Matthew Flannagan fails to show child torture is objectively immoral

At another blog, Christian philosopher and apologist Matthew Flannagan and I are having an argument about whether any actions of humans are objectively moral or immoral.

I am an atheist, and deny that any moral can be "objective" (i.e., good or bad for reasons transcending the human mind).

As predicted, Flannagan has cited to the popular example of "don't torture children purely for entertainment", in his effort to convince me that some actions of humans are objectively immoral.

For unknown reasons, Flannagan has asked me whether I think societies that approve of child torture solely for entertainment, have made a morally mistaken judgment.  He seems to think that he is going to prove something significant whether I say "yes" or "no", despite the fact that the moral opinion held by an atheist is clearly insufficient to demonstrate that the hypothetical wrong is objectively wrong.

My shorter answer (as posted to Matt's blog) is given below, followed by my more point-by-point answer

barry jones

Nov 9, 2017 at 2:22 pm

Matt,

My point by point response to you will be at my blog tomorrow, but for now, answering your most critical point is perhaps best.

You ask “so you think that a society which endorses the torture of children is making a mistaken moral judgment?”

Yes, I believe a society which endorses the torture of children is making a mistaken moral judgment.

First, unlike other atheists, I admit that my personal basis for finding such torture of children immoral, is entirely subjective. If my genetics had predisposed me toward a sociopath mentality, and had I been raised by sociopaths, I could easily have come to believe that where I am entertained by it, torturing children is morally good. I really don’t see how you think my agreement with the consensus of humanity (i.e., that torturing children solely for entertainment is unacceptable) does anything toward your goal of demonstrating the existence of objective morals.

Second, I notice that while you had asked me whether I think America’s former endorsement of race-based chattel slavery or that Europe’s death penalty for atheism were morally mistaken notions, you DIDN’T ask me whether I thought burning a woman to death for practicing prostitution in her fathers house, was morally mistaken.

Leviticus 21:9 is God’s command to burn such a female to death.

If you believed my agreement with most people that slavery and killing atheists is morally wrong, somehow did something to support your belief in objective morality, then, to be consistent, shouldn’t you think my agreement with most people that it is wrong to burn a prostitute to death for working out of her father’s house, can also somehow do something to support your belief in objective morality?

Or does your trust in the objective goodness of the god of Leviticus 21:9 forbid you from asking why the vast majority of humans in history eschewed burning people to death?

If under your logic, the world’s majority view eschewing of child-torture spells “because God himself doesn’t like it either”,

…then the world’s majority view eschewing burning prostitutes to death would necessarily also scream just as loudly “because God himself doesn’t like it either”.

Which would then mean your logic could be used to “argue” that Leviticus 21:9 was not something God commanded.

I don’t see where you have left to run: You can avoid the above criticism by saying you infer god from something other than human majority moral opinion, but if so, what was your point in asking me to give my moral opinion in child-torture?

------------------- 

Here is my more in-depth answer.  I usually avoid this because the sheer quantity of material gives apologists more opportunity to transfer focus off of real problem areas and give the false impression from their focus on less essential areas that they've adequately answered:

Nov 8, 2017 at 9:55 am
Barry you write:
 I can truthfully say that I constantly hear Christian apologists raising “don’t torture children purely for entertainment” as if the proof that it was objectively true was the fact that they happened to make the statement.
And I can just as truthfully say that I’ve never seen a Christian apologist explain exactly why they believe torturing children purely for entertainment is objectively immoral, except of course in the question-begging manner of “the bible tells me so”, which hardly conduces to beneficial dialogue with atheists who do not espouse the divine inspiration of the bible.
The example of torturing children for fun actually comes from an atheist, writers not “Christian Apologists” it is standardly used in the Euthyphro objection to divine command ethics.

But I wasn't wrong to assert that it is standard fare among apologists too.  When I challenged you to establish the existence of any absolute or objective moral, you too appealed to "do not torture children solely for entertainment".

As an example of an action which cant be made right or wrong by someones willing it to be so.

I'd say such debates are convoluted, since logically there is no such thing as an objective good or bad.  My advice is that atheists simply point out that because the evidence that God exists is unspeakably weak, that debate needs to be resolved, before you plunge into the abyss of conveniently unfalsifiable trifles, such as whether an act can be morally good merely because god requires that the act be done.

Second, Despite your prefacing those comments with the word “truthful” I am skeptical what you say is correct. I am reasonably familiar with the literature on God and Morality, and I don’t know of any defender of objectivism who defends it simply by asserting it, nor do I know any who argue that “the bible tells them so.”

Well I said that about "Christian apologists", I didn't say every defender of objectivism believe their merely asserting their theories proved them true.

On the contrary, many of the standard texts on God and Morality explicitly spell out why they think moral obligations are objective
For example, Robert Adams cites several reasons why it’s plausible to think that our concept of a moral obligation involves a presupposition such things are objective. for example such this as that “‘wrong’ has the syntax of an ordinary predicate, and we worry we may be mistaken in our moral judgments”,

Most people would agree that the disobedient child who doesn't go to bed when ordered to do so by their parent, is making a mistake in moral judgment.  But what time children must go to bed is hardly subject to objective verfiication.  The employee can later believe that he was morally mistaken to insult his boss.  But his sense of moral mistakenness is clearly limited to the circumstance.  So our sense of making moral "mistakes" does precisely nothing to justify the inference that there are morals which are objective.

that neither we, nor society, can “eliminate all moral requirements just by not making any demands”

That presupposes that moral requirements exist.  I deny the assumption.  Civilized society obviously couldn't be what it is without some people making moral demands and other people obeying those demands.  Again, the fact that such a thing would conduce toward civilized society doesn't argue, at all, that any moral requirements involved in the matter were objective.  I don't obey my employer out of any sense that such a thing is objectively good.  I obey solely to earn a paycheck so I can keep a roof over my head.  Nothing more is required, and this motive of mine is not capable of being shown objectively immoral.  And it would be foolish to assert that some objective moral requires one to obey one's employer.  There would have to be qualifications that become so numerous that the relativity of the entire business would be assured.

and that “what the Nazi’s did to the Jews was horribly wrong whether or not the Nazi’s thought so

But all they are doing is asserting the wrongness and dogmatizing that it be so whether the Nazis thought so or not.  This hardly establishes that Nazi treatment of the Jews was objectively immoral.

and it would have been more horribly wrong if they had managed to persuade the Jews that it was not wrong” [I cite all this in my original article which Carrier responded to]

Same answer:  assuring the reader that the Nazis were wrong, not matter what, hardly suffices to establish that their treatment of the Jews violated some objective moral.

Stephen Evan’s similarly stresses that we assume or presuppose that moral judgments are the “kind of thing we can be mistaken about”

Already answered:  we clearly also feel mistaken often when disobeying requirements or mandates that aren't objective, such as parentally imposed bedtimes, or jaywalking.  Our sense of our own mistakenness is absolutely fused to the culture.  And room need to be made to significantly deal with those in society who feel no sense of mistakenness when they engage in acts others find immoral, such as vigilante justice, or stealing from the corrupted rich to help the unfairly treated poor.

and we criticise societies and other people for making mistaken moral judgments, all of which presupposes objectivity.

No, we might believe our criticism of Hitler's treatment of the Jews goes back to some type of objective moral, but it doesn't.  If we had been born in Germany in 1910, we could just as easily have believed our country got it right in mistreating the Jews. But no, we act as if the American way is god's way, we just cannot imagine that America is also a mere culture.

