Denialism

In the latter half of the 20^th century, an important development in religious epistemology changed the sort of debate that theists and atheists have been having.  This much was not new:  for centuries, when believers were confronted with challenges, it has become common to simply deny that evidence, reason, logic, arguments, or justifications are relevant or applicable to something as marvelous and transcendent as God.  That anti-intellectual and arational trend in religious circles has been tempered by a more sober view in natural theology that God’s existence and nature can be known and understood through reason and that successful arguments for God’s existence can be given. 

But for many, including people who were once in the tradition, the natural theological project is dead.  The vast majority of philosophers, even ones who believe, do not think that a successful argument for God’s existence can be given.  Knowledge of God can be had by other less conventional methods, however.  Plantinga and the reformed epistemologists now claim that they know God by way of an inner voice, a sensus divinitatus, or the “witness of the Holy Spirit,” that informs them of God directly, non-inferentially, and they say, the knowledge comes in a way that external appeals to evidence, reason, or empirical facts cannot undermine.  The details need not concern us here. 

What should concern all of us, theists and atheists alike, is a strong disposition in human beings to get caught up in an ideology that renders us incapable of reasoning clearly, particularly about that ideology itself.  Beware of positions, like conspiracy theories, that build answers to why they don’t appear to be true into the essential claims of the ideology itself.  We are organic beings, with kludgey equipment that is prone to go off the rails frequently.  Given our fallible cognitive faculties, it is an enormous challenge to sustain any level of intellectual freedom and cognitive integrity.  We’re more prone by our natures to get it wrong, and get it wrong in a big way, than to get it right. 

One of the ways that an ideology infects our minds and consume us is by exploiting our propensity to explain away any counter evidence in order to hang onto views we are emotionally commited to.  We’ve all seen it, of course, and we’ve all felt the urge to hold onto some pet idea even when it is clear that it’s a mistake. 

But the nature of this impulse is coming into focus with recent efforts in empirical psychology.  Geoffrey Munro of Towson University recently showed that when we are confronted with scientific, empirical evidence that challenges a position we favor, we are more likely to reject science altogether and claim that it cannot be employed to address questions of that type at all. The Scientific Impotence Excuse:  Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts.  Munro took test subjects with views about stereotypes, such as homosexuality.  Subjects were tested beforehand to determine what views they held.  Then they were given fake abstracts of scientific studies that purported to either prove or disconfirm the stereotype.  So some studies indicated that homosexuals had a higher rate of mental illness, for example, while others indicated that their rate of mental illness was lower.  Not surprisingly, the subjects who read abstracts that supported their preconceived views concluded that their views had been vindicated.  But something remarkable happened with the the subjects who had their prior views challenged.  Rather than acknowledge that they were mistaken and change their minds, these subjects were much more likely to conclude that proving (or disproving) the thesis simply couldn’t be done by science.  They rejected science itself, rather than give up their cherished idea. 

Contradictions, counter-indications, improbabilities bother us.  They create cognitive dissonance.  See The Forbidden Conclusion.  Our minds need resolution to the conflict.  One way (the poor way, in this case) is to just reject the source of information that is creating the dissonance.  If scientific methods themselves are suspect, then there is less strain on my belief system when I continue to hold views that it rejects. 

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with seeking to have a more coherent, less contradictory worldview. Quite the contrary, we should all be doing more of that.  But the model of reality that we construct in our heads should be as consonant and responsive to as many of the known facts as possible.  One can have a highly internally consistent picture of reality that is detached from reality.  But what we should be striving to do is to incorporate as much of what known into whatever worldview we adopt. 

We can imagine some scheme whereby one of the subjects in the study might think their way out of the problem.  “Sure, this authentic looking and authoritative sounding scientific study says that homosexuals have a lower rate of mental illness, but I know different from my own experience.”  (Other studies have demonstrated how strong our tendency is to accept anecdotal and personal experience over abstract, scientific analyses.  See Jonathan Baron's  Thinking and Deciding.  But what our subject has failed to realize is how unreliable reasoning about general epidemiological and stratitistical trends from personal and anecdotal evidence can be.  Even if the scientific study is a fake, it’s methodology is superior to our subject’s method.  So it should have lead him to reject his prior view, not science itself. 

The application to religious belief is obvious.  Sustaining the view that there is an invisible, undetectable, almighty, all knowing, and infinitely loving being who exists in another plain of reality from ours is incredibly difficult in an age where science has shown us so much and when naturalism has “won” as the theologians lament.  Believing in God cannot be had easily or readily given the other things we know.  So for many people who believe, the answer is to simply reject the source that is telling them different. 

Recently in some of the debates about the resurrection, beleivers confronted me with the works of N.T. Wright, a Christian historical apologist.  One of Wright’s theses is that the New Testament Jews simply could not have come up with the idea of a bodily resurrection on their own.  The only way they would have ever produced the idea is if Jesus himself gave it to them by actually returning from the dead.  Wright presents a masterful argument filled with historical arguments and citations.  As long as the historical evidence appears to be in favor of his view, he’s eager to employ its methods.  But deep within his works, the truth about his commitment to historical methods and the resurrection comes out.  Ultimately when he is faced with serious historical challenges to making the case for the resurrection, Wright recommends that the real problem is the historical method and that we should put the belief in Jesus first. 

“If we attempt to argue for the historical truth of the resurrection on standard historical grounds, have we not allowed historical method, perhaps including its hidden Enlightenment roots, to become lord, to set the bounds of what we know, rather than allowing God himself, Jesus himself, and indeed the resurrection itself, to establish not only what we know but how we can know it?” (Jesus' Resurrection and Christian Origins)

That is, since we  know that Jesus was real, then we can be assured that the only acceptable historical methods for proving that Jesus was real must be ones that prove that he was real.  If our historical methods do not produce the correct conclusion, then it must be the methods, not the conclusion that are wrong. 

Wright gives us just one example of an academic scholar dressing the fallacy up to make it seem more presentable.  Putting lipstick on the pig, as it were.  The other instances of the comparable mistake in the religious rationalizations are countless. 

