skeptics with being unreasonable merely because they hesitate longer than you before accepting patristic sources.

Eyewitness Accounts Vary Based on Their Perspective and Purpose

They also vary sometimes because eyewitnesses tell lies or are sincerely mistaken. Funny how you never give that possibility any consideration.  Actually not really, you are an inerrantist:  You are not here to be objective, but to push the inerrancy agenda.  And if you started personally doubting biblical reliability, the fact that you have a history of making money selling biblical reliability justifies the suspicion that you'd never honestly or publicly admit it.  You become a liberal, and you can look forward to being abandoned by the inerrantist apologists you currently network with.  Most people aren't stupid enough to nuke their opportunities to make money and preserve stability.

In addition, the witnesses I interview often want to highlight a particular element in the crime scene or a particular suspect behavior they think is important. Sometimes their choice of detail is influenced greatly by their own life history. Their values, experiences and personal concerns guide their selection of which details they include, and which they omit. Witnesses also typically try to offer what they think I am looking for as the detective rather than every little thing they actually saw. They are speaking to a specific audience (an investigator), and this has an impact on what they choose to include or omit. When this happens, I have to refocus each witness and ask them to fill in the details they skipped over, including everything they saw, even if they don’t think it’s important to me as a detective. If I don’t encourage eyewitnesses to be more inclusive and specific, they will omit important details.

The Gospel authors were not similarly directed. They had specific audiences in mind and particular perspectives to offer, and none of their testimony was guided by a unifying investigator who could encourage them to fill in the missing details.

 Then you are denying their inspiration by God, whom you say could very well have had them fill in the missing details had He wished them to.

Luke clearly had a particular reader in mind (Theophilus): “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught (Luke 1)”. Like other witnesses and historians, Luke likely allowed his intended audience to influence his selection of details. His testimony was also most certainly shaped by his own life experience (as an educated man),his own personal history, and his values.

 And conservative Christian scholars can also be found who say this "Theophilus" was just a figure of speech, and that Luke used this name to characterize any Christian reader:

Where did Luke write from, and to whom did he write? These questions probably are unanswerable. Luke dedicated the book to Theophilus, and Theophilus is a Greek name. Did Luke then write primarily to Gentiles? If so, why did he concern himself so much with Jewish questions? Why the elaborate messianic proofs of Peter’s sermons in Acts 2 and 3 if not to provide his readers with a pattern for witness to Jews? The most likely answer is that Luke intended his work for Christian communities that included both Jews and Gentiles—mixed congregations such as those we encounter frequently in Paul’s epistles.

Polhill, J. B. (2001, c1992). Vol. 26: Acts (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 31). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

In other words, Acts was written for believing communities, and thus not intended to satisfy skeptics, rationally warranting skeptics if they choose to ignore Luke and Acts.  They'd be acting more in conformity to the author's wish, than Christian apologists today who ignore authorial intent and childishly splatter every biblical thing to every part of the cosmos. 

Matthew did something similar when he highlighted the details of Jesus’ life most relevant to Matthew’s Jewish audience.

 But patristic accounts make clear that he wrote for Jews:

The Gospel according to Matthew was written to the Jews. For they laid particular stress upon the fact that Christ [should be] of the seed of David. Matthew also, who had a still greater desire [to establish this point], took particular pains to afford them convincing proof that Christ is of the seed of David; and therefore he commences with [an account of] His genealogy.

See here.

That is, the author of Matthew seriously expected for unbelieving Jews to find his story of Jesus' virgin birth to be true, and to find his use of Isaiah 7:14 to be legitimate.  In other words, if you are going to be so accepting of patristic testimony about gospel authorship, the apostles were rather gullible and anti-intellectual.  Any self-respecting non-Christian Jew, knowledgeable of the OT, would not be persuaded by such presumptive storytelling.  Scholars complain there's no evidence in pre-Christian Judaism that Isaiah 7:14 was considered messianic prophecy.  

Yet we have to believe that the author of the most Jewish sounding gospel, surely knew that non-Christian Jews do not just buh-leeve any interpretation of their OT that outsiders give.  Yet Matthew engages in precisely zero attempted justification for his use of Isaiah 7:14, nor does he provide anything useful to help non-Jews track these things down.  He had the objectivity-level of a KJV Onlyist who thinks screaming bible verses at people causes the Holy Spirit to do things.  He seems to think that there's just no rationality in questioning anything he has to say, thus preempting any need for him to bother with the least bit of documentation of sources.  No thank you.

Eyewitness Accounts Vary Based on Their Knowledge of Other Testimony

Sometimes an eyewitness will only provide those details he thinks are missing from the testimony of others. This is most likely to occur if the witness is the last one to be interviewed and he (or she) is already familiar with the testimony of the other witnesses. When I see this happening, I ask this last witness to pretend like he or she is the only witness in my case, “Try to include every detail like I’ve never heard anything about the case. Pretend like I know nothing about the event.” Once the witness has done that, I may go back and re-interview the prior witnesses to see why they didn’t mention the late details offered by the final witness. In the end, my reports related to everyone’s testimony will be as complete as possible, including all the details remembered by each person I interviewed.

The gospel authors were not similarly directed and re-interviewed. John was the last person to provide an account, and he clearly selected those events important to him, given his stated goal: “…many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name (John 20)”. John knew what had already been provided by others, and he selected specific events (some which were previously unreported) to make his case.

 And as usual, you tell your followers nothing about the growing conservative Christian scholarly view that John's gospel attributes to Jesus things Jesus never actually said or did.  This, despite your quickness to believe everything you read in the early church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria's statement, which clearly differentiates John's subject matter from the "external facts" subject matter in the Synoptics:

But, last of all, John, perceiving that the external facts had been made plain in the Gospel, being urged by his friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel. This is the account of Clement. ( Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., 6:14)     

But John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel. (ANF, Vol. II, Fragments of Clement of Alexandria, From the Books of the Hypotyposes)

 It doesn't matter if you can trifle that Clement's remarks can be plausibly interpreted to say John also provided "external facts", you certainly cannot condemn as unreasonable my own interpretation that says Clement here was saying John's purpose was not to convey external facts.  The fact that my interpretation would kill evangelical conservativism in its cradle, doesn't suddenly mean the interpretation is wrong or unreasonable. 

