turch is rong

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Demolishing Triablogue: The virgin birth story is fiction whether it was a cover story or not

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

Is the virgin birth a cover story?

Hostile readers assume the account of the virgin birth is a cover story for a prenuptial scandal.

Some of them think it is rank fiction not intended to be a cover story.

That makes sense if you reject miracles out of hand, as well as the larger context of Christ's extraordinary life and ministry.
However, even on naturalistic grounds, why would Mary or early Christian propagandists concoct a story like that?

Maybe because the Jesus whom they wished to worship, really was born in circumstances not becoming a holy "son of God"?

To begin with, no one except Christians is going to believe it. So it will fail to silence suspicion and allegation. The very audience that assumed the worst in the first place will hardly be persuaded by this explanation.

But you don't know the originally intended audience of the gospel authors sufficiently to justify dogmatizing about whether Matthew and Luke expected their virgin birth narratives to be convincing to unbelievers. The gospels appear more likely written for believers, and less likely intended to convince unbelievers. And yet in light of John 20:31, it could be argued that the gospel authors really did, in gullible fashion, expect unbelievers to trust whatever they had to say about Jesus. Not any more unlikely than the con artists at TBN who "expect" to wow unbelievers with their gossip about Jesus. It's really stupid, but people sometimes really are THAT stupid.

In addition, it's not even the most plausible naturalistic explanation.

Correct, the silence of Mark and 24 other NT authors on the virgin birth makes it clear that the virgin birth story is more than likely fiction, even if there was no sexual scandal to cover up.

The Mosaic law has a loophole for rape victims. If a virgin says she was raped when she was out in the field, she can't be prosecuted since there were no witnesses to confirm whether it was consensual or not (Deut 22:25-27).

Despite the fact that had God wanted to, he could have given some miraculous sign to the judges so they could determine whether her version of the story was truthful or not, like he allegedly does in causing a dishonest woman's vagina to get gooey and disgusting in Numbers 5.

But that would make it harder to enforce the law on adultery, since even if a betrothed virgin (or married woman) became pregnant through consensual sex, she would always claim rape. Say she wasn't within earshot of any witnesses at the time.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Mary was pregnant because she had consensual premarital sex, why make up a story about angelic visitations and a miraculous conception when she could simply say she was a rape victim?

Easy, she wasn't raped, she was a teen slut. Problem solved.

Don't forget that the virgin birth story clealry does more than cover up some sex scandal, it also promotes Jesus as the divine son of God, so that could be the sole motive of the authors, a cover-up being utterly irrelevant to their motives.

Another answer is that perhaps there's no report of rape because the evidence of her consent was clear to those who investigated? I.e., the story is covering up Mary's slutty history?

Rape was probably not uncommon back then. So unlike the virgin birth, there'd be no air of unreality to the claim. People who scoffed at the virgin birth wouldn't be in a position to scoff at that explanation.
Given how easy it would be to invoke this loophole, it stands to reason that some women who were guilty of consensual premarital or extramarital sex evaded the allegation by claiming to be rape victims. So long as they weren't caught in the act, there'd be no presumption that their claim was false.

And since we cannot know to what degree others knew the truth about how Mary got pregnant, your questions do little more than beg for speculative answers. I'd rather you answer the problem of Mark not mentioning a virgin birth. I think this is where you suddenly discover that Markan priority is just a trick of the devil, and Mark was simply abbreviating Matthew and Luke.

Yet Mary doesn't say that.

You don't know what Mary herself had to say about this incident. You have the disputed hearsay of gospel authors whose identity and exact relation to the eyewitnesses or to these events is nearly a complete unknown, yet you act like the reasons they wrote they way they did are perfectly clear.

Matthew and Luke don't represent Mary having said that.

And since first-century Christians never lied about anything, atheists have no other choice but to worship bible inerrancy.

If you're going to invent or circulate a cover story, that would be far more plausible to hostile readers than the virgin birth.

But we don't know that the gospel authors were intending to make a cover story, so all you are doing is refuting extreme skeptics who irrationally insist that Mary was raped or a slut. Let me know when you have something to say threatening MY basis for virgin-birth skepticism.

