Babble About Baba

 I got into a discussion with a Christian playing devils advocate. I've been in the game awhile, these Jesus doubles are anything but new. 

Jackson

He basically just repeating Hume's Argument

Although, in his argument that other religions have miracles, I don't think you should just concede that. I think each miracle has to be looked at on its own merit. Christianity's main miracle is unique because it was extremely unexpected.

Lucas

I pretty much agree. However, I grant it for sake of the argument because it is true it’s not a problem for Christianity. He also didn’t give a specific miracle for me to analyze.

Jackson 

Well, someone can make the argument that they could also be performing miracles in God's name, Which would make Jesus' statement that he is the "only way "apparently false. One could argue That if God raised Jesus from the dead to show his divinity, He could do the same for other people doing miracles.

I think the best argument in this would be Sam Harris's example of Sai Baba, who is a modern Indian gurus. He had millions of followers, and thousands of eyewitnesses to his miracles. He was said to be able to make things appear, To raise the dead, to read minds, to be in two places at once, etc. We could do the "liar, lunatic, Lord" trilemma, Although I don't think many would argue that all of his thousands of followers are all just lying.

Anyway, Harris's point is that the evidence for Sai Baba as far as better than Jesus, and that we literally have thousands of witnesses who are still alive, and these accounts are modern and not written decades later. But, according to Harris, If we were to reject Sai Baba's Miracles based on insufficient evidence, then how much more should we reject Jesus's miracles that are less attested

I think that's a much more robust way of articulating what counter apologist probably would have wanted to say. I guess I'm just a better spokesman at it than he is

Lucas

We have the criteria for false prophets in Deut. 13 & 18. Pace Gathercole (2006), Bauckham (2008), Hengel (2007), Loke (2019) et al, the Biblical case for Jesus being God is good. Swinburne (2010) argued, imo, successfully that Jesus behaved and taught how an all loving and powerful God would (treatment of women, Romans/gentiles, and Samaritans, radical love for the weak and forgiveness).

As for Sai Baba, there’s quite a number of issues.

1: Harris is not an historian. You know how well he treats the Bible, not sure you want to cite him here.

2: The evidence is good that Baba was a fraud. Let’s hear what an actual historian by trade has to say. Commenting on Modern Miracles: Sathya Sai Baba, a Modern-Day Prophet by Erlendur Haraldsson, reviewer Brian Steel makes the following observation:

“One aspect of the parapsychological phenomena that might have rewarded investigation is the increasing tendency in the past three decades, under the intense scrutiny of larger and larger darshan audiences and of camera zooms and videocameras, for SSB’s public materialisations to be largely confined to vibhuti, small items of jewellery, and necklaces, as well as the occasional dubious Shiva lingam (and the aborted lingam session caught on camera by the BBC in their 2004 documentary, Secret Swami). Also, is it not worth consideration that there have been no reports of spectacular phenomena like trances, bilocations, or ‘Lazarus-like resurrections’ in SSB’s final decades of life?” JSPR Volume 79.2 Number 919 April 2015.

This sounds an awful like the typical fraud/charlatan to me. Plus, we’re dealing with 2 entirely different cultural contexts here.

Kyle

Well, I think more to the point of Baba is that people can be fooled by a charlatan and not know that's what he was.

Jackson

And they say the same thing about Jesus. Make it argue that people weren't skeptical and were deceived

Lucas

1: I’m fully aware of the argument he’s making. The movement wouldn’t have even gotten off the ground if Jesus was a fraud. Baba (supposedly) had a lot of followers, but did the movement spread like Christianity? Plus, none of that discounts the evidence I presented. You need to factor that in as well.

2: We have evidence for what kinds of miracles frauds or mere magicians performed in the Greco-Roman world. Jesus doesn’t match that. Consult Keener 2011, 68-75

3: Someone like Sabbatai Zevi or Apollonius of Tyana. They are actually used by historians, not hacks like Harris.

Jackson

to be fair, they could argue that if we had biographies That were only written by followers of Sai Baba, They would try to portray him enough more positive light, especially if they were written decades later

Lucas

Then it would be a meaningless hypothetical vs. real world evidence. I think this also would bring us into a discussion about Gospel reliability, which is beyond the scope of this post.

Repetitive Disanalogy

I am going to reply to counter apologist on the resurrection and miracles. See his post here.

He writes "What if I told you that I believed that god raised Jesus from the dead, but that I did not believe that Jesus was the son of god, and denied that belief in his death and resurrection was the path to salvation and eternal life in reconciliation with the one true god, Yahweh.

That would just sound crazy. 

Right?"

In Christian theology, the resurrection is the vindication of Jesus' claims and message. It will be interesting to see how he argues this. 