The hazards of simply rejecting reality when it doesn’t suit our preferences should be equally obvious.  The Munro study gives us a stern warning about the cognitive pitfalls we are prone to, and the application to religious cases shows us how seductive a supernatural ideology can be. 

Frequently, people make the charge against atheism or science that it is some form of religious faith too.  Perhaps they are thinking that if science is just as much an ideology, then there’s nothing so wrong with adopting an equally groundless religious one instead.  That would be a mistake.  But more important, what Munro and Wright show us is that there is a fundamental difference between science and religion that people are missing.  The point of religiousness is to believe particular doctrinal claims.  Believing is the whole point of religiousness as Wright’s drawing his line in the sand makes clear.  But science is a method for acquiring beliefs that is neutral with regard to what they are.  It tells us how to confirm or disconfirm what we think might be true.  Much of what religious institutions strive to do is to implant belief and then equip us with the means to reject anything that would conflict with them.  Preachers, priests, and rabbis cultivate believing of certain claims in their flocks.  Their charges are in need of protection; they need their faith strengthened against doubts that would undermine them.  Sermons, prayers, devotionals, and cermonies serve to fortify beliefs and behaviors in them that would not be sustained otherwise.  Doubt, criticisms, and objections are the point of the scientific method.  Finding reasons to reject a hypothesis makes it possible for us to make some provisional claims about what is true.  Without some methodological procedure for vetting hypotheses and separating the good from the bad, we can’t claim to have any justification for them.  The method of doubting is what justifies and keeps the floodgates of failed views closed.    

The Illusion of Moral Guidance from God

When we consider only our own cases and our own experience, it is easy to make serious errors in our reasoning that we wouldn’t if we approached the question from a more objective, empirical, and scientific perspective.  I take a large dose of vitamin C when I feel a cold coming on, the cold seems to be abated, so I conclude that megadoses of vitamin C prevent colds.  The anecdotal evidence and reasoning isn’t born out by the facts, however.  Large doses of vitamin C have not been found in large scale, double-blind, control group clinical trials.  

Something similar is going on when the Christian who is contemplating some serious moral question, studies his Bible, listens intently to his preacher, prays, and feels that he has received moral guidance from God.  

Some peculiarities of the human psyche are contributing to a powerful illusion that then feeds into the widespread view that it’s not possible to be moral without God, or that God provides the pious with moral guidance. 

Recent studies prove the point.  People change their moral views when asked to consider alternatives, then they cover up the change and portray their view as the same all along.  And people are more egocentric in their attributions of moral views to God than they are to other people.  That is, with God, not knowing so clearly what his view is, they are more likely to attribute their own moral view to him than someone like George Bush where they acknowledge that Bush has his own, likely different views from their own.

Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs.

Epley N, Converse BA, Delbosc A, Monteleone GA, Cacioppo JT.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19955414

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1-4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

In one of the most revealing studies, the researchers manipulated the subject’s moral views about some topic by having them write and deliver speeches for or against some position. The subjects’ attitudes about the position varied in parallel with the position they were assigned to defend, not suprisingly.  When you have to actually think hard about the other side, you tend to soften your stance or change your mind.  Have them deliver a speech in favor of the death penalty and their views shifted in favor of it, and have them present a case against it, and their views shift against it.  And when they were tested before and after the manipulation, it became clear that their assessment of God’s view of the position shifted too.  According to the subjects, God (and the subject) favored the death penalty more before the subject wrote and delivered a speech opposed to it, and then God’s view of it shifted against it afterwards along with the subject’s. 

But this shift in us and in our view of God tends to be invisible to us.  We don’t notice that we are changing our minds.  And then we don’t notice that we are rewriting history by attributing our current view to our former self and to what we previously thought about God’s views.  What we think God’s moral guidance is depends on what we are currently thinking about, and when our current thinking changes, God’s views do to, but we tend to see God’s views and our own as monolithic, unchanging.  “What I believe now, that’s what I always believed.  And that’s always been God’s commandment too.”  One of the places where you can actually observe this moral confabulation going on is in the shift of people’s attitudes about homosexuality, gay marriage, and civil and women’s rights.  Our culture has undergone a rapid shift on all of these views—in just a few generations many people have gone from being passionatly opposed to many of these developments and giving powerful religious justifications for them, to being much more liberal and subsequently arguing that the new views are in fact God’s views too. 

So what’s happening is that our moral inquiries are actually more rudderless than we know, and to ill effect.  There’s nothing wrong with changing our minds, or reflecting on new evidence.  Quite the contrary, we should gather as many relevant considerations as possible for moral decisions and then be prepared to alter our views.  What’s dangerous is being oblivious to the organic nature of how our cognitive faculties produce these ideas and being ignorant of our tenedency to create revisionist histories.  And what’s even more dangerous is the tendency to attribute these shifting moral decisions to an almighty, supernatural being who will enforce them, whatever they happen to be that day, with eternal damnation.  Putting God into the process adds a level of false certainty, and ignores its fluid, constructive nature.  It also ignores the fact that our moral judgments should be defeasible and that a moral principle or judgment that seemed to work well in the past may not capture the subtleties of evolving moral situations.  It would be insane to think that the moral principles that served a nomadic band of Iron Age peasants will serve us equally well in navigating the complicated moral status of different classes of embryonic stem cells in a 21^st centurey Berkeley laboratory.

 

The irony is that neither the Bible, nor God are actually making the substantial contribution to the content of the judgments that many people think.  The Christian is finding his own way through the moral problem, with the vague, metaphorical, and diverse ideas from theology and the text providing some opportunities for cognitive riffing.  The same thing could have been done just as well, and probably with better results, by studying Shakespeare, or George Elliot’s literature.  We approach a text and ponder some passage, “What does this mean?”  We talk about it, read other passages, think about things we’ve heard about it, draw connections, and out of this activity some lesson or theme emerges.  You’ve probably heard a preacher, priest, or rabbi engage in this very process out loud in a sermon. 

