Just over a week ago, Victor Reppert promised an “attack” on me, specifically with reference to my book UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God. Shortly afterwards I saw this:
Chris Hallquist’s book, UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God, is a nice compendium of skeptical responses to Christian historical apologetics.
Oh! Thanks, Vic, that was much nicer than I was expecting. I intend to henceforth quote that as a positive review of my book.
This was followed by some criticism, but it felt a bit sparse for an “attack.” There’s just one point I want to respond to:
Further, while we are farther removed from the events than we are from, say, the frauds of, say, Peter Popoff/Steve Martin (see the movie Leap of Faith), the impact of these events on history is undeniable.
But the impact of the founding of Islam on history is also undeniable. I know, I know, there are standard Christian apologetic responses to Islam. One is that Islam gained converts by the sword from the very beginning, but this is a bit silly: Muhammad didn’t one day have his alleged vision, and the next day go around personally threatening people with a sword. While Islam attained political power much faster than Christianity did, both religions originally had to win converts through persuasion.
The other stock Christian line against Islam is that miracles aren’t so prominent a part of the Islamic tradition as the Christian tradition. But Victor doesn’t seem eager to dispute my claim that legends plus delusions explain the miracle reports associated with the founding of Christianity. Will Vic then say that while naturalistically-explicable reports of miracles aren’t good evidence for a religion, and historical impact alone isn’t good evidence for a religion, the two combined are good evidence for a religion?
Whatever he thinks, the criticisms struck me as half-hearted, which made me even more surprised to find Vic making the following assertion just a couple of days later:
the anti-apologetic arguments that we see from skeptics today are not at all new, and were answered by apologists long ago.
I am not sure what to make of this, except to think it might make good fodder for a discussion of the epistemic significance of persistent disagreement.
You said this about Victor previously ‘I can only conclude, then, that he’s repeatedly failed to understand the most basic points of Biblical scholarship and the post basic points made by people he’s arguing with’
Do you still stand by your assessment of the intellectual capabilities of Victor?
You also spelled ‘Reppert’ incorrectly.
Interestingly, it appears that Tim McGrew, himself, appeared on that thread. Do you have any thoughts on his comments?
Steven: Fixed the spelling error. As for my assessment of Vic… the fact that his comments on my book didn’t include any non-sequiturs thrown up in defense of the Bible’s value as historical evidence makes me think maybe he understood what I said about Biblical scholarship, and now that he understands it, doesn’t want to talk about it. But I’m not sure.
Mark: Not really. Was there something specific Tim said that you wanted my comments on?
We had a discussion on the post devoted to you that went for 89 comments, and you were conspicuous by your absence from it.
I think my main criticism was the disconnect between many of the cases of the paranormal that you cover, where the explanation involves deliberate fraud, and the case of the founding of Christianity, where you don’t appeal to deliberate fraud to account for the events in question. It raises an issue of how relevant these paranormal cases really are to the problem of explaining the founding of Christianity.
Further, with respect to parapsychology in general, you seem to uncritically accept the CSICOP line on it, when I think the jury is out to a much greater degree on a good deal of psychic phenomena. What people like James Randi are good at is detecting deliberate fraud.
I do think the best option the skeptic has for dealing with the founding of Christianity is not the Jesus Myth option, which overuses legend, or a full acceptance of the texts using a hallucination theory to explain them, but some combination of the two. However, I think there are difficulties with this strategy, even though it’s the best one out there.
I’m moving very slowly through this material. But I will get to those hypotheses later.
>We had a discussion on the post devoted to you that went for 89 comments, and you were conspicuous by your absence from it.
Vic, what’s the point in saying this? FYI, a lot of that discussion happened while I was in the middle of cramming for big exams (this post was written the day after getting done with them). And from skimming the discussion, a lot of it looked like people floating their own arguments, and you responding to those other people. Am I to be faulted for assuming your main criticisms of my book would occur in the post labeled as such?
>I think my main criticism was the disconnect between many of the cases of the paranormal that you cover, where the explanation involves deliberate fraud, and the case of the founding of Christianity, where you don’t appeal to deliberate fraud to account for the events in question.
But I discuss plenty of cases where it’s not clear that anyone was anything but sincere (and deliberate frauds depend on the ability of other people to be sincerely deceived). Reading your post, it actually occurred to me that this might be your main criticism, but I figured it couldn’t have been because it’s so silly.
>Further, with respect to parapsychology in general, you seem to uncritically accept the CSICOP line on it.
I’ve read a number of on lab parapsychology both pro and con, and find the con arguments more convincing. I just didn’t discuss this much because it isn’t especially relevant to the topic of the book. But if you are looking for good criticisms of lab parapsych (when it doesn’t involve Uri Geller), I’d recommend not Randi but Susan Blackmore and Ray Hyman.
>I’m moving very slowly through this material. But I will get to those hypotheses later.
Uh, okay.
I was just a little surprised that you didn’t join in. Not that big of a deal, really.
I do think that deliberate fraud cases are less useful than other kinds of cases when you are looking for parallels to the New Testament miracles. So I was surprised that all of the cases in your “brief history” looked to me like fraud cases. It may turn out to be more of an issue in writing strategy than with the substance of the issues.
In the Craig-Parsons debate, Craig brings up the “two generations” argument, Parsons comes back with UFO and Bermuda Triangle legends as counterexamples, and Craig then says that what he means is that it takes two generations at least for legends to wipe out the hard core of oral tradition. I wonder if you were aware of Craig’s attempting to gloss the Sherwin-White statement, which does indeed look false on its face.
On Craig on SW, I explicitly cite one or two place where Craig uses SW, though I wasn’t aware of how Craig did it in the Parsons debate. My impression of how Craig has represented SW in print is that he distorts SW a little, but not as much as Lee Strobel does. Unfortunately, one of the things that makes me distrustful of Craig is that his accounts of what “the experts” have said shifts around from occasion to occasion, and seems to be based on what’s convenient to say and what he thinks he can get away with saying.
The gloss on SW from the Parsons debate does sound more accurate than what Craig’s said in print. In fact, I think “wipe out the hard core” is SW’s phrase but it’s not clear what that means. As I point out in the book, it may be true that the gospel writers could have exploded any legends about Jesus that they heard, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily would have.
Here’s one way of looking at it: suppose 40 years after the fact there were people who could say, truly:
“My dad heard that guy from Nazareth speak once, and heard quite about him from the very beginning. Jesus claimed he could heal the sick and cast out demons, but according to my dad a lot of what you hear about him, things like being born in Bethlehem and walking on water and conjuring up food, that stuff my dad never heard about until long after.”
Would the existence of a few such people guarantee those stories would be kept out of the gospels? Would doubts about those stories necessarily get around the Mediterranean as efficiently as the stories themselves?
Would doubts about Jesus really being born in Bethlehem have stopped the Gospel writers making up stories about Jesus being born in Bethlehem?