Wallace continues:

He acknowledged his limited choice of data: “…there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written (John 21)”. John admitted what we already know: witnesses pick and choose from their own observations unless they are specifically directed to do otherwise.

I don't have a problem with the gospel authors picking and choosing what material to include or exclude.  I have a problem with modern-day Christian apologists who blindly assume that only the explanations for this, which help defend biblical inerrancy, are the only explanations that have any significance.  Once again, you also know that eyewitnesses will differ because they are lying or mistaken, but you never entertain this obvious reality here...probably because to suggest the gospel eyewitnesses differ from each other due to lying or mistake, is to raise possibilities you don't wish to raise...such as bible inerrancy being a false doctrine.

Because the gospel authors were not specifically instructed, guided or re-interviewed by a single detective, we simply cannot conclude much from the differences between the accounts.

Bullshit.  If you think Peter was the source behind Mark's gospel, you'll have a hard time explaining one of Mark's more striking and unexpected omissions:

“Messiah”?  or “Messiah, Son of the living God”?
Mark 8	Matthew 16
27 Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, "Who do people say that I am?"   28 They told Him, saying, "John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets."   29 And He continued by questioning them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered and said to Him, "You are the Christ."  (omitted!)    30 And He warned them to tell no one about Him.  31 And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must  suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes,	13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi,   He was asking His disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"  14 And they said, "Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets."  15 He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"  16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."  17 And Jesus said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.  18 "I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.  19 "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven."  20 Then He warned the disciples that they should tell no one that He was the Christ. 21 From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.

 Now what, Wallace?  Do you seriously think that Mark knew Jesus' answer was as long and theologically significant as the one we today see in Matthew's version, and Mark merely "chose for unknown reasons to exclude" such critically important part of Jesus' answer?  FUCK YOU.

Conservatives defend by saying Peter didn't wish to impose his authority on others, but this is total bullshit, since if Jesus really did give the longer answer preserved in Matthew, we are reasonable to assume Peter would not sideline Jesus' statement, but would have properly done what even Paul did, and make clear how and why he possesses the authority that he does.

Nah, the authority that Jesus bequeaths on Peter in Matthew's longer version is not something Mark would likely have omitted (Mark never has Jesus giving anybody "keys to the kingdom", so you cannot even pretend that "Mark covered the matter once and didn't feel it needed repeating"), had he known Jesus' answer was that long.  Therefore, you cannot blame me, any skeptic, John Meier, or most Christian scholars, for concluding that Mark omitted it because he and Peter remembered Jesus' answer being shorter, and therefore, Matthew's longer version is not what Jesus really said, it is what Matthew has falsely fabricated and embellished in the effort to give more dramatic effect to this particular scene.

Skeptics sometimes infer more from omissions (or inclusions) in the Gospels than what is reasonable, especially given the manner in which the Gospels came to be written.

And inerrantists sometimes give more weight to inerrancy-favoring explanations than the evidence will allow.  But surely its only the skeptics who are dominated by their presuppositions, while Christian inerrantists are objective calculators pushing no agenda.

Because the four authors were not specifically instructed, guided or re-interviewed by a single detective, we simply cannot conclude much from the differences between the accounts.

That's stupid, there's no Christian gospel scholar on the face of the earth that will say our modern inability to get the authors to fill in the blanks means we cannot draw reasonable inferences from the way they differ from one another.  Even inerrantist Christian scholars, such as J.A. Brooks,  explain Matthew's and Luke's softer form of a story than the version Mark gave, is because they are "toning down" language of Mark that they believe is errant or likely to support an errant view:

Mark 6:5 This statement about Jesus’ inability to do something is one of the most striking instances of Mark’s boldness and candor. It is omitted by Luke 4:16–30 and toned down by Matt 13:58.

Brooks, J. A. (2001, c1991). Vol. 23: Mark (electronic e.). Logos Library System;
The New American Commentary (Page 100). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

If Matthew thought Mark's gospel was "inerrant", he'd no more "tone down" Mark's choice of wording than YOU would.  

We must, instead, do our best to employ the four part template we use to evaluate eyewitness reliability after the fact.

 No, we should examine the gospels using standard techniques that all historians use to analyze the probable truth-content of other similarly ancient documents.  There is some overlap between the methods of historiography used by historians, and rules of evidence as used in modern American courts, but the issues with ancient testimony are far more complicated than modern court rules of evidence were intended to address.  Wallace, do you know of any court cases where trial was allowed on a question that required the truth to rest upon what a 2,000 year old document said?  Obviously not.  When I accuse you of using clever marketing bells and whistles as gimmicks to con Christians into buying your stuff, that's not as inaccurate as you'd wish.  What's your next book going to be?  "True Colors:  How Techniques used by Painters Reveal the Truth of Bible Inerrancy?"

The fact that it doesn't make sense is precisely why there's money in it, remember?

This template (as I’ve described it in Cold-Case Christianity), provides us with confidence in the trustworthy nature of the Biblical narratives. That’s why you can trust the Gospel eyewitness accounts, even though some are missing important details.

I find it funny that you never considered an equally likely explanation, that eyewitnesses often differ from one another because some of them are lying or mistaken.  That's also a stark reality daily experienced in courts of law, but you omit this genuine possibility as if only a crazy person would consider it.

Probably because to even start talking about the possibility of eyewitnesses lying or being mistaken, opens the door to kissing bible inerrancy goodbye forever.   Wow, even criminal investigators are blinded by their own biases.  Thanks for the lesson.

Dear Cameron Bertuzzi: Morality without god is easy for atheists to explain and justify

This is my reply to an article by Cameron Bertuzzi entitled
 

CC021: If God Does Not Exist, Why Be a Moral Person?

If atheism is true, in other words, if God does not exist, then what reason is there to be a moral person?

 That question is about as valid as "if space aliens don't exist, then why do some people write with their left hand?"  The question fallaciously assumes there's a prima facie problem with the concept of atheist morality.  There isn't, as will be explained, infra.  But if you are already a "fundamentalist" Christian, the I guess you are already predisposed to take whatever you find in life to be "good" and insist that it surely cannot be explained any other way than "god".

