I agree that Leprechaunology is not a great analogy for the work of Aquinas or Leibniz. But it’s easy to suggest better analogies: how about Spinozism or Hegelianism? I’d be surprised if Feser took either of those doctrines terribly seriously.

The dirty little secret of philosophy is that just because a philosopher is held up as “great” to the public and considered required reading in undergraduate courses does not mean professional philosophers think his work is very good, or that they’re obliged to study him carefully before thinking his work is not very good.

Feser bemoans this when his colleagues do it to Aquinas, but he himself does it with plenty of modern and contemporary philosophers. The brand of rhetoric that Feser has made his name on strikes many professional philosophers as utterly bizarre, and with good reason.

Let me expand a little. Feser seems to rely on the assumption that people like Augustine and Aquinas were great thinkers, and there’s no need to argue this, because everyone knows who history’s great thinkers are. And if what you mean by a “great” thinker is an influential one, then there’s no question that Augustine, Aquinas, etc. were “great” thinkers. The problem is that there’s little reason to think believing nonsense is a barrier to becoming influential, so the “greatness” of Augustine and Aquinas in this sense is no evidence that they didn’t believe a lot of nonsense.

On the other hand, if what you mean by “great” is the quality of a thinker’s insights, the quality of his contributions to the intellectual tradition, then there’s no agreement as to who the “great” thinkers are. For example: Georg Hegel (1770-1831): greatest philosopher whoever lived? Or was his work, as Schopenauer (1788-1860) said, “a colossal piece of mystification” featuring “the most outrageous misuse of language”? Informed people disagree. Then there’s the fact–as mentioned above–that Feser himself has little regard for most of the philosophers in the standard list of greats from Descartes onwards.

A third thing people might mean when they talk about “great” philosophers is that when we read Augustine or Aquinas, it’s just obvious that these were very smart men, and any idea had by a very smart man must be at least somewhat good. Now, I don’t think it really is so obvious that Augustine and Aquinas were that smart (Augustine’s The City of God is on the face of it a rambling piece of hack polemic), but let that pass.

The bigger problem here is that intelligence isn’t much of a barrier to believing nonsense. Indeed, it isn’t even always a barrier to supporting downright evil causes–as we learned from Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and the other German intellectuals who supported the Nazis. Part of the problem, as Michael Shermer said, is that “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” But the problem is even worse than that: there are some kinds of nonsense that only smart people are capable of producing.

This is related to the points I’ve made previously, but let me give an especially clear example: physicist Alan Sokal’s paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Here is a sample:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz’s analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross’ discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray’s and Hayles’ exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding’s comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

There’s no question that this is nonsense. When the journal Social Text published the article in 1996, Sokal immediately revealed that the article was “a parody,” which he had submitted to the journal to test the question “would a leading North American journal of cultural studies… publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”

However, while Sokal’s article was “liberally salted with nonsense,” it was not nonsense that just anyone could have written. To write an article like that you’d need, at minimum, some knowledge of physics, some knowledge of postmodern literary theory, and a certain knack for imitating other people’s writing style. In other words, it’s something Sokal might have published even if he hadn’t had a point to make and just wanted to show off. And if he had just wanted to show off, he might have been better off not revealing the hoax.

This is not to say that any famous philosophers have consciously perpetrated Sokal-style hoaxes and just not told anybody. I suspect that the worst nonsense producers do want to impress people but also manage to convince themselves they’re talking sense. But whatever is going on inside the heads of certain people, the Sokal hoax shows that a piece of writing can display intelligence and learning and still be arrant nonsense.

Now, while there are lots of important differences between science and philosophy, most of what I’ve said here applies to scientists as much as philosophers. Newton’s work in physics is held in high regard not because Newton was obviously such a great guy, but because Newton did an impressive job of drawing inferences from the evidence (even though we now know some of his ideas about physics were wrong). Newton also put a lot of effort into occultism and finding hidden messages in the Bible, but scientists don’t feel obligated to respect that part of Newton’s work simply because he was a “great thinker.”