He writes "The argument for the resurrection comes in many forms, but they all eventually come back to referencing the bible’s stories about Jesus being crucified and resurrected. They all are based on testimonial evidence for a miracle occurring in the past, and unfortunately for Christians"

1: There is a hidden premise in here. Notice he says "they all eventually come back to referencing Bible stories about Jesus being crucified and resurrected'. Well, obviously. Who else is supposed to report that the resurrection happened besides Christians? 

2: Is he not aware that Tacitus and Josephus report the crucifixion of Jesus? 

He writes "testimony can not be used in an evidential way to justify belief in a miracle claim in the world we live in"

There is a lot to say about this little sentence 

1: Assuming event M happened, I would expect someone to claim that it did happen. 

2: I need more background knowledge. What type of person are you? Are you a known liar? Are miracles possible, and if so, do they happen?

3: On naturalism, you should be quite skeptical of miracle claims. However, on Biblical theism, the world is chockfull of miracles. Jesus' ministry is supernatural through and through, you can not separate it from that context. So, if you are a trustworthy source, and you tell me that you have experienced a miracle, I will probably believe you. 

4: In CA's article, there is no mention of the necessary readings on this very topic. To take a few:

Keener, Craig S. Miracles: the Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Baker Academic, 2011.

Larmer, Robert. Questions of Miracle. McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997.

_____. Dialogues on Miracle. Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2015.

_____. Water into Wine?: an Investigation of the Concept of Miracle. McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.

Coady, C. A. J. Testimony: a Philosophical Study. Clarendon Press, 2002.

5: Suppose you are sleeping, and your roommate runs into your room, screaming "there is a fire, a huge fire in the kitchen!". I never pull pranks, I am not a jokester, and there is very few things in the kitchen that are flammable. Do you say testimony isn't evidence, or do you take my words seriously? 

Continuing: What if I told you that I woke up in my bed in New Jersey this morning, then had lunch on the moon, but then was home here on earth for dinner?"

1: This is not a miracle claim.

2: Is there good reason to think you were able to go to the moon? Do we have evidence of this happening like we do for miracles? I don't think so. CA's argument fails by disanalogy. 

You probably wouldn’t believe me.

I wouldn't believe you because the evidence isn't on the same playing field. You could say that there is testimonial evidence for alien abduction, but from what I have read, these are almost certainly cases of old hag syndrome.

Continuing: "The difference is the background knowledge in each case. In Star Trek, there are transporters that can span an incredible distance in a second, not to mention galaxy class starships that make such a feat possible. In the real world, only a handful of human beings have undergone the training and incredible journey via rocket spacecraft to make it to the moon, a process that takes a lot longer than a day. 

Now what if my statement was about me doing something physically impossible that no level of technology can overcome? How much more unbelievable is that? Our entire lives we build on this background knowledge of how the world works.

Does my moon lunch scenario become any more plausible if I amend it to say “God transported me to the moon for lunch and then sent me back home to Earth for dinner that same day”?

If I were to try and use a defense in a murder trial that my concealed carry gun levitated out of my holster and fired on my hiking companion in the middle of the woods, would the jury accept or reject that claim? Would you want the jury to accept that claim?"

There is a lot wrong here. 

1: We have a mechanism by which the miraculous can happen. Divine Entities. 

2: You are bound by the laws of nature, God is not. As Craig Keener (2011, p. 131) observes: 

 "“One violates a law only to which one is subject, so the language would not be consistent with the theistic premises…”

3: Christians do not claim that Jesus rose by human powers, rather, they claim God raised him (Acts 2:24; 3:15; 10:40; 13:30; Romans 4:24; 8:11).

4: Jesus is not a mere human, he is God in the flesh.

So, again, CA presents us with a disanalogy.

He says: Even if someone was recently convinced by apologetic arguments to be a “mere theist”, why should the regard the 5 pieces of testimonial evidence we have to the resurrection of Jesus over the other pieces of testimony we have for a wide array of miracle claims for contradictory religions like Hinduism, Mormonism, or Islam?

Miracles are only evidence against CA's naturalism. The Bible is full of miracles from non-believers. Take pharaoh's magicians in the Exodus or Satan himself tempting Christ. Examples abound.

He says "The general fact that there are a lot of non-verifiable, implausible miracle claims would seem to support the idea that a supernatural realm exists. However once we look more closely at the data, the specific details of miracle claims that happen in support of contradictory religions undermine the idea that the supernatural exists, or at the very least that miracles can serve as evidence for the truth of a specific religion."

Again, this does not work against Biblical theism, as per above.

He goes after Mike Licona after this, & I don't have a dog in that fight. I am also not going to do his homework for him. The relevant texts on miracles are cited above.

References

Miracles: The Credibility Of The New Testament Accounts. Baker Academic 2011. 