The question also assumes we cannot be reasonable to act in accord with our own moral principles in daily life unless we have a specific motive or "reason" in mind for doing so at the time of the moral act.  That's also false; most people do not conform to their own moral code merely because they can tell how it implies or doesn't imply "god". Human beings, as mammals, more often simply "react" automatically to the world based on their genetic predispositions coupled with some degree of environmental conditioning.  If a Christian wipes their ass due to a presupposition that such act is more cleanly, do you suppose they do so in deliberate conscious intent to glorify Jesus?

I can imagine the desperate apologists saying "yes", in their determined effort to look more spiritually mature than other Christians, as if they'd never dare so much as blink their eyes without asking permission from Jesus first, horrified at the thought that any little action done in presumption might offend infinite holiness.

Well fuck them, I'm talking about how you really are in daily life, I'm not talking about how clever defense attorneys can word your campaign speech so that you look better than you really are.  You do not go around consciously crediting Jesus with all your acts in daily life somebody could label "morally good".  Do you thank Jesus every time your child craps their diaper without expelling their guts?  I'm guessing "no".

Why do what’s morally right?

That's easy for atheists to answer in a way that makes supernatural explanations completely unnecessary:

a) because the atheist was raised to believe the moral act they are engaging in is the "right" one;
b) because they don't want to go to jail
c) because they want to impress other people like friends, followers or family
d) because they notice that the"moral" response from them will bring greater security and peace to their lives than the "immoral" response, and they naturally prefer stability and comfort above turmoil.

If God doesn’t exist, then if you live your life good or bad, it doesn’t matter.

If you meant that there is no ultimate purpose to life, then you are correct.  Yes, it doesn't "ultimately" mater.  Your problem is that lack of "ultimate" purpose doesn't mean the atheist's sense of purpose is illogical, irrational or misguided.  There is such a thing as "temporal" purpose, and this is quite sufficient to provide rational warrant to the person engaging in the act.  What fool would say my temporal purpose in telling my friend about traffic backup on the freeway is irrational because I didn't intend to achieve some eternal goal therein?

Lower mammals like cats and dogs obviously aren't motivated to do what they do out of a sense of trying to please "god".  Do you really think the only reason Rover wished to scare away the bear in your front yard is because he intended to lay up for himself treasures in heaven, with moth and rust doth not corrupt?

The lower mammals simply respond to their environment in a way that they think will prioritize comfort and security.  There is nothing irrational about the higher order mammal called "human" being motivated by the exact same animal instinct.  The moral motive that says "I wish to save that drowning child from further misery and death" is not rendered illogical, irrational or unreasonable merely because the motive doesn't link back to "god".  The temporal purpose is quite sufficient to make such an atheist reasonable.

Furthermore, since "god" is an incoherent concept anyway (i.e., the objection that all traditional religious language is meaningless) means the atheist who has her own reason to choose the moral reaction she engages in, at least doesn't have a problem of "incoherence", and that makes her moral motivation to be somewhat more reasonable than yours.

Furthermore, the bible supports the temporal-purpose model of justifying morality.  The bible approves of teaching children morality by physically abusing them (Proverbs 22:15), and that this refers to something more traumatic than "tapping them on the butt with a small stick" is justly inferred from ancient Israel's belief that children were routinely "deserving" of brutal fates where infliction of such horror would achieve Israel's larger goals...like burning tweens to death for sex before marriage (Lev. 21:9), burning them to death because their dad stole something (Joshua 7:15), or generally regarding the death of baby boys as promoting a greater good than trying to parent them (Numbers 31:15) or causing them to suffer death for things their great-great-great grandfathers did some 450 years previous (1st Samuel 15:2-3)...to say nothing of the fact that their own god, despite being omnipotent (i.e., he could achieve his larger goals in perhaps millions of different ways, he is not "required" to limit himself to particular acts),  nevertheless apparently thought that torturing a baby for 7 days before killing it was "better" than just killing it immediately (2nd Samuel 12:15-18, the child didn't die from this traumatic painful divinely inflicted sickness until "seven days later", and its obvious that the baby was not personally guilty of the sin that caused the sadistic god to react this way).

The point of the above was that if your god approves of physically abusing children in order to set them on the correct moral path, then your god also approves of the adult who grows up from that conditioning and therefore simply "reacts" in the way he was conditioned to.  That is, your god doesn't think people are necessarily irrational for lacking a conscious justification at the time that they morally react to a situation.  So if atheists just engage in moral acts without having a conscious justification for doing so in their heads at the time of the act, that doesn't render them "irrational".

Everyone ends up in the same place. Being a terrible person doesn’t have the same kind of negative consequences as on Christianity.

 It doesn't have to.  Unless you think the justice system god put in place in America (Romans 13) is unreasonable, then apparently god thinks it is rational and reasonable for those who don't believe in him, to be motivated to moral conduct solely by fear of jail.  Indeed, jail is a "deterrent".  If you think the only rational moral motive is the kind that acknowledges "god", then you necessarily think it irrational when the atheist's moral reaction arises from their fear of jail.  Which would mean you disapprove of the moral system that God in Romans 13 takes responsibility for instituting. And you are saying the justice system's view that jail should be a deterrent, is unreasonable.

Why would god want fear of jail to be a sufficient motive for atheists to act morally, if it's also true that mere fear of jail isn't a sufficient reasonable justification for the moral act?  If God could use fear of jail to scare people into morality, he could have made his own greater day of judgment equally scary to them.  But no, that concept is hidden behind a tangled mess of theological disagreements created by fundamentalist inerrantists who individually regard their respective and contradictory interpretations as "clear".  Apparently, there is no god behind this judgement day crap, it's just the way ancient leaders scared the gullible illiterate masses into conformity.

I’ve even heard Christians say that if they found out Christianity was false, then they’d consider doing really immoral things. It’s not like they’d go to Hell after they died, so why not sin all the time? Or at the very least sin as much as possible.

 I would accuse Frank Turek of this type of immaturity.  He is always berating the atheist worldview as leaving the atheist no reasonable justification for acting morally.  He thus unwittingly admits that if he himself were an atheist, he wouldn't be the type that just has a natural inborn humanistic compassion for their fellow woman, he would be more like the drunk teenager-type who thinks the lack of ultimate authority in the cosmos implies nothing more than life being little more than a ceaseless party, taking stupid dares, and a few too many beer-pongs.  I really have to wonder about the level of actual maturity in grown men whose basis for morality is nothing more than a belief in an incoherent concept.  The adult whose humane compassion arises from completely naturalistic origins has greater innate maturity than the 40 year old adolescent who is ripe and ready to start acting like a toddler the very second they find out there might not ever be any "ultimate" accountability.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a topic that receives a whole lot of attention in the apologetics world.