What the studies show is that God’s moral positions, because he’s not a concrete person who we know much about, are more or less a blank slate for this process of moral extemporizing.  And the studies also show that when our moral views drift, as they inevitably do, we tend to ignore or not notice the shift in our views, and we cover it up by thinking that God’s view was the same all along.  People can and do justify anything they like with any text they like.  And when the text is as convoluted, diverse, ambiguous, metaphorical, and large as the Bible, the opportunites are endless.

The persistent myth that the Bible is the inerrant, consistent word of God excacerbates this cluster of mistakes.  The text is a hopeless mashup of contradictions that have been documented over and over again.  Then if we were to carefully record what the fundamentalist Christian avows as God’s moral judgment on one day, and then compare that to what he insists is God’s perfect moral judgment about the same topic a year or 5 years later, the further inconsistencies of this faulty textual exegetical process would be even more apparent.  Going to God and the Bible for moral guidance the way many people do it piles contradictions, fallacies, and mistakes on top of fleeting and rationalized errors.  And yet the Christian insists through this convoluted mish mash that God is the only true source of morality.  This mistake is thinking of the moral query as a matter of just checking the divine rule book as if there are discrete, unambiguous, and consistent answers there, and then refusing to acknowledge that the process that produced the answer was highly subjective, variable, and contingent.  

Historical Double Standards

Historical Christians, or believers who think that the quality and quantity of historical evidence we have justifies our concluding that the resurrection really happened, are inclined to take the Bible as a reliable source of information about events in history.  There are a number of problems with the position, and specific challenges that I have outlined to the case for the resurrection are insurmountable.  But for the sake of argument, let’s accept the criteria of historical reliability that the Christian would have us apply to the Jesus case.  Now consider the conundrum that accepting some, but not all Biblical claims about historical events.  We know, beyond any reasonable historical doubt, that many other historical claims made by the Bible, such as the age of the Earth, the order and occurrence of animal life, the history of the universe, the lineage of the human race, basic biological facts about pregnancy, menstration, medicine, and other historical facts are wrong.  Given that so many other historical claims coming from the same book, with presumably the same historical virtues and lineage, are wrong, what are we to make of someone’s claims that the resurrection of Jesus is justified on the basis of the historical merits of the Bible.  

If the historical Christian acknowledges, as they should, that at least some of the many historical claims of the Bible are mistaken, but they insist that the claims about the resurrection are reliable, what exactly are the criteria that separates the categories?  Recent archeological evidence has overturned a number of important stories from the old Testament.  Many believe that the Jewish exodus from Egypt never occurred.  The existence of Moses and Abraham have come under serious doubt.  Not a bit of archeological evidence has been found to corroborate the opulent, influential, and vast reign of Solomon.  Even the use of camels in the Old Testament is reported thousands of years before there were any camels in the region.  See Daniel Lazare’s False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History, from Harper’s Magazine for a survey. 

So the dilemma for the Christian who would defend the historical resurrection is, under what circumstances, generally, can we accept Bible history and when should we reject it? The universe has existed for 13.7 billion years, with the earth not forming until about 4 billion years ago.  Life was present and evolving on Earth for billions of years before humans came onto the scene only recently.  Dinosaurs existed tens of millions of years before humans did.  There is simply no way to reconcile those clear facts with the stories about the origins of the Earth, life, and the universe in Genesis.  Humanity did not start with Adam and Eve 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, there was no great flood,  and so on.  We must either conclude that those  historical claims from the Bible are false, or perhaps they best understood metaphorically, mythically, or allegorically.  If the historically minded Christian acknowledges that they are false, then we would like to know what set of criteria of historical reliability requires that we reject one set of claims from the Bible but accept the resurrection stories?  If the historically minded Christian suggests that the origin stories are metaphorical, mythological, or allegorical, then again we want to know what are the criteria that indicate that those stories should not be taken as true, but the resurrection did occur.  And these criteria must not include any ad hoc or special pleading provisions; they should motivated by sound historical and epistemological reasoning.  

The  problems get compounded when we take these trumped up historical criteria and apply them to other religions.  The question becomes, what is the result when we apply these same criteria of historical reliability to the important books of the other religious traditions?  Will those criteria make it clear that the miraculous claims about Muhammed’s encounters with Allah are not reliable?  Will the principles that the Christian says show that Jesus’ resurrection was real also show that all of the other supernatural claims from historical sources in the ancient world were not?  I think it is obvious that without some creative ad hoc rationalizing, they will not.  

The simple and obvious fact is that the Christian cannot have their cake and eat it too here.  They cannot reasonably argue that the Bible is a reliable historical document concerning the magical return from the dead of Jesus, and then with the next breathe dismiss the host of other outrageous and false claims claims made by the Bible and other ancient religious documents.  The same criteria that lead us to reject the supernatural claims about the origins of Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and various other mistaken claims about the history of the Earth and humanity in the Bible should lead us to reject the resurrection of Jesus.  And if we acknowledge that the resurrection is not justified, then the entire edifice of Christian belief topples. 

Debating God

Some thoughts about my recent debate over the historical evidence for the resurrection.  First, thanks again to all those people who came, thought about the topic, offered comments and suggestions, and to Bridgeway Christian Church for having the maturity and courage to host it. 

This was the first debate I have done, and my general feeling now is that I’d be willing to do more.  But there’s something peculiar about debates and the whole debate culture over God and Christianity that does not sit well with me.  For many people, both debators and audiences, the point of a debate in their minds appears to be to win, where winning means something like giving the most rhetorically effective, and emotionally powerful  set of points and rebuttals in defense of your view.  Being rhetorically effective involves your demeanor, being nimble with your responses, being pithy or laconic, and having the appropirate sort of passion, among other things.  Quick, incisive responses can score big points in the minds of audiences, and can easily sway their estimation of who won.  These are only part of what’s effective in a debate, and not everyone is influenced by these factors equally.  But histrionics often eclipse clear reason, for the audience and the debators.  And histrionics figure largely in what we take away from the debate. 