And if you want Jesus to sound like pre-Christian god-men like Perseus, you invent a tale of virgin birth that puts words in the mouth of his mother, then you kick out of your church anybody and everybody who take issue with what God's annointed apostle Matthew said.

So why didn't Mary, Matthew, and Luke resort to that explanation rather than the virgin birth? For the obvious reason that the tradition of the virgin birth was the true explanation, even though it will invite derision in a way that feigning rape would not.

Bullshit, the virgin birth story could be covering up Mary's consensual adultery, and THAT could just as easily explain why the rape-hypothesis doesn't make sense of the data. Leaping from the falsity of the rape-hypothesis to the conclusion that the virgin birth is true, is hasty generalization and the fallacy of false dilemma.

The falsity of the virgin birth is as secure from the silence of Mark and 24 other NT authors as an historical hypothesis could possibly be. Engwer's trifles about Mark 6:3 cannot explain how Mark could have "chosen to exclude" a story that would have supported his doctrinal beliefs the most, the virgin birth. The truth is that Mark is silent about the virgin birth because either a) he doesn't know about it, implying Peter doesn't either, implying the story was false, or b) he knew the story but thought it false.

Now go commit a sin and blame it on God like a good Calvinist.

Changing one stupid philosophy for another, a reply to J. Budziszewski

Triablogue promotes "Escape from Nihilism", below is my reply

ESCAPE FROM NIHILISM

Copyright © J. Budziszewski

In 1997, a group of students at the university where I teach asked me to give a
short talk about how I had returned to my abandoned Christian faith. The
following version was included in The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the
Fall of Man (1999, rev. ed. 2010). For a longer and more analytical account of
my reversion, see at this website “Why I Am Not an Atheist.”
Sixteen years ago I stood in the Government Department of the University of Texas
to give a talk. I was fresh out of graduate school, and it was my here's-why-you-houldhire-
me lecture. I wanted to teach about ethics and politics, so as academic job seekers
do everywhere, I was showing the faculty my stuff. So what did I tell them? Two
things. The first was that we human beings just make up the difference between good
and evil; the second was that we aren't responsible for what we do anyway. And I laid
out a ten-year plan for rebuilding ethical and political theory on these two
propositions.
Does that seem to you a good plan for getting a job teaching the young? Or does it
seem a better plan for getting committed to the state mental hospital? Well, I wasn't
committed to the state mental hospital, but I did get a job teaching the young. I've
been asked to tell you how I became a nihilist, and I've been asked to tell you how I
escaped from nihilism. Perhaps I should first explain just what my argument for
nihilism was.
As I mentioned above, I made two claims: first that we make up the difference
between good and evil,

That is obviously true, since it is a category mistake to apply "objective" to "morality" no less than it is to apply "greasy" to "4".

second that we aren't responsible for what we do anyway.

If Calvinist Steve Hays of Triablogue got it right, then no, we are not responsible for what we do any more than a pot is responsible for the shape the potter formed it into.

My argument reversed this order, because first I denied free will.

We have no reason to think the human mind is free of the laws of cause and effect that we see affecting everything else. There is a very good reason that mature civilized adults exhibit routinely repeated patterns in their choices, and no, it's not coincidence.

The reasoning was not
very original. Everything we do or think or feel, I thought, is just an effect of prior
causes. It doesn't matter that some of those prior causes are my previous deeds or
thoughts or feelings, because those would be effects of still earlier causes, and if we
traced the chain further and further back, sooner or later we would come to causes
that are outside of me completely, such as my heredity and environment.

So far, so good.

Second I concluded that if we don't have free will, then good and evil can't
make sense.

Then you were a rather stupid atheist, since there's nothing about good or evil that require their definitions to be restricted to absolute terms. Good and evil make perfect sense even where the context is wholly subjective, such as whether it be good or evil to preserve the results of unconstitutional searches merely because the officers acted in good faith upon a warrant lacking in probable cause (i.e., good faith exception to the exclusionary rule). Many lawyers say that exception is evil, and ALL evidence obtained from an unconstitutional search must be supressed, while our courts are required to agree with the US Supreme Court that as long as the officer's reliance on the warrant was reasonable, the fruits of the search can be saved and used against the accused in trial.