Probably because most apologists recognize how weak it is to argue that "we all know child rape is wrong, and the best explanation for this is an incoherent form of life beaming his instructions down into our hearts from the sky".

Christians just kind of assume that this is a legitimate way to reason. And it's a stance that I took not too long ago.

That’s why I’ve invited an expert on moral motivation and Theism to the podcast, namely, Dr. Anne Jeffrey, to help us think through this question philosophically. Are negative consequences a good reason to act morally?

How many times do parents intend for their children to use the fear of negative consequences as a sufficient motive to be morally good?  Are such parents all irrational because they don't give the child a lecture about the invisible Jesus every time the child disobeys?  Obviously not.

Shouldn’t we do what’s right simply because it’s right, not because of the good or bad consequences we might receive?

 No, your god takes credit for instituting America's justice system (Romans 13), so apparently god agrees with us atheists, namely, that it is reasonable if a person's sole motive for acting morally is limited to "fear of jail" or some other equally non-ultimate basis.  God would hardly make jail the deterrent to crime that it is, if he thought our being deterred solely by fear of jail was an irrational unreasonable thing.  he could have also made his own will equally as known to criminals as he made known to them the fate they will endure if they commit crimes.  So God has only himself to blame if criminals refuse to credit their good behavior to mere fear of jail. If God can make the fear of jail an empirically undeniable threat, why didn't he make fear of his own Judgement Day an equally empirically undeniable threat?

Gee, is the proof of god's judgment day equally as compelling as the proof that jail awaits the criminal in modern America?  FUCK YOU.

This may shock you, but the difficulty level for this podcast is advanced. That’s how deep we look at this question.

I guess everybody has their own ideas about complexity.  IMO, the difficulty level of your arguments, including those heard in the podcast, supra, was "LOL". 

So settle in and get ready to look at this issue at a depth you probably didn’t know existed.

Thanks for testifying that the knowledge in the Christians you aim your apologetics stuff toward, is at the level of "God loves everybody, see John 3:16".

What's next boss?  Proving evolution false by pinning little cloth animals to a giant picture of Noah's Ark?

Cold Case Christianity: When Does God Identify “You” as “You”?

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: When Does God Identify “You” as “You”?

Posted: 13 Mar 2019 01:40 AM PDT

Life begins at the moment of conception.

The same was true for the baby boys whom Moses ordered killed in Numbers 31:17.

Apparently, the question of when life begins, does not answer the question of whether killing them can be morally justified.  And by the way, under your own stupid theology, because aborting babies sends them directly to heaven with no possibility of going to hell, any fair moral analysis would take this good effect of abortion into account when deciding whether abortion produces more bad than good.  The fair moral analysis would not ignore this obviously good effect.  And in the NT, the spiritual effects are always given greater weight than the earthly effects, see Romans 8:18.  If murdering babies who have already been born can be morally justified by God (1st Sam. 15:2-3), you need to back the fuck off before pretending that murdering unborn babies cannot be morally justified. 

And since your god takes responsibility for all murders (Deut. 32:39) and decrees how many days a person shall live (Job 14:5), your stupid Christian theology would force the conclusion that God's bitching about abortion is equal to God's bitching at people for doing exactly what he wants when he wants.

We know this to be true due to the unique genetic nature of every fetal human. I didn’t always accept this truth, however. In fact, for most of my life, I was pro-choice. I came to this realization about the nature of human life through a careful examination of embryology, rather than a careful reading of Scripture.

Irrelevant, your god doesn't just kill babies, but tortures them for 7 days, before killing them:

 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. (2 Sam. 12:14-18 NAU)

Then you wonder why some people characterize your god as a sadistic lunatic? 

Perhaps those sorts of bible verses will cause you to hesitate before you blindly presume that torturing babies is an objective immorality.  Since your fictitious god tortures babies, you are forced to give up the idea that baby-torture is always immoral.  In fact, I'd go further and say your quick disapproval of baby torture arises from your sin nature, since you appear to be far more soft-bellied than your god.

Face it:  if God wants your little girl to die in a car accident, but you don't want your daughter to die in a car accident, then you deserve to be called "Satan" because you care about human compassion more than god's will. Now discover a bible passage you apparently never noticed before:

 21 From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.
 22 Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to You."
 23 But He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's."  (Matt. 16:21-23 NAU)

Wallace continues:

The Bible does, however, affirm this truth. Every human being, according to Christian scripture, is a unique, intentional creation of God, even if he or she might appear to be an unplanned accident from our limited, human perspective.

 Thus assuring us that you've chosen the easier route of preaching to the choir, instead of the harder route of giving skeptics anything to worry about.

The Bible affirms our identity as unique, distinct human beings long before we were born.

Not if you take Deuteronomy 28:15-63 seriously.  When God doesn't like you, you become about as important as a homeless welfare-abusing crack-whore.  If god thinks even these scumbags are "important", well, Mr. Wallace, how many homeless crack-whores have you allowed to stay in your house?

If the only way you could save the lives of 5 unborn crack-babies is to raise them in your house yourself after they are born, would you sign the contract?  Obviously not.  

God Had Plans for You Before You Were in the Womb

God had plans for you and I from the very beginning. This makes sense if we are us from the moment of conception. God knew us before we began our mortal existence, and we began it in the womb at the moment we were conceived:

Jeremiah 1:5

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

If you were in Mormonism, you'd have quoted the book of Mormon, your students would have clapped, and you'd have felt no less a sense of fulfillment than you have now. Dismissed.

God Referred to You While You Were in the Womb

You have always been you, even from the earliest moments in the womb.

 But the more interesting question is how we existed before conception.  You will say we had no existence apart from God's foreknowledge of us, but some church fathers believed in pre-existence of the soul, which they would hardly have believed, if as today's fundies insist, such a doctrine was as contrary to scripture as the notion that Jesus was a woman.  See here.

As usual, J. Warner Wallace's "apologetics" have less to do with beating back skeptics, and more to do with coddling the currently existing beliefs of his Christian followers.