Nor is this unique to Christian writers the idea that objectivity is presupposed by our concept of moral obligations is actually common in secular ethics and there are textbooks such as James Rachels, Loius Pojman, or Shafer Landau which note things like the fact societies have made moral mistakes or the existence of moral reformers,

that proves nothing.  Protestants and Catholics disagree on whether Luther's reforms were morally good or bad.

or the fact we think some cultural mores or moral systems are worse than others and so on, all of which presuppose objectivity.

They do not presuppose objectivity, they presuppose that we THINK they presuppose objectivity.  The truth is most people feel their own peculiar set of morals are objective, and they are in fact mistaken.

Or the fact we engage in debate with other people over what is the right thing to do.

The fact that Christians disagree with each other about moral issues makes plausible the inference that there are no objective standards, or if there are, they are mooted by our apparent inability to recognize them.  

In fact, in the quote, you cite from an earlier post I went on offer an argument for my conclusion. In other words, I put forward a hypothetical situation where a community endorsed the torture of children and asked whether you think a society which judged it was ok to do this was mistaken in doing so, or whether you thought there judgment it was permissible to torture children was correct.

No, you didn't present that as a question, you simply declared, in several different ways, why you think a) the moral holds true in all situations, and b) how I'd be "biting the bullet" if I tried to differ with you on it.

In fact, I put the challenge to you in the post? Most people judge that such a society does make a mistake, which shows that they presuppose that moral judgements are objective.

Already answered.

So seeing you missed this argument

I didn't miss it, you failed to specify what your moral yardstick was, for saying that torture of children purely for entertainment, was objectively immoral.  Assuring me that you think such act is always immoral, isn't that yardstick.

I’ll put it to you again, do you think that a society which endorses the torture of children is making a mistaken moral judgment?.

Yes.  But only because of my genetic predispositions and my environmental conditioning.  Had I been raised by sociopaths, I could very well take the position that i don't really care what other people do to their kids.

You don’t need a hypothetical example there are lots of concrete historical ones, for example in the US not long ago it was accepted culturally that race-based chattel slavery was permissible?

Why are you asking me whether I agree with the current US law that race based chattel slavery is immoral?  Yes, I reflect the beliefs and customs of the culture I was born and raised in.  This does precisely nothing to help you establish that this moral belief of mine derives from an objective moral.

It was accepted that atheism was a capital crime that warranted death in 18th century England?

Same answer:  My belief that the death penalty for atheism is immoral, is entirely subjective and relative.  Had I been born in 18th century England, I could well have been one of the legislators that enacted such law.  Depends on culture.

In your view were these judgements mistaken or were they entirely correct?

In your view, was the judgment of Moses mistaken or entirely correct when he required the burning to death of any prostitutes who work out of their priest father's house (Lev. 21:9)?

If you believed my agreement with most people (that slavery and killing atheists is morally wrong), somehow did something to support your belief in objective morality, then, to be consistent, shouldn’t you think my agreement with most people that it is wrong to burn a prostitute to death for working out of her father’s house, can also somehow do something to support your belief in objective morality?

Or does your trust in the objective goodness of the god of Leviticus 21:9 forbid you from asking why the vast majority of humans in history eschewed burning people to death?

If under your logic, the world’s majority view eschewing of child-torture spells “because God himself doesn’t like it either”,

…then the world’s majority view eschewing burning prostitutes to death would necessarily also scream just as loudly “because God himself doesn’t like it either”.

Which would then mean your logic could be used to “argue” that Leviticus 21:9 was not something God commanded.

Now if you say burning prostitutes to death used to be morally good but is no longer morally good, then you just said one of God's own morals was relative (i.e., burning prostitutes to death for working out of their father's houses isn't always good or always bad, but depends on the culture).

If you say no, it only depends on whether God tells us to do it, then you are still making one of God's morals subjective, since you'd then have to say that burning prostitutes to death for working out of their father's houses is good when God tells us to do it, and bad when god tells us not to do it.

That is, the objectivity of God's own morals can be turned on and off like a light switch.

No, Dr. Flannagan, I am NOT changing the subject by showing that the Christian position runs into significant problems in the area of objective morals, anymore than YOU were changing the subject by pointing out what secular writers on morality had to say.  

And so what?  Are you willing to defend the idea that your god's morality is objective, yes or no?

If yes, then where can we debate that?

Matt Slick fails to show that torturing babies is objectively immoral

Matt Slick of Carm seems to think the baby torture example just rips Jesus out of the sky and slams him into the face of all atheists:

Matt Slick: The proof that moral absolutes exist is in the statement I gave you: "It is always wrong for people to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure." 

No, he who asserts, must prove.  YOU are asserting it is always wrong for people to torture babies to death merely for their personal pleasure, so YOU have the burden.  Provide the reasons why you think such act is always wrong.

If you can falsify that statement, you have proven me wrong.

There is nothing to falsify if you set forth a proposition and offer nothing to support it.

Let's throw your logic back in your face:  "It's always wrong to count nickels on Tuesdays solely for personal pleasure".  I give this moral maxim, like you gave yours, without supporting argument.  Do you have anything to refute?   Of course not.  So if I were to say "If you want to tell me that it is not a moral absolute, then all you need to do is falsify it. Go ahead", that would actually be dishonest, in that it gives the false impression that I have fulfilled my burden of proof and now the monkey is on your back.

Therefore YOU, Matt Slick, are being dishonest when you talk so confidently about how the atheist is free to falsify.  YOU are the one asserting your moral maxim.  YOU therefore cannot view your opponent as morally or intellectually obligated to "refute" it unless and until you provide supporting argument as to why you think such baby torture is always wrong.

Or is this the part where you confess that you don't really know what the fuck to do if your opponent doesn't automatically agree that you've fulfilled your own burden?

You have not falsified the statement. I have not found any atheist that has falsified the statement yet.

You just did.  Hello, my name is Barry Jones.

  If you want to tell me that it is not a moral absolute, then all you need to do is falsify it. Go ahead.

Correction, if I want to tell you its not a moral absolute, I can achieve that goal by pointing out that you never supported your premise.  Your bare statement that the maxim constitutes a moral absolute, certainly doesn't make it so, you are not god, remember?  If so, then you aren't obligating anybody to answer anything until you have supported your maxim with argument.

Again, there is nothing to falsify, you've simply set forth an unsupported moral maxim, as if its truth were so obvious that it did not need to be supported.   I say that stems from your other irrational beliefs, such as Calvinism (i.e., presuppositionalism, questioning the truth of Christian claims is absolutely forbidden, and the futility of non-Christian thought is an untouchable icon of absolute truth).

Once you start revealing the secret you are guarding so closely (the reasons you think such baby torture is always immoral, you are the claiming so that's YOUR burden) the more you will cease looking like a frightened barking child and the more you will sound like a professional philosopher who is willing to put all his cards on the table.

Apologist Clay Jones fails to morally justify Joshua's massacre of Canaanite children

This is my reply to a lecture by Christian apologist Clay Jones, Phd., uploaded to YouTube by Biola University, entitled:

Killing the Canaanites Was Justified Capital Punishment

1. Before we get started, I recently made a debate offer to Dr. Jones concerning his online articles about how sinful the Canaanites allegedly were (i.e., his attempt to convince modern western readers that the Canaanite kids being killed by Hebrews was actually consistent with modern western notions of deserved justice).  He first replied asking where my blog was.  When I told him, he sent a final email saying he is just too busy to debate the issues raised in his articles.  Now, I'm not saying he is lying.  I'm just saying if he really was too busy, he likely would have said this before asking where my blog was.  I think what happened was that he believed he could make the time to debate me if he liked my blog site, but after reading it, then “discovered” that he didn’t have enough time to do such a debate.  