What I’ve written so far has been about philosophers and “thinkers” in general, but there’s an additional problem with defending Christianity with appeals to great Christian thinkers: for much of the history of Christianity, it wasn’t safe to be anything other than a Christian in Christian lands. Augustine argued that heretics should be corrected with torture and imprisonment, and there is a place in The City of God where he gloats about the fact that some people had written rebuttals to his work, and then refrained from publishing them out of fear for their own safety. Aquinas went a step further and argued that heretics should be executed.

Things improved only gradually after the scientific revolution. Hobbes was tried for heresy and could have been executed if found guilty, but escaped with only a ban on future writings. Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise (which argued for “freedom to philosophize”) had to be circulated clandestinely, and Spinoza was unable to publish his Ethics during his lifetime.

Hume lived after the last execution for blasphemy in Britain, but lost out on a teaching position at the University of Edinburgh in part because his Treatise of Human Nature was perceived as threatening the traditional arguments for the existence of God. Hume later discussed the arguments for the existence of God in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and though he concealed his own views behind the characters in the dialogue his friends persuaded him not to publish the book during his lifetime. Only in the 19th century did it become truly safe to openly reject all religion, and at that point you got prominent thinkers openly rejecting all religion.

One reason this last point is important is that it’s tempting to say, “The arguments for the existence of God given by people like Thomas Aquinas and Samuel Clarke were convincing to people back then because people back then accepted the arguments’ assumptions, but today we reject those assumptions.” But I wonder if people found the arguments all that convincing even back then. Maybe they were just afraid to disagree.

Recently, my sunny optimism has gotten a boost from Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s an excellent book, possibly topping Pinker’s previous book How the Mind Works, and marshals an incredible amount of evidence to show that violence–including violence by states against their own citizens–has been declining throughout history. When I first read it, my reaction was, “wow, now I feel pretty silly about my occasional flashes of pessimism.”

But Pinker’s defense of optimism comes with an important caveat: in the long run, things get better, but in the short run they sometimes get worse. And I now think that in the United States, there’s a significant chance that things will get much worse before they get better. Exhibit A is the fact that Congress is trying to pass a bill requiring indefinite detention for terror suspects, and the fact that Obama’s main objection to the bill appears to be that it would limit his power. Seriously, the debate is over whether the government should have to detain people forever without trial, or whether that should be up to the president. This is how fucking insane the political situation in the United States is right now.

Exhibit B is the rise of Newt Gingrich, who has labeled Wikileaks leader Julian Assange an “enemy combatant,” which in current parlance means “someone we should be able to imprison and kill without trial.” This is disturbing, because what Wikileaks’ actions were not a crime in the US, and are in fact an important part of investigative journalism. Let me say that again: in a couple years, the United States may have a president who thinks it is okay to imprison and kill someone without trial for doing investigative journalism.

Seriously, when Wikileaks was big in the news, I thought the people making the craziest statements about it had no shot at the presidency. This is no longer clear. Newt may stumble before making it to the Republican nomination, just as Bachmann, Perry, and Cain have, but Newt only has to hang on for a few more weeks before he can start winning states and build momentum that way. And while it’s true that polls say most people would currently vote for Obama over Gingrich, a bad economy could still sink Obama. (I stress that my fear is not that Obama will lose, but that he will lose to someone ever worse than himself.)

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

“Show of hands: Who here’s an atheist?” If a keynote speaker were to pose that unlikely query to an audience of 1,000 scholars gathered at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature my guess is only about a couple of dozen or so would publicly confess to infidelity.

Nonbelievers are few and far between in biblical scholarship. Not counting the theologians employed by seminaries who have yet to come out of the closet, the cohort is so small that we literally all know one another by name.

I knew Biblical scholarship was dominated by believers, but I wouldn’t have guessed that non-believers are so few that “we literally all know one another by name.” This is on top of the fact non-believing Biblical scholarship tend to be former believers who got into Biblical scholarship because of their faith and lost their faith because of their scholarly studies.