Rebuttal to Craig Blomberg's defense of miracles

This is my reply to a North American Missions Board article by Dr. Craig Blomberg entitled

The Credibility of Jesus' Miracles

03.30.16, Craig Blomberg

Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary

For some people, the miracles in the Gospels form the most incredible part of the New Testament accounts.

 That's because what the gospels allege is not only not part of our life-experience, but contradictory to what is possible (i.e., the same criteria by which we judge the tooth-fairy to be wholly imaginary).  Contrary to popular belief, the existence of a "god" doesn't automatically make walking on water any more possible than an ant's acknowledging the existence of superpowerful human beings would justify the ant to believe humans can walk on water.  Even if a super-powerful intelligence existed, this doesn't automatically get rid of the impossibility-objection.   You leap, far too quickly, from "god exists" over to "miracles are possible".  How powerful this god is, whether he created the universe or is a mere advanced life form, are questions that are not answered.  But since your own bible credits your god with imperfection in places that decidedly are NOT "anthropomorphic" (Genesis 6:6-7), we can make an educated guess that if such god exists, he probably isn't eternal, otherwise he'd have learned the error of his ways long before the days of Noah. 

Modern science, they say, has demonstrated that the universe is a closed continuum of cause and effect.

You cannot fault somebody for learning by experience.  If a child learns to avoid playing with matches because he got burned the last time, you can hardly fault him for drawing the conclusion that there is no miraculous power that might possibly allow him to put his hand in fire without causing pain.  If God didn't want us to draw such empirical assumptions, maybe his shouldn't have limited our ability to learn solely to our five physical senses.   If you wish to prove that god can give people telephathic powers, feel free to waste your time.

The ancients may have believed in the possibility of supernatural forces in the world but we know better today.

Indeed:  thunder is not Thor rumbling across the sky or hitting the other side of the sky with his hammer.  People who go comatose and froth at the mouth and flail about on the ground do not have a demon, etc.

In fact, this cluster of opinions proved more common a half-century ago than today. Philosophers of science have stressed that by definition all science can adjudicate is that what is repeatable under controlled conditions.

 Irrelevant, we don't have to absolutely disprove the possibility of miracles, all we have to do is show that "miracle" is incapable of coherent definition, and/or that no "miracle" has sufficient documentation so as to render the skeptic unreasonable.  1st century people didn't know that the human body's survival depends on bacteria and a good immune system.  There's plenty of rational room to posit the possibility that future studies into human-kind might reveal truths that remained previously undetected.  But I don't depend on such speculations, the gospels are historical unreliable on the merits.  Justifying skepticism toward them is about as difficult as justifying skepticism toward the dancing sun miracle alleged by thousands of eyewitnesses in Fatima.

If there is a God of the kind in which Jews, Christians and Muslims have historically believed, then we would expect him occasionally to bypass the laws of nature.

 And if there isn't, we wouldn't.  Your point?

The real question becomes whether there is good reason to believe in God in the first place.

That's one way to start, and the answer must necessarily be "no" because the traditional religious concept of "god" constitutes an incoherent concept.  You can hardly fault somebody for choosing to walk away after they find out that the subject of discussion is an incoherent concept.  You wish to "reason" about 'god' with skeptics.  You cry victory when human reason makes some biblical description of God appear morally justified, but you automatically invoke god's "mysterious ways" whenever human reasoning about him would tend to show him to be an idiot, a sadist, or non-existent.  What is the point of "reasoning" about god, if you've already decided that only the reasoning that supports your hypothesis, is the reasoning that actually counts?

One of the most exciting and encouraging developments in recent years in this respect is the intelligent design movement.1

 Wrong.  They've been clobbered too often in the past.  See here.  Furthermore, refuting atheism does precisely nothing to make it 'easier' to 'prove' one specific religion (Christianity) to be true.  The evidence for and against Christianity is very great, so if you don't wish to be a fool by telling unbelievers they are under an intellectual obligation to mire themselves in the tedious back-and-forth discussion we seen in scholarly Christian publications such JETS, to say nothing of the countless books for and against Christianity, you are going to have to acknowledge that the average dad on the street can be reasonable to put down the apologetics book long enough to go to work, purchase clothes for the kids, have sex with his wife and all the other stuff dads reasonably do, which doesn't involve gluing their noses to your recommended reading lists.

But under your fundie view of salvation and damnation, the more such a dad does things in life beyond bible study and prayer, the more chance he takes of dying on the way to the library to check out your books, in which case he would die before coming to faith, leading him straight to hell, in which case your fundie attitude requires that you stop "recommending books" and "making arguments in articles" and respond to unbelievers the way you'd respond to a fellow hiker who just fell over a cliff and is hanging on by a weed.  If you would seriously react in an extreme way to people who are in obvious urgent danger, why don't you react that way to their spiritual danger?  What, do you think the reliability of the gospels is so obvious that only willfully ignorant people would challenge them?  What, do you think most Christian bible scholars are willfully ignorant merely because they don't happen to be fundamentalists?

Finally, since the traits of carnivores would, under ID, be intended by god and not merely the way Adam and Eve's sin caused the molars of lions to degrade into flesh-ripping fangs, you are forced, under ID, to admit that god intended, for reasons apart from sin, that carnivores should inflict the misery to other life that they do.  Then you are going to call your god "loving"?  Sure, if you allow that Hitler was also "loving".  But then such reckless word-games would reasonably justify the skeptic to walk away from you concluding that you are completely beyond reasoning with.  What's next?  Maybe a pedophile rapes a little girl because he truly "loved" her? How do you know what stupid sadistic lunacies can be committed out of a genuine "love".

Pointing to numerous examples of fundamental entities in the natural and biological worlds that display irreducible complexity, even some scientists who are not Christians at all have acknowledged that there must be an intelligent being behind this creation.

 But since we have steadily knocked down one after another of the alleged proofs of intelligent design, its reasonable to suppose we'll keep doing so.  you are like the stupid atheist among the Vikings on a ship at sea in 800 a.d., who decides believing in Thor is better than atheism, because you cannot, in 800 a.d., provide a fully naturalistic explanation for thunder.

Behe's irreducible complexity crap is always being responded to by equally qualified scientists. See here.  To say nothing about how he was humiliated as an expert witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case.  See here and here.   The only people that find his arguments compelling are those who don't wish to give up their faith.

