Demolishing Triablogue: Jason Engwer fails to defend traditional authorship of Matthew's gospel

Jason Engwer responds to Richard Bauckham's denials of Matthian authorship of Matthew's gospel.  I show why Jason is guided more by a subjective desire to promote a conservative view than in objectively evaluating the evidence:

Monday, May 29, 2017

Posted by Jason Engwer at 5:31 PM

Richard Bauckham Is Wrong About Matthew's Authorship

He's mostly right about gospel authorship issues. He thinks Matthew may have had some sort of role in the origins of the gospel attributed to him,

An admission that makes it even more difficult to identify with reasonable certainty any particular part of Matthew as an eyewitness account, for example, Matthew 28, the resurrection story, which could be hearsay just as easily as Luke's resurrection account is secondhand.

accepts the traditional authorship attributions of Mark and Luke, and attributes the fourth gospel to a close disciple of Jesus named John.

Which makes it even more difficult to decide which parts of John's gospel are truly from an eyewitness, or secondhand or worse, such as John's resurrection stories in 20 and 21.

But he doesn't think Matthew is responsible for the first gospel as we have it today, and he thinks the John who wrote the fourth gospel wasn't the son of Zebedee.

...Regarding Matthew, Bauckham argues (108-12) that it's highly unlikely that a first-century Jew living in Israel would have had two Semitic personal names as common as Matthew and Levi. It's very unlikely, then, that Matthew is the Levi referred to in Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27. And if Levi were another name for one of the Twelve, Mark surely would have explained that in his list of the Twelve, where so many other details are included (108). Since the author of the gospel of Matthew uses a passage about another man to tell his readers about Matthew's calling (Matthew 9:9), the author must have been somebody other than Matthew. "Matthew himself could have described his own call without having to take over the way Mark described Levi's call." (112) Bauckham also thinks the replacement of "his house" (Mark 2:15) with "the house" (Matthew 9:10) suggests that the author of the gospel of Matthew was only applying Mark 2:14 to the apostle Matthew and didn't think the rest of the passage was applicable (111).

What about the unlikelihood of somebody being named both Matthew and Levi? There are extremely rare names and combinations of names, sometimes even unprecedented ones, in every culture. Why do we conclude that people with such names exist? Because the prior improbability that somebody would have such a name is just one factor among others that have to be taken into account as well, and those other factors can outweigh the prior improbability that somebody would have that name. How reliable is a source who reports that somebody had such a name? How likely is it that such a report would exist if the person under consideration didn't have the name in question? And so on. In his book, Bauckham often accepts a highly unusual name if there are ancient sources attesting it, even just one source. He does it in his section on Matthew's authorship, where he mentions some ancient Jews who are referred to with two names, including at least one that's "unusual" or "very unusual" (109-10). The many comments he makes elsewhere in his book about how popular or unpopular various names were assumes that some unpopular names existed, even ones attested only once. Even if naming somebody both Matthew and Levi would have been "virtually unparalleled", "very unlikely indeed", etc. (109-10), we should go on to look at the other evidence pertaining to Matthew's names and Matthean authorship of the first gospel. We should try to determine the significance of the improbability Bauckham is appealing to in light of the evidence as a whole.

D.A. Carson refers to some problems with how Bauckham goes on to handle the remainder of the evidence:

"Yet whatever the onomastic improbability, the identification of Levi (Mark's gospel) with Matthew (here [in Matthew 9:9]) seems less implausible than Bauckham's explanation: the unknown evangelist knew that Matthew was a tax collector (like Levi), and knew he was one of the Twelve, and so simply transferred the story across (on the assumption that the conversion of one tax collector would be very much like the conversion of another?)." (The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Revised Edition, Vol. 9: Matthew & Mark [Gran Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010], 263)

What's mentioned in Matthew 9:9 isn't what we'd expect of the calling of every tax collector, most of them, or even one other tax collector. How many tax collectors would be in their booth at the time of the calling and would be sitting while Jesus walked by? How many would immediately leave their work and follow Jesus upon being told "Follow me"? How many would experience all of those things? It's doubtful that the author of the gospel of Matthew would have thought that the story of the calling of this tax collector would be so applicable to another tax collector. Bauckham is wrong in commenting that "The story, after all, is so brief and general it might well be thought appropriate to any tax collector called by Jesus to follow him as a disciple." (111), since the story isn't "so brief and general". The appropriate response to Bauckham's claim that "Matthew himself could have described his own call without having to take over the way Mark described Levi's call." (112) is that anybody could have.

But the question is whether it is likely that Matthew, having personally experienced what Mark is talking about, would have surpressed his own first-hand ability to tell the history, and favored more the same history that was sourced in a hearsay account. No, it isn't.  

There wouldn't have been anybody, whether Matthew or somebody else, who would have needed to use Mark's account about the calling of another man to describe the calling of Matthew.

I find the Matthew-author's drawing on Mark for Matthew's own calling to be especially unlikely if Matthew really did experience those events himself.   But since you agree that not everything in that gospel come from apostle Matthew himself, your further disagreements with Bauckham at this point are immaterial to my purpose. 

And it's very unlikely that the author of the first gospel would have wanted to tell Matthew's story in that manner. Why give such a significant figure in early Christianity such secondhand treatment,

Are you sure Matthew was any more significant than any other first-century Christian?  According to the NT, he is not accorded any special place the way other apostles like John, James and Peter are.  His becoming significant later in church tradition is irrelevant and after-the-fact, and even then he himself did not gain any significant notoriety, it was only his name being attached to a gospel, that caused "him" to become more prominent in later tradition.

especially if the author of the gospel was associating his work with Matthew as much as Bauckham thinks he was? The scenario Bauckham is proposing is highly improbable.

But he makes a good point about Mark's list of the twelve apostles. You'd think Mark would mention that Matthew was also known as Levi, if Mark had held that view. Luke's list of the Twelve isn't as detailed as Mark's, so the lack of clarification in Luke's list is less important, but it's significant that Luke, like Mark, doesn't explain to his readers, inside his list of the apostles or elsewhere, that Matthew and Levi are different names for the same person.

However, there's other evidence Bauckham doesn't discuss that suggests that Mark and Luke viewed Levi as one of the Twelve. It follows that though Mark and Luke don't tell us who among the Twelve had the alternate name of Levi, they thought somebody among the Twelve did.

That's unlikely, their lists often specify that one named person had a second or alternate name:

  16 And He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom He gave the name Peter),
 17 and James, the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James (to them He gave the name Boanerges, which means, "Sons of Thunder ");
 18 and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot;
 19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Him.
 (Mk. 3:16-19 NAU)

  13 And when day came, He called His disciples to Him and chose twelve of them, whom He also named as apostles:
 14 Simon, whom He also named Peter, and Andrew his brother; and James and John; and Philip and Bartholomew;
 15 and Matthew and Thomas; James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot;
 16 Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. (Lk. 6:13-16 NAU)

 Seems reasonable to conclude that if Mark or Luke thought somebody had some type of secondary or new name, they would have specified so.  There was no second person named "peter" such that the two would need to be distinguished in writing, yet Peter still had a secondary name.

That weakens Bauckham's argument about what's "clear" from Mark's list of the Twelve and how Mark "surely" would have included the detail that Matthew had that other name if he'd known about it (108).

It's nice to see Christian apologists disagreeing with each other like this.  It makes you seem rather ignorant to pretend that we spiritually dead people are accountable to figure out the problems that not even spiritually alive people can resolve.  One thing is for certain, you cannot blame atheist denials of gospel authorship on their mere spiritual deadness, there's plenty of academic room in the evidence to justify the majority Christian scholarly position that Matthew's gospel was anonymously written.