2. Dr. Jones starts out with the NT and its out-of-context OT quotes for original sin.  So apparently he seeks to restrict his persuasion power not just to "Christians", but to specifically only those Christians who regard bible inerrancy + doctrine of original sin as a foregone conclusions.

That's a problem:  Does Jones recommend that his Christian audience take any of his pro-bible inerrancy apologetics arguments and try them out on atheists?  Or he is just giving the lecture to help those already committed to his version of Christianity, to feel better about serving a Christian god that used to ask his followers to kill children? 

3. Be that as it may, Jones cites Romans 3 to “prove” that everybody “deserves” to die because of “original sin”.  Unfortunately, Paul here was taking Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 out of context.  Psalm 14:5 says God is with the righteous generation, thus meaning the universal condemnation words immediately preceding weren’t intended in absolute fashion..  In Psalm 53, the Psalmist obviously excludes himself from the others he accuses of having gone astray.  Apparently, Paul was misinterpreting Psalmic hyperbole as if it was literal, and in a way that ignored the context of those passages.  The same is true for the case of Psalm 10:7.  Romans 3:18 quotes Psalm 38:1, but in v. 10 the Psalmist admits the existence of those who are righteous.  Evangelical Inerrantist scholars agree that Paul thought he could help god by "adapting" God’s originally inerrant wording in the OT, to a context the OT author did not have in mind:

"Also a New Testament author would quite often, under the inspiration of God and to accentuate a specific point, adapt an Old Testament verse to serve his immediate purpose. Furthermore, the practice of precise citation and scholarly acknowledgment is a modern phenomenon. It was not at all a customary practice in antiquity."-----------Romans 3:9-12, Mounce, R. H. (2001, c1995). Vol. 27: Romans (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; The New American Commentary (Page 108). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers. 

4. Clay is apparently only talking to evangelical inerrantists, since his blind presumption of the doctrine of original sin would not be taken well by nearly half of the evangelical world “only fifty-two percent of evangelicals held to the doctrine of original sin.” See also Danielle, MDiv Princeton Theological Seminary, author of Original Blessing: Putting Sin in its Rightful Place,

Even conservative Christians deny original sin, such as the “Churches of Christ".  The bible and especially the book of Jeremiah are full of references to the wrongness of a person in shedding "innocent" blood, which would doesn't make sense if in truth a) nobody is sufficiently innocent to deserve protection from murderers, and b) God numbered our days and thus logically also decreed the act that would take our lives, which often would be murder (Job 14:5).

5. Clay also overlooks that if he wishes to credit God with the modern Christian moral disdain for murder, he opens the door to the possibility that it is also something from God in the heart that causes many Christians to disdain the doctrine of orginal sin.  Doesn't do much good to talk about how our sense of morality comes from God placing his laws on our hearts, if in truth human intuition really isn't a criteria for deciding what morals come from god.

6. Clay overlooks that Jeremiah and Ezekiel set forth new dogmas of individual guilt, intended to replace the older dogma of corporate guilt, and the new dogma appears to conflict with original sin, since the new dogma promises protection from the guilty conduct of others: 

29 "In those days they will not say again, 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, And the children's teeth are set on edge.'

 30 "But everyone will die for his own iniquity; each man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth will be set on edge.

 31 "Behold, days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,

 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. (Jer. 31:29-32 NAU)

20 "The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself. (Ezek. 18:20 NAU)

7. Clay then cites to atrocities committed by other nations on their own people, but this is rather disingenuous, since to be consistent, Clay would have to draw similar inferences from the fact that people and leaders also do much good to their people too.  Why doesn’t America’s creation of the U.S. Constitution show good in people just as much as tyrants of other countries show the bad?  Could it be that we are simple minded idiots and feel more comfortable labeling somebody fully good or bad, and would rather not admit the complex truth that most people are an inconsistent mixture of both?

8. Clay overlooks the fact that the vast majority of people on earth have not been egregious tyrants or criminals outside of their country requiring them to participate in war or battles.  The vast majority of people in history do not exhibit the atrocities Clay documents from a handful of tyrants like Stalin and Hitler.  The point is that Clay's unwillingness to credit people properly with being good for their good works, makes him inconsistent to say the only works they can be properly credited with are their bad works.

9. Clay says Jesus never implies that those who die might be undeserving of death, but he overlooks Exodus 32:9-14, where God backs off of his original intent to kill the Exodusing Hebrews, because Moses slapped some sense into the divine head.

  

9 The LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.

 10 "Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation."

 11 Then Moses entreated the LORD his God, and said, "O LORD, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?

 12 "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, 'With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth '? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people.

 13 "Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, 'I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.'"

 14 So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.

 (Exod. 32:9-14 NAU)

10. Clay presumes that all of God’s judgments are good and right, but in this overlooks the plain fact that given his presuppositions about the nature of sin and man, God either knew or should have known that flooding the world in the days of Noah would not accomplish his goal.  God appears to admit he should have known that the flood was a bad idea.  Genesis 8:21 makes no sense unless it means that God discovered at some point after flooding the world that this response to man’s sin was inappropriate or inadequate:

21 The LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. (Gen. 8:21 NAU)

11. at timecode 26:20 ff, Clay says Canaanites fully indulged their sins, thus trading on the western individualist ethics of his modern Christian hearers to make Canaanites seem “deserving” of being massacred, but in this he overlooks that the Hebrew god command things just as atrocious.  We are most offended at the idea of Canaanites throwing their live children into burning furnaces, but God commanded death by burning for teen girls who lost their virginity and/or engaged in prostitution during pre-marital sex while living in their fathers house:

9 'Also the daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by harlotry, she profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire. (Lev. 21:9 NAU)

12. refers to reader to “we don’t hate sin” article, and at time code 27:17 says bestiality and other sins were ‘rampant’, but as I show in my own blog post, one author Clay relies on for his bestiality comments frankly admits she cannot find any Mesopotamian sources asserting anybody ever had sex with animals. 

13. Mr. Jones than cites to a Baal poem of the Canaanites saying baal committed rape incest bestiality a lot, and he says we may thus infer the people worshipping said god did the same.   But that is ludicrous.  Christians believe their God is responsible for all murders (Deut. 32:39), should we assume that Christians imitate this divine practice?  Christians believe their God causes ceaseless conscious torment in mind-numbing pain for those who die in unbelief (hell), should we assume Christians do something similar?  Christians believe God credits himself with why pagan nations brutalize the Hebrews by beating children to death and forcing women to endure abortion by sword (Isaiah 13:15-16, Hosea 13:15-16), should we assume Christians engage in whatever acts they believe their god does?

14. 28:15 ff says our modern liberal culture is against death penalty because sin has corrupted us, but one wonders how strongly Jones would fight to save his daughter, should she be falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to capital execution.  Would he tell her that her deserving death from original sin, and suffering for righteousness sake for Christ, was more important than the fact that she was actually innocent of the charges?