On the one hand I'm not responsible for my deeds, so I can't be praised
or blamed for good or evil; on the other hand I'm not responsible for my thoughts, so
I can't have any confidence that my reasoning will lead me to the truth about good
and evil.

That is true, but the reason most humans praise and condemn each other is precisely because of ignorance or denial that we too are just machines. Since most people neither know nor care about the arguments against freewill, the world is not psychologically ready to depart from their older way of holding others responsible for their deeds.

Now so far it may seem that my argument was merely skeptical, not nihilist.
But I reasoned that if the good for man cannot be known to man, then it cannot be
offered to man as his good; for all practical purposes, there is no good.

then you were wrong, since identifying good and evil using the criteria of one's living environment, city, state, or nation, is sufficient to justify saying good exists "for all practical purposes".

This practical nihilism was linked with a practical atheism, for my arguments were
couched in such a way that I thought they applied to God too. He couldn't escape
causality either, I thought; therefore He couldn't possess confident knowledge of
good and evil any more than I could.

non-existent beings have great difficulty possessing knowledge.

And even if He could achieve such a
standard, it would make no sense for Him enforce it; trapped in causality like Him,
human beings have no ultimate control over their conduct.

Sure it could make sense; if God exists, he could just be an irrational asshole like so many past human dictators. If an ant is not correct to asssume human beings are all good or all powerful merely because we achieve something the ant never could, then we too are irrational to conclude "god", if he exists, is all good or all powerful merely because he is capable of feats we cannot accomplish.

The upshot was that
although God might exist, He would be irrelevant. I couldn't quite rule out the
existence of God, but I thought I could rule out the existence of a God that
mattered.

You should have met me earlier. I could have introduced you to the atheist argument from incoherent religious language, and you would have found out that God's non-existence is equally as assured as is the non-existence of any incoherent concept.

Holes Large and Numerous
The holes in the preceding arguments are so large that one can see light through
them. One hole is that in order to deny free will I assumed that I understood
causality.

No, in order to deny freewill, all you have to know is that the mind is nothing but the operation of the physical brain, and at that point, you have no basis to say it is capable of doing something for reasons independent of physical law, anymore than a tree branch is free to do something contrary to physical law as it breaks off and falls to the ground. The fact that most agree "freewill" disappears more and more, the further down the food chain you go (from animal to reptile to insect) seems to suggest that freewill really is nothing but an illusion.

That is foolish because I didn't know what causality really is any more
than I understand what free will really is. They are equally wonderful and
mysterious, so I had no business pretending to understand one in order to attack the
other. Another problem is that my argument was self-referentially incoherent. If
my lack of free will made my reasoning unreliable so I couldn't find out which
ideas about good and evil are true, then by the same token I shouldn't have been
able to find out which ideas about free will are true either. But in that case I had no
business denying that I had free will in the first place.

You don't need freewill to figure out truth anymore than a video camera needs freewill to make an accurate recording of reality.

At this point two things must be clearly understood. The first: One might think that
my arguments for nihilism were what led me to become a nihilist, but that is not
true. I was committed to nihilism already, and cooked up the arguments only to
rationalize it. The second: One might think that my recognition of the holes in the
arguments were what enabled me to "escape" nihilism, but that is not true either. I
saw the holes in my arguments even at the time, and covered them over with
elaborate nonsense like the need to take an ironic view of reality. Good and evil
just had to be meaningless and personal responsibility just had to be nonexistent.
The arguments were secondary. I was determined.

Personal responsibility doesn't require freewill. We desire an ordered society that punishes criminals whose mental abilities are within whatever criteria of soundness we determine. Your personal responsibility (I think you meant culpability) draws solely from others who impose their will. Most criminals are perfectly content with their lifestyle. A sense of moral culpability must be determined from outside the individual person. There's a reason you need to teach kids manners. If they are left to raise themselves as feral children, they will have no sense of responsibility and will do anything to survive, including steal, deceive and kill.