In Mark and Luke's passages about the calling of Levi, the language, themes, and placement of the text are reminiscent of the calling of other apostles, which suggests that whoever is being called in the passage is an apostle as well. Compare Mark 1:16-20 to 2:14-17. Compare Luke 5:1-11 and 5:27-32. In both gospels, the calling of Levi is narrated in close proximity to the calling of those other apostles, with similar language and themes, leading up to the nearby choosing of the Twelve by Jesus and the listing of them by the gospel authors (Mark 3:13-19, Luke 6:13-16). Jesus is walking by and looks at the individual(s) in question and says "Follow me" and is immediately followed, which involves leaving a profession (fishing or tax collecting), in both contexts in Mark (1:16-20, 2:14). That theme of leaving a profession makes sense for the calling of an apostle in the sense of being one of the Twelve, since that sort of apostleship would require so much devotion. Similarly, both of Luke's passages have the individuals in question "leaving everything" to follow Jesus (5:11, 5:28). That theme of the apostles leaving everything is repeated elsewhere (Mark 10:28, Luke 18:28). Their leaving the professions they were involved with was important, "so that they would be with him [Jesus] and that he could send them out" (Mark 3:14). So, the passages in Mark and Luke about Levi have a series of connections both backward to the call of Peter and his associates and forward to what's said of the Twelve. Even without reading Matthew, the accounts about the calling of Levi in Mark and Luke look like the calling of a member of the Twelve.

But Jesus required the "leave everything" committment of ALL of his followers:

 37 "He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. (Matt. 10:37 NAU)

 26 "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. (Lk. 14:26 NAU)

 Matthew makes pretty explicit that the degree to which the apostle left everything is the same degree he expected any other follow to leave everything:

 28 And Jesus said to them, "Truly I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
 29 "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms for My name's sake, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life.
 30 "But many who are first will be last; and the last, first. (Matt. 19:28-30 NAU)

Therefore, while you are correct that the story says Levi left everything just like the apostles did, this doesn't put Levi on any higher level than any other follower.

You will say his specific calling from the tax-collector booth sets him apart.  But I would argue that if Jesus was consistent, he would have extended the same type of "leave everything" call to anybody at all that he wanted to be part of his ministry, especially given Luke 14:26.  It wasn't any easier for lesser ranking disciples, was it?

NAU  Luke 10:1 Now after this the Lord appointed seventy others, and sent them in pairs ahead of Him to every city and place where He Himself was going to come. (Lk. 10:1 NAU)

Engwer:

Some passages in Mark and Luke about people other than apostles refer to themes like following Jesus and leaving possessions and making other sacrifices to follow him. But those other passages have less similar language and themes and less significant placement in the text of the gospels.

No, EVERYBODY that wishes to follow Jesus must leave everything to the same degree required of the apostles.  Luke 14:26, supra.

Something like Jesus' call to discipleship in Mark 8:34-38 or his interactions with Zaccheus in Luke 19:1-10 is somewhat reminiscent of the calling of the apostles, but also significantly different. Jesus walks by Zaccheus and looks at him (verse 5), and Zaccheus gives up possessions to follow Jesus (verse 8), for example, but Jesus is only staying in Zaccheus' house briefly (verse 5), there's no reference to his leaving his profession, the passage is far removed from the appointing of the apostles earlier in the gospel, etc.

Paul's justification by faith doctrine in Romans 4 is far removed from the legalistic salvation Jesus taught in Matthew 19:17 ff, but you always fix arguments based on distance with a healthy presupposition of bible inerrancy, don't you?  If you can reconcile justification by faith alone with what Jesus said in Matthew 25:37, what prevents you from reconciling the calling of the apostles with the calling of Zaccheus?

Likewise, Jesus' exchange with the rich young ruler (Mark 10:17-31, Luke 18:18-30) involves a call to discipleship and to giving things up to follow Jesus, but the man doesn't follow Jesus, the passage is far removed from the context of the calling of the apostles, and so on.

See above, you don't have the first clue about the way Jesus "called" others to ministry, you only get a small sampling from the gospels, and you pretend as if the literary purpose of the author is equal to the historical reality.  That Jesus required everybody who followed him to make such extreme sacrifices, does indeed create a difficulty in getting Levi = Matthew from the mere fact that Levi's calling is similar to the calling of other apostles.

Both passages contrast the rich young ruler's rejection of Jesus' call and the apostles' acceptance of it (Mark 10:28-31, Luke 18:28-30). While the calling of individuals like Peter and Levi is similar to Jesus' interactions with other people elsewhere in Mark and Luke, there are substantial differences as well. The calling of Levi is significantly similar to the calling of Peter and his associates in a way in which other passages in these gospels aren't. So, independently from the gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke give us reason to place Levi among the Twelve.

Origen, the greatest textual scholar of the early church, felt that it was only by a textual variant that Levi could be said to be numbered among the Twelve:

It is manifest to us all who possess the Gospel narratives, which Celsus does not appear even to have read, that Jesus selected twelve apostles, and that of these Matthew alone was a tax-gatherer; that when he calls them indiscriminately sailors, he probably means James and John, because they left their ship and their father Zebedee, and followed Jesus; for Peter and his brother Andrew, who employed a net to gain their necessary subsistence, must be classed not as sailors, but as the Scripture describes them, as fishermen. The Lebes also, who was a follower of Jesus, may have been a tax-gatherer; but he was not of the number of the apostles, except according to a statement in one of the copies of Mark’s Gospel.

NPN, Origen: Against Celsus (Contra Celsum), 1:62.

 

But they don't refer to any of the Twelve as Levi when they list the apostles, nor do they tell us elsewhere which apostle went by that name. They also leave out other information about apostolic names. Peter is referred to as Simon Barjona in Matthew 16:17, but not anywhere in Mark or Luke. Similarly, Luke doesn't tell us that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were referred to as Boanerges, a detail that Mark does include. And so on. Bauckham doesn't claim that Mark and Luke are exhaustive about apostolic names.

 Indeed, trying to figure out what's what in early Christianity is a fool's game.  If the answers were so clear and compelling, we wouldn't expect so many conservative Christians to be so deeply divided on the related historical and exegetical issues as they are, for example, you and Bauckham.  Which one of you has the Holy Spirit, and why can't you demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in you by something other than the force of academic argument?  Could it be that although with your lips you yap about the need for the third person of the Trinity to enligthen you, that at the end of the day, you don't ever receive any enlightenment except that which comes from the same type of study that englightens one about science?

More significantly, Bauckham thinks the identification of Thaddaeus (Mark 3:18) with Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16) is "very plausible" (108), but neither Mark nor Luke offers that identification, even though Bauckham thinks Luke used Mark as a source and appeals to such sources in the opening of his gospel. That's an instance in which Luke knew about a potential confusion over apostolic names, but didn't offer a clarification.

Or Luke's Markan source wasn't as detailed as canonical Mark is today.

Still, Luke's failure to clarify something potentially seen as a discrepancy between what he wrote and what's in a source he used and that many of his readers would be familiar with (Mark) isn't the same as a failure to clarify something that people could misunderstand in his own writings (that Levi and Matthew are the same person).

Please stop talking like you think canonical Luke is exactly today the way it was in its original form.  You don't have the first clue whether anything specific to canonical Luke was what Luke himself wrote.

I'm just giving some examples of Mark and Luke's failure to provide details and clarifications they could have provided about apostolic names, even though the examples I've cited in this paragraph are less significant than not clarifying the relationship between Levi and Matthew.

What's most important to recognize in this context is that identifying Levi and Matthew as two different individuals still leaves you with a substantial lack of clarity in Mark and Luke.

Lack of clarity in the bible is a meaningless point, it hasn't stopped Christians from convincing themselves that their particular version of Christanity is the "right" one.

If Levi isn't Matthew, then which member of the Twelve is he, given the evidence cited above that he's portrayed as a member of the Twelve in the two gospels under consideration?