15. Clay at timecode 21:45 ff deflects question on whether some Canaanites might have been moral among the many depraved, like Lot, by assuming that because God destroyed Sodom despite promising to spare it should he find 10 righteous people (Genesis 18:32), the slaughter of the Canaanites can only have taken place by reason that not even one of them were righteous.  But the possibility that some of the Canaanites weren’t deserving of death is found in the story of Rahab the innkeeper or “harlot”, wherein she is the only person spared in the sacking of Jericho because she assisted the Hebrew spies.  But nothing in the story from Joshua 2 expresses or implies that Rahab was doing anything more than pretending to align herself with the views held by spies whom she believed were part of an army easily capable of massacring her city, when in fact she didn’t really give up her pagan faith, she was only pretending so as to save her own skin.  There’s no evidence that she actually repented, and the Christian view is even more unlikely if she was actually a prostitute and not mere innkeeper.  What she did is what anybody in her position would have done had they felt the coming destroyers of her city would be successful. And if she was a Canaanite prostitute, she probably had much practice in pretending to believe things she didn’t really believe.

  

16. Matthew Flannagan who co-authored the “Genocide” book with Paul Copan, believes no children were present in Sodom when it was destroyed, because Genesis 18-19 indicate God would spare it if 10 righteous people could be found there, but then he didn’t spare it.  Flannagan thinks children are righteous by default because of their innocence.  But despite Flannagan’s belief being unlikely given that Sodom and the cities of the plan were a rich metropolis, the point is that Jones and Flannagan still disagree about the moral status of kids.  Can they blame the atheist bible critic for saying such disagreement is not likely if their god is true and they both seek god’s truth sincerely as equally authentically born again Christian scholars?  How many times must you pray for God to lead you into a correct understanding of the bible, before it becomes God’s fault that you continue to misunderstand it?  If God can make even pagans willing to do whatever he wants or believe whatever he wants them to believe (Ezra 1:1), then why does God prefer to “toy” with you and make you plead for truth over and over before he implants the truth and right motive in your heart? 

17. Jones then adds to the word of the Lord by saying God’s choice to kill Canaanites is based on his foreknowing who would respond to the truth and who wouldn’t.  But that is unfalsifiable nonsense.  Had the story of Rahab the harlot ended with her being accidently killed in the sacking of Jericho, Clay would have just as blindly assumed that God “knew” Rahab’s “faith” was fake.  Jones treats his view of God’s goodness as some untouchable icon of presuppositional glory, when in fact it is the bible itself that testifies that God often learns and regrets his own actions no less than imperfect humans often learn and regret their own prior acts.

18. Jones’s assumptions would require that he view Lot as righteous and godly, no matter what, all because the NT characterizes Lot as righteous and godly (2^nd Peter 2:7-9), when in fact, if today’s apologist doesn’t already have his defense mechanisms on red alert, he would automatically conclude that any “Christian” who sought to protect his house-guests from homosexual rape, by appeasing the mob with invitation to rape his own virgin daughters, was not righteous nor godly in any sense of the word, yet Lot committed such atrocity:

8 "Now behold, I have two daughters who have not had relations with man; please let me bring them out to you, and do to them whatever you like; only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Gen. 19:8 NAU)

If today’s atheists do not stoop this low into immorality, would it be fair to say that they are more righteous than Lot?

19. Jones at time code 32:20 ff uses his foster parenting history to argue that kids who are corrupted at early age simply do not learn better regardless of whatever new parents they are placed with,  but he overlooks that child-rearing was much stricter and violent by OT policies than he would have been as a modern Christian foster parent.  The OT advocates beatings with a rod that leave welts, believed to be the body removing evil (Proverbs 20:30), and that specifically the rod must be used on children to cure them of their foolishness:

 15 Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him. (Prov. 22:15 NAU)

13 Do not hold back discipline from the child, Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.

 14 You shall strike him with the rod And rescue his soul from Sheol. (Prov. 23:13-14 NAU)

How can Jones know that the child abuse policies approved by God in proverbs likely wouldn’t have changed the disposition of disobedient Canaanites kids orphaned by Joshua?  Did Jones use a rod to beat his foster kids, only to find there was no positive change?  If so, was that true even in those cases where he beat the child to the point of leaving the bruises and welts the bible says perform the good of cleansing away evil (Pr. 20:30)?  Or can he not answer because he never actually did use a rod to beat his foster kids?  Doesn’t matter if the Proverbs are guarantees.  If Christians are still supposed to apply the proverbs in faith and not discard them merely because they don’t promise guaranteed success, then Jones cannot argue that the risk of discipline failing to correct the child was sufficient to justify Joshua in putting Canaanite kids to the sword.

20.   Again, when Jones assures us the Canaanites would not have repented, he is ignoring the important bible teaching from Ezekiel 38:4 – 39:7 that God can and does force people to do whatever he wants them to do, and that God can cause even pagans to become motivated to do God’s will (Ezra 1:1)

21. Jones at time code 32:55 ff, says such kids will bring their bad behaviors with them, as if this justified killing them, and at 33:20 ff Jones asks if we have any logical reason to believe Canaanite kids would not have retained the sinful ways of their parents.  Yes, Jones overlooks how his “these kids were incorrigible” excuse gets him in trouble with bible texts where Hebrews, presumably knowing this truth Jones gives us, nevertheless chose to assimilate pagan kids into their lives anyway by God’s authority. In Numbers 31:17-18, Moses requires his people to kill the male babies and boys of the pagan POW’s, but allows his men to take alive the little virgin girls for themselves (v. 18).  If Jones denies the interpretation that says this was permission for the men to marry and have sex with prepubescent girls, then he is committed to the premise that these girls would become house-servants…in which case Jones must say Moses intended for Canaanite kids to be assimilated into Hebrew homes and family life.  So… did Moses require this because he disagreed with jones and believed proper training could purge a pagan child of her prior rebellious conditioning?  Or did Moses require this because he knew about, but didn’t care about, the ability of pagan kids to corrupt the Hebrew culture? 

22. Will Jones foolishly trifle that because it was only Midianite virgins who were spared here, they were spared solely because they did not participate in the sexual sin at Peor (Numbers 25:1) that was being avenged here in Numbers 31 (i.e., these kids exhibited potential for not corrupting the Hebrews)?  Last I checked, virgin girls can do plenty of sinful sexual acts without losing their virginity, so that the unbroken hymen tells you NOTHING about whether she became involved with and helped facilitate the sin in question.

23. If virginity of pagan girls overshadows the question of their specific propensity to sin, in Numbers 31:18, we have to wonder how Jones explains that the virginity of young Canaanite girls in the promised land doesn’t overshadow their propensity to sin in the case of Joshua massacring the Canaanites in the promised land.  Will Jones trifle that the pagan corruptions of the Midianites at Peor (Numbers 25) were somehow less grostesque than the sinfulness of the Canaanites in Jericho?

24. Jones is confronted the same problem of God’s people appearing arbitrary in whether to spare pagans, from Deut. 21:10-14, which allows the Hebrew man to marry a female pagan war captive.  Tellingly, the text nowhere expresses or implies that the captive first repent of her paganism, nor that she make clear her adoption of the YHWH cult beliefs, as a pre-condition to the marriage.  And if the GNT is correct in saying the sexual consummation was rape, then it is even more clear from the context that here God was authorizing his Hebrew men to marry pagan women unwilling to be with them, which justifies the inference that such pagan women still clung to their pagan religious beliefs the whole time.  God’s basis for massacring some and sparing others is truly arbitrary and likely the result of commingling disparate Hebrew religious traditions by the OT editors, than that God really does things like this for sovereign mysterious reasons.