Robert M. Price and Bart Ehrman were originally fundamentalists, and Price had a long career as a liberal Christian and is still a seminary professor. Gerd Ludemann was a member of the Theological Faculty of a major German university until he lost his job for publicly rejecting Christianity. Michael Goulder was an Anglican priest for 30 years. And notably, Price, Ehrman, and Ludemann have doctorates in theology. Hector Avalos became an atheist while in high school, but he had apparently already done a lot of reading about apologetics by that time. The guy had been a child evangelist, which I guess gave him a head start thinking about that stuff.

Many Biblical scholars are nevertheless very left-wing in their theology, to the point where many conservatives will insist they’re not real Christians or real theists. But the fact that they still identify as believers explains why it’s so incredibly rare for Biblical scholars to say anything that would be truly embarrassing to Christianity. They never consider the possibility that Paul may have been a fraud. And it makes William Lane Craig’s sneers at people who disagree with him all the more ridiculous.

In a bibliographical survey of over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975, Gary Habermas found that 75% of scholars accept the historicity of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb and that there is near universal agreement on the post-mortem appearances.

Since New Testament critics do not simply confess these facts but rather acknowledge them on the strength of the historical evidence (which I detail in my published work), I think it is fair to speak of them as established facts about Jesus that need to be explained. That doesn’t mean that they are certain or indubitable (though N. T. Wright at the end of his voluminous study on Jesus’ resurrection opines that the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus have a historical probability so high as to be “virtually certain,” like the death of Augustus Caesar in A.D. 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70!2), but merely that they have a degree of credibility comparable to other commonly accepted facts of ancient history.

So if your friends maintain that these are not historical facts, you should ask them what source of information they have that leads them to disagree with over 75% of the trained scholars who have studied this question. How did they come by such insight? How would they refute the evidence which has led so many scholars to the contrary conclusion? I’d be interested to learn what they say.

Assume for the sake of argument Habermas is right. In the case of the empty tomb Habermas found 25% of scholars reject its historicity. If I found out that 25% of historians doubted that Jerusalem really fell in 70 A.D., that would make me a lot less certain that it really happened, and I would want to know what the controversy was about. I don’t know what to do except laugh at Craig’s rhetoric here.

I suppose Craig’s response here is “well, maybe not a certain the fall of Jerusalem, but as certain as other accepted facts.” But what facts does he have in mind? What facts worthy of the name are doubted by a full quarter of the experts? And if Craig realizes Wright is being silly, why does he bother quoting him?

The questions Craig recommends asking in the last paragraph are also pretty funny, because they have me imagining Craig going around a conference for Biblical scholars, bugging a full quarter of the attendees with his questions. And the final sentence is obviously insincere. If Craig is interested in why anyone would disagree with the majority view, he should just go read what all the scholars advocating the minority position have to say. Apparently he prefers to sneer at them.

Seriously, who thinks this is smart even as rhetoric? What am I missing here?

There’s no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn’t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it’s meant literally.

It’s not clear to me that Sullivan has anything like a coherent view here, since just a couple months ago he made a point of telling his readers that Adam and Eve did not literally exist, and went so far as to point out that this causes problems not just for fundamentalist protestantism, but also for Sullivan’s own Catholic Church. I suspect that Sullivan’s real problem is not what Coyne said, but the fact that someone who’s critical of religion in general said it so frankly.

But I think it’s a mistake to focus on “traditional version of original sin” vs. “revised, science-compatible version of original sin” as interpretations of the Bible. Because, well, have you read the fucking thing? The traditional story is that Satan tempted the first humans into sinning against God, and this resulted in a deep corruption in human nature that was spread from generation to generation through sexual reproduction. The story in Genesis has none of that.

Instead, we have this thing called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God tells Adam and Eve they can’t eat its fruit or they will die. But then comes a talking snake to tell them that no, they won’t die, instead they’ll become like God, knowing good and evil. And the snake is right! God even says so! “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

This incident is supposed to explain a lot about the world: why people wear clothes, why crawl on their bellies (apparently the talking snake also had legs, before God cursed it?), why snakes are such a nuisance to humans, why childbirth is painful, why men rule over women (!), and why farming is such a pain in the ass. Notably absent, though, is Paul’s claim that this is how sin entered the world.