A friend may he forgive me for quoting him thinks my dismissal of my previous
rationalizations as elaborate nonsense seems too pat. Is it really that simple? The
answer is that yes, it really is that simple. In my present opinion (though not my
opinion of sixteen years ago), modern ethics is going about matters backwards. It
assumes that the problem of human sin is mainly cognitive that it has to do with the
state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don't know what's
right and wrong and that we are trying to find out.

Once again, there is no objective basis to declare any human act moral or immoral. We might think we are "trying to find out" what's right and wrong, but all we are doing is evolving and having arguments with others about the matter. Christian philosophers have already tried and failed to show objective morality with their personally chosen best examples.

Actually the problem is
volitional it has to do with the state of our will. In other words, by and large we do
know the basics of right and wrong

Not when most of the world disgrees with the fundie fanatics who claim God used to think it was morally good to burn teen prostitutes to death: Leviticus 21:9.

but wish we didn't, and we are trying, for one
reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance. Is this an ad hominem
argument that because my motive was bad, my nihilism must have been false? No,
it is a diagnosis, with myself as case in point. My nihilism was "false" because it
was self-referentially incoherent. [There may exist nihilisms which are false for
reasons other than self-referentially incoherency, but I am speaking only of the
version I held myself.] The motive was "bad" because although I knew this to be
the case, rather than give up the nihilism I embraced the incoherency. What one
must do with such a fellow as I once was is not to tell him what he doesn't know
(because he really knows it), but to blow away the smokescreens by which he hides
from the knowledge he has already.
The Motives Behind Nihilism
Then how did I become a nihilist? Why was I so determined? What were my real
motives?
There were quite a few. One was that having been caught up in radical politics of
the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, I had my own ideas about redeeming the
world, ideas that were opposed to the Christian faith of my childhood. As I got
further and further from God, I also got further and further from common sense
about a lot of other things, including moral law and personal responsibility.

Well then maybe you can get closer to God by lobbying for America to legalize a moral God approves of: burning teen prostitutes to death. Leviticus 21:9

That first reason for nihilism led to a second. By now I had committed certain sins
that I didn't want to repent. Because the presence of God made me more and more
uncomfortable,

Then you must have been taking some drugs back when you were an atheist, as there's more reason for "god" to make anybody unconfortable than there is for the Bermuda Triangle to make them uncomfortable, ignorance being the only exception.

I began looking for reasons to believe that He didn't exist.

Sort of like the vast majority of Christians who came to faith in an emotional moment in church, and their acceptance of theistic arguments and bible inerrancy is wholly derivative.

It's a
funny thing about us human beings: not many of us doubt God's existence and then
start sinning. Most of us sin and then start doubting His existence.

Speak for yourself, that wasn't true in my case.

A third reason for being a nihilist was simply that nihilism was taught to me. I may
have been raised by Christian parents, but I'd heard all through school that even the
most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society. That's
empirically false as C.S. Lewis remarked, cultures may disagree about whether a
man may have one wife or four, but all of them know about marriage; they may

disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank
cowardice as a virtue.

But human consensus doesn't make a moral objective. There is human consensus that burning teenage prostitutes to death is always immoral, but because of Leviticus 21:9, Christians must concede that the consensus is wrong, and it's not allways immoral to burn such girls to death. Hence, moral consensus cannot be a justification to call any particular action of man objectively good or bad.

But by the time I was taught the false anthropology of the
times, I wanted very much to believe it.

And of course that couldn't have been the case with the start and rise of Christianity. No, it was only the undeniable miracles of Jesus and the apostles that forced unbelievers to come kicking and screaming over the line into the faith, no presumption or wish-fulfillment about it.

A fourth reason, related to the last, was the very way I was taught to use language.
My high school English teachers were determined to teach me the difference
between what they called facts and what they called opinions, and I noticed that
moral propositions were always included among the opinions. My college social
science teachers were equally determined to teach me the difference between what
they called facts and what they called "values," and to much the same effect: the
atomic weight of sodium was a fact, but the wrong of murder was not. I thought
that to speak in this fashion was to be logical. Of course it had nothing to do with
logic; it was merely nihilism itself, in disguise.