  

25. Jones at 33:38, says God doesn’t do wrong in taking the life of children because God foreknows they wouldn’t repent, but if so, he opens the door to the possibility of those kids going straight to hell for the same reason (i.e., they wouldn’t have repented).  Jones is also deceptive since he gives the impression God could be proven immoral if we should show God kills kids despite believing they would repent later in life.  Not true.  If we found such biblical text, Jones would simply insist that God’s ways are mysterious, he always does good, and that we are nobody to question God’s reasons or his morals.  Jones is thus deceptive for pretending God’s goodness can be substantiated on the merits, when in fact he removes the issue from the merits whenever expediency dictates.  Jones would NEVER accept ANY evidence that God ever did anything immoral.

26. At 33:50 ff, Jones agrees with Paul Copan there is possibility god by killing pagan kids thus saved them from further harm since their death placed them into heaven, but if removal from sinful earth is good, then neglecting children and leaving them to grow up in the sinful earth is bad, and God certainly allows children to strive on the earth and slowly die of starvation and abuse.  Once again, Jones gives the appearance that God’s goodness can be demonstrated by reasoned argument on the merits of God’s acts, but in fact is quite willing to say God’s ways are good even if they don’t prove to be good by human examination on the merits.  Hence, the effort to show goodness on the merits in god is deceptive, since they don’t believe the merits actually matter anyway.  They will pick and choose that which looks like it can be argued, and insist the yucky stuff be resolved into the mystery of God. 

27. Jones at 34:00 ff says Joshua’s conquest of the promised land was not genocide but capital punishment, but a) the dictionary definition of genocide does not take the motives of the killers into account, only that they systematically remove some religious or political group; and b) it wouldn’t matter if Joshua’s conquest wasn’t genocide, the brutal war-atrocities God causes the pagans to inflict on the Hebrews as revealed by Isaiah 13:15-16 and Hosea 13:15-16 and 2^nd Samuel 12:15-18, show God willing to do worse than genocide, and cause children to suffer horrific miseries before experiencing the release of death.  Will he say God also “knew” the fetuses of the pregnant Hebrew women God caused to endure abortion by sword (Hosea/Isaiah, supra)  would otherwise have grown up to imitate their sinful parents?  Then how does Jones explain God allowing to live those kids that never repent and die of old age as unbelievers?  God must have known they wouldn’t repent either, yet the fact that he allowed them to live means God did not feel “compelled” simply by reason of foreknowing a person’s consistent stay in unbelief throughout their life, to just kill them in their infancy.  If God can allow some incorrigibles to live despite his foreknowledge, then his killing off only some is nothing he was morally compelled to do.  Once again, Jones’s god is utterly arbitrary in a way that reference to god’s mysterious ways will not fix.

28. Clay’s pessimistic outlook on disobedient children overlooks the other reality that many kids enduring a horrible childhood turn out better than their parents?  Are we quite sure that the Israelites, so infected with original sin, surely had no selfish patriotic genocidal motive in killing non-Hebrew kids?  Can we really say it was at all “likely” that allowing the orphaned Canaanites to live would have led to infecting Israel with idolatry/corruption?

29. Jones says the best proof that the Canaanite massacre was capital punishment and not genocide was that God exacted the same punishment when Israel did the same type of sins.  But that the Hebrews imposed on themselves the same ethics they imposed on others only shows they weren’t as inconsistent as they could have been.  This argument doesn’t take away from the fact that the Hebrews and other ANE nations were far more brutish than evangelicals are today. Clay further blindly presupposes the people who authored these stories were just passing down intact traditions, when critical scholars have made it pretty clear that it is later editors that are taking Israel’s military histories of various origins, stitching it together and infusing it with explanatory glosses about how losses were the result of sin and wins were the result of obeying God, etc.  Not much different than a reporter who takes raw footage of what happened, and turns it into a documentary where her after-the-fact commentary “explains” the footage.  For all we know, Moses and Joshua were genocidal maniacs who thought they were their own gods, and it is only dishonest priests and scribes of hundreds of years later who infuse these earlier raw stories with theological commentary to make it seem like Moses and Joshua only did what they did after being given moral and theological justification by God.  The conservative view that all we read in the current canonical form of the Pentateuch was written by Moses before he died, is precarious.  Even such an evangelical commentary as the Word Biblical Commentary finds that stories like those in Numbers 31 have “little realism”:

  

In an idealized way this section tells of a battle against the Midianites, and of its consequences…The story has little “realism,” and is best understood as a midrashic construction,

Budd, P. J. (2002). Vol. 5: Word Biblical Commentary : Numbers. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 332). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

  

30. Jones at 34:30 ff says God promised capital punishment to them if they mingled with Canaanites, but a) we don’t see this happening in Numbers 31:18 where virgin pagan girls were spared despite the fact that virgin girls can do plenty of sexual sins without losing their virginity and b) we don’t see God imposing the death penalty on anybody in any consistent way in the Monarchy, particularly the time of Solomon and other kings who allowed intermarriage and mixed Yahweh and pagan worship.  So we have to entertain the prospect that, like many other matters, exactly to what degree to enforce Mosaic legislation was often unclear, justifying the belief that the law of Moses was an ambiguous thing that developed throughout an inconsistent history between Moses and the exile.

31. Clay’s blind trust in Deuteronomy 20:18 and in God’s alleged belief that the pagans would surely corrupt Israel if allowed to live next to each other, overlooks that Saul believed the Kenites worthy to be spared despite living so close to the doomed Amalekites (1^st Samuel 15:6…did the Amalekites corrupt the Kenites by close living proximity?  If so, then apparently, Saul believed a prior act of kindness from the Kenites overshadowed the fact that they were equally as deserving of death as the Amalekites.  If the Kenites kept free of Amalekite corruption despite such close proximity to each other, then Deut. 20:18 and other passages speaking in absolute terms about how Hebrews sparing the pagans will surely cause the Hebrews to imitiate the pagan sins, are the passages that must be viewed as hyperbole…in which case the urgency to rid the land of the pagans was nowhere as extreme as the biblical narrative makes it seem.).

32. Jones at 35:25 ff. cites to Jeremiah 5 where God says he will forgive the sinful city if even one person who deals honestly can be found therein.  Jones overlooks that this supports the doctrine of corporate responsibility (i.e., that doctrine that says a group will be found equally as guilty as the actually guilty member even if the rest of them didn’t partake of his sin, the doctrine that most modern western Christian cannot stand).  Jones also overlooks that this passage from Jeremiah contradicts the statements in Numbers 14:18 saying God will “by no means” clear the guilty.  In this, Jeremiah has a friend in 2^nd Samuel 12:13, where God, with nothing more than a wave of his magic wand, clears David from guilt deserving of capital punishment, or at least chooses to exempt David from the capital punishment requirement otherwise mandated by his acts of adultery and murder of Uriah.  Dr. Jones isn’t being biblically consistent in pretending that God feels some type of moral compulsion to hold people guilty for sin.  God could have waived his magic wand and exempted Canaanites from their death-deserving sins of bestiality and child-sacrifice no less than he did when exempting David from his death-deserving acts of adultery and murder.  Biblically, Jones gets nowhere pointing out that somebody “deserved” the fate god imposed on them.  God does not impose punishment and sparing in a uniform way, strongly suggesting that the real reason is that there is no god behind this stuff, it is just a canonical bible of today that is the result of a long process of stitching together ancient stories and adding theologically appropriate commentary where expediency dictated.