The entire "big-bang" theory for the beginnings of the universe leads to the question of what or who produced that "bang."

Which poses no threat whatsoever to those of us who say the big bang is false scientifically and biblically.  A list of such persons would include myself, everybody at the creationist propaganda mills Institute for Creation Research, and every similar person at the similar propaganda mill Answers in Genesis, etc.

Finally, the fact that competent Christian scholars disagree with each other about whether Genesis supports young-earth or old-earth creationism would make reasonable the outsider who chooses to avoid the entire mess completely, concluding that the data involved are too contradictory and ambiguous to justify thinking conclusions of any degree of reasonable certainty could be meaningfully drawn.  Such debates are little more than an endless circle of trying to squeeze certainty out of uncertain sources.

For others, philosophical arguments like those of the famous seventeenth-century Scotsman, David Hume, turn out to be more persuasive. While not alleging that miracles are impossible, the claim now is that the probability of a natural explanation will always be greater than that of a supernatural one.

And since you Christians have never come up with any evidence for a miracle that made its truth more probable than its falsity... (Dr. Keener never answered my challenge, see here).

Phenomena could mislead, witnesses could be mistaken and, besides, explanations of events must have analogies to what has happened in the past.

 As skeptics we usually do better than simply allege that the witnesses could possibly be lying or mistaken.  We usually make a reasonable showing that one of these two possibilities has greater probability than the "they saw a real miracle!" possibility.

But it is not at all clear that any of these arguments mean that the evidence could never be unambiguous and the witnesses unassailable.

Quit trifling about what's "possible" and set forth the one miracle that you believe is the most impervious to falsification already.  Or would you recommend I first spend a few years researching the in-house Chrisitian disagreement between charismatics, who say miracles still happen to day,  and cessationists, who say the age of miracles ceased hundreds of years ago?

And if every event must have a known analogy, then people in the tropics before modern technology could never have accepted that ice exists!

They would have been reasonable to deny ice if they never saw it, and always lived in a place where water never takes that form.  Just like Dr. Craig has never seen bricks float of their own accord, therefore, it doesn't matter if they have done so in absence of Dr. Craig, you cannot blame him for being skeptical of any such claim.

Today, perhaps the most common scholarly objection to the credibility of Jesus' miracles is that stories and myths from other religions that competed with Christianity in the first-century Roman Empire are similar enough that it makes best sense to assume that the Christian miracles stories likewise teach theological truth through fictional narrative. It is curious how often laypeople and even some scholars repeat the charge that the Gospel miracles sound just like the legends of other ancient religions without having carefully studied the competing accounts.

 Then count me out.  Stories of women getting pregnant by the gods by means other than normal intercourse can be reliability dated hundreds of years before the 1st century.  The concept was nothing unique.  Pindar wrote around 450  b.c. that Zeus took the form of a golden mist at the time he got the virgin Danae pregnant.
The story goes on to say that she was accurately characterized as "virgin goddess" at the time she gave birth to Perseus, so she apparently got pregnant in a way leaving her hymen intact.

Of course that story is fiction, but we don't need to show that other real virgin conceptions occurred before Jesus was born, we only need to show that the concept of "virgin birth" was common before the 1st century.  It was. Therefore, you are forbidden from leaping from "unique!" over to "must be historically true!".

For example, it is often alleged that there were virgin births and resurrection stories all over the ancient religious landscape. But, in fact, most of the alleged parallels to special births involve ordinary human sexual relations coupled simply with the belief that one of the persons was actually a god or goddess incognito. Or, as with the conception of Alexander the Great, in one legend almost a millennium later than his lifetime, a giant Python intertwined around Alexander's mother on her honeymoon night, keeping his father at a discrete distance and impregnating the young woman.

 Such comments are dismissed, you need to deal with the one pagan case of a virgin birth, the story of which originated hundreds of years before the 1st century.  We are reasonable as skeptics to dismiss the virgin birth of Jesus as nothing but a new fictitious spin upon an older fiction, whether you can trifle about this or that detail or not.

Furthermore, it does no good to pretend the differences between the Christian virgin birth and the pre-Christian stories of the same outweigh their similarities.   What fool would pretend that because the Geo Metro is so different from the Model-T, that therefore, the former must have arose completely independent from the latter?

So what danger do skeptics create for themselves by admitting the Christians took older pagan savior-god myths and gave them a new twist to make Jesus sound "better"?  Gee, Luke and Matthew's nativity stories aren't perfectly identical to similar pre-Christian pagan tales, so all of a sudden, the original nature of the Christian story argues for it's historicity?

Then why don't you believe Medusa was a real biological monster?  After all, her nature of having snakes for hair is an original concept, not a copy from an earlier myth, right?

But if the ability of the pagans to come up with an original spin upon an older motif, doesn't suddenly mean the new spin is describing actual reality, then the ability of 1st century Christians to come up with an original spin upon an older motif , doesn't suddenly mean the new Christian spin is describing actual reality.

Skepticism of the nativity stories is even more justified if we take seriously the patristic accounts that say Matthew the evangelist left behind his written gospel to replace him as he went off to other lands. That is, the tradition is telling us that Matthew seriously intended for unbelieving Jews to find his version of the nativity story to be true...despite the obvious fact that he merely quote-mines Isaiah 7:14, gives no explanation, and quickly scampers off, as if his telling of the story constituted the final proof that should be found acceptable to any reasonable person.

In other words, the original Christians appear to have been horrifically gullible, expecting unbelievers to convert on an especially uncritical basis.

And if Mike Licona's explanation for the zombie resurrection in Matthew 27:52 be reasonable, then we are dealing with at least one author of a nativity story who saw no problems in mixing truth and fiction in ways likely to deceive the reader about which was which. 

In the case of resurrections, there are stories about gods or goddesses who die and rise annually, often corresponding to the seasons and the times of harvesting and planting respectively. Greco-Roman writers use the term metaphorically at times to talk about the restoration to health of someone who was gravely ill or about the restoration to status of someone who was disgraced or deposed for a time from some position. But there are no stories from the ancient world (or the modern world, for that matter) of people known to have been real human beings, which began to circulate during the lifetimes of their followers, in which those individuals died completely, rose bodily to life again, and were declared to have atoned for the sins of the world.

