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Chris Hallquist Q&A on UFO’s, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus

1. Chris, what moved you to write your controversial new book, UFO’s, Ghosts, and A Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus? The key here is there is a whole cottage industry of fundamentalists claiming to be able to prove the Bible is historically reliable, and it’s based on seriously misrepresenting the facts.  It’s just like Creationism, except that there’s no controversy about teaching it in the schools.  This is something I became aware of a little in high school, and then in college I really became aware of it through Campus Crusade for Christ. I also was exposed to a quasi-mega church in town. At my college campus, Evangelists were swarming. So, I started doing research, and I realized the information you need to debunk these claims is out there, but you have to dig. I wanted to make that information accessible.
2. Are you against any organized religion or is it Christianity in particular that you have serious doubts about? Almost all religions have had at least some of the same problems as Christianity. Buddhism has completely unsubstantiated claims of miracles attributed to the Buddha. Hinduism has creation myths that are contradicted by modern science. As an aside, though–why do people always talk about “organized religion”? Would they say, “You know, I wouldn’t mind Unitarians, except the Unitarians insist on organizing”?
3. Are you saying you have evidence to show Jesus was never resurrected, or are you merely claiming there’s a lack of evidence to prove he was resurrected? I think, by far, the best way to make sense of everything we know about the origins of Christianity is to assume Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. The story we have is that after Jesus supposedly rose from the dead, he appeared to a few people, and then was never heard from again. That’s bizarre if the story is true–imagine what most people at that time, the people who didn’t accept Christianity, must have thought. You also have to answer the question of, if Jesus granted his followers with miraculous powers like the Bible says, and that continued through the saints of Christian legend–what happened to all that?
4. If religion is founded, in large part, on one’s beliefs, and not necessarily in documented facts, why attack those who are Christian? I would never have written this book if not for fundamentalists presenting their beliefs as documented facts, pushing unsubstantiated and, often, outright false claims about history. But aside from that, belief isn’t really a private matter. Traditional religious believers claim their beliefs are objectively true for everyone, even if they don’t claim they’re documented. That makes them open for public discussion.
5. Why do you compare how claims of what Jesus did are no more valid than claims of mediums, UFO abductions, or ghost sightings? Because the evidence is no better–weaker, often–and to a large extent the social and psychological processes that generate these claims are the same.  For example: Christian apologists will get really excited, saying “we have documents attesting to Jesus’ resurrection”–and by “documents” all they mean are the books of the New Testament, which technically are documents–and they treat that as a trump card. But we also have written accounts of the power of mediums, of UFO abductions, of ghost sightings. So just having a written account doesn’t prove anything.
6. Do you think a time will come when people no longer accept the Bible as a book to live their lives by?  That’s pretty much what’s happened in Europe. In America things seem to be shifting in that direction, though the data is mixed. The liberal churches are collapsing, with people either becoming complete unbelievers, which is what I did, or they’re looking for something more solid. But the fundamentalists are also causing a lot of people to leave religion altogether. Underneath all this, though, is something more interesting:  fundamentalist churches are finding they have to really soften their pitch. If you read Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life, it starts out like a bland, fake –challenging self-help book, and only at the end does he try to slip in a call to dogmatically believe everything the Bible says.
7. Have you ever come across a miracle you can believe in?  No. When I was little, I thought I was psychic, but now I realize that that was a matter of what psychologists call confirmation bias: remembering the “hits,” the successes, and forgetting the misses. This is where a lot of the miracles ordinary people think they’ve experienced fall. Grandpa’s in the hospital, the doctors don’t think he’s going to pull through, and then he does. But anyone who really understands medicine knows that he just beat the odds, and people beat the odds every day. If people didn’t occasionally beat the odds, no one would go to casinos. As a matter of fact, if people didn’t make mistakes in statistical reasoning, no one would go to casinos.
8. Ghost sightings, the paranormal, and psychic healing. All bogus? How do you know? Because they’ve all been investigated, quite carefully, often by people who were initially hoping to confirm the existence of these things. Around 1900, for example, you had respectable scientists, including William James, hoping to find solid evidence of apparitions. But within maybe half a century even most people who wanted to find solid evidence of the supernatural had given up on that. Or, in the 1950′s when the first UFO sightings were reported, almost immediately organizations formed to investigate them, and these organizations tended to assume UFOs were spacecraft from another world. But as time went on, they were forced to admit that the vast majority of UFOs could be proven to be of earthly origin.
9. What do you believe in? Let me quote Bertrand Russell: “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” And I believe in the power of self-knowledge: too many people get through life on little lies they use to bolster their self-esteem, but at the same time, they don’t understand their own real potential, and they don’t have the
   self-confidence that comes from understanding your own potential. That self-confidence is a powerful thing.
10. Why don’t Christian apologists point out modern-day miracles of the caliber that fill the Bible? Because today, when people make miracle claims they can usually be investigated and every time they’re investigated they’re exposed as bogus. The faith-healer Peter Popoff, for example, had this routine where he would pretend to get messages from God about what people in the audience had what diseases. Investigators, following a hunch, use a device for listening on radio communications to record his wife feeding him information through an ear piece. It ended up on Johnny Carson –first they played authorized videotape of the event and then they re-played the video tape with the wife’s voice-over. Huge blow to Popoff.