33.  Jones at 36:15, cites to Ezekiel 14:12 ff, but Ezekiel’s statements that the three most righteous men in bible history could only save themselves when god’s wrath hits the sinful city, contradicts the deal god made with Abraham to spare Sodom if even 10 righteous people could be found in it.  How can God be willing to spare Sodom on the basis of 10 righteous men, but be unwilling to spare the Jews if a few righteous men were found living among them?  It’s called theological evolution, not bible inerrancy:

 12 Then the word of the LORD came to me saying,

 13 "Son of man, if a country sins against Me by committing unfaithfulness, and I stretch out My hand against it, destroy its supply of bread, send famine against it and cut off from it both man and beast,

 14 even though these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, by their own righteousness they could only deliver themselves," declares the Lord GOD.

 15 "If I were to cause wild beasts to pass through the land and they depopulated it, and it became desolate so that no one would pass through it because of the beasts,

 16 though these three men were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters. They alone would be delivered, but the country would be desolate.

 17 "Or if I should bring a sword on that country and say, 'Let the sword pass through the country and cut off man and beast from it,'

 18 even though these three men were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters, but they alone would be delivered.

 19 "Or if I should send a plague against that country and pour out My wrath in blood on it to cut off man and beast from it,

 20 even though Noah, Daniel and Job were in its midst, as I live," declares the Lord GOD, "they could not deliver either their son or their daughter. They would deliver only themselves by their righteousness."

 21 For thus says the Lord GOD, "How much more when I send My four severe judgments against Jerusalem: sword, famine, wild beasts and plague to cut off man and beast from it! (Ezek. 14:12-21 NAU)

34. Jones at 37:52 ff, says we have no basis to intuit that Canaanites would have repented had they been allowed to live, but Jesus made clear the exact opposite concerning other cities and how they would have repented had they been allowed to see more of God:

20 Then He began to denounce the cities in which most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent.

 21 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

 22 "Nevertheless I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you.

 23 "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day.

 24 "Nevertheless I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for you."

 (Matt. 11:20-24 NAU)

12 "I say to you, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city.

 13 "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

 14 "But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the judgment than for you.

 15 "And you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will be brought down to Hades!   (Lk. 10:12-15 NAU)

Will Jones trifle that Chorazin and Bethsaida were significantly different from the Canaanites Joshua killed throughout the promised land?

35.  Jones at 38:05 ff, says Lord is indifferent to whether we die of old age or by tooth and claw, and that seems to be a pretty good case for God’s sadism, confirmed in Deut. 28:63, where God says he gets the same “delight” in inflicting atrocities that he gets in prospering the faithful.  Some atrocities God would delight in (v. 63) include rape (v. 30) and parental cannibalism (v. 53-57).

36. Jones at 38:30 ff specifies the biblical descriptions of atrocities are not metaphor or hyperbole, therefore making perfectly clear that he is not impressed with the thesis of evangelicals Copan/Flannagan, that most such descriptions are hyperbole.

37. Jones again at 39:15, argues that since god foreknew who would repent, we can be sure he did no wrong in killing children.  This is deceptive, because he implies he would accept that god’s judgment is immoral if god killed kids despite knowing they would have repented, when in fact even if confronted with such a nuanced bit of theology from the bible, Jones would simply run to sophistry fortress #521 (God’s acts can never be immoral or evil regardless of how they might appear to us).  But Exodus 32:9-14 forbids trust in the goodness of god as if it was some untouchable icon or foregone conclusion.

38. Jones quotes Genesis 6:5 about man’s heart being always evil, but the next verse shows god regretting his own prior choice to make man, and because a) context favors literal interpretation while b) anthropomorphic interpretation is premised on nothing more objective than the need to maintain biblical inerrancy, the open theist interpretation here, asserting God’s regret signifies his imperfection, is more objective.

39. At 40:20 ff Jones says there is a cosmic lesson for “free beings”, but a) the sinner’s ability to repent is hotly disputed within conservative Christian scholarship, and b) if God knew the kids he killed would not have repented, and if God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then those kids were not “free” to deviate from their foreknown fate (i.e., not free to make freewill choice to repent).  If God’s foreknowledge is infallible, then whatever it contains in incapable of failing.  If God infallibly foreknows what will actually happen, and thus infallibly foreknows you will actually drop a pan on your foot tomorrow at noon, then dropping a pan on your foot tomorrow at noon is not capable of failing.  How you reconcile that with “freewill” is immaterial and will not change the definition of “infallible”.

40. Jones at 40:45 ff ends with preaching, but the entire experience of “getting saved” and “new nature” and “adopted into god’s family” is 100% theoretical and has no empirical justification beyond a few bible verses which talk the same way.  It is deception to say the least to speak about the born-again experience with the same type of language one uses to describe how one became a member of a local organization.

41. Jones at 41:20 ff, answers question as to why other peoples on earth, allegedly as deserving of death as the Canaanites, aren’t killed off by God too.  Answers the Canaanites had given themselves over more thoroughly to evil.  But as I show in my blog post cited above, the specific accusations that Canaanites burned children to death and engaged in bestiality cannot be verified by actual literary or epigraphic evidence.  Jones may point to the bible, but we accuse the bible of misrepresenting the Canaanites, so it would be the fallacy of begging the question to quote the bible as proof when the reliability of the biblical record is precisely the issue. Furthermore the bible has two stories indicating “pass through the fire” was a symbolic rite not intended to cause pain or death to a child.  2^nd Kings 16:3, Ahaz made his “son” (singular) pass through the fire, but then his “son” (singular) Hezekiah took over the throne (v. 3) (!?).  Well gee, because God can do miracles, maybe Hezekiah took over the throne as a zombie rising from the ashes?   Manassah also made his “son” (singular) pass through the fire (2^nd Kings 21:6), but then his “son” (singular) Amon took over the throne (v. 18).  Since the context provides no reason to think the kings had more than one son a piece, it appears the Kings author did not believe the “pass through the fire” was a ritual intended to cause the child to die.

  

42. Jones at 42:20 ff,. resorts to Genesis 15:16 and the story bit about how God refused to clear out the Canaanites since the time of Abraham because their sin was not yet complete.  But there are serious problems with this verse;  a) all scholars admit the Pentateuch was edited to include information moses didn’t write, so it remains a possibility that this blurb is a bit of theological explanation that was added to the text of Genesis between authorship by Moses and its current canonical form; b) the very idea that god would spare people so they could fill up the measure of their sins, contradicts the Christian interpretation of this verse saying God waited those 400 years for them to repent.  No, he was waiting them to become exceedingly sinful, he wasn’t waiting for them to repent.  And if God’s foreknowledge was infallible, then i) infallible means incapable of failing, which would mean the Canaanites could not deviate from becoming more and more sinful, since god cannot be surprised,  and ii) God therefore wasn’t “hoping” the Canaanites would prove his foreknowledge wrong, anymore than you wait two years “hoping” your two year old will prove wrong your predictions about their behavior two years into the future, and pass college tests in advanced statistics.  The standard Christian view that God waits around “hoping” for an outcome that by his infallible foreknowledge he is perfectly certain has no chance of actually materializing, is a serious blight on Christian doctrine.

43. Basically, Jones’s traditionalist stance makes it ironic that he seeks to appeal to our human reasoning to make his 44 minute argument justifying God’s acts as good, since he has already committed to the premise that human reason is corrupt.  Jones would be more consistent to bypass human reasoning altogether and simply quote the bible without his imperfect commentary.  How can it be meaningful for Jones to satisfy our sense of justice by saying Canaanites deserved to die for acts like bestiality and child-sacrifice, if in truth he will merely run and hide behind the mysterious ways of God when confronted with biblical instances where God killed others in ways that don’t satisfy modern western reasoning?