That's a problem for the apologist who insists the source is reliable, not the skeptic who puts no stock in the source to begin with.

Or if you deny that Mark and Luke meant to portray Levi as one of the Twelve, why did they use language, themes, and text placement that are so suggestive of Levi's identity as one of the Twelve?

Maybe because they mistakenly thought he was one of the 12?  You will say it is absurd that a false rumor could have spread among the original eyewitnesses and their followers, which would signify that you never read Acts 21:18-24, where an allegedly false rumor about Paul is held as true by thousands of converted Jews, so much that James thinks not even a speech by Paul, but only his paying expenses for other Jews to conduct a ritual, will suffice to dissuade them from this allegedly false rumor.

I don't see how a significant lack of clarity in Mark and Luke is a problem only for those who consider Levi and Matthew the same person. There's a substantial clarity problem for Bauckham's position as well.

What should we think of the change from "his house" in Mark 2:15 to "the house" in Matthew 9:10?

 Craig Blomberg says Matthew's Greek is more ambiguous than Luke's on this point:

9:10–11 On some later occasion, Matthew throws a party for Jesus (cf. Luke 5:29, in which the antecedent of “his” is less ambiguous than in the Greek of Matthew).

Blomberg, C. (2001, c1992). Vol. 22: Matthew (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; 

The New American Commentary (Page 155). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

It could easily be an attempt on Matthew's part to clarify the passage rather than an attempt to distance verses 10-13 from verse 9. As Bauckham notes (111), the "his" in Mark 2:15 is sometimes taken as a reference to Jesus rather than Levi, so Matthew may have changed "his" to "the" in order to avoid that confusion. Luke makes the passage clearer by referring to how "Levi gave a big reception for him in his house" (5:29). Perhaps Matthew intended to provide clarification. Or he may have just chosen different terminology than Mark without any intention of clarifying anything and without intending to distance verses 10-13 from verse 9 in the way Bauckham suggests. Furthermore, how would changing "his house" to "the house" have the implications Bauckham claims? To the contrary, the lack of qualification for "the house" motivates the reader to look at the surrounding context for indications of what house is in view. Why would the author send his readers to the surrounding context if he wanted them to avoid the conclusion that verse 9 provides the context they're looking for? The most natural way to take "the house" in verse 10 is as a reference to Matthew's house, since Matthew's booth had just been mentioned, and the reference in verse 9 to Jesus' traveling makes it more likely that he'd be in somebody else's house rather than his own. If the author of the gospel of Matthew had wanted to distance verses 10-13 from verse 9 as much as Bauckham suggests, he could have put one or more other accounts between the content of verses 9 and 10 or changed or added language to verses 10-13 to distance those verses from verse 9 rather than keeping them together and so undistinguished (e.g., he could have referred to "the house of Levi, a tax collector").

I agree that Matthew's context would suggest that the house is Matthew's. 

As far as I can tell, Origen's bias in favor of traditional gospel authorship makes it unlikely he would have trifled that it is only a textual variant that can support Levi = Apostle.  Engwer needs to explain Origen's unlikely trifle, if Engwer wishes to maintain that that Levi was an apostle.

Yes, Bill, extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence: a response to William Lane Craig's strawman attack

When miracle skeptics say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (ECREE), they are not saying miraculous claims require miraculous evidence.  They are also not saying normative types of evidence such as testimony, documents, photos, video footage, can never suffice to establish an extraordinary claim.

That would be stupid.  NO fool says impossible claims require impossible evidence.  But many Christian apologists are fond of mischaracterizing ECREE in their desperation to avoid admitting how rational it is to dismiss biblical miracle claims.

Instead, the miracle skeptic merely means the more one's claim about reality depart from those experiences that we can agree all humans commonly share ( flames burn skin, money doesn't grow on trees, kittens don't massacre adult pit bulls, etc), the greater quality and quantity of evidence will be required before the hearer can be intellectually obligated to believe the claim. 

Yet there is no mechanical test for exactly how much or what type of evidence is minimally necessary to rationally justify rejecting or accepting any claim.

In light of this, by "greater quantity of evidence" we mean that the more a claim runs contrary to our perception of what's physically possible, the greater number of independently corroborative evidences will be needed.  Absent evidence that you are lying, I'd likely believe your claim to have won the lottery if I find that after you made that claim, you started buying expensive cars and homes.  However that type of corroboration is not conclusive, you could be claiming a lottery win merely to cover up a huge profit you made shipping illegal drugs.  ECREE is not about absolute verification or falsification, it's only about how to increase the odds that your rejection or acceptance of somebody else's claim will be reasonable and rational.  ECREE does not pretend to guarantee to show the truth to a person investigating a very deceptive scam or fraud.

Likewise "greater quality of evidence" simply means your corroborating evidences have a stronger ring of truth about them and are less susceptible to skepticism than other types of corroboration.  A person without any known ties to you emotionally, financially or socially, corroborating your claim of winning the lottery, would be a bit more objective of a proof than if the same testimony came from a family member or friend.

It's real easy:  When total strangers tell us they bought groceries at the store last week, we usually don't remain skeptical until they can corroborate their claim, because purchasing groceries at the store happens with routine regularity.  That is, most rational mature adults do in fact more readily believe claims that cohere perfectly with their own ideas of what's physically possible/likely.

When total strangers tell us they won the lottery for $45 million dollars, the greater unlikelihood in this example makes us slightly more hesitant to believe the story absent some type of corroboration.  It is highly unlikely for any certain person to win the lottery.  That is, most rational adults do in fact remain skeptical, in absence of corroborating evidence otherwise, of claims that substantially depart from their own ideas of what's possible/likely.  If anybody retains the least bit of skepticism toward a total stranger's claim of winning the lottery until some type of corroborating evidence has been disclosed, they are employing ECREE.

When total strangers tell us they can levitate their bodies using nothing more than their non-physical mental powers alone, we are very hesitant to believe such a claim.  Why?  For the same reason YOU are skeptical of such a claim, it's never happened to you before, you've never seen genuine levitation happen, there's no science to show it's possible and there's plenty of personal experience and science saying only some type of physical countering force (magnets, support beam, etc) can free you from gravity's influence.

Ok...suppose one friend of the stranger corroborates the stranger's grocery-store claim.  Is that a sufficient basis upon which to believe her claim that she bought groceries at the store?  If so, how do you know?  If not, why not?

Suppose one friend of the stranger corroborates the stranger's levitation claim.  Is that a sufficient basis upon which to believe her claim of levitation?  If so, how do you know?  If not, why not?

----------------

With that preamble, let's dive into Craig's errors on ECREE:

First, Craig at :30 ff says this aphorism of ECREE is "demonstrably false".  That's his first error:  ECREE is not a mechanical test that produces a definite result of "believable" or "not believable".  It is a general rule of thumb intended to help a person properly decide whether any given claim is likely true or false.  Saying ECREE is demonstrably false is about as muddled as saying "interviewing witnesses is false".

Second, at :40 ff, he claims ECREE fails to take into account all the factors that play into assessing the probability of an event.  This too is an outrageously false strawman, since ECREE is a generalized rule of thumb and just what level of quantity and quality of evidence would be required to justify belief in a claim would possibly radically differ from case to case. 

Third, at :45 ff, Craig says if ECREE were true, we could never have adequate evidence for extraordinarily improbable events, and appeals to somebody winning the lottery.  But the reason we know people have won the lottery before is for reasons for more substantial than their own testimony.  We can obtain state records showing big payments to lottery winners, we can see claimants suddenly quitting their jobs and purchasing very expensive items for themselves, and the idea that winning the lottery is all mere "fake news" is contradicted by a great quantity and quality of objective reports from disinterested parties, which would thus qualify as the "extraordinary evidence" (i.e., evidence of greater quality and quantity than we normally demand for claims of routine everyday events).