The Slippery Debate Tactics of Matt Dillahunty

 Part 1: https://youtu.be/fzYvFY9oB70

Part 2: https://youtu.be/aTuO0iYUDXw

Part 3: https://youtu.be/ZM0yvV9NTGU

Part 4: https://youtu.be/wwnNaKdugLg

Ormond Knows God Exists!

 From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwge67wY49c&t=438s

"I think I've also noticed through the 

sort of ways that Christians 

do apologetics that it's mostly this 

psychological need to not feel stupid um to feel justified in something which at some sort of intrinsic level they know isn't true and so apologetics exists to be like like it's just this again i think it's mostly psychological the arguments don't matter you know like it can be Thomism to freaking Alvin planting or whatever who cares as long as you're an arty and there's like an us and there's a them and it's just like I will adopt anything that does say or okay 

right and anything they say is wrong and 

it's just like this psychological thing again of like how can i be confident how can i not feel stupid that I believe like crazy things"

Naturalists engage in counter apologetics so that they don't have to feel stupid for holding to such an insane position. Intrinsically, they know naturalism is nonsense. From Tom Jump to Graham Oppy, it doesn't matter, they will adopt any argument, from any naturalist, so that they can feel confident and not stupid for not believing in something they know deep down, is in fact, true. 

Counter-Apologist Sound Bites

I'm going to comment on this video by counter apologist Dave S. 

1:53 "I can't think of a single instance off the top of  my head of someone coming to theism because of the arguments being used" 

I can think of quite a few. Daniel Howard-Snyder, Edward Feser, Peter Van Inwagen, William P. Alston, and CS Lewis all converted from atheism to Christianity. Yujin Nagasawa also became a theist, though he is not a Christian at the moment. 

2:14 "...apologetics is giving people who already believe in god reason to hold the view more than just this feeling they get" 

1. On face value, this is not even an issue. It's just a talking point. Should you not have reasons to believe in what you do? Should you not seek answers to questions you have? Why would I want anyone to leave the faith, especially for inadequate reasons?  

 I'll grant some people may do this, but it is quite disingenuous to shoehorn most apologists into this one small category of the community. 

2. Dave does not have access to everyone's motivations, I, along with the other bloggers here, write in hopes that we will lead non-believers to Christ, but we also want believers who have questions. Apologetics is for both the believer and non-believer, it cuts both ways. 

2:37 (paraphrased) "If you read Craig's conversion story, he is very candid he's very candid about it he talks about...how he had an experience at school and he saw people who seemed to be on a different realm that him...and he developed a career coming up with arguments to say it's more than a fuzzy feeling"

This is severely mistaken. 

1. The moving of the holy spirit is predicted on Christian theism, this is not some foreign idea. 

2. Craig was not a philosopher at the time, nor did he study it. He was most likely unaware of the rigorous philosophical defenses of Christian theism. 

3. Craig defends reformed epistemology, which cuts deeper than just a "warm fuzzy feeling". This is easily accessible information. As someone who claims to be a counter-apologist AS WELL as trying to do a PhD by publication, I expected Dave to know better. 

8:09 " It is so often the case that you hear the same two, three, four, five arguments that there are"

1. All it takes is one theistic argument to be sound, no matter how many times it is repeated. 

2. There are quite a number of theistic arguments out there, such as the argument from embodied moral agents (See Blake Giunta's beliefmap.org), the argument from collections by Menzel, The argument from numbers by Goldschmidt, I could go on and on, but I think my point is clear. 

8:58 "They've read William Lane Craig, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga or whoever their favorite pop apologist is"

This is quite shallow. It seems Dave doesn't know the field, nor it's history well. 

1. A 'pop apologist" is someone like Frank Turek or J. Warner Wallace. To shoehorn 3 of the most influential philosophers of the modern era into that category shows a lack of knowledge in the subject. 

2. Has he read these men's CV's? Take a look at Craig's, Swinburne's as well as Plantinga's. Is that really "pop apologist' to you? 

3. All of Craig's publications speak for themselves. Swinburne has worked rigorously his whole academic career bridging his work from the philosophy of science, religion and philosophical theology together. He is widely regarded as one of the most well read men in the field. Alvin Plantinga revived philosophy of religion in the 60's from the shackles of logical positivism. Plantinga broke new ground in religious epistemology as well. His work there will be talked about so long as the field is still around. 

I highly recommend Trent Dougherty's channel on the work of Swinburne. As for Plantinga, check out the work of Andrew Moon and Tyler McNabb. 