Are The Gospels All Just Hearsay? Yes, thanks for asking

This is my reply to an article entitled 

Are The Gospels All Just Hearsay?

 Nathan  2 years ago Bible, Objections 

One of the more popular arguments at a lay-level against the reliability of the gospels is that the evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is all based on hearsay. While you won't find too many scholars or historians making this point, it is such a prevalent assertion among the masses that I think it's important to take a critical look at the argument and determine whether or not it impacts our ability to trust the content of the New Testament documents.

Most bible scholars believe the only two gospels allegedly claiming to be eyewitness accounts (Matthew and John) were not written by the eyewitnesses.  So while they might not explicitly say the gospels are mostly hearsay, this is the effect they create by denying eyewitness authorship.  Regardless, the testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus which come down to us in first hand form, generoulsy granting highly disputed apostolic authorship, would be Matthew, John and Paul.  Anything else in the NT asserting Jesus rose from the dead is either vision, second-hand, or something other than first-hand.

Courtroom One Gavel by Lambda Chi Alpha / CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0
So firstly we need to ask the question: What is hearsay? One atheist website I looked at defined hearsay as "information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate". Often when people use the word hearsay, they are referring to information that comes from a third-hand source. It's important to note that these are common usages of the term, because there is also a legal definition that is considerably different in meaning.
 Hearsay in the Legal Setting In a day and age of fictional legal dramas, everyone is familiar with the idea that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law. In U.S. law, hearsay refers to a statement made out of court that is then used in court to assert the truth of a matter. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, only statements made in a trial, under oath, by someone who can be cross-examined, can be used as evidence. In a simple example on the Wikipedia page for hearsay in US Law, if a witness makes a statement such as "Sally told me Tom was in town", this would be inadmissible evidence that Tom was in town, because it relies on a statement made by Sally outside the courtroom. To satisfy the requirements for evidence, Sally would need to make this statement herself in court. The hearsay rules are similar across most legal systems around the world. However the common misconception that hearsay is never permitted in court is factually incorrect. Under U.S. law there are nearly 30 exceptions to the hearsay rule, which mean that out-of-court evidence may be used if it falls into a particular category, such as business records, spontaneous or excited statements, recorded past recollections, or my personal favourite - statements in authentic ancient documents (more than 20 years old).

Correct, but a) the ancient documents rule wasn't intended to govern matters arising from documents authored 2,000 years ago, that's why they are called ancient at 20 years; b) the ancient documents rule requires that the hearsay copy be found in a place it likely would have been found it authentic, for example:

{¶ 59} Documents can be authenticated under the ancient documents rule contained in Evid.R. 901(B)(8) if, "[e]vidence that a document * * *, in any form, (a) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity, (b) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be, and (c) has been in existence twenty years or more at the time it is offered."---Source

 (a) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity,
Rule 1003. Admissibility of Duplicates------"A duplicate is admissible to the same extent as the original unless a genuine question is raised about the original’s authenticity or the circumstances make it unfair to admit the duplicate."  Of course, with most scholars and apologists being unwilling in assert that modern canonical Greek Matthew and John are accurately reflecting of what Matthew and John the apostles had to say, and with nobody being able to know to what degree, if any, these men gave freedom to their followers to do the writing, the question of the authenticity of the originals of Matthew and John is genuine, hence, you need the original if you wish to get them in under the ancient documents rule

 (b) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be,
This obviously cannot be fulfilled:  How could anybody pretend to know that the place they found an ancient copy of Matthew, was a place that, if authentic, the copy would likely be?  We have no reliable traditions on where Matthew was when he wrote a gospel.  This is to say nothing of the fact that the place our existing gospel ms. came from ("provenance") is often clouded in secrecy.  Exactly where Alexandrinus came from is hotly disputed.  The earliest gospel manuscripts are trifling scraps also plagued with unknown origin or origins not connectable to Matthew.  P1 contains Matt. 1:1-9, 12, 14-20, and it was found in a dig in Oxyrhynchus (now called El Bahnasa), a city in middle Egypt, and any church tradition that might have Matthew passing that way hardly qualifies as the place a Matthew gospel copy would "likely" be "if authentic".

Suffice it say that there is too much scholarly disagreement on the authenticity authorship of the canonical gospels, to pretend they could possibly fulfill these tests of admissibility.

Update: December 29, 2017
See my latest comments criticizing J. Warner Wallace of "Cold-Case Christianity" for studiously avoiding that rule of evidence that would toss his cold case out the window.

So it's not enough to say that hearsay is unreliable evidence - such a blanket statement doesn't accord with the reality of the legal courts, where precision in the use of evidence is sometimes literally a matter of life and death. The truth is that certain kinds of hearsay evidence are used to prove the innocence or guilt of a defendant on a regular basis.

It is equally true that lawyers and judges disagree with each other and the lower and higher appeallate courts on whether circumstances had justified characterizing some testimony as qualifying as non-hearsay.

This is a great system for determining truth in contemporary legal matters, where we can examine witnesses directly in a court setting and compare their claims to the evidence provided by the prosecution and defense attorneys. Here only the strictest rules for evidence apply.\
  Hearsay in Historical Inquiry
 But is such a high standard of proof logical or even workable when it comes to determining the truth of past events in which all the witnesses are no longer alive? Under such circumstances, documentary evidence is all we have. While this would be considered hearsay in a court of law, historians have developed more appropriate methods for establishing historical truth.

By examining primary and secondary source documents, and cross-checking these with external sources such as archaeological evidence, historians formulate hypotheses about what happened in the past and determine the probability of an event having occurred.

Correct, and since the case for eyewitness authorship of Matthew and John sucks like a Hoover vacuum, you don't have any "primary" records of the life of Jesus by which to ascertain the likely level of truth/falsity in the hearsay sources like Mark and Luke.  Paul could not be considered a primary source because he characterized his experience on the road to Damascus as a vision (Acts 26:19).  Visions are are even more inadmissible than hearsay.

Using this process, professional historians have come almost unanimously to the conclusion that Jesus was a real person who actually existed, on the basis of the New Testament documents, along with some brief external evidence from the historians Tacitus and Josephus.  As fiercely critical atheist scholar Bart Ehrman puts it:
  “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”
 Beyond this, historians use criterion of authenticity to sift through statements in the New Testament writings to determine their historicity. Rather than deciding on the reliability of the books as a whole, individual sentences are compared to the criterion to determine their historical credibility one-by-one.

I don't see the point: the authorship nand literary interdependence of the Synoptics is so complex that we cannot know which statements constitute first-hand reports and which constitute second-hand, so the job of preparing argument to the court for admissibility cannot even be done.

As for ancient historians, the vast majority of what they have recorded for us must be considered hearsay by the consistent critic.

We only accept their hearsay reliability in tentative fashion, forever open to the possibility that the historian's remark was misleading or false.  There is no confirming the truth to such a point that we find it just as reliable as the report from the school principle that our daughter just died in a school shooting.

Given the limits of technology in early times, what alternative did historians have other than to record their own testimony concerning the statements they had heard from eyewitnesses?

Maybe god could have convinced the gospel authors to record their orignals in stone, the way the Eyptians and Sumerians did, so there would be no doubts about what the originals said?  Does there come a point where the "god's mysterious ways" excuse can be abused, or does that excuse just always infallibly work whenever you need it to?