11. What are some common fallacies that are widely held to be true as it relates to Jesus and the founding of Christianity? One is thinking that as long as there’s a logically possible way to rationalize away a problem, it’s legitimate to rationalize it away. This comes into play when Christians see discrepancies in the gospel accounts, and then insist on believing the most convoluted explanations for the discrepancies, rather than accept that the Bible contains mistakes. Another is thinking you have to accept miracle claims if you would accept a non-miraculous claim on the same evidence.
12. What problems do you see with the Gospel stories? There are a lot. The first, though, is that we know have no idea who the authors were and only a vague idea of when they wrote. The historian Richard Carrier put this very well–they are literally anonymous religious tracts, and should be taken with a grain of salt, just the way you would the claims of any other anonymous religious tracts.
13. Why do you compare Bible discrepancies to something like the Amityville Horror hoax? With the Amityville Horror hoax, the discrepancies in the story were the first clue that it was largely made up. There was stronger evidence later on, but the discrepancies were the first clue. The discrepancies, often large, in the gospel accounts are a clue that they aren’t very reliable. For example: the standard story of Jesus’ birth is pretty incredible, but actually in the Bible there are two stories, one in the book of Matthew, one in the book of Luke. Our standard kid’s nativity play is a mash-up of the two stories that isn’t really consistent with either, because you can’t tell a story that’s really consistent with both accounts. That’s pretty strong confirmation that the stories are legends.
14. Must we have strong evidence for Christianity’s miracle claims to be of a higher degree than is demanded to support other historical claims? Yes. This is just like how historians are willing to use Herodotus as a source of information on Greek history, but when he talks about miracles he isn’t taken seriously. Or, how normally, we consider eyewitness testimony pretty reliable, but few Protestants and Catholics would convert to Mormonism just because the Mormon Church got a few people to sign a statement saying they had seen an angel come down from heaven to authenticate the Book of the Mormon.
15. You write of how legends are created. What role does time play in this? A legend can form at the speed of storytelling. If a story is passed around in a day, legends will form in a day. You see this happening, for example, with legends surrounding the September 11th attacks. Maybe you remember hearing some pretty wild stories a few days of the attacks–and if you don’t remember, you can see the rumor-debunking pages that Snopes.com had to put up within a week.
16. Why didn’t early Christians critically examine the things they heard and debunk them then? Because doing so would have been hard. Limited communication and transportation technology, as well as a lack of written documents, would have made it very hard to trace down the source of any claims. Also, because when people join a cult, they become emotionally invested in believing what they’re told. Probably, people’s social networks, friends and family, were used as tools for bringing in converts, and you tend to trust your friends and family.
17. Do you see evidence that many people will more readily believe an extraordinary lie than a mundane truth? Yes. In the 70′s there was a psychological experiment where researchers had a young actor do magic tricks or the sort being used by fake psychics of the time. Researchers played around with the conditions of the experiment, and even when they made no claim what he was doing was real, even when they led people through the thought processes needed to figure out he was probably fake, most of them still were convinced he was real.
18. How come those who rivaled early-day Christianity didn’t do a better job to expose the religion as mythology? Because it would have been hard, given the lack of transportation and communication technology, and because Christianity almost certainly started as a very tiny cult that only eccentrics would have been worried about. In the entire history of the Roman Empire, with all its upstart cults, we only have one instance of someone writing an expose of a new cult. The author was a guy by the name of Lucian of Samosata, who’s attitude towards cults was very unusual for the time, and even he didn’t feel the need to write a full expose of any other cults.
19. Should we have a larger public effort to debunk legends of all kinds? Nowadays, simple, straightforward bogus claims–UFOs, psychics, and so on–get pretty thoroughly debunked, and the craze for them has died down. What we really need is better communication on scientific issues–global warming, evolution, health–that take some work to explain to the general public. Those are harder to give quick explanations of, there’s more of a need for convincing people to sit down and take some time learning about the issues.
20. Some people think Jesus was a magician. What do you think? I doubt it. The main miracles attributed to Jesus–healings and exorcisms–don’t sound like magic tricks. They’re the kind of thing that someone can actually delude themselves into thinking they can do. You try to heal someone, maybe they tell you they’re suddenly better, maybe a few days later they get better, maybe a few days later all that happens is they improve a little. And then the people that don’t get better, you tell yourself there was a lack of faith there. Pretty soon, you’ve convinced yourself you can work miracles.
21. How do you dispute all of the healings, exorcisms, and miracles performed by Jesus? Healings can be psychosomatic. They can be a matter of taking credit for people getting better on their own. They can be a matter of people feeling better short term as a psychological effect of seeing the healer. They can be a matter of no one bothering to check if anything actually happened. Exorcisms, in the modern world, tend to be a matter of mass psychology, of people falling into a role because they believe they’re possessed. Also, there’s at least one gospel story where it sounds like the “possessed” person was epileptic, and the seizure ended naturally. Probably Jesus followers just didn’t check if the person stayed better.

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