Not at all, associating "objective" with "morality" is a category mistake, read how God accepts moral correction from Moses in Exodus 32:9-14. SInce you cannot refute the thesis on the merits in the context, pretend that the larger context of Exodus is "necessary" to a "proper understanding" of those verses.

Yeah, and I cannot understand Exodus 32:15 without consulting the "larger context". Sorry Charlie.

A fifth reason for nihilism was that disbelieving in God was a good way to get
back at Him for the various things which predictably went wrong in my life after I
had lost hold of Him. Now of course if God didn't exist then I couldn't get back at
Him, so this may seem a strange sort of disbelief. But most disbelief is like that.

Not mine. When I say God is stupid and cruel, I'm only tryinig to talk to Christians at their level, not because I seriously believe it to be the case. Just like we often say to a 3 year old "Santa wants you to be nice" around Christmas. We are not committing to the premise that Santa is real.

A sixth reason for nihilism was that I had come to confuse science with a certain
world view, one which many science writers hold but that really has nothing to
with science. I mean the view that nothing is real but matter. If nothing is real but
matter, then there couldn't be such things as minds, moral law, or God, could
there?

No, since minds are nothing but brains in action, morals cannot be shown to exist apart from physical matter stuff like brains, and incoherent concepts like god only arise because of misinformed physical brains.

After all, none of those are matter. Of course not even the properties of
matter are matter, so after while it became hard to believe in matter itself.

Not true, quarks and leptons are no less physical than rocks. You cannot get rid of their physicality by calling them "energy", because energy is not some ghostly esoteric something-or-other that is different than matter, energy is nothing more than matter in motion. The heat that burns your hand when you place it in the middle of an oven is not less physical than the wires carrying the electrical current into the oven.

You can use your finger to press a key on a computer keyboard, yet when you do, there's nothing "non-matter" about it, the entire operation was 100% physical from beginning to end.

But by
that time I was so disordered that I couldn't tell how disordered I was.

Sorry to hear it. Lay off the drugs.

I recognized
that I had committed yet another incoherency, but I concluded that reality itself
was incoherent, and that I was pretty clever to have figured this out even more so,
because in an incoherent world, figuring didn't make sense either.

Yup, drugs.

A seventh and reinforcing reason for nihilism was that for all of the other reasons, I
had fallen under the spell of the nineteenth-century German writer Friedrich
Nietzsche. I was, if anything, more Nietzschean than he was. Whereas he thought
that given the meaninglessness of things, nothing was left but to laugh or be silent,
I recognized that not even laughter or silence were left. One had no reason to do or
not do anything at all.

That was illogical. Unless you are some idiot fanatic who never takes a shit except when he thinks god will be most pleased, it is clear that God's absence doesn't negatively impact one's sense of purpose in life. You don't purchase a candy bar for the glory of God. You don't run the kids by McDonald's to avoid having to cook dinner, because you wish to lay up for yourself treasure in heaven. The normal shit that makes up the average Christian's life does not change even when they decide that atheism is true...unless they are irrational. If you could find purpose in purchasing a candy bar as a Christian, seems obvious you can find purpose in doing the same after telling yourself atheism is true.

This is a terrible thing to believe, but like Nietzsche, I
imagined myself one of the few who could believe such things who could walk the
rocky heights where the air is thin and cold.
But the main reason I was a nihilist, the reason that tied all these other reasons
together, was sheer, mulish pride. I didn't want God to be God; I wanted J.
Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn't see that then.

Nothing wrong with being master of your own fate since nothing fails quite like theistic arguments.

The Stupidity of the Intelligent
I have already said that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of
the good things He's given us, such as our minds.

Some Christians would argue that God's presence doesn't make life any more bearable when life has you down.

One of the good things I've been
given is a stronger than average mind.

I would beg to differ. Your basis for atheism was a scary exercise is willful blindness.

I don't make the observation to boast;
human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is
that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going
wrong.

Then do what Steve Hays, a Calvinist at Triablogue does, and blame it on god.