A couple of obvious points suggest themselves about these aspects of debates.  First, as a trained philosopher I’m much more interested in what sort of overall view makes the most sense, what arguments support it, and what the problems with it are.  All of that can rarely be fairly captured in the rather contrived format of a debate.  At best, a debate is going to give you a somewhat skewed snapshot of the complete philosophical argument behind the position being presented.  And the philosophical merits of the position may well be obscured by the artifice of the debate structure.  Ultimately the most reasonable position can come across very poorly in a debate, and a completely flawed and bankrupt position can appear to be brilliant.   

This will sound naively idealistic of me, but our first goal in these efforts ought to be to figure out what’s true and what conclusions the best available evidence supports, period.  It’s empowering and seductive to be swept into the rhetorical aspects of debates, but that takes us off track.  On some views, the Sophists were regarded by the Greeks as people possessing remarkable debating and argumentative skill, but their sole purpose was to confound, perplex, and best their opponents, no matter what the content.  They were relativists about the truth and knowledge, and took great pleasure in tying all opponents in knots with their debating skill.  Socrates was executed over suspicions about his alleged sophistry.  The worst and ugliest modern version would be the hired gun lawyer with no principles who puts her legal mastery and rhetorical skill to work for any client willing to pay without regard to any larger moral principles about justice. 

After having read much of his work, and watched many of his debates and videos, I’m of two minds about William Lane Craig, who is a dominate figure in the Christian debating circuit.  On the one hand, Craig is a decent philosopher who generates some arguments of interest in the growing state of the discipline.  But on the other hand, Craig has indicated on many occasions that there are no circumstances, even hypothetically, under which he would be prepared to change his mind about certain basic propositions of Christian theology.  The “self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit” has given him a special knowledge, he maintains, that is incorrigible and therefore beyond any possibility of error.  He also has considerable rhetorical and debating abilities that have been honed with hundreds debates.  He is a master of manipulating or reframing the discussion and scoring points that are rhetorically effective, but on reflection seem to have little real philosophical merit.  On this darker side of Craig’s work, it would appear that this agenda of defending his Christian convictions at all costs, and by whatever rhetorical or argumentative means necessary has eclipsed his concerns about truth and reason.  He will insist that the Holy Spirit has given him unassailable access to the truth, but until I understand how a special feeling inside your head can do this all by itself, I’m deeply suspicious. See this video for his take on it:  Craig on Faith

Given Craig’s centrality in the recent Christian debate culture, it was inevitable that people would suggest his work to me, recomment I read his articles, watch his debates, and it was even suggested that I should debate him.  And in many of my recent blog posts, his arguments have been brought up.  My short answer is this:  it’s a mistake for serious philosophical atheists to devote too much time and energy to dealing with Craig because he’s a person in this field who seems to be shouting the loudest and the most.  Craig’s arguments have been dealt with at length and with devastating consequences by many people, including myself.  Craig is rarely deterred by any of these critiques, and he is not prone to acknowledge any objection or weakness no matter how clearly it has been illustrated.  But we shouldn’t mistake his pitbull persistence and rhetorical skill in defending Christianity for something other than what it is.  The unassailability of Christianity in his mind bestows a weird kind of pointlessness to his debates.  As he and his followers see it, debates can only serve to corroborate what they already know is true—Jesus is lord.  If Craig “wins,” which he often does given his skill, then that just vindicates Christian belief once again, if he doesn’t (and few of his supporters would acknowledge that this ever happens), it doesn’t matter because he would never change his mind, and the private, magical, Holy Spirit knowledge he has in his mind makes any consideration of arguments or the evidence irrelevant.  At this point, given what he’s said about the indefeasibilty of Christian belief, I’m not inclined to take anything that Craig or his followers say seriously until I’m convinced that they are playing the same game with the same rules of rationality that the rest of us are.  An essential principle of rationality, as I see it, is that all beliefs are defeasible, and subject to the tribunal of reason.  If I start claiming to have a special magical voice in my mind that tells me there is no God, and that this knowledge is invulnerable to any disproof or counter evidence, you would be right to dismiss me as a lunatic.  You have my permission to commit me to a mental hospital if that happens.   

The question about just what a debate is supposed to do is vitally important too.  In religious matters, it’s naïve to think that many people who watch and think about a debate will have their minds changed by what transpires in the discussion.  If the topic of the debate was about a matter that an audience member had not already formed opinions about, and one that is not as emotional, then it could happen that someone could listen closely and then form a considered conclusion on the basis of the debate that they did not have before. But we all know that this is exceedingly rare in religious matters.  People come to the debate deeply entrenched in a set of views about the matter, and they are prone read the success or failure of the debators by the extent to which their positions and arguments corroborate what the listener already thought was true.  Democrats invariably figure that the Democratic candidate won the debate, Republicans think the Republican candidate won, with only a tiny minority shifting their views on the basis of what they heard.  My suspicion is that that minority is even smaller in religious debates and that any shifting is even smaller in magnitude.  I’ve mentioned this study before that shows how confrontation with substantial evidence that contradicts their actually results in believers being more entrenched  in their views. 

One of the ways that the bias emerges in these situations is that the theist who listens, for instance, applies a harsher, more critical, and more careful set of standards to the atheistic arguments, and then he relaxes those same standards with regard to the arguments for theism.  And many atheists appear to be just as guilty of this double standard problem.  In fact, this is just a human problem.  We bring a belief structure to the evidence and we are prone to evaluate that evidence in ways that will make it consistent with the belief structure.  Instead of carefully considering the evidence first and then forming a conclusion, the conclusion leads, and we distort the evidence in order to corroborate it.  A related phenomena is our proclivity to identify bias in others, while being reluctant to attribute it to ourselves.  See Pronin, Gilovich, and others in this list of sources.  

At the same time the non-believers are shaking their heads and complaining to each other, “How can the believers possibly believe that nonsense?,” the believers are commiserating with each other about how wrong headed the nonbelievers’ approach is. 