Third, at 1:00, he says the evidence for the reliability of the evening news would be swamped by the improbability of the event reported.  But this is a weak argument simply because reporting something through the evening news does not more of less obligate a person to believe it truly happened. Again, when the evening news reports that somebody picked all the right numbers and won the lottery, they are not reporting something that runs afoul of what our everyday experience tells us is physically possible.

Fourth, at 1:17 ff, Craig says ECREE would lead to skepticism toward non-supernatural claims.  Yeah, so?  The alibi witness on the stand stand corroborating the murder-suspects alibi, is his mother, and since mothers have an obvious natural instinct to protect their children, the mother's credibility does not become trustworthy or believable merely because she causes her vocal cords to do something that can be percieved by the human ear, and jurors would naturally require her credibility be established a bit more objectively than they would if it was a cop on the stand corroborating the alibi, who otherwise was biased against the suspect by arresting him for the crime.  IF ECREE would justified skepticism of non-supernatural claims, that would be a good thing.

Fifth, at 1:25, Craig says probability theorists concluded that we have to consider how likely the evidence would be if the event had not occurred.  Since the question concerned Jesus's resurrection being extraordinary, Craig likely means skeptics needs to explain how the resurrection evidence came about at all, if in fact the resurrection claim is false.  Fair enough, and hardly anything that sends skeptics running in fear.

Religious people are known to be delusional, Pentecostals have individual experiences at church, but the collective nature of their corporate worship encourages them to insist that they all had the same experience, the first 100 years after Jesus died are the textually dark period of the NT where we don't have the first fucking clue just how close the original versions of the gospels mirrored the canonical form they take today, John the apostle was prone to visions anyway, Apostle Paul was a self-confessed liar, the last 100 years shows how true Paul's claim was that some can peddle the gospel solely for money, Mark's gospel was eariliest and contains no resurrection appearance stories like we normally expect if Mark or Peter had believed such reports were true. 

But let's also not lose sight of the fact that the claimant is the one with the burden of proof.  There is no general rule of evidence or reasoning that says the skeptic is required to come up with reasons to reject the claim (because the logical opposite of that would be a requirement that byou believe every claim you hear until you have reasons to reject it, which is the very definition of gullibility.  We don't just believe everything we hear).  The skeptic's goal is successfully completed if he can show enough legitimate evidentiary shortcomings in your evidence that it becomes rational to be suspicious of your claim.  The idea that we are obligated to provide the actual naturalistic truth behind the claim is total bullshit, since many fake religious claims arise in private circumstances that can never be fully debunked, such as the kids pretending to see visions of Mary at Fatima.  Nobody can go back and perfectly reconstruct all the realities that led up to this alleged vision to show that the vision claim is false.


Sixth, Craig at 1:55 ff asks how probable would be the Empty Tomb, the post mortem appearances, and origin of the disciples' resurrection belief, if Jesus hadn't rose from the dead.  Again, this is old hat:  Craig's  belief in the Empty Tomb draws from the minimal facts argument of Gary Habermas, and I'll soon be explaining why independent evaluation of each piece of NT evidence overthrows the idea that the empty tomb is a reasonably certain fact of history.  How likely true the post-mortem appearances are, depends in part on how early they are, which depends in part on how early one dates the gospel reports of such resurrection appearances.  And Gospel dating itself arises from other presuppositions that could be debated.  One thing appears reasonably certain, it doesn't matter if the alleged hymn of resurrection Paul repeats in 1st Corinthians 15 started the third day after Jesus died, that hymn is not a resurrection appearance story, and carries no more weight than when today's Christians recite John 3:16.  They don't say this because they have empriical evidence that God loves the world, they say it as a mere matter of theological devotion, nothing more.  As far as origin of the disciple's resurrection belief, this too is hazy:  therer were allegedly 12 disciples, with Matthias replacing Judas in Acts 1.  We don't have a clue just how strongly the majority of these twelve held to a belief that Jesus rose from the dead, and one could plausibly argue that the reason only Peter, James, John and Paul far overshadow the others in the NT is because a substantial number of original disciples stopped believing Jesus rose from the dead.  That becomes worse when we remember it isn't just some of the 12 that never left any surviving records of resurrection preaching, in Acts 1 there are about 120 people who are intimately associated with the apostles, likely including the 70 otherwise unnamed disciples.  There's an awful lot of allegedly amazingly transformed Christians in league with the original apostles, whose preaching activity was apparently not extreme enough to protect it from destruction by the passing of time.

Seventh, Craig at 2:12 boasts that we'd agree that if Jesus didn't rise, these "facts" would be enormously improbable, but he is just talking crazy at this point.  Even if we grant yes they would be improbable, so what?  ECREE neither expresses nor implies that if some claimed event has any degree of improbability, then it must be false.

Eighth, Craig at 2:25 ff says we don't need to have extraordinary evidence to establish extraordinary claims, but he fails to define "extraordinary evidence" here, which is why I took the time to do so in this blog post, supra.  The sad truth for apologists is that ECREE is not just reasonable and rational, but is so precisely because it is how everybody including Christians, decide which types of claims in the real world they will believe, reject, or remain undecided about.  ECREE does not assert that a claim should always be capable of meeting the demands of greater quality and quantity of evidence.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that evidence for improbable events is lost or destroyed.  It may be true that byour dad told you orally, before he died, that he is leaving his entire estate to you, but if you didn't record it or otherwise have other people hear your dad say such a thing, and if what he said is contrary to what he stated in his will, then the truth doesn't matter, the administrator will still be reasonable and rational to insist that the written will constitutes the more objective evidence of what dad wished.  Even so, it doesn't matter if Jesus really did rise from the dead, the issue is whether you can demonstrate this contention to another person with such force that a reasonable person would feel compelled to agree that the claim is true.  You can't.

Craig's response here was little more than a desperate strawman; ECREE is the type of reasons that Christians themselves employ when they attempt to evaluate ANY truth-claim, even truth-claims of other competing religions.  Indeed, it is what we employ when making ANY decision about whether a given claim is likely true or false.

Cold Case Christianity: Why Make the Case for Christianity, If God Is in Control?

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

Why Make the Case for Christianity, If God Is in Control?

Posted: 31 Jul 2017 01:58 AM PDT 

 

I’ve written a Christian apologetics book that makes the case for making the case.

No doubt because you have perfect confidence that God doesn't need your help on anything, having already Himself written a book that you publicly profess to be not just divinely inspired, but also "sufficient" for faith and practice.  I'm getting the idea of a dad who installs training wheels on his daughter's bike, but insists to hell and back that he isn't trying to "help" her do what she wants to do by making the bike a bit "better".

I argue that Christians ought to embrace a more evidential, thoughtful faith and accept their duty to become Christian case-makers.

And since your Reformed and 5-Point Calvinist brothers in the faith strongly insist that the evidentialist approach to apologetics is both flawed and unbiblical, you are also involving your intended unbelieving readers in a debate that not even spiritually alive people can resolve, how irrational is it, then, to pretend that spiritually dead unbelievers could possibly find the truth here?

Many people, after reading the book and thinking about this call to become better case makers, have asked, “If God calls His chosen, can’t He achieve this without any case-making effort on our part?”

Probably because they know about bible verses which teach that God not only can, but often does, force people to do what he wants them to do, and apparently he doesn't stay up late at night worrying about whether their freewill was violated:

 4 "I will turn you about and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords; (Ezek. 38:4 NAU)

Sure, that "hook" is metaphorical, but the metaphor cannot be defined as irrelevant; it still brings to mind an obvious level of force overriding any contrary intent by the humans themselves.  And why would God use a metaphor that brings images of absolute force and overriding of freewill to mind, if that mental image is somehow inaccurate?