When I read this story, the connections that leap to mind aren’t to later Christian doctrine. They’re to Greek myths about stealing fire from Mount Olympus, and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. The story is obvious mythology, similar to countless other myths that have been told throughout history (Wikipedia’s article “Pourquoi stories” has a very partial, but still useful, list).

Given these mythological parallels, no one who reads the story without preconceptions is going to conclude that Genesis was divinely inspired in any sense that Hesiod wasn’t. The story, and Paul’s later claims about it, also makes a mockery of the idea that the Bible is a beautifully unified whole. Rather, it’s a clear example of how the Bible was written by a bunch of different people with different viewpoints, who often engaged in dubious reinterpretations of what people before them had said.

So when modern believers like Sullivan try to square original sin with evolution, they’re not merely reinterpreting Genesis. They’re piling reinterpretation on top of reinterpretation until the original story is unrecognizable. Here’s Sullivan again:

I would argue that original sin is a mystery that makes sense of our species’ predicament – not a literal account of a temporal moment when we were all angels and a single act that made us all beasts. We are beasts with the moral imagination of angels. But if we are beasts, then where did that moral imagination come from? If it is coterminous with intelligence and self-awareness, as understood by evolution, then it presents human life as a paradox, and makes sense of the parable. For are we not tempted to believe we can master the universe with our minds – only to find that we cannot, and that the attempt can be counter-productive or even fatal? Isn’t that delusion what Genesis warns against?

How far we’ve come from using a talking snake to explain why humans wear clothes! Yeah, Sullivan’s interpretation is no more plausible than the same interpretation applied to the Prometheus story.

This leaves some interesting questions about what exactly is going on in Genesis 3. The name “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” is certainly evocative, making it tempting to read this as an allegory about how ignorance is bliss and to attain knowledge you must also know evil. However, according to Wikipedia, some scholars think “knowledge of good and evil” was just a poetic way of saying “all knowledge.”

This makes a lot of sense. Eating the fruit causes trouble for humans insofar as they start freaking out about being naked, but most of their trouble comes from God getting mad and cursing them. The point isn’t that they know evil, the point is that they have knowledge and God didn’t want them to, just as God doesn’t want them to live forever. I suppose the author figured humans have a nudity taboo as a side-effect of being so knowledgeable.

There also isn’t any real indication we’re supposed to be on God’s side here, any more than we’re supposed to be on Zeus’ side in the Prometheus story. That makes me think this isn’t a story about humans being bad. It’s a story about humans being AWESOME. It’s says humans are special. How special? The kind of special that is only attainable by STEALING MAGIC FRUIT FROM GOD! And our only problems come from time we made God go, “Oh crap! I need to do something before humans become too awesome!”

For example, in his debate with Bart Ehrman, he kicked things off in his usual way, by declaring all the major details of the Bible story to be “relatively uncontroversial” and “agreed to by most scholars.” However, he says “That the resurrection is the best explanation is a matter of controversy.” After going through his “four facts” in detail, Craig tells us:

Of course, down through history various alternative naturalistic explanations of the resurrection have been proposed, such as the Conspiracy Hypothesis, the Apparent Death Hypothesis, the Hallucination Hypothesis, and so on. In the judgment of contemporary scholarship, however, none of these naturalistic hypotheses has managed to provide a plausible explanation of the facts. Nor does Dr. Ehrman support any of these naturalistic explanations of the facts.

If you allow Craig some wiggle room on the meaning of certain words (like the “relatively” in “relatively uncontroversial”), none of these statements are obvious falsehoods. But Craig has left some important stuff out. For example, he cites Gerd Lüdemann in favor of the claim that Jesus’ post-mortem appearances are historical, but carefully omits the fact that Lüdemann doesn’t think any of the stuff about the tomb is historical.