In fact, after the debate, I drifted across several conversations between clustered believers and non-believers who were expressing just these sentiments.  I resisted the temptation to get drawn into several “Can you believe how stupid they are?” discussions that non-believers were having and deliberately tried to engage  many of the believers to get their thoughts about the arguments.  The bias attribution bias makes it difficult and sometimes unhelpful when I’m presenting arguments for non-belief to non-believers.  They love the argument no matter what it is because of the conclusion, so often they can’t help me figure out what’s wrong with it nearly as well as some believers can.  It’s for this same reason that my philosophy department where there are atheists, Catholics, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, and Fidiests (and a lot of collegeality) is an incredibly stimulating environment.  A department full of atheists would quickly lead to stagnation and intellectual breeding.  The pitfalls of intellectual inbreeding are exactly why believers and non-believers should be seeking out these exchanges of ideas like we had in the debate.  I’d love to do it again ten times next year in the biggest churches Russell and I can find. 

That said, I do think that debates, discussions, and arguments can change minds.  But the process can be a slow one.  At any given time in a person’s intellectual history, their belief structure has a great deal of inertia.  If we are talking about abstract, philosophical or religious convictions, the network of things you believe resists sudden changes.    Neurobiologically, this torpor can be traced to developed activation thresholds between neurons.  Over time, neurons that fire together, wire together.  Neurochemical pathways inside neurons and between them get well worn, and metabolically entrenched.  But most importantly, neurons, even when we get old, are plastic and can change, grow new connections, form new networks.  That requires varied input and varied stimulus.  And it requires time.  So here’s my hope about what the essays on my blog, the debate, my lectures, and all the work I’ve done on this topic.  My hope is to be part of a shift in thinking that leads to greater intellectual liberation in some members of my audience.  My hope is that something I’ve said will stick, some idea or image or analogy will be remembered, in the mind of someone who is not completely lost to a consciousness devouring ideology, and it will be part of a process that will lead them greater intellectual freedom.  My goal, ironically, isn’t even to create a bunch of atheists.  Unreflective, ideologue atheists who have been enslaved by the idea that religion and belief in God  are evil (and I’ve met a lot of these) are just as lost and objectionable as the Christian who has been too swept up in the agenda to reason straight.  

Is It Reasonable to Believe that Jesus Came Back from the Dead

Videos of the debate that I did last week with Prof. Russell DiSilvestro are now up on YouTube here:

Did Jesus Return From the Dead?

Unfortunately with the time limits on the length of videos on YouTube, the debate has been cut into 12 parts.  But I think you'll find the material interesting and important.  

Mark (last name?) at SacFan went to all the trouble to film and edit this for YouTube.  Many thanks.  

The Implications of the Historical Jesus Question

          For Christians to take the historical case for Jesus’ resurrection seriously is a surprising and, on the whole, positive thing.  By even engaging in the discussion about whether or not we have sufficient evidence to think that Jesus came back from the dead suggests a number of important presumptions.  First, and most obviously, engaging the topic indicates that you think the evidence matters.  This is a vast improvement over the host of peculiar, and a-rational accounts of belief and its functions that have proliferated in the post-modern era.  There are Wittgensteinian, Fideistic, Kierkegaardian, Tillich-ian, and Plantinga style approaches among many others, where, in one form or another, a straight up appeal to the facts is not considered necessary or even important to the grounding of religious belief.  They aren’t interested in what actually happened or what our evidence is.  As I see it, the insufficiency of the evidence for the resurrection utterly undermines the whole edifice of Christianity; as these non-evidentialist thinkers see it, the lack of evidence doesn’t matter in the slightest.  So for the Christian to take the question seriously with those views in the background represents a huge step forward.  It would seem that the historical believer and I agree about the basics at least:  whether or not we have adequate historical evidence for thinking that Jesus was real and that he returned from the dead after being executed matters.  

Second, what a willingness to engage in the discussion about the historical evidence also suggests is that this believer is prepared, at least in principle, to change her mind if that is indicated by the evidence.  She thinks that since the historical facts are X, Y, and Z, then presumably, she would admit that if those had been different—if Gospels were different, or if different archeological evidence had been found, or if the facts about how the story of the resurrection came to be known by us was different--then that would warrant her concluding that Jesus was not resurrected.  So if the historically minded Christian believes that the facts about the  Jewish oral tradition, or the history of the early church, or the things that Paul wrote in his letters all help to fortify the case for the resurrection, then we must assume that if some of those facts had been different, then she would acknowledge that the case for Jesus is not very good.  You can’t have it both ways.  You can’t argue that all historical evidence, no matter what it had turned out to be, supports your thesis no matter what or you’re not really giving a historical argument at all.  And you can’t just employ those historical facts that suit you while ignoring the ones that are more uncomfortable. 

If the historical Christian is being intellectually honest with herself and with us, then she must be prepared to accept that the historical evidence could, in principle, disprove the existence or resurrection of Jesus too.  That’s what gives her argument force (if it has any at all).  She can say to the non-believer, “Look, you’re not being reasonable.  Here is ample evidence that shows that the things that I believe are true.  When we consider all of the relevant facts, they show that Jesus was real, and he was resurrected.  Not believing in the face of this evidence is irrational.  So failing to be a Christian is irrational.”  (I freely admit that this is a rare and peculiar breed of Christian, but this view has some virtues that shouldn’t be ignored.)  A really good question for the historical Christian, then, as I have been coming back to again and again here, is “what sort of historical evidence (or lack thereof) would lead you to conclude that Jesus was not resurrected?”  If the answer is that there is nothing that could dissuade them, then there’s something seriously amiss.  The same goes for the non-believer like myself who argues that there is insufficient historical evidence to prove the resurrection.  What would convince me that it did happen?  I’m pretty sure that there could be a sufficient historical case that I would find convincing.  The problem is, however, that the evidence we actually have is orders of magnitude worse in quantity and quality than it needs to be to meet that burden.

Another interesting aspect of the situation with the historical Christian is that she probably already acknowledges many cases in history where we have comparable evidence for the occurrence of some alleged supernatural event, but she does not think we should accept that evidence at face value.  At the Salem Witch trials, during the Inquisition, at the founding of many world religions, and in many other ancient histories there are tales of magic, witchcraft, demon possession, visions of angels, the voices of gods, and miraculous events, but viewing them from our vantage we do not conclude that any of them were real.  Richard Carrier points out that in Herodotus’ book on the Persian Wars, he reports without a hint of doubt “that the temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated armaments, lightning bolts, and collapsing cliffs; the sacred olive tree of Athens though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm’s length in a single day; a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon; a horse gave birth to a rabbit; and a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish.”  But the historical Christian will readily acknowledge that there was no witchcraft at Salem, black magic during the Inquisition, confrontations with the angel Moroni, or a mass resurrection of cooked fish.  The skeptical principles that we apply to historical reports about fantastic, supernatural, and implausible events must be applied with uniformity to all historical cases, not just to those that we wish to reject because of prior religious convictions.  See my posts on the Salem Witch Trials for much more. 