See above.  The originality of the Christian version does precisely nothing to argue for its historicity, lest you insist that Medusa was a real biological Gorgon, all because the concept of a female with snakes for hair has no serious parallel in prior tales.

In fact, the closest parallels to Jesus' miracle-working activity in the ancient Mediterranean world all come from a little after the time during which he lived. Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the late first century, was said to have worked two or three miracles very similar to Jesus' healings and resurrections.

Then count me out.  I don't falsify the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of Apollonius of Tyana.  I falsify the resurrection of Jesus by showing that the historical evidence in favor of that hypothesis is so utterly weak, contradictory and implausible that skeptics are reasonable to consider the hypothesis false.  Exactly to what degree the original stories were stolen from earlier pagan myths is a fun academic exercise, but does far less to compel skepticism, than the arguments that attack the merits of the gospel stories themselves.

The charismatic Jewish wonder-worker Hanina ben Dosa, whose stories appear in the later rabbinic literature, likewise reportedly worked a couple of miraculous healings similar to Christ's. The second-century Gnostic myth of an ascending and descending redeemer sometimes explicitly inserted Jesus instead of (or as) Sophia or "Wisdom" as its hero. Mithraism began to resemble Christianity only in the late second and early third centuries. But all of these developments are too late to have influence the first Christian writers; if anything, they may have been born out of a desire to make their heroes look more like Jesus and therefore more credible in a world in which Christianity was coming to have ever greater influence.

See previous answer.  Once again, the details of the god-men which can be documented from definitively pre-Christian sources, are quite sufficient to give the gospel authors plenty of ideas to put new spins in their effort to make Jesus sound like what the 1st century pagan mind would naturally expect of such sons of the gods.  Putting new spins on older motifs would be natural if they wished the people to think Jesus "better" than previous god-men such as Perseus.  They'd immediately cry foul if they found that the story of Jesus matched perfectly with the details found in older similar myths, especially given the Christian contention that Jesus is supposed to be the fulfillment of OT types and shadows, a trait the pagan gods never had.

If all the main reasons for not believing in the Gospel miracle stories fail to convince, what are positive reasons for believing in them?

 Are you drunk?  You haven't even STARTED exhausting the naturalistic hypotheses for the gospel miracle stories.  The most historically plausible hypothesis to explain John 7:5 is that Jesus' family saw his miracles and found them about as convincing as you'd find Benny Hinn's "miracles" to be.   It's a rather small leap from "Jesus couldn't work true miracles" over to "God would never premise his second covenant upon the words and works of a deceiver".

To begin with, they are deeply embedded in every layer, source and finished Gospel in the early Christian tradition.

But "multiple attestation" isn't the infallible authority you think it is, as can be seen by the obvious fact that witnesses often conspire to spin the truth.  Furthermore,  if the majority Christian scholarly opinion about Markan priority and the Two-Source hypothesis are correct, the only reason Matthew and Luke tell the same stories found in Mark, is because they are merely borrowing text from Mark.  They are NOT "independently" attesting to the stories.  Multiple attestation turns into garbage if the only reason Witness # 2 tells the same story as Witness # 1, is because Witness # 2 is simply reading from Witness # 1's previously filed declaration.

Jewish sources likewise attest to Jesus' miracles. Faced with the opportunity to deny the Christian claims that Jesus performed such amazing feats, Josephus and the Talmud instead corroborate them, even though they don't believe he was heaven-sent.

Meaning precisely nothing since the the more laudatory form of Josephus' text is clearly a Christian forgery, and regardless, we have to ask how Josephus would have known Jesus was a doer of many wonderful works, if in fact non-Christian Jews found Jesus to be a scoundral.  Since Josephus himself wasn't a Christian, it sounds like he speaks that way about Jesus only because he draws his information from secondhand Christian sources.  The Talmud's accusing Jesus of sorcery testifies to little more than pre-scientific gullibility.  There's a good reason why most authors from the 1st century and before never explain that an alleged miracle-worker's feat was a purely naturalistic trick:  such reporters were caught up in their culture and credited "tricks" to supernatural entities.

The rabbis often made the charge that Jesus was a sorcerer who led Israel astray, much like certain Jewish leaders in the Gospel accounts (Mark 3:20-30) accused Christ of being empowered by the devil.

The trouble being that Jesus' own family called him "insane" (Mark 3:21), which in the first century was the equal of saying Jesus was demon-possessed (John 8:52, lunacy is a mark of the devil).  That is, to take the gospels at face value, Jesus' own family didn't merely disagree with him, they were willing to categorize him in the worst possible terms this culture knew.  In such a collectivist honor/shame culture, they wouldn't likely draw such a negative picture of Jesus unless they perceived what he was doing to count as unforgivable acts of deception and departure from basic Jewish norms.  Since John P. Meier does such a good job of showing how gospel stories about Jesus are often a mix of what the story character actually said, and what the author is putting into their mouth, your blind black and white fundie approach, which simply insists on reading the bible like a modern newspaper, is dismissed, and as such, what Mark reports the gospel enemies as saying, is NOT a settled matter of history.  

In addition, the nature of Jesus' miracles contrasts markedly with most of those from his milieu.

Again, because giving a few innovative twists to the older motif was naturally expected in the race to  prove that one god-man was better than the rest.

There are a fair number of exorcisms and healing accounts from Jewish, Greek and Roman sources but none where a given wonder-worker consistently and successfully works his miracles without the use of magical formulae, paraphernalia, or proper prayer to God or the gods.

 Again, because Christians were innovative, and as already shown, you don't get "it's historically true!" out of "Christians told stories in ways different than the pagan versions were told".

The more spectacular miracles over nature have fewer parallels in the Greco-Roman world; where similar accounts exist there are also often reasons for disbelieving them. For example, the fountain in the temple of Dionysus in Ephesus flowed with wine once a year rather than with water. But Lucian explained that the priests had a secret underground tunnel that enabled them to enter while the building was locked at night and replace the water supply for the fountain with one of wine. This is hardly the background for Christ's miracle of turning water into wine.