This is important. Lüdemann thinks the appearances were hallucinations. However, Lüdemann isn’t an example of someone who advocates a naturalistic explanation of all the things which Craig calls “facts,” since Craig’s “facts” include Jesus’ tomb being empty. So he isn’t technically a counter-example to Craig’s claim about scholars rejecting naturalistic explanations for his “facts”–Craig chose his words carefully. Lüdemann doesn’t, however, think that “fact” of the empty tomb is a fact, so he doesn’t agree that it needs to be explained.

You’ll never figure all that out from listening to Craig. Craig gives the impression that pretty much everybody accepts that the evidence is inexplicable without a miracle. He doesn’t say it, because that claim is easy to disprove (see Lüdemann, Crossan, Goulder, etc.) And the trick seems to work: one negative Amazon review of my book tries to cite “Luddeman” against me, even though in the book I defend views very similar to Lüdemann’s.

Unlike Craig, I won’t pretend to have clear numbers, but I suspect scholars with roughly Lüdemann’s position are quite common. Gary Habermas reported that in his survey of scholarly writing on the resurrection, the ratio for accept:reject the empty tomb was 3:1, and the ratio for accept:reject the resurrection was about the same. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell Habermas wasn’t using a representative sample, but his numbers make it plausible that scholars who accept the empty tomb are mostly believers, not baffled skeptics, and that the skeptics would mostly wouldn’t accept all of Craig’s “facts.”

Parting shot: in the comments on last week’s post on Craig, someone pointed me to an article where Craig cites Ehrman as an example of a scholar who accepts his four facts. Craig provides a lengthy quote from Ehrman to support this. Trouble is, the quote is from 2003, Ehrman later changed his view, and Craig knows this because Ehrman told him so during their debate. The article alludes to the debate, and so was clearly written after it. More evidence that Craig isn’t above telling outright lies.

The motivation for this post comes from a Campus Crusade presentation I went to awhile back. “Evidence for the Resurrection,” a classic. The speaker supposedly had all kinds of education, and he didn’t strike me as a bullshitter. Yet he said a number of things that suggested he had no idea what he was talking about. Claiming, for example, that very few scholars doubt the historicity of Jesus’ tomb being found empty. What was going on? Best I could tell, his problem was basing his presentation entirely on things he’d heard William Lane Craig say.

You’ll never hear Craig say that very few scholars doubt the empty tomb. That’s because that claim is easily disproven. Indeed, some of Craig’s fellow apologists are quite open about the fact that many scholars reject it (see for example pp. 461-462 of Mike Licona’s new book). So instead, Craig makes slightly vaguer claims about majority opinions and what “scholarship” says, claims which he never has much support for, but which at least can’t be immediately refuted. At the same time, he carefully avoids mentioning that there are any scholars who disagree, leaving his audience to assume there aren’t any.

Similarly, when Craig takes all the major details of the Biblical story of and calls them his “four facts,” the word “facts” there is a lie. Normally in a debate “facts” refer to things that are easily proven and can be agreed upon by all. But there’s no proof for any of those facts, no evidence for them beyond the word of the Biblical authors, who may have been misinformed or lying. But by calling them “facts” over and over again, Craig gives the impression that they’re uncontroversial. And if called on it, he can defend himself by quibbling about the meaning of the word “fact.”

And Craig even tries to hide the fact that he’s replying on the Bible as the only evidence for his claims. He’ll cite “early Jewish polemic” (i.e. what the Bible says the Jews said) or “the pre-Markan passion narrative” (i.e. something some people are guessing existed based on reading the Bible). He knows he’d loose a debate on the Bible’s reliability, so he insists its reliability is irrelevant. If he can avoid the discussion entirely, many members of his audience will continue to take the Bible’s reliability for granted, especially once they’ve been told all the important things are “facts.”

For someone like me, it’s tempting to ignore this kind of stuff, because to any informed person it’s all just rhetoric. But based on my experiences with Campus Crusade types, that’s not the whole story. For someone who hasn’t read a few books on Biblical scholarship, this stuff is almost guaranteed to give a false impression of the facts. That’s why Craig needs to be called out on it.

Craig genuinely is better informed than most apologists. That does set him apart from the pack. He just doesn’t use his knowledge to make his followers better informed. Instead, he uses his knowledge to put out a series of misleading half-truths and unsupported claims, while side-stepping any discussions that he knows would go badly for him.