The other implication of the historical approach to Jesus is that one’s belief in Jesus now hangs entirely on the contingent and shifting state of the historical evidence.  If some important find is dug up tomorrow that has significant implications for the Jesus story--an authentic, lost Gospel where Jesus says that he is going to fake his own death and resurrection, or something of that nature—then the believer would have to change her mind. 

I suspect, however, that the mind changing is not likely to happen with many believers, even ones who insist that their belief in based on the historical evidence for Jesus.  For many believers, they will engage in the discussion about the historical Jesus and they will argue vigorously for the positive conclusion as long as it suits them.  But no argument and no historical evidence could in practice actually dissuade them.  If that is the case for a given believer, then this discussion is actually undertaken in bad faith, as it were.  This is a believer for whom the evidence doesn’t really matter, she just says that it does.  She’s deceiving us, and possibly herself by saying otherwise.  Many of these believers will happily concur with any pro-Jesus argument from history that they hear, while treating any historically skeptical argument about Jesus with an artificially high level of criticism.  Prior enthusiasm and commitment to a Christian ideology when brought to the historical question of Jesus creates a non-disconfirmable position.  Pro-historical argumentation is accepted with little critical scrutiny, while anti-historical arguments meet with inordinately high levels of skepticism and criticism.  All historical evidence is to the greater glory of God. 

As a result, the faux historical believer and the historical non-believer are actually playing two very different games, although one or both of them may not realize it.  The faux historical believer is cheating—there is no outcome in which she doesn’t win.  If she’s arguing for the historical evidence, but in practice she wouldn’t actually accept a good historical argument against Jesus, then, in effect, the only historical arguments that she will accept are the ones that support her conclusion.  She believes, and she would believe no matter what the state of the historical facts.  So the time and energy spent on the discussion could have been better spent by both parties. 

Let me be more specific about how the deck gets stacked in favor of one’s favored conclusion.   We now have a mountain of empirical evidence that confirms what everyone who’s had one of these conversations already knows: humans have a very strong tendency to find evidence for the conclusion that they favor.  That is, our beliefs and the evidence we find to justify them are distorted in the direction of our desires.  This can be abundantly evident when the Christian comes to the historical Jesus debate with a strong prior conviction that Jesus was real and that he really was resurrected.  If that prior enthusiasm is present, then it’s not hard to find, skew, or misrepresent the evidence in a way that pads it in your favor.  Furthermore, the distortions often happen completely without your awareness.   Here’s are two telling questions:  how frequently does someone become a Christian as a result of his considering the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?  I’m not asking about how often are people led to Christianity by reading the Bible, but rather from consulting the historical arguments that would establish that anything stated in the Bible is true?  By contrast, how often does someone adopt the Christian views held by his parents from his childhood, and then conclude that there is a compelling historical case for the existence and resurrection of Jesus? 

Here’s a tiny portion of empirical evidence about the effects of desire on belief formation and evidence gathering, taken from Jonathan Baron’s Thinking and Deciding. 

McGuire, W. J.  (1960).  A syllogistic analysis of cognitive relationships.  In M.J. Rosenberg, C. I. Hovland, W.J. McGuire, R. P. Abelson, and J.W. Brehm (eds), Attitude organization and change(pp. 65-111).  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press. 

Svenson, O.  (1981).  Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 47, 143-148. 

Weinstein, N.  (1980).  Unrealistic optimism about future life events.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39 806-820. 

Babad, E.  and Katz, Y (1991).  Wishful Thinking—against all odds.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21, 1921-1938. 

Weeks, J.C.  Cook, E.F., O’Day, S.J., Peterson, L.M., Wenger, N., Reding, D., Harrell, F.E., Kussin, P.,  Dawson, N.V., Connors, A.F., Jr., Lynn, J., and Phillips, R.S.  (1998).  Relationship between cancer patients’ predictions of prognosis and their treatment preferences.  Journal of the American Medical Association,  279, 1709-1714. 

Lowin, A.  (1967)  Approach and avoidance:  Alternative modes of selective exposure to information.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 1-9. 

Frey, D.  (1986).  Recent research on selective exposure to information.  In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp 41-80).  New York:  Academic Press. 

Brenner, L.A., Koehler, D.J., and Tversky, A.  (1996). On the evaluationof one-sided evidence.  Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 9, 59-70. 

So the real question that is more fundamental than the historical evidence for Jesus is, did you come to the historical debate to confirm what you already believed, namely that Jesus was resurrected miraculously, or do you come to the historical debate prepared to accept the results of applying fair, uniform, and appropriately skeptical standards of reasonableness whatever results they may indicate? I’m really only interested in discussing it with the latter. 

Carrier, Richard.  “Why the Resurrection is Unbelievable,”  in The Christian Delusion, ed. John Loftus.  Amherst, NY:  Prometheus Books, 2010.  291-292

Objections: Doesn’t the Case Against the Resurrection Make You a History Skeptic? And Preserving the Jesus Story through the Jewish Oral Tradition

Ken Pulliam has offered this comment about my plan to debate the resurrection soon in Sacramento.  The questions are good and important, and can’t be easily dealt with in the comments section of the previous post.  So I’ll give a more complete answer.  Ken’s comment:

This is excellent and you are right on target. 2 considerations: 1) Some will say that if what you are saying is correct, we can know nothing about ancient history and very little about more modern history, this objection needs to be anticipated and answered. 2) While your opponent may not raise it, some Christians have argued that the telephone game is a completely erroneous analogy because of the Jewish method of passing along oral tradition. It is believed that they memorized the teaching of the rabbis verbatim and were careful to pass it down verbatim. While this may have been true of SOME Jewish disciples, to argue that it was true of Jesus' disciples is another matter. They were fishermen, "blue collar" people if you will for the most part and had not been trained as some of the more educated and hand selected disciples of the leading rabbis had. A great source on Oral Tradition in general is Oral Tradition as History by Jan Vansina(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

In addition, on the subject of Eyewitness Testimony, an article was just published this month rebutting the book by Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It is entitled: “How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research” Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010) 177-197. 