Unfortunately for you, we don't know whether and to what extent Jesus conspired with others in trickery.  Any stupid fool at the front lines of a Benny Hinn crusade could go home and truthfully report in their diary that "Benny Hinn healed all the people of whatever ailments they had", because they are honestly recording their true convictions about the event  And yet such a first-hand "eyewitness report" leaves unanswered the critical question of whether the author's perception was accurate.  Thousands watch Benny Hinn smack people with his coat and "heal" various people on the stage, and they all think and report that such healings are genuinely supernatural.  They are also high on crack, as you would quickly agree.  How you could possibly pretend that accounts from 2,000 years ago, of disputed authorship, do a "better" job of reporting "actual reality", appears to have more to do with your a priori commitment to the reliability of the gospels, and less to do with common sense.  You start publicly questioning the gospels, you can look forward to being ousted by many long-time friends and starting over again at some other seminary.  Most people prefer the security of the social comfort they've known for decades, over a "truth" that might require them to be uproot and go somewhere else.

Apocryphal Christian miracles form part of narratives that tend to fill in the gaps of the gospel record. What was Christ like as a boy? How did the virgin birth occur? What happened when Jesus descended to the dead? The answers at times are quite frivolous compared to those in the canonical Gospels—Jesus the child fashioning birds out of mud and water and breathing life into them so that they might fly away, or cursing a playmate who has been mocking him so that he withers up. Indeed, even within Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the primary purpose for Jesus' miracle-working activity is to demonstrate that the kingdom is arriving, that the Messianic age has come (Luke 12:28 par.). But if the kingdom is coming, then the King must be coming. If the Messianic age has arrived, then the Messiah must be present. The miracles are not primarily about what God can do for us.

Irrelevant, the question is whether the miracles were genuinely supernatural, or purely naturalistic tricks.

The closest parallels to the miracles of Jesus are in fact in the Old Testament.

Another reason to say the Jesus of the gospels is not much more than a Moses or Elijah with a few innovative twists.

Feeding the multitudes with miraculously supplied bread, God's sovereignty over wind and waves, Elijah and Elisha raising people from the dead all appear as crucial background for understanding the New Testament texts. If anything, such parallels should inspire confidence in the reliability of the New Testament accounts.

No, such parallels should inspire skepticism toward the historical reliability of the gospels.  Regardless, trifles about how the Jesus story "parallels" something in the OT does more to give fundies something to gaze at, and less to give skeptics anything to worry about.  Modeling Jesus after Moses and Elijah is actually required if the story is supposed to be about how the OT "messiah" manifests himself.

The death of the messiah is not in fulfillment of the criteria of embarrassment.  Jesus really was executed.  This couldn't be denied, so his early followers, mostly Paul, had to think of a lie that would turn this defeat into a 'victory', especially in a culture soaked to the skin with tales of martyrs.  "My strength is made perfect in weakness", and all that bass-ackwards fortune cookie bullshit.  What's next?  Maybe atheism is true because it is easy to falsify?  How many other stupid backward aphorisms should we live by?

At the same time, nothing in Christian theology requires one to argue that only the biblical miracles ever occurred.

That's nothing but a trifle.  You don't spend nearly as much time pouring over the historical problems of ancient pagan miracle accounts, with anywhere near the obsessed way you do the gospel accounts.

Nothing in the Bible requires us to imagine that God uses only his people to work the supernatural, and both demonic inspiration and human manufacture can account for other preternatural works.

That's historically dishonest.  The question is not whether you, the Christian, can come up with a convenient way to "account for" the miracles in ancient pagan literature without sacrificing your own ancient miracle literature.  The question is two-fold:

a) why do you even grant the historicity of ANY ancient pagan miracle story, when you know perfectly well that most of them are shameless lies, and

b) why you don't reason from "true miracle" to "the theological claim must be true" in the case of pagan miracles, but you are quick to make such connection when it's a story about Jesus in the bible.  The patristic stories about Simon's miracles might be true, but the claim they point to (that he was a god) is false.  Why?  How do you know when miracles accurately substantiate a true theological claim, and when they don't?

Nothing requires them to be without parallel in later Christian tradition either. At the same time, historians should not and need not have a more credulous attitude toward biblical miracles than toward extra-biblical ones. When we apply the same criteria of authenticity to both, the biblical miracles simply enjoy more evidential support.

Then apparently you never read the story of Simon Magus and how his purely naturalistic tricks managed to deceive entire cities:

 9 Now there was a man named Simon, who formerly was practicing magic in the city and astonishing the people of Samaria, claiming to be someone great;
 10 and they all, from smallest to greatest, were giving attention to him, saying, "This man is what is called the Great Power of God."
 11 And they were giving him attention because he had for a long time astonished them with his magic arts. (Acts 8:9-11 NAU)

 It is perfectly reasonable to say Simon was employing purely naturalistic tricks, not Satanic power,  to delude gullible pre-scientific people.  The SOLITARY reason you insist he was doing genuinely supernatural feats with the aid of Satan is because if you admitted the naturalistic interpretation was better, you'd be deluged with "then why are you so hesitant to admit Jesus' miracles were purely naturalistic tricks?", and you find that through the artifice of crediting real pagan miracles to Satan, you spare yourself the need to account for your own inconsistency.  

There would be no obligation on the part of the objective historian to presume such deceivers were employing genuinely supernatural means.  Your Christian manner of accounting for pagan miracles might be a trifle, but it does nothing to intellectually obligate skeptics.  So if we have no compelling reason to think Simon was astounding cities with anything more than naturalistic tricks, we also have no compelling reason to think the gospel "eyewitness" authors were telling the truth about what they saw, anymore than we'd get similar truth from Benny Hinn's devotees as they write in their diaries what they "saw" from the front row.

When all is said and done, one of the most meticulous historians among contemporary biblical scholars makes the following significant observation:

    Viewed globally, the tradition of Jesus' miracles is more firmly supported by the criteria of historicity than are a number of other well-known and often readily accepted traditions about his life and ministry. . . . Put dramatically but with not too much exaggeration: if the miracle tradition from Jesus' public ministry were to be rejected in toto as unhistorical, so should every other Gospel tradition about him.6

 Nope, I'm a responsible historian. I have specific reasons for acknowledging that Jesus lived and was executed as a criminal, and I have good reasons for insisting that the miracles attributed to him in the NT constitute little more than fabrications and embellishments intended to make him seem more wonderful than he really was.

But you certainly get an "A" for effort.