When some people flee from God they rob and kill.

When some people convert to Christ they bomb abortion clinics.

When others flee from
God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex.

When others flee TO God, they have lots of pedophilia sex. Numbers 31:18.

When I fled from God I didn't do
any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid.

Sorry to hear it. My way of fleeing from God was not too different from the way I fled from the concept that the Bermuda Triangle is a gateway to another dimension: I simply rejected the concept and moved on with my life.

Though it always comes
as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be
highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull
down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a
doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and
evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even
taught these things to students; now that's sin.

Not at all, you Christians cannot even show that torturing babies to death solely for entertainment, is "objectively" immoral. That's pretty said given your presupposition that some human acts are objectively immoral.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself well, if
you are like I was, maybe you can what a person has to do to himself to go on
believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God's law is "written
on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness." The way natural law thinkers
put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means
that so long as we have minds, we can't not know them.

Nice to know you don't trifle about "work of the law" in Romans 2:15 as desperately as some apologists do.

Well, I was unusually
determined not to know them; therefore I had to destroy my mind. I resisted the
temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the
temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was
determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and
objective value. Think what this did to very capacity to love them. After all, love is
a commitment of the will to the true good of another person,

Which is precisely why it is ultimately subjective.

and how can one's
will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of
good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are in his
control?

He can't. But defining those matters as "subjective" doesn't equate to saying they don't exist. The time I put my kids to bed on a school night is a decision within the category of "moral", despite the fact that it is wholly subjective with no possible way of nailing down which precise bedtime is the "objective" one. So love can be "real" while also being subjective.

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the
components that have God's image stamped on them.

I thought I told you to lay off the drugs.

The problem is that they all
have God's image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how
much he pulls out, there's still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out
more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there
was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more
focussed. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was
smarter and braver than the people who didn't believe them. I thought I saw an
emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of
course I was the fool.
Escape Through Horror
How then did God bring me back? I came, over time, to feel a greater and greater
horror about myself. Not exactly a feeling of guilt, not exactly a feeling of shame,
just horror: an overpowering sense that my condition was terribly wrong. Finally it
occurred to me to wonder why, if there were no difference between the wonderful
and the horrible, I should feel horror.

Easy, you find one accords with your wishes, and the other opposes those wishes. We all wish to live, that's why we are horrified to think of another person taking our lives.

In letting that thought through, my mental
censors blundered. You see, in order to take the sense of horror seriouslyand by
now I couldn't help doing soI had to admit that there was a difference between the
wonderful and the horrible after all. For once my philosophical training did me
some good, because I knew that if there existed a horrible, there had to exist a
wonderful of which the horrible was the absence. So my walls of self-deception
collapsed all at once.
At this point I became aware again of the Savior whom I had deserted in my
twenties. Astonishingly, though I had abandoned Him, he had never abandoned
me.

The bible is not consistent on whether and to what extent God abandons those who walk away from him.

I now believe He was just in time. There is a point of no return, and I was
almost there. I said I had been pulling out one component after another, and I had
nearly got to the motherboard.
The next few years after my conversion were like being in a dark attic where I had
been for a long time, but in which shutter after shutter was being thrown back so
that great shafts of light began to stream in and illuminate the dusty corners. I
recovered whole memories, whole feelings, whole ways of understanding that I
had blocked out.
Of course I had to repudiate my dissertation. At the time I thought my career was
over because I couldn't possible retool, rethink, and get anything written and
published before my tenure review came up, but by God's grace that turned out to
be untrue.
Defending What I Had Denied
As an ethical an political theorist, what I do now is poles apart from what I did
sixteen years ago. What I write about now is those very moral principles I used to
denythe ones we can't not know because they are imprinted on our minds,
inscribed upon our consciences, written on our hearts.

Romans 2:15 says it is the work of the Law that is written on our hearts, which under bible inerrancy must mean Leviticus 21:9 is written on our hearts. Yet no Christian thinks it morally good to burn teenage prostitutes to death. I'd say you've got problems.