Thanks Ken.  These are great questions.  This is right, there may be the objection that if we apply my critical standards to other ancient historical sources, we’ll have to reject them too.  My short answer is that if those other historical bodies of evidence are as poor as what we have for the resurrection, then we’d be right to be skeptical. 

But the more serious answer involves some of the details of my critique of the case for the resurrection.  Why not reject the claim that Caesar crossed the Rubicon too on the basis of my historical skepticism?  Well, the situations are not analogous.  In my argument against the resurrection, the biggest factors that undermine the reliability of the transmission process that brings the Jesus stories to us all involve the question of supernatural, magical, or paranormal events.  The case I make against the alleged eyewitnesses depends in large part on what I’m calling the Lourdes Problem.  

We know from Lourdes France that people are remarkable unreliable when it comes to miracle claims.  That is, people have different levels of reliability depending on the subject matter, their competence, and a number of other factors.  When illiterate, Iron Age religious converts make claims about supernatural events occurring, we’d do well to be very skeptical of them.  In fact, because of their era, their lack of knowledge, and their ignorance about a host of relevant psychological factors, we should be even more skeptical of them than we are about modern religious converts.  And what the Lourdes, France example shows us (along with a lot of other contemporary religious and paranormal testimonies) is that perhaps only one in millions of people who claims the have witnessed a miracle actually has.  At Lourdes a panel of only modestly skeptical “experts” established by the Catholic Church has recognized a mere 67 authentic miracles out of the thousands that they have considered, and of the millions of people who have gone there and thought they saw a miracle.  Other examples, as I have outlined in many previous posts, give us more reasons to doubt miracle testimony.  But when people make claims like, “Caesar crossed the Rubicon,” the nature of the event and absence of some of the religious/psychological and educational factors that undermine the miracle claim are not present.  That’s why, if we apply my argument to the origins of Islam with Mohammed’s visions from Allah, or Joseph Smith’s rapturous encounters with the angel Moroni that produced Mormonism, the obvious answer is that we should be highly dubious.  The argument I’m giving would be uncontroversial to most people if I was pressing for the conclusion that there was no real black magic at Salem, Mass., or that the heretics tried and tortured by the Inquisition were not possessed by demons or guilty of witchcraft.  I’m giving a more rigorous account of why we reject lots of historical magic claims, and of course that applies to the alleged return from the dead by Jesus in the first century too.  I have several other points to make in the presentation about why ancient testimony about supernatural events is much more unreliable than many other sorts of claims that we accept from ancient people. 

What about the second question:  Does the Jewish Oral tradition give the historically minded Christian some hope of proving the reliability of the people who brought us the Jesus stories?  I don’t think so for several reasons.  First, as far as I understand it, the Rabbinical oral tradition had a very specific purpose that was antithetical in several ways to the Jesus resurrection story.  The oral tradition was preserved for a set of specific laws given to the Jews by God from Moses.  These laws were to be committed to memory and passed on in a very deliberate fashion from Rabbi to student under specific circumstances.  And the context was confined to these laws and some of their elaborations.  It’s far fetched, to say the least, to suggest that the Jews would violate the centuries old customs of this tradition and immediately fold in a story about a renegade Jew with some radical teachings that amount to an overthrowing of the Jewish religious doctrine.  The oral tradition wasn’t for outrageous stories, and it wasn’t used for stories about a heretic who was rejecting traditional Judaism. 

Furthermore, it’s well established that in the first few centuries after his death, the early followers were engaging is a great deal of open, free development of writings about the new religion.  Here’s what Kurt and Barbara Aland, respected scholars on this topic, have to say:

“Until the beginning of the fourth century the text of the NT developed freely.  It was a “living text,”  unlike the text of the Hebrew Old Testament, which was subject to strict controls because (in the oriental tradition) the consonantal text was holy.  And the NT text continued to be a “living text” as long as it remained a manuscript tradition, even when the Byzantine church molded it to the procrustean bed of an ecclesiastically standardized and officially prescribed text.  Even for later scribes, for example, the parallel passages of the Gospels were so familiar that they would adapt the text of one Gospel to that of another.  They also felt themselves free to make corrections in the text, improving it by their own standards of correctness, whether grammatically, stylistically, or more substantively.  This was all the more true of the early period, when the text had not yet attained canonical status, especially in the earliest period when Christians considered themselves filled with the Spirit.”  The Text of the New Testament:  An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism

The point is that there was a great deal of talk, the story was spreading by word of mouth among Jews and non-Jews, from city to city.  By the 3^rd and 4^th centuries, there are thousands of manuscripts of different sorts in circulation that contained a wide variety of stories, anecdotes, sermons, and  metaphysical speculations about Jesus and his teachings.  In fact, as the modern Bible was canonized, thousands of these other documents, with their varied accounts that often contradicted the Bible account outright, were deliberately excluded.  We know that all manner of stories were proliferating and that there was a self-conscious attempt with canonization to settle on one account at the exclusion of the others.  Given this proliferation of stories, free talk, and upheaval of traditional Judaism, it won’t do to insist that an obscure and conservative Jewish tradition would have given us a clear, high fidelity line back to the original event of the resurrection. Finally, I’ll just make an appeal to your common sense.  We all know good and well how much people will talk, especially about some extraordinary event, and how the telling and retelling of stories through many people amplifies the distortions and variations on themes.  People just aren’t that good at carefully preserving the exact details of a story they have heard, even when the event is perceived to be of enormous significance. 