I also pondered this question as a new Christian, and I think the following analogy is helpful, although certainly imperfect.

Exactly, you could have chosen anything from the bible, but no, you are a marketing genius, you recognize like other authors that you can increase sales if you infuse personal stories into your books.  This is probably because you are aware of how strongly the Holy Spirit controls the lives of true Christians and doesn't need your help in any way whatsoever.

When my son David was a young boy, he hated mushrooms. If salvation were dependent on voluntarily ordering a mushroom pizza, David would never experience heaven because he would never, on his own accord, order such a pizza. In fact, I once took David to a pizza restaurant and cleverly removed the mushrooms from a pizza in an effort to convince him to eat it. He refused. “I can see the shape of the mushroom right there!” He knew it had been poisoned by “mushroom juice,” and no amount of effort on my part could change his mind, in spite of my best mushroom-pizza case-making efforts.

But what if there was some way to remove David’s hatred of mushrooms prior to entering the restaurant? If David no longer hated mushrooms, he would be open to my mushroom-pizza case-making efforts. Then, if I was able to make a “five-point case for the deliciousness of mushroom pizza,” David would, under his new nature (having had his hatred for mushrooms removed), choose to voluntarily order the mushroom pizza.

 I think you ate some mushrooms without pizza right before you wrote this.

In this admittedly imperfect analogy, David’s salvation was clearly dependent first on the role God played in removing his enmity for mushrooms. But once this enmity was sovereignly lifted, David was open to my case making. God allowed me to play my role as a case maker, and David responded to my effort in a way he never would have if God hadn’t first moved.

And the bible-god's ability to sovereignly override human freewill to force whatever he wants to happen, is precisely why your god is a fucking liar for pretending that we make him mad or angry.  If you can prevent your child from playing in the street, but you let them do it anyway, you have nobody to blame but yourself if they get ran over.  Nobody will listen during your parental-neglect arraingment that you issued clear warnings and the child willfully disobeyed.  They will say that if you are such a loving father, you wouldn't just stand there issuing edicts, you'd FORCE them out of the street, because true love will employ such force to protect the loved one from the consequences of their own stupidity or rebellion.

God’s incredible love for us is evident in this process.

But it's not evident when he just stands at the foot of the bed and watches as a little girl is raped to death.

God loved my son enough to remove his hostility,

Does he love little kids enough to remove the hostility of the man raping them?

and He loved me enough to disciple and encourage me. Even though God is clearly sovereign, He graciously allowed me to play a part in reaching David.

If the bible has anything to say about it, the part you played was that of a puppet.  Or so say your 5 Point Calvinist spiritually alive brothers who think your apologetics are a load of crap.

I got to make the case for what I know is true about salvation, and in the process, my confidence grew as I mastered the evidence for Christianity. God’s sovereign purposes and amazing love were ultimately expressed both in the son He called and in the son He encouraged.

Sounds like your editors and ghost writers did a good job agreeing on the best way to rouse the emotions of the Christians you market your shit to.

Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays fails to show his god disapproves of marital pedophila

Steve Hays just happens to have written on July 8, 2017, a blog article ostensibly answering a Christian complaining that God's presumed disapproval of pedophilia cannot be sustained from the bible.  This is right around the time I began posting my other entries here on the topic of why Christians cannot show that their god disapproves of sex within adult-child marriages.

I answer Steve and his commenters here point by point: 

First, he says nothing at all about the infamous quotations from the Babylonian Talmud where the earlier Rabbis/Sages held that girls are suitable for sexual relations at age 3 years and one day.

Second, he says nothing about the Romans 13 argument which would have biblically justified a man living in 19 century Delaware to have sex with a 7 year old girl, because under Calvinism, God really is the creator of all secular law, not just the laws that cohere with the bible.

Third, he says nothing about the argument that because the bible is not explicit on the subject, this forbids Christians from disfellowshipping the man who disagrees with them on this subject.

Saturday, July 08, 2017

Islam, Christianity, and pedophilia

Question from a commenter:

I wonder, though, if we Christians aren't revealing a weak spot when it comes to objections to pedophilia. When pressed by our opponents, I don't think that we'd be able to provide any prooftexts condemning the practice - or am I wrong? Worse, I could see opponents seizing on the notion of Boaz seeming to be an elder while Ruth appeared to be a young girl. Granted, that's a bit flimsy but I'm not sure what the proper response might be. So I guess I'm asking how you might mount a defence against the claim that the Bible has nothing to say about pedophilia.

Interesting question. Requires a many-layered response:

1. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the Bible is silent on the moral status of pedophilia.

I deny the legitimacy of this move.  My argument is that the bible god approves of sex within adult child marriages, not that god approves of adults having sex with kids outside of marriage.  Hays' characterization is faulty here because apart from marriage, adults having sex with kids would be covered under either the fornication or adultery prohibitions.  It's the adult-child sex taking place within marriage, that is impervious to biblical rebuttal.  But Hays pretends to be answering Islamic arguments concerning charges of pedophilia and the bible, so it's probably not his fault that he is beating up a rather weak form of the argument.  Let's see him refute my particular argument. 

There's an essential difference between a religious text that condones pedophilia and silence.

Not according to the historians who lay out the criteria for knowing when an argument from silence is likely to be successful.  Not all arguments from silence are automatically fallacious.

The Bible's not an encyclopedia. It doesn't purport to address every ethnical issue.

You cannot afford to disagree with Paul, who said his solitary basis for being able to know a human act was sin, was the Mosaic Law: 

 6 But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.
 7 What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, "YOU SHALL NOT COVET."
 8 But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. (Rom. 7:6-8 NAU)

It doesn't matter if you are correct to say your God disapproves of marital pedophilia, the challenge is whether you can demonstrate that contention from the bible.  You can't.

Steve continues:

Some activities may not be condemned because they are obviously wrong. It isn't necessary to explicitly condemn them. That's understood. Take the cliche example of torturing little kids for fun.

Several problems: 
a) Paul in Romans 7:7 does not allow for even himself to know, apart from Mosaic law, that some human act is sin;

b) You are a Calvinist who believes God secretly wills all human sin, so by your own admission, God is no less approving of pedophiles who torture kids in basements for fun, than he approves of fathers who make their kids attend a Calvinist turch, which logically means God finds the human acts in his secret will no less holy than the human acts in his revealed will; 

c) no thank you, I'll stick to biblical examples, since they trip you up more easily.  If "obviously wrong" might explain why God is silent about torturing kids for fun, then what are you saying about God's prohibition against bestiality?

 23 'Also you shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it, nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it; it is a perversion. (Lev. 18:23 NAU)

 Indeed, God apparently thought one single prohibition wasn't sufficient:

Exo 22:19 "Whoever lies with an animal shall surely be put to death.
Lev 20:12 If there is a man who lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall surely be put to death; they have committed incest, their bloodguiltiness is upon them.
Lev 20:15 If there is a man who lies with an animal, he shall surely be put to death; you shall also kill the animal.
Lev 20:16 If there is a woman who approaches any animal to mate with it, you shall kill the woman and the animal; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltiness is upon them.
Deu 27:21 Cursed is he who lies with any animal. And all the people shall say, Amen.

 Under your "obviously wrong" type logic, then the only reason God revealed multiple specific prohibitions against bestiality for Israel is because God didn't think Israel's common sense was sufficient to dissuade them from this type of activity. 

That won't help you when you start trying to argue that the obvious immorality of pedophilia would have been appreciated by Israel.

But if sex with animals is an obvious wrong, then why should God feel Israel needed more specific guidance on it than they needed on the proper minimum age of marriage?

Gee, could it actually be that these stupid questions come up because the bible is not inspired by a consistent creator, but is inspired by nothing but various people spouting various theological opinions?