I don’t want to be guilty of acting this way, so: what misconceptions about science, history, and so on have you encountered frequently among atheists? I’m looking for straightforward matters of fact, not things like “atheists don’t understand the true meaning of Christianity.”

For example: I occasionally have to cringe at meeting an atheist who thinks The Da Vinci Code has some basis in historical fact. A quick debunking: First of all we know that Constantine didn’t order a massive re-write of the Bible. We know this because we have mostly-complete Biblical manuscripts dating from about 200 A.D. on, and while these manuscripts prove that some changes to the Bible were made from 200 A.D. onwards, those changes were fairly limited.

Similarly, while different early Christian groups had different ideas about what sacred writings should be accepted, Origen of Alexandria (who died in 254 A.D.) had a list fairly similar to the one that would eventually be accepted by the Christian church. So the list of books that made it into the Bible wasn’t simply something made up out of nowhere for political reasons in the 4th century.

That’s the only big one that’s coming to mind right now. I suspect that there are probably real misconceptions floating around out there about the Inquisition, witch trials, etc., but some alleged “misconceptions” about them are things no one I’ve ever met believes. (I.e. I’ve seen people trying to whitewash the Church’s treatment of Galileo point out that the Inquisition didn’t torture Galileo, but who ever claimed they did?) So whadaya got?

Edit: Anyone can contribute to the comments–Christian, atheist, Jain, whatever. Also, sources are appreciated if possible.

Firstly- why do atheists claim that the majority of biblical scholars believe that Jesus was an endtime prophet? To my knowledge (and according to Wikipedia), the view of Jesus being a “good teacher” is accepted by 3/4 to 3/5 of all critical historians. That means that the “end time prophet” and all other theories are accepted by only a quarter of the member of the field.

According to the preface of Bart Ehrman’s 1999 Jesus book, the “apocalyptic Jesus” view was taken “probably by the majority of scholars over the course of the century, at least in German and America.” Now it’s important to point out that Wikipedia itself doesn’t make the claim you attribute to it. Rather, it says Marcus Borg says that. Based on the Google Books link Wikipedia provides, Borg isn’t disputing Ehrman’s statement. He’s claiming that there was a shift in historical Jesus scholarship at the end of the 20th century.

I can’t find a hard copy of the Borg book cited to check his endnotes. Absent that, I’m wary. Sharp observers of Biblical scholarship have noted that sometimes, both sides in a debate will claim to have a majority on their side. Wikipedia links to another book which says Borg “spoke to soon.” It’s tempting to twist your definition of “critical scholar” in whichever way will best suit you. In the case of Borg, I have to wonder if he defined “critical scholar” as “member of the Jesus Seminar” (which some advocates of the “apocalyptic Jesus” view have complained about being excluded from).

That said, it’s possible that in the past, I or other atheists have been sloppy about “majority view in the 20th century as a whole” vs. “majority view right now.” Do you have examples? The closest thing I can find is John W. Loftus’ essay on the subject from The Christian Delusion, which says that there is no longer a consensus in favor of apocalyptic view, but quotes James Charlesworth as saying it is still accepted by “leading scholars.” (“But how many leading scholars?” one wonders.)

Secondly, why are so many atheist historians so confident with themselves. I have read essays on the secular web and what there critics have to say, and they both seem to be equally unimpressed by each other. It leads me to wonder why some Christians leave the Christian faith (Like Ehrman). The arguments and consensus are on their side. Why did they leave. I mean, considering how many refutations I’ve read of “Jesus Interrupted”, I don’t know why he is so confident with himself. And why he makes so many consensus calls (which aren’t always accurate).

Overconfidence is a universal human vice. That said, just because someone claims to have refuted Ehrman doesn’t mean they have, or that Ehrman’s confidence should be undermined by their reply to him. I haven’t read many reviews of Jesus, Interrupted, but I did read quite a few reviews of Misquoting Jesus and their criticisms were pretty lame, amounting to, “Ehrman is right about everything, but he is a bad man for writing the book because it might give non-scholars the wrong idea.” For the record, Ehrman did respond briefly to criticisms of Misquoting Jesus in Jesus Interrupted, and I don’t think most critics of the former book deserve any more than that.