Shortly after the news of the space shuttle Challenger disaster went out, Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch had students in a psychology class write an account of where they were and what they were doing when they found out. Then two and a half years later, they had those students write another record of what they were doing when they heard the news. It is significant that before they saw the earlier record, the students predicted that their memories were accurate. But when the two accounts were compared, the details matched in fewer than 10% of the paired accounts.More than 75% of the accounts had significant errors, some of them dramatic. Yet, even when confronted with this clear evidence to the contrary, many students refused to believe that their later memories were inaccurate.

Neisser, Ulric and Nicole Harsch, “Phantom Flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger” in Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser, eds. Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of “flashbulb” memories (Cambridge U Press, 1992), 9-31.

There are more details about the empirical evidence that shows how bad we are at preserving records of important events in this earlier post:  Remembering God

So once again, thanks Ken.  Unless I’m really missing something, I’m not overly concerned about these two objections.  

An Accumulation and Amplification of Doubts

It’s not uncommon for critics of the Jesus story to cite the Telephone Game as an analogy for why we should doubt the information we have about him.  In the Telephone Game, a group of children sit in a circle.  The first kid whispers a sentence into the ear of the second, the second whispers it to the third and so on.  When the last kid compares notes with the first one, the original sentence has often been warped beyond recognition.   The analogy is supposed to be to the long series of people that the Jesus story passed through from the alleged eyewitnesses, to those who repeated the story, to the authors of the Gospels, to the scribes to copied the Gospels that we have now.  We can’t trust the information coming out of this conduit to be the same as the information that went in.

The response to the Telephone Game analogy by historically minded Christians has been to argue that for various reasons, the process that preserved the Jesus story would have been highly accurate so our worries are misplaced.  I won’t review the specifics of the argument here. 

A superficial grasp of the argument that I’ve been making might liken it to the Telephone Game criticism.  But as I see it, the Telephone Game doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the multitude of obstacles that stand between us and accurate information about what, if anything, happened with Jesus. 

Here are some slides that I will use in an upcoming debate.  Some explanation is in order.  Between 35 CE and 2010, a great many people and events interposed between you and the alleged resurrection of Jesus.  You challenge is to try to form a reasonable opinion about the reality of the resurrection on the basis of information that has been fed through many layers of filtration, interference, psychological distortions, social and political forces, and so on.  So the real question becomes, given the path through history that the ressurection story has taken, should you believe it?  My answer has been “no.” 

We can divide the layers of interference into five groups:  the alleged eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, the people who heard the story from them and repeated them until the authors of the Gospels wrote them down 30 to 100 years later, the athors of the Gospels, the copiers who copied and recopied the stories over the next two centuries, and the canonizers who made a deliberate effort to cull one particular narrative about the life and death of Jesus out of thousands of early Christian writings that were circulating around until the Christian Bible as we know it was formed.  That’s Alleged Eyewitnesses, Repeaters, Authors, Copiers, and Canonizers. 

I’ve been arguing on this blog that there are a variety of doubts we should have about every one fo these stages of the history of the story.  Some of these doubts are fortified by recent psychological research, some of them are corroborated by Bible scholars, some of them are epistemological, and some of them are probabilistic.  So here’s a time line that gives us a representation of these layers and some of the doubts that I have raised about their fidelity in transmitting the Jesus story. 

Each item is linked to a previous blog post or other source that explains in more detail what the problem is here:

  

The Alleged Eyewitnesses: 

The Lourdes Problem   

Bereavement Hallucinations  

Asch Effect  

Supernatural Belief Threshold  

The Gorilla Problem  

The Repeaters

Organic Memory Problems  

Confirmation Bias  

Source Amnesia  

  

Authors

Mark Bottle Neck

Contradictions  

Copiers

Ideological Revisions  

Copy Errors

Counter Evidence Problem  

Harmonizations  

Canonizers

Salem Witch Problem  

Jesus Sharpshooter Fallacy  

Counter Evidence Problem  

In my version of the Telephone Game, there are thousands of people in the chain, spread over many centuries.  Many of them are illiterate, Iron Age peasants.  Some of them are suffering from bereavement hallucinations.  Some of them are apparently having epileptic seizures complete with religious visions.  Many of them are deliberately discounting any information that they receive that does not conform with the account of Jesus that ends up in the Christian Bible.  They refuse to pass on any other information, and they even go out of their way to destroy those accounts so that no one else can have access to it.  They are deeply committed religious converts.  They are subject to a variety of psychological effects and fallacies like the Asch effect and confirmation bias that they would not have been aware of.  Many of their memories actively reorder, reimagine, and retell the events that they are repeating.  Many of them are highly disposed to accept wild, supernatural and magical accounts of spiritual forces at work in the world because they don’t know of any better way to explain things they see.  They lack education, hence they are highly prone to superstitions and religiousness.  They are notoriously bad eyewitnesses.  And they are remarkably unreliable, like other humans, at accurately reporting the occurrence of miraculous events. 

So now, with this embellished picture of a huge circle of humans and their various problems in mind, what shall we think are the odds that a piece of important information that is fed into the system at one end will be accurately and completely transmitted to the other end? 

One thing we need to know to answer that question is a simple point from probability reasoning. 

I won’t make things tedious by trying to put an actual number on the fidelity of the each of the layers of interference.  But the Lourdes Problem—the general unreliability of humans giving miracle testimony—is significant.  Even by a very conservative estimate, the vast majority of cases of human miracle testimony are false.  Even a dedicated believer would have to concede that when people typically claim that some miraculous event or divine intervention has occurred, there is a better explanation.  It would be exceedingly generous to put the accuracy rate at 1/100.  It would still be generous, given how effusive humans are with miracle claims, to put the rate at 1/10,000.  The Lourdes example suggests it should be orders of magnitude lower than that. 

So if a reliability rate of .001, .00001, or .000000001 is appropriate, the effect of this number alone on our signal degradation estimate will be devastating.  That is, the cumulative effect of all of these layers of doubt is to undermine our confidence that the resurrection really occurred.  The Lourdes effect alone is sufficient to lead us to reject the historical resurrection claim.  There is a staggering burden of proof facing anyone defending the historical case for Jesus.  And it will not be met with the paltry provisions of the Bible.