Some call these principles the "natural law." Such as it is, my own contribution to
the theory of natural law is a little different than those of some other writers. One
might say that I specialize in understanding the ways that we pretend we don't
know what we really do the ways we suppress our knowledge, the ways we hold it
down, the ways we deceive ourselves and others. I do not try to "prove" the natural
law as though one could prove that by which all else is proven; I do try to show
that in order to get anywhere at all, the philosophies of denial must always at some
point assume the very first principles they deny.

Not at all. You couldn't prove any act of a human to be objectively good or bad, to save your life. All you can do is reel in horror at the atheist who doesn't agree with you that torturing babies for fun is objectively immoral, call him a dangerous sociopath, and complain that the only opponents who count are those who already agree with you. That's a pretty sad case for objective morality, that you cannot prove it unless your opponent agrees with you on it.

It is a matter of awe to me that God has permitted me to make any contribution at
all. His promise is that if only the rebel turns to Jesus Christ in repentant faith,
giving up claims of self-ownership and allowing this Christ the run of the house,
He will redeem everything there is in it.

Some would argue you wouldn't bloom with so much god-pollen if terrorists kidnapped your daughter and sold her into sex slavery. There are very good reasons why "His mysterious ways" is nothing but a dogshit excuse.

Just so, it was through my rescue from
self-deception that I learned about self-deception. He has redeemed even my
nihilist past and put it to use.
Many of my students tell me they struggle with the same dark influences that I
once did. I hope that by telling the story of my own escape I may encourage them
to seek the light.
Copyright © J. Budziszewski

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Apologists have failed to debunk the usefulness of ECREE

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

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

Wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question. Who needs to provide evidence for their view?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, November 30, 2017

J. Warner Wallace denies the biblically proper response to mass-killing

This is my reply to a video by J. Warner Wallace entitled

How Should Christians Respond to Mass Shootings and Similar Events? (Podcast)

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 01:09 AM PST

In this podcast, J. Warner Wallace is interviewed by Frank Turek on his CrossExamined Radio Show. They discuss recent shootings and terrorist attacks and talk about possible responses that Christians can offer. How can we respond to the problem of moral evil in general and issues related to violence and gun control?

There is no need, the bible makes it perfectly certain, at least for Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy, that when crazy people go on a killing rampage, it is because they are being caused to do so by the biblical god who used to cause crazy people to beat children to death, rape women, and force pregnant women to endure abortion-by-sword. And no amount of trifling "God-works-through-secondary-causes-so-he-can-cause-evil-without-being-morally-culpable" bullshit can help the apologist save face:

Isaiah 13:13-18 13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, And the earth will be shaken from its place At the fury of the LORD of hosts In the day of His burning anger. 14 And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, Or like sheep with none to gather them, They will each turn to his own people, And each one flee to his own land.
15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold.
18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children.

Hosea 13:15-16 15 Though he flourishes among the reeds, An east wind will come, The wind of the LORD coming up from the wilderness; And his fountain will become dry And his spring will be dried up; It will plunder his treasury of every precious article.
16 Samaria will be held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, Their little ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be ripped open.

Quite obviously, Christians who think God "would never" cause women to be raped and little kids to be "dashed in pieces", simply haven't read their bible.

No, J. Warner Wallace, they were not "heresies"

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

Historic Heresies Related to the Nature of Jesus

Posted: 27 Nov 2017 01:00 AM PST

Over the centuries, believers have sometimes struggled to understand the nature of God and the great mystery of Jesus.

No doubt because God did his level best to make the theological truth clear to the human mind.

The Bible describes Jesus as having the nature and power of God, and the Gospel of John tells us that He existed before the universe began (He was, in fact, the creator of the universe).

It also tells us there were aspects of his personal will that were in conflict with the Father's will. See Matthew 26:39. He would have no occasion to say "not my will..." if in fact his will was always 100% aligned with the Father's will. And you cannot limit his statement to merely his human nature because a) that is irrelevant, you do not believe Jesus could, solely in his human nature, desire things in conflict with the Father's will, and b) "nature" is by definition what a thing really is, so if Jesus really had two natures, Man and God, he could no speak apart from his divine nature, than YOU can speak apart from your human nature. Natures cannot be turned on and off like a light switch, so having more than one nature will not bequeath any such ability. So when Jesus says "not my will..." that is the second person of the Trinity or Logos saying that too.

