A Response to Paulogia's Response to Exploring Reality's Resurrection Debate

A big thank you to Than Christopolous and Caleb Jore for helping me with different aspects of this post. 

A few months ago, my good friend Than of the channel of Exploring Reality debated the well known atheist Matt Dillahunty on the resurrection of Jesus. Despite the fact that I find Dillahunty less than impressive, I still think it was a great dialogue and recommend everyone to check out. A month after the debate, well known atheist youtuber Paulogia (henceforth Paul) did a review. Given the popularity of Paul’s channel, I think it is worth reviewing the review. To make the flow of this post more smooth, I will be giving summaries of Paul's arguments; lest anyone accuse me of straw-manning, the link to Paul's video is above and the comment section here is open. I also won't cover every point due to post length. Indeed, this is meant to point out some of my own thoughts on different issues raised by Paul. Furthermore, at the time of writing this, Than, Inspiring Philosophy, and Tim Howard of Doxastic Mastery (formally Invoking Theism), did a full length review of the video I am writing about. Please, go check it out as well. 

 

(Paul's responses are in red for the sake of clarity)

Right out of the gate, Paul mentions that Than is "enamored" with Bayes Theorem. I do not know if this was meant as a pot shot or not, but it is worth noting that one's epistemology is fundamental to discussions surrounding beliefs. In the case of Bayes, it is directly relevant to the debate about God (does God probably exist?) and, despite unfortunately controversial, the resurrection of Jesus (is it probable that Jesus rose from the dead?) 

Paul goes on to say that we should spend "less time talking about the odds, and more time talking about the evidence."

By way of reply:

Paul seems to be unaware that these are inextricably linked. When assessing evidence, you are assessing odds! That is precisely what Bayes theorem is getting at--and exactly what Than is getting at in the very clip Paul is showing. 

To illustrate Than's point (and Bayes, really) is that given a certain hypothesis, event, etc., we would expect certain things if the proposed hypothesis were true. If there were, for example, a burning building near you, what would you expect to observe if it were the case that there was a nearby building on fire? The smell of fire itself, the sound of firetruck sirens in the distance, on and on. Now, take the proposed hypothesis that there is NOT a nearby burning building: can the aforementioned expectations still happen? Yes--but which hypothesis do we better expect this evidence under? The former.

Fellow writer and friend Caleb Jore adds the following: "We can assign a rough probability of the evidence occurring both if the hypothesis is true and if it is false. The ratio of these two probabilities is called the 'odds factor', and the size of this odds factor determines the weight of the evidence."

Paul bifurcates between the approach of Richard Swinburne and "resurrection scholar" (whatever that means) Mike Licona. 

There is much to say here

1) Given the fact that the resurrection is, really, a multi-disciplinary subject, it is not surprising that two different scholars from two different fields, have different approaches.

2) With reference to 1), I have no problem with the explicit use of Bayes in the practice of history. Indeed, I think all historians - whether in NT, Classics, American, European, etc. - should (and I think many of them do implicitly, but that is a subject for another time), at the very least, use bayesian reasoning. After all, history is the study of the past--what probably happened. Given Licona's lack of training in philosophy, though, I fail to see why it is significant that he doesn't use Bayes. 

3) New Testament scholar Christopher Heiling employs the theorem in his 2017 book, Hidden Criticism?: The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. A very brief overview of his use of the theorem can be found here. 

Paul goes on to note how Licona neglects to argue for God raising Jesus from the dead. 

But refer to my point above. The existence of God (philosophy of religion) and the subject of history are different fields. Of course, they can be intertwined at many different junctures, but, again, Licona is not a philosopher; he is a NT scholar by training, so he sticks to his guns there. This is why I and many others think the resurrection is best approached from an inter-disciplinary perspective.

The rest of the section that covers Bayesian reasoning is quite frankly intellectually immature and sophomoric; so I will skip that part and move on to more of the direct historical evidence. 

Paul goes on to say that God should be able to provide him with the evidence necessary for him to believe

1) Given that Paul does this full time, I assume that gives him a significant amount of time to study these subjects. He should know full well that watching Youtube videos is hardly "research" at all. 

2) Perhaps Paul expects God to serve him evidence and a state of belief on a silver platter. You have to put in some leg work and not rely on whatever Kamil Gregor tells you. A list of some of my recommended resurrection works can be found here. Why doesn't Paul cite any of the scholarly literature in his review? Funny, that!

I agree with Paul that it is too long to get into another discussion of who wrote the Gospels.

Given that, I will just point the reader to various posts on this blog. Of course, there is more to come, and so much more out there from other writers: 

https://thinkchristiantheism.blogspot.com/2020/11/ferguson-fumbles.html

https://thinkchristiantheism.blogspot.com/2020/11/mcgrew-wipes-floor-with-ehrman-some.html

https://thinkchristiantheism.blogspot.com/2020/12/martin-hengel-gospel-titles.html

https://thinkchristiantheism.blogspot.com/2022/01/justin-martyrs-knowledge-of-gospel-of.html

https://thinkchristiantheism.blogspot.com/2022/05/why-i-think-papias-attributed-fourth.html

Paul talks about how comparing Luke to other ancient historians isn't that useful, given the fact that other ancient historians talk about the miraculous

1) It is not as if this puts the Christian on the backfoot. We can observe, in the scriptures itself, the use of the supernatural by those not of the faith, such as Pharaoh's magicians (Exodus 7-8) and a demonically possessed girl has the spirit of divination in Acts 16.

2) The more evidence of the supernatural, the less likely naturalism (so long as we define it as physicalism and causal closure) becomes.