In the words of Polybius, one of the founders of Roman historiography:
  "For since many events occur at the same time in different place, and one man cannot be in several places at one time, nor is it possible for a single man to have seen with his own eyes every place in the world and all the peculiar features of different places, the only thing left for a historian is to inquire from as many people as possible, to believe those worthy of belief and to be an adequate critic of the reports that reach him." (The Histories 12.4C.4-5)
 Neither modern scholars or ancient historians reject indirect evidence as hearsay, instead they probe the sources they have to determine their reliability.

Again, this is mooted by how weak the case for eyewitness authorship of Matthew and John are, and the hearsay in Mark and Luke has never ceased to be subjected to widespread disagreement among Christian scholars.  We also know that the gospel authors felt free to create copies which changed and modified what was asserted in their source material.

Hearsay Can Communicate Truth
 The reliance of historical investigations on documents and recorded testimony to determine the truth of history proves an important point - hearsay can communicate truth. This becomes obvious as soon as we imagine a simple scenario. I was born too late to meet any of my great-grandparents. The only information I have about them comes from my parents, who knew them and could provide eyewitness testimony about them. But as soon as I tell my friends about my great-grandparents, repeating the things my parents told me, that information becomes hearsay.

Which is precisely why your friends' choice to believe or reject what you say about your great-grandparents will be decided by how trustworthy they think the messenger is.  But neither the NT nor church history gives us enough information upon which to decide what type of men the gospel authors were at the time they allegedly wrote or dictated.  Benny Hinn might be considered an honest person if the only info you had on him came from the first two years after he was ordained.  Notice then the gargantuan pitfalls that potentially open when we pretend some sketchy info here and a blurb over there in 2,000 year old sources tell us all we need to know to form a reasonable judgment on the general credibility of the NT authors.

Provided the testimony of my parents is true, the hearsay I pass on is also true. The fact that a statement is hearsay doesn't make it false, it just means that the truth factor needs to be investigated in order to be established as fact - which is exactly what historians do.

And its precisely at the investigation level where NT hearsay breaks down.

In the meantime, should my friends be automatically skeptical about the details I give them about my great-grandparents?

If you were capable of levitating using only their mental powers alone, yes.

Should they reject my claims until I provide further evidence?

If you were capable of levitating using only their mental powers alone, yes.  If you were only asserting your great-grandparents owned some farmland, then no...unless there is reason to believe you assert such a thing to gain some type of benefit or advantage.

If we presume that all hearsay is untrustworthy, then we should reject any kind of indirect news reporting out of hand - yet nearly everybody believes that there is a basis of truth to current events news stories that they hear from a reporter who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.

No, the problem is not that hearsay is typically untrustworthy, but that it often cannot be determined with any reasonable degree of confidence whether it is, in fact, trustworthy, especially where the hearsay is sourced in documents authored more than 2,000 years ago.

This kind of hyper-skepticism is unworkable and impractical.

No it isn't.  I say 99% of the gospels, as well as any other sources for equally ancient religion, are a hopelessly tangled mess of hearsay and exaggeration.  I do not see whatever ill-effect you think this skepticism should have in my life.  If you can depend on your own presupposition of Christanity being true to justify you in avoiding investigation into the Muslim version of hell, then you cannot find fault in others who depend on their presuppositions to justify avoiding investigation into the Christian versions of hell.  In fact, you'd probably say Christian scholars cannot even agree on it, so if spiritually alive people cannot figure it out, spiritually dead atheists will only fumble even worse.  A perfect reason for spiritually dead people to say "fuck you" to all biblical theology.

By all means critically examine the New Testament texts to see if they tell the truth - but don't reject them because they contain hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.

Which means you probably shouldn't have brought up the fact that American courts sometimes allow hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.

Are The Gospels Even Hearsay? The last consideration we need to make is whether or not the gospels, along with Acts and the letters of Paul, are even products of hearsay in the first place.
 Using the common definitions in regards to hearsay, we want to determine how many mouths each gospel passed through to determine whether it is second or third-hand. We also want to decide whether or not the information within the gospels can be adequately substantiated.
 In the case of John and Matthew, much of what occurs in their gospels is their own eyewitness testimony.

No, most scholars agree the author of alleged eyewitness Matthew borrowed extensively from non-eyewitnes Mark's earlier text, which is not what we'd expect an eyewitness to do, even if you could trifle that an eyewitness might possibly rely on hearsay to report something he saw himself.

The gospel of John has very high christological sayings of Jesus that the Synoptic authors never mention, which they surely would have had they believed Jesus said such things.  Clement of Alexandria says John wrote a spiritual gospel in the sense of writing for a reason other than to relay the external facts about Jesus as the Synoptics did, which warrants us in supposing John's gospel presents Jesus as doing and saying more than he actually did in real life.

Both men were members of the inner circle of Jesus and were positioned to hear and record statements directly from other eyewitness as well.

So are those with front row seats to Benny Hinn healing crusades, but you are singularly unimpressed with their eyewitness testimony explaining how many people were healed.

 In addition to multiple secondary sources that link Mark's gospel to the eyewitness testimony of the apostle Peter, notable scholar Richard Bauckham points out internal evidences within Mark that support this claim.

So?  The apostles are often unspeakably dense and stupid throughout the gospels, including after they "experience" the resurrected Christ.

An inclusio device bookends Peter's involvement as a disciple and witness of Jesus, indicating that he is the original source of the material.

Indicating that Peter never preached that Jesus was born of a virgin.

There is also a literal framing device throughout Mark that records events initially from a plural perspective ("we went there", "we did this") that moves to a singular perspective as the action gets underway. This is as clear an indication of eyewitness testimony as we can get from a writing system that didn't have a mechanism like speech marks for indicating quotations. At worst, Mark's gospel is secondary reporting of Peter's eyewitness testimony, and on par with anything recorded by Polybius.

Please quote the section of Mark where he uses the first person plurals.

Luke seems more vulnerable to the claim that his gospel is hearsay. While the evidence shows he was closely connected with Paul, there aren't too many links to the original disciples who were eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, the material he shares fits with the things established in the other gospels, and in fact Luke often uses portions of Matthew and Mark directly and unabridged.

Which means Luke gave a misleading view to the reader by revealing he relied on eyewitnesses, but kept silent about his reliance on hearsay, which was great, since he too incorporates much of Mark.

He explains in the prologue to his work that he has carefully interviewed eyewitnesses and is connected enough within the early church to plausibly gain access to them.

Josephus similarly says he carefully checked his facts, but that hardly means you trust him when he reports miracles not already found in the bible.  Do you seriously think a cow gave birth to a lamb?  Are modern skeptics "stupid" for rejecting this ridiculous nonsense?

Luke benefits more than the other gospel writers from the corroborative historical evidence that has validated him as an outstanding and accurate recorder, so even though he is further from the inner circle of Jesus than the others, we can be confident that he has carefully recorded the events as they took place.

In Acts 15 he limits his representation of the Judaizers with a single summary position statement once repeated, while he takes about 40 verses to tell all about the apostles, their arguments, what they actually said, what they did afterward, and how their views were conveyed to their followers afterward.  Some would say Luke isn't a whole lot different than Fox News.  Does he tell the truth?  Yes.  Does he do it in a misleading prejudicial way?  Yes.

The gospels are a mixture of direct eyewitness testimony, along with secondary reports from eyewitnesses.

You cannot show which parts of the gospels are direct eyewitness testimony.

While some of this would not be admitted as evidence in an actual court, this is no problem for the Christian, since this is not a legal matter but a historical one. The fact that there are four separate accounts of the life of Jesus, each of which contains original material not found in the others, mean that the accounts can be substantiated.

No, most of John cannot be found in the Synoptics.  That hardly "substantiates" John's version.