At the same time, the Bible teaches Jesus was fully human and died on the cross. Efforts to reconcile the Divine and human nature of Jesus have resulted in a number of classic and historic misinterpretations:

Probably because the very notion of one person having both a divine and human nature is a self-contradiction, no matter how artfully dressed up in theologically deep gospel stories.

Adoptionism (2nd Century)
This heresy denies the pre-existence of Christ and therefore denies His Deity. It taught Jesus was simply a man who was tested by God and after passing the test was given supernatural powers and adopted as a son (this occurred at His baptism). Jesus was then rewarded for all He did (and for His perfect character) with His own resurrection and adoption into the Godhead.
Leader(s) in the Heresy: Theodotus of Byzantium Corrector(s) of the Heresy: Pope Victor (190-198AD)

First, Acts 13:33 places God's begetting of Jesus at the resurrection, by using Psalm 2:7 as a proof-text, when in fact Psalm 2:7 was typically used in pre-Christian Judaism as an official designation of the human king:

33 that God has fulfilled this promise to our children in that He raised up Jesus, as it is also written in the second Psalm, 'YOU ARE MY SON; TODAY I HAVE BEGOTTEN YOU.' (Acts 13:33 NAU)

Second, while the canonical text of Luke 3:22 says

"and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came out of heaven,

"You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased." (Lk. 3:22 NAU)

...an early and widely attested textual variant for Luke 3:22 strongly supports adoptionism:

"You are My beloved Son, this day have I begotten you." (

R.H. Stein was an evangelical inerrantist Christian scholar who wrote the commentary for Luke in the inerrancy-driven New American Commentary. Notice how how he breezes by the textual problem with nearly zero commentary on the textual evidence for the adoptionist reading:

You are my Son, whom I love. It is unclear whether this is an allusion to Ps 2:7, although a few Western manuscripts (Codex Beza and the Itala) make this explicit by adding “this day I have begotten you.” The latter, however, is a scribal addition. The voice from heaven clearly reveals a unique relationship between Jesus and God and refers to Jesus’ past as well as present status with God. The voice did not confer upon Jesus a new status, so we should not see here some kind of adoptionist Christology. Rather, the voice confirmed what the readers read already in Luke 1:32–35 and 2:49, i.e., that Jesus was the Son of God before his baptism. In light of 20:13 “whom I love,” i.e., beloved , may mean only . With you I am well pleased. This is a possible allusion to Isa 42:1.

Luke 3:22, Stein, R. H. (2001, c1992). Vol. 24: Luke (electronic ed.). Logos Library System;

The New American Commentary (Page 140). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Bruce Metzger's importance to the field of NT textual criticism cannot be underestimated, especially by Christians since he himself was a Christian. What he has to say about the adoptionist textual variant for Luke 3:22 indicates the early and wide textual support for that reading is just a bit stronger than Stein had let on, supra:

3.22 Su. ei= o` ui`o,j mou o` avgaphto,j( evn soi. euvdo,khsa {B}

The Western reading, “This day I have begotten thee,” which was widely current during the first three centuries, appears to be secondary, derived from Ps 2.7. The use of the third person (“This is…in whom …”) in a few witnesses is an obvious assimilation to the Matthean form of the saying (Mt 3.17).

A Textual Commentary On The Greek New Testament, 2nd Ed.

Stein also doesn't tell the presumably inerrantist reader that Justin Martyr quotes Luke 3:22 as if he had no reason to think this adoptionist reading was a corruption:

but then the Holy Ghost, and for man’s sake, as I formerly stated, lighted on Him in the form of a dove, and there came at the same instant from the heavens a voice, which was uttered also by David when he spoke, personating Christ, what the Father would say to Him: ‘Thou art My Son: this day have I begotten Thee;’ [the Father] saying that His generation would take place for men, at the time when they would become acquainted with Him: ‘Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten thee.’”

Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, end of ch. 88