The argument can be extended: how 'obviously wrong' is it to burn your kids to death?  And yet we see God constantly prohibiting the Israelites from imitating this pagan practice:

10 "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer,
 11 or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. (Deut. 18:10-11 NAU)

Same question:  if God thought the Israelites would recognize the "obvious" immorality of burning their kids to death, why did he specifically prohibit it?

You will say the prohibitions against acts condemned by common sense were needed because the pagan nations surrounding Israel did them and Israel might imitate them and often did.

So I really have to wonder why you would defend the high moral scruples of a people who could be persuaded by other cultures/nations, that burning their kids to death, was acceptable?

How many Christians live in big cities full of homosexuality and witchcraft.

How many of those Christians give in to practicing homosexuality and witchcraft?

So if your answer is that God needed to guide Israel because of the corruption of the pagans, you are making the Israelites out to be unacceptably gullible, which cannot be good for your other argument that surely they were wise enough to intuitively "know" when an act was sinful.

Could it really be, after all, that Paul was correct, and that your only hope for identifying human acts God thinks are sinful, is Mosaic law?

I think there's a place for natural law considerations in Christian ethics. We don't require biblical warrant for all our ethical determinations.

But you claim that God disapproves of sex within adult-child marriages.  You aren't going to prove that disapproval comes from God, if all you are using are natural law arguments.  And natural law arguments can backfire.  It's natural for a parent to not wish to burn their child to death, so was God contradicting natural common sense in Leviticus 21:9?

2. In Scripture, couples marry with a view to having kids. That assumes the bride and bridegroom are sexually mature.

A view fatally mitigated by the NT's consistent reference to Lot as a consistently righteous man.   Lot is called righteous in 2nd Peter 2:7-8 despite how clearly Genesis 19 asserts that Lot recommended to a sexually violent mob that they rape his two virgin daughters.  In other words, if this NT statement is true, then the author did not believe Lot’s attempt to have his daughters raped, constituted anything immoral, especially given that the story says Lot was trying to achieve a good purpose (preventing angels from being raped).  

 7 and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men
 8 (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds),
 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation,  (2 Pet. 2:7-9 NAU)

In other words, while it may have been the ANE norm for virgin girls to lose virginity only in marriage, it also appears that where larger issues were involved, exceptions to normative sexual ethics were allowed.  

Lot, in particular, is considered righteous for offering his virgin daughters in order to save wayfarers. 

Freedman, D. N. (1996, c1992). The Anchor Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday.

 
Couple marrying in scripture with a view toward having kids may also assumes the couple is not allowed to engage in the specific sex act that would make the girl pregnant until she is older.  The Song of Songs would suggest at that point that an adult-child couple can engage in other similar acts that would not carry that danger.

In Scripture, couples also sometimes begin marital rites upon no other basis than that the man lusted after the woman's beauty, Deut. 21:10-14, a passage that neither expresses nor implies the purpose of the marriage would involve having children:

 10 "When you go out to battle against your enemies, and the LORD your God delivers them into your hands and you take them away captive,
 11 and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and have a desire for her and would take her as a wife for yourself,
 12 then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails.
 13 "She shall also remove the clothes of her captivity and shall remain in your house, and mourn her father and mother a full month; and after that you may go in to her and be her husband and she shall be your wife.
 14 "It shall be, if you are not pleased with her, then you shall let her go wherever she wishes; but you shall certainly not sell her for money, you shall not mistreat her, because you have humbled her.   (Deut. 21:10-14 NAU)

Steve continues:

3. Ruth was a widow. Moreover, she'd been married for ten years before her husband died (Ruth 1:4-5; 4:11). Presumably, she was in her twenties when she married Boaz.

4. Are there passages in Scripture that have implications for age of eligibility in reference to marriage?

i) Take the much maligned passage about war brides (Deut 20:10-14). The brides are widows. So these are not prepubescent girls. It's unlikely that they are even adolescent girls. Rather, the context suggests adult women. They are chosen for their overt womanly sex appeal.

You are dreaming:  

a) It's Deut 21, not 20, you specified "much maligned passage about war brides, and Deut. 21:10-14 is far more explicit in its discussion of war brides than Deut. 20 is.

b) you cite no contextual or grammatical evidence to show these female war captives were widows, 

c) that Moses allow his men to enslave prepubescent and adolescent girls is clearly seen in Numbers 31:18, and 

d) you don't know what ancient Israelite men would have found attractive in other females, in Deut. 21:11, what would constitute "beauty" is not defined and left to the eye  of the beholder; 

e) if the GNT is correct in translating v. 14 as "you forced her to have sex with you" is a proper dynamic translation, the probability increases slightly that the text is assuming younger girls, i.e., those more likely to resist first intercourse; 

f) if the GNT is correct in its rape-translation, then these Israelites apparently didn't have any scruples against a single act of rape as the result of an attempted marriage rite, and this increase in their barbarity gives you all the less justification to automatically assume the god of the bible surely agrees with modern American Christian scruples on sex.

ii) In 1 Cor 7:36, the virgins are, at the very least, sexually mature, and the word (hyperakmos) may well mean the "bloom of youth". That suggests females in the upper teens or early twenties. 

here you assume the inerrancy of the bible, when the more scholarly objective approach would appraise the morals of the ANE Hebrews solely on terms of ANE practice and the OT.  And regardless, Paul's meaning is ambiguous,

48      36-38. The Apostle applies the preceding teaching to a particular case. There has been a lively discussion among exegetes concerning the precise relation of the man (tis) to his “virgin” in these verses.

Brown, R. E., Fitzmyer, J. A., & Murphy, R. E. (1968]; 

Published in electronic form by Logos Research Systems, 1996).  

The Jerome Biblical commentary (electronic ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

 ....and he appears to be talking about a man with a virgin daughter who is past her sexual prime and wants to marry another man, since he is dealing with a specific problem that apparently had no common sense answers:

36. behaveth … uncomely—is not treating his daughter well in leaving her unmarried beyond the flower of her age

Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., Fausset, A. R., Brown, D., & Brown, D. (1997). A commentary, critical and explanatory, on the Old and New Testaments. 

On spine: Critical and explanatory commentary. (1 Co 7:36). 

Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

So if spiritually alive Christians cannot even agree on what Paul's meaning is, you can hardly seriously expect your unqualified interpretation of Paul's words to look the least bit persuasive to spiritually dead Muslims and atheists.

5. It's common to speculate that Mary was an adolescent bride who was widowed by the time Jesus began his public ministry because she married a much older man. But even if we grant some of the assumptions, it was probably rare for people to die of old age in the ancient world. Mortality was high, and there are many common ways to die young, viz. illness, accident, infection.

But Joseph was likely rich given that he apparently had more children with Mary, not a wise decision if he was poor.  Joseph was a carpenter, and he could easily have earned enough of a living to avoid the harsh realities that caused shortened life spans, such as famine, or eating diseased food, forced to take dangerous labor-intensive jobs, etc.

6. Regarding the morality of older men who marry younger women, that depends.

i) On the one hand are coercive or exploitative relationships.
Older men (and women!) in positions of power who abuse their authority by taking advantage of subordinates.

I don't see why you think that matters.  Even denying the pedophilia interpretation of Numbers 31:18, you still think these men expected these little girls to start slaving away in their houses soon after hearing the dying shrieks of their parents and siblings.  Some would argue that the way these men obtained the service of these little girls was horribly exploitative, and worse than a single act of sexual molestation. Touching a little girl improperly doesn't kill off her parents.

ii) On the other hand, there are desperate or ambitious women who take the initiative. They court or seduce older men who can advance their career, provide financial security, or lavish lifestyle. That's calculated. Some women are attracted to alpha males or powerful men. I'm not making a value judgment, just a sociological observation. Between consenting adults, I don't think age disparity is coercive or exploitative.