Also, I’m surprised that you would say–without any support, as if it were uncontroversial–that Christians have the arguments and consensus on their side. I certainly don’t think Christian arguments are any good, and I’ve written an entire book explaining why. It’s possible that a majority of Biblical scholars take pro-Christina views (for some value of “Christian”), but if so that’s only because hardly anyone enters Biblical scholarship without being a Christian or a Jew.

You should be aware that some Evangelical apologists have gotten very good at selectively quoting Biblical scholars on the things that seem to support their brand of Christianity, while simply keeping silent about things that are less favorable to their case. Maybe that explains your impression of a pro-Christian consensus?

Thirdly- which theory do you think is the best one and why? What books/reasons/evidence led you to your beliefs and, more importantly, reject every other one.

Personally, I think the “apocalyptic Jesus” view is likely but not certain. This isn’t because I think it’s what the majority of “critical scholars” think. Historical Jesus studies strike me as suffering from a lack of low-hanging fruit; people’s desire to know about the Historical Jesus greatly exceeds the available data, and that leads to quite a bit of silliness IMHO.

I support the “apocalyptic Jesus” view because an awful lot of the things attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels suggest it, and I think it makes for a very plausible story of how Christianity got started. From what I can tell, arguments for the “wise teacher” view tend to depend on trying to use subtle clues to pick out which little bits of the gospels are historical and which aren’t, and that doesn’t strike me as a credible methodology.

Fourthly- The state of atheism is not looking very good. Atheist philosophy started to decline recently with the advent of religious philosophy returning; Mythicists are ignoring criticisms and looking inept; Apologists are answering atheists with even more veracity than before and lastly, that high quality atheist resources are becoming harder and harder to find.

I’ll start with mythicism, because I don’t have much to say about it. I’m not impressed with most defenders of mythicism, but Richard Carrier is a very good historian and I’m eagerly awaiting his forthcoming book (two books, really) on the subject. In Carrier’s case, any lack of interaction with his critics is probably the result of putting his energy into the books. To his credit, he’s said he doesn’t expect anyone to be persuaded by the things he’s written so far.

I have, to put it mildly, worries about the current state of academic philosophy in general. Like historical Jesus research, it suffers from the low-hanging fruit problem. Because of this, I don’t want to say “atheist philosophy” is in great shape.

On the other hand, I can’t see that it’s in any decline. If “atheist philosophy” just means “philosophy done by atheists,” then the fact is that academic philosophy (in the English-speaking world, at least) is dominated by atheists who don’t take philosophy of religion seriously. If most of your philosophy reading is philosophy of religion, wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t realize this. There are, for example, plenty of philosophers of mind/philosophers of science/whatever who think that the problem of evil is a great argument, so much so that it would be a complete waste of their time to rehash why it’s a great argument in Faith and Philosophy.

Furthermore, if “atheist philosophy” means “philosophy of religion done by atheists,” I’m not seeing the decline there either. Luke’s list of Best Atheism Books of the Decade contains four monographs and two anthologies by respected atheist philosophers of religion. I don’t know that any previous decade produced a comparable batch of books.

I’d also cite Luke’s list as evidence against the suggestion that good atheist resources aren’t being produced anymore, though its possible that the fact that there’s so much atheist literature out there now has made it hard to sort through it all to find the really good stuff. In my opinion, other great resources include Bart Ehrman’s books, Luke’s blog, and Richard Carrier’s Internet Infidels writings. I also think Sam Harris’ writings are generally first-rate, even if I wouldn’t recommend them as “resources.”

I agree that Christian apologetics isn’t as bad as it used to be. Just about everything I’ve read before 1980 or so comes across as completely clueless about what a non-Christian would say in response to the arguments being offered. This is no longer true. This doesn’t mean that the arguments Christian apologists are currently offering are all that good, though, and I certainly don’t think today’s Christian apologists are suffering from any excess of veracity: see almost anything I’ve written about William Lane Craig or Lee Strobel.