Posted by steve at 9:29 AM

But you are ignoring the precise question at issue:  What age did the Hebrews require a girl to reach, at a minimum, before they would allow her to be married to an adult man?  You simply don't have any biblical basis to select any age except the age of 12 that can be gathered from what is already known about ANE peoples outside the bible.  But that does not represent an absolute mandate, anymore than a state's law requiring a person to be 18 to marry is absolute, since we know some states will allow lower age with parental consent.  You can only show what was "normative", you cannot do what you need to do, and that is to show that sex within adult-child marriages was consider sinful.

    ANNOYED PINOY7/08/2017 3:00 PM  

    I think there's a place for natural law considerations in Christian ethics. We don't require biblical warrant for all our ethical determinations.

    That's a powerful statement by Steve. Christian ethics based on the Bible takes into consideration natural law. Even if Islam could theoretically do the same thing, Islam nevertheless teaches that it's okay for men to have sex with prepubescent girls. As I said in the comments of another blog:

    To add to what Steve said, if one reads Ezek. 16:1-8 (and following) God likens his relationship with His people as Him having found her like a newly born abandoned child. He waited until she was sexually mature to "marry" her in covenant. I think that suggests the same thing Steve is saying. I think we can inductively infer from this what the Jews believed during that time and what God Himself approves of regarding when it's appropriate for a female to get married.

 Even assuming Ezekiel 16 is the answer to your dreams (it's not, God is rather stupid and brutish to assume that formation of breasts and pubic hair indicates the girl is "ready" for love), Gleason Archer and others have accepted that some kings in the Monarchy were fathering kids at 11 years old.  As I said in another post, revered commentators believe that the modern practice of girls marrying before puberty was true also in the OT days:

 Second, many conservative Christian scholars still revere the Keil and Delitzsch Commentary, because what it has to say about the bible remains very scholarly despite its having been written in the 1800’s.  After acknowledging King Ahaz fathered a child at 10-11 years old, they recognize the question this will pop into the mind of the reader, and they go on to cite documentary evidence that prepubescent marriage was normative for middle-eastern families, and this evidence forces Holding, without a rebuttal otherwise, to admit ancient Hebrews were willing to allow marriage at even younger ages than 12:

2 Kings 16:1–4. On the time mentioned, “in the seventeenth year of Pekah Ahaz became king” see at 2 Kings 15:32. The datum “twenty years old” is a striking one, even if we compare with it 2 Kings 18:2. As Ahaz reigned only sixteen years, and at his death his son Hezekiah became king at the age of twenty-five years (2 Kings 18:2), Ahaz must have begotten him in the eleventh year of his age. It is true that in southern lands this is neither impossible nor unknown,33 but in the case of the kings of Judah it would be without analogy. The reading found in the LXX, Syr., and Arab. at 2 Chron. 28:1, and also in certain codd., viz., five and twenty instead of twenty, may therefore be a preferable one. According to this, Hezekiah, like Ahaz, was born in his father’s sixteenth year.
------33 In the East they marry girls of nine or ten years of age to boys of twelve or thirteen (Volney, Reise, ii. p. 360). Among the Indians husbands of ten years of age and wives of eight are mentioned (Thevenot, Reisen, iii. pp. 100 and 165). In Abyssinia boys of twelve and even ten years old marry (Rüppell, Abessynien, ii. p. 59). Among the Jews in Tiberias, mothers of eleven years of age and fathers of thirteen are not uncommon (Burckh. Syrien, p. 570); and Lynch saw a wife there, who to all appearance was a mere child about ten years of age, who had been married two years already. In the epist. ad N. Carbonelli, from Hieronymi epist. ad Vitalem, 132, and in an ancient glossa, Bochart has also cited examples of one boy of ten years and another of nine, qui nutricem suam gravidavit, together with several other cases of a similar kind from later writers. Cf. Bocharti Opp. i. (Geogr. sacr.) p. 920, ed. Lugd. 1692.

Keil, C. F., & Delitzsch, F. (2002). Commentaryon the Old Testament. 

(Vol. 3, Page 283-284). 

Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

Annoyed Pinoy continues:

    Many (not all) Muslims have the wrong notion that once menstruation occurs it's God's sign that she is ready to be sexually active and bear children. But that's not medically true. Other parts of a woman's anatomy (like the hips) need to develop for her to be ready to bear children. That's a reason why a lot of women die or suffer terrible injuries in Islamic cultures. Because they didn't postpone marriage long enough.

 Good reasons to call the God of Ezekiel 16 stupid and brutish for thinking a girls "readiness" for love is indicated by formation of breasts and pubic hair.   Plenty of 10 year old girls have fully formed breasts and public hair, and yet are obviously nowhere "ready" for sex as God thinks they are.

    The Christian God of love, wisdom, and healing would naturally want and expect us culturally to promote a safe age for marriage (with the assumption that the consummation of the marriage occurs soon after marriage).

Or because so many Christians are insincere liberal idiots, the Christian God has decided to wreak havoc and chaos in America like he apparently did in Israel, read Deut. 28.

In some cultures female sexual maturation occurs earlier than in other cultures. So, there can be no specific fixed age for a female to marry.

But a god who creates a universe shouldn't have a problem doing at least as good of a job at setting the minimum age by law, as godless secularists have in America for the last 50 years.  

It depends on both biological and psychological maturity.

No, your God only identifies two criteria, boobs and pubic hair.  Ezekiel 16. 

    Mr. Fosi7/08/2017 8:10 PM
    My first response when I saw the initial question that Steve is addressing was to point out the repeated directive in Song of Solomon to "not awaken love before it's time" and the idea at the end of the book that the "little sister without breasts" is one who is being guarded/protected. It's also clear from the language of that book that the lover and the beloved are sexualy mature.

Again, sex within adult-child marriages was likely not "normative" in ANE cultures, but that does not fulfill your burden to disprove the contention that the God of the bible disapproves of that act.

    Also, there is a much more basic argument to be had from the 2nd greatest commandment.

That's a rather vacuous argument:  were the Israelites treating their neighbors as themselves when massacring the baby boys in Numbers 31:17?

    Children are never sexual objects in the bible.

Argument from silence.  Can you back it up?

You can call that 'silence' if you like but in the presence of plenty of sexual stories and rules regarding sex, it is a ringing silence.

On the contrary, the fact that the rules specifically prohibit obvious sins like bestiality, but never give the minimum age or conditions under which a girl could be legitimately married, counsel that the god of the bible did not feel that sex below any certain age was prohibited.  Does God care more about animals having sex, than he cares about kids having sex?

    Finally, Christian parents don't encourage their kids to marry and have sexual relations with adults and Christian kids are told to obey their patents. Not exactly second use of the law but the bible is primarily for God's people.

But marriage today is based on romance and an evolved intellectual consideration of compatibility, entirely different from the arranged marriages for business and profit and continuation of family line as they were in the ANE.

Steve's failure is clear from the fact that he presupposes biblical inerrancy...he is writing to Christian inerrantists who are just as prone as he is to automatically think any use of the bible to justify modern Christian morality is valid. It doesn't matter if Paul knew of other ways to identify sin apart from the Law, what else Paul knew does not fit with his absolutist language in Romans 7:7. 

So while you are free to believe the bible condemns sex within adult-child marriages, you certainly cannot fulfill your burden to show that the god of Moses similarly disapproved.

Demolishing Triablogue: No, Steve Hays, a theology of secondary causes does not absolve God from being the author of evil

Steve Hays argues that Calvinists can consistently deny that God is the author of evil as long as they have a theology of secondary causes:

If actor was a synonym for auctor, then to deny that God is the "author" of sin means that God is not the agent, viz, God is not the doer or performer of sin. Rather, it's the human agent (or demonic agent) who commits sin. 

In that sense, it's perfectly coherent for Reformed theologians who deny that God is the author of sin–so long as they have a theology of second causes.

Several problems:

1 - Some bible texts claim God is directly responsible for causing people to sin, such as Ezekiel 38:4, the hook-in-jaws metaphor bringing to mind a sense of absolute force.

2 - Semantic quibbles about how God doesn't personally act in the human sin are theologically suspect, a god who is as omnipresent as Calvinists typically say he is, has more intimate association with a kidnapper's crime than the kidnapper.  Or are some classical theist doctrines resting upon hyperbolic biblical language?

3 - Semantic quibbles about how God doesn't personally act in the human sin do not imply that God is somehow not culpable.  God often orders others to sin:

 19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you."
 (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)

Unless Calvinists say they would absolve the mob boss from the crime of murder because he only ordered the hit, but didn't himself actually pull the trigger, then the popular moral objection to the Calvinist god authoring evil is not refuted by observing that God doesn't personally commit the sins.

4 - Secondary causes are moot for the reason explained above:  If what God himself is doing is evil, the fact that secondary agents have their part to play in the overall scheme does not take away from his own culpability.

 

5 - God appears to have carefully distinguished the evil David did, from the evil that god himself would do, to wit, causing David's wives to leave him and have polygamous sex in public with another man:

  9 'Why have you despised the word of the LORD by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon.
 10 'Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.'
 11 "Thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.
 12 'Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.'"
 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 (2 Sam. 12:9-13 NAU)

 Whether the wives had freewill is immaterial; God is claiming all the credit for causing this instance of people engaging in polygamous sex in public.

 

V. 12 doesn't make sense if it doesn't mean God is declaring himself responsible for this particular bit of evil. 

There can be no doubting whatsoever that at the end of the day, consistent Calvinism teaches that people compare to God the way puppets relate to a ventriloquist.

 

Indeed, unless one accuses Paul of premising his Romans 9 theology on hyperbole, which would nuke Calvinism off the face of the planet, then when Paul tries to support his theology by arguing that God is potter and we are the pots, he really wasn't pushing the analogy too far.

 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it?
 21 Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?
 (Rom. 9:19-21 NAU)

If Paul wasn't pushing the pot/potter analogy too far, then we cannot be any more responsible for our sins, than pots can be responsible for being what they are. 

Why God paints himself as so wrathful against his pots turning out to be exactly what he wanted them to be, requires we conclude that God is as irrational as an intelligent being can possibly get:  He is angry and wrathful because his plans worked perfectly.

One has to seriously wonder at how Calvinists can go about seriously believing that God makes Christians feel guilty about doing his secret will.

If a Calvinist praised God's secret will in allowing children to be raped to death, would God accept or reject this theologically correct form of praise?  

If God is a God of truth, does that mean he accepts any and all praise that is based on actual truth, or does God require that praise of him not take into account certain actual truths?

These are questions that Calvinists, who think God secretly wills all human sin, cannot easily answer.

Demolishing Triablogue: Miracles and Induction

Steve Hays points out flaws in induction his discussion of miracles, and I answer him point by point.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Posted by steve at 1:59 PM

Miracles, induction, and retrodiction

According to the principle of induction, we can retroengineer the past from the present. There's a chain of events leading up to the present. Antecedent states produce subsequent states.

The same causes produce the same effects.

Since that's repeatable, if we're familiar with the process, we can retrace an effect back through intervening stages to the originating cause.

For instance, when I see an adult human, I know how he got to that point. I can run it backwards from adulthood through adolescence, childhood, gestation, and conception.

All things being equal, that's a generally reliable inference.

Meaning those who affirm miracles must show that their hypothesis to explain the data is better than whatever naturalistic hypothesis is being used to counter the miracle-explanation.  You can argue that during your mission to Uganda, you were dead from disease for the three days that nobody could find you, and that God resurrected you in the same body, but you will have to show that your theory to explain the data is more convincing than the naturalistic theories that either you are lying, deluded, just kidding, or you weren't truly dead.

However, miracles pose an exception to induction. A classic miracle (in contrast to a coincidence miracle) is causally discontinuous with the past. A miracle isn't uncaused, but it's not the result of a causal chain. Rather, a miracle results from the introduction an anomalous cause outside the ordinary chain of events.

I deny the coherence and legitimacy of such talk.  You might as well say God lives "outside of time".  Utter nonsense. When you propose a break with the "ordinary chain of events", you carry the burden to show that your theory to explain the data is better than the naturalistic theories proposed to counter your own theory.  When you can demonstrate any such place as "outside the ordinary chain of events", let me know.

It represents a break in the causal continuum. The continuum resumes after the break, taking the miracle as a new starting-point.

For instance, suppose a person suffers from a naturally irreversible degenerative condition. Suppose he undergoes miraculous healing. That outcome can't be retrodicted from his prior condition.

In the case of miracles, induction hits a wall. When the subsequent course of events is the result of a miracle, inductive inference can't go further back than the miracle.

If what happened was a miracle, then yes.  But this sophistry does not translate into practical life.  If you claim to have been recently healed miraculously of permanent blindness since birth, the limits of induction are not going to slow me down in the least from attempting to authenticate all of your relevant medical and witness claims, should I decide to focus my investigatory curiosity on such a thing.

It can't reconstruct the past before the miracle occurred, because the post-miraculous state is not a product of the pre-miraculous state. Induction can only take you from the present to as far back in time as the precipitating miracle. It can't jump over that to the other side, because the chain of events prior to the miracle is a dead-end. The prior chain of events terminated with the miracle, which represents a new beginning.

This raises a potential problem regarding past-oriented sciences (e.g. cosmology, historical geology, paleontology, evolution). If miracles occur in the past, are they even detectable?

What's the scope of any particular miracle to reset the status quo? That limits our ability to reconstruct the past.

This thought experiment is totally worthless, because the only way you can successfully invoke the fatal limits of induction is by assuming what happened was indeed a miracle, in which case, yes, induction would not suffice to argue against it.  So I'll give Hays the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he intended only theists and other miracle-watchers to take him seriously.

What Hays needs to do is provide argument in favor of the one miracle he believes is the most compelling.

Demolishing Triablogue: Moses was not humble

Steve Hays takes on the old atheist canard about how Numbers 12:3, saying Moses was the most humble man on earth, wouldn't have been written by a truly humble man.

But some would argue that when you talk back to God and suggest a plan to him different than His own, this personality trait doesn't leave room for humility:

 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)

When apologists start hemming and hawwing about how God didn't "really" want Moses to leave Him alone (v. 10), we skeptics start hemming and hawwing about whether giving a false impression of one's intentions constitutes lying.

 lie2 noun     
1An intentionally false statement.     ‘they hint rather than tell outright lies’     ‘the whole thing is a pack of lies’     
1.1 Used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression.     ‘all their married life she had been living a lie’

 Steve says

"More humble than anyone else on the face of the earth" is simply hyperbole.

 ...making us wonder whether other statements in the bible, such as those describing God's wrath, are also hyperbole.  Do unbelievers really face the terrible wrath of God in the literal sense, or is this just hyperbole?

Also, doesn't matter if it was hyperbole, this would still have left an impression on the original readers even if they knew it was exaggeration.  When I tell a friend that my neighbor is the "nicest guy in the world", the fact that this is not technically true but exaggeration, does not mean the hearer just dismisses the comment outright.

She still receives the impression that in my view he is one of the nicest persons one can know.  The hyberbolic way of speaking still creates a strong literal impression, and likely would more so with pre-literate societies.

So you cannot get rid of the problem produced by literal interpretation, by classifying the speech as hyperbole.  The literal intent is still there even if the language is exaggerated.