Which leads to fifthly- It just seems like most of the things that hit the shelves that are critical of Christianity are just poorly thought out resurfacings of arguments that carry no weight among serious scholars. I know I sound like Craig when I use appeals to authority- but it is stupid to think that you can make the best judgments of arguments when you know nothing of ancient history. I’m sorry, but if a large amount of experts disagree with something (ID), than maybe there is something wrong with it.

I agree that experts in physics, chemistry, biology, history, and so on generally deserve to be taken seriously on the subjects they’re experts in. In the case of philosophy and historical Jesus studies, though, I think I have good reason to take what the “experts” say with a grain of salt. In addition to reasons already given, it’s funny that you should mention “resurfacings of arguments,” as if good arguments have to be shiny and new. This is actually a problem with academia–academics gain status by doing new things. When there isn’t any low-hanging fruit that hasn’t been grabbed yet, this can lead to some major-league nonsense… a theme I plan to write on more in the future.

In a blog post a while ago you mentioned you might give your thoughts on Dawkins’ take on Aquinas’ five ways.

I’m currently trying to write something which includes Dawkins’ coverage of natural theology, and how far he’s given acceptable responses to theistic arguments. If you did have time to cover what you think of his take on them, it’d be very helpful to me. Even a few brief reflections in a message would probably be very useful.

Here’s a slightly edited version of the message I sent in response:

I think Dawkins’ treatment is not great but not terrible. It looks cribbed from an undergraduate philosophy textbook (in fact, I would be interested to find evidence of what books Dawkins might have been influenced by.)

Dawkins has been accused of misrepresenting Aquinas on the grounds that Dawkins said Aquinas thought the universe had to have a beginning, whereas at one point Aquinas says the finitude of the past is something we only know by faith.

However, I don’t think Dawkins’ reading of Aquinas is so crazy – even if he later says otherwise, the things Aquinas says in his five ways do seem to commit him to a finite past.

Dawkins has also been accused of misrepresenting Aquinas on the grounds that Aquinas 4th way isn’t really the argument from design, and Aquinas thought any regularity at all in the world is proof of teleology.

This is a more plausible criticism of Dawkins, but linking the 4th way to the argument from design is somewhat reasonable, IMHO. Aristotle seems to have thought the clearest cases of telos are those involving biological complexity. He’s fuzzy on whether simple natural regularities require telos. So I think there is a tie here to Paley, evolution, and so on.

In general, I think Dawkins made a mistake in trying to tie Aquinas’ arguments to ones normal people make nowadays. Aquinas has the virtue of being much more systematic than even contemporary philosophers of religion, but he also relies on lots of assumptions that hardly anybody today finds plausible.

Rather than try to pick all his arguments apart in detail, it’s more interesting to ask why Aquinas made so many weird assumptions. The short version, I’m told, is that almost all learning in Western Europe was destroyed by the dark ages, so when Aristotle was reintroduced to the west he looked unbelievably awesome compared to what had been going on for the last several hundred years. And the translations of Aristotle weren’t necessarily that great.

In fact, I think calling Aquinas a medieval philosopher may be somewhat misleading. It might be better to use “proto-Renaissance” or somesuch label.

The reader wrote back, generally, agreeing, but also with a link to an Edward Feser article criticizing Dawkins. My reply:

I agree that Leprechaunology is not a great analogy for the work of Aquinas or Leibniz. But it’s easy to suggest better analogies: how about Spinozism or Hegelianism? I’d be surprised if Feser took either of those doctrines terribly seriously.

The dirty little secret of philosophy is that just because a philosopher is held up as “great” to the public and considered required reading in undergraduate courses does not mean professional philosophers think his work is very good, or that they’re obliged to study him carefully before thinking his work is not very good.

Feser bemoans this when his colleagues do it to Aquinas, but he himself does it with plenty of modern and contemporary philosophers. The brand of rhetoric that Feser has made his name on strikes many professional philosophers as utterly bizarre, and with good reason.