Licona vs. Robinson on The Resurrection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoq4bLxzop4&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR176bHW-BljXp85d1YYzGlWwdcKZjeUn9QmydRhtL-79Vl2VCX2ckTMyrc

This was a really good discussion. It's a pretty good example of why the minimal facts approach to the historicity of Jesus' resurrection faces serious difficulties with regards to establishing the nature of the resurrection appearances. A focus on the origin of the disciples' belief in the resurrection (a la Craig, Wright, Levering, Allison, etc.), as well as a robust defense of the empty tomb + appearance traditions in the Gospels yields far more promising results.

I could give far more, but I'll limit myself to 9 points.

1. A maximalist approach to the Gospels/Acts would put far more epistemic pressure on her when it comes to things like the empty tomb, the appearances, and the origins of the post-crucifixion Christian movement.

2. Conceding for the sake of argument that the Gospels are a hopelessly contradictory mix of legend and testimony shoots oneself in the foot with regards to the historical case for the resurrection. 

3. Licona's dichotomy between the event itself and the the explanation of that event shoots him in the foot. If one doesn't establish that Jesus is in a separate reference class from anyone else who there is a claimed resurrection for, it's hard to see how Licona's case doesn't fall victim to Humean arguments for a low prior probability. 

4. Robinson's views on the nature of the resurrection body, without any affirmation of the empty tomb is potentially intentionally ambiguous. She seems to contend that there is some middle ground between a bodily resurrection of Jesus' corpse and a spiritual resurrection. That's simply not the case in the Pauline literature. 

5. What does Laura believe best explains the origin of the post-crucifixion Christian movement? Wright's entire case was neglected unfortunately throughout the discussion. A simple visionary appearance would not have been nearly enough for a variety of reasons. For one, this idea of visions being common shoots itself in the foot, because they had solid terminology to explain such things apart from resurrection. To quote Wright

"However, precisely because such encounters were reasonably well known (the apparently strong point of those who have recently tried to insist that this is what 'really happened' at Easter) they could not possibly, by themselves, have given rise to the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. They are a thoroughly insufficient condition for the early Christian belief. The more 'normal' these 'visions' were, the less chance there is that anyone, no matter how cognitively dissonant they may have been feeling, would have said what nobody had ever said about such a dead person before, that they had been raised from the dead. Indeed, such visions meant precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the person was dead, not that they were alive. Even if several such experiences had occurred, if the tomb was still occupied by the dead body they would have said to themselves, after the experiences had ceased, 'We have seen exceedingly strange visions, but he is still dead and buried. Our experiences were, after all, no different from the ones we have heard about in the old stories and poems.'" (N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of The Son of God, 690-91)

Secondly, the early church had no problem preserving visionary accounts of the risen Jesus (i.e. Stephen's vision in Acts, Paul's experiences in the third heaven, etc.). If the earliest resurrection experiences were of this nature, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't be preserved in the appearance traditions, but they aren't in any form. (see O'Connell's 2009 paper)

6. Robinson seems to indicate that the differentiation between visionary encounters of Jesus in the early church and the resurrection appearances isn't strong at all. This couldn't be further from the truth. In addition to my 2nd point regarding visions, the evidence of differentation in Acts chapter 1, and the evidence from the gospel accounts themselves, Kendall & O'Collins make the following points,

"Many commentators understand the list in I Cor 15:5-8 (of individuals and groups to whom the risen Christ appeared) to follow a chronological sequence (29). Within the context of this article, two points are important: the tense of the verb ophthe, and Paul's phrase of "last of all".

The aorist tense of "appeared" which Paul uses in I Cor 15:5-8 suggests events over and done with in the past and not repeated (30). As regards I Cor 15:8 and the appearances to Paul, C.F. Evans wonders whether Paul meant "last of all" to be a factual statement. Or is it an expression of Pauline egoism (31)? Evans does not answer his own questions but implies that the apostle holds that the appearance to him was in principle the last: "Paul envisages the whole series as coming to a close only with the appearance of the Lord to himself." (32)

Hans Conzelmann argues that the long list of witnesses, starting with 1 Cor 15:5 and ending at 1 Cor 15:8, is there to maintain the resurrection's "temporal distance from the present and thereby to rule out the [present] possibility of a direct appropriation of it." (33) Here Conzelmann seems to be saying that the witnesses, from Peter to Paul, directly appropriated the resurrection (directly encountered the risen Lord) in a way that was simply not possible for believers when Paul wrote I Corinthians.

Fuller is quite clear in holding that the appearance in Paul (I Cor 15:8) is in principle the last appearance of the risen Lord. He argues for two types of appearances (founding the eschatological community and inaugurating the Christian mission). He asserts that Paul not only knew of no other appearances during the past twenty years after his own, but also ruled out in principle any such appearances (34). Fuller sums up his points by saying: "The appearances occurred over a period of some three years or so, the last and definitive one being to that of Paul" (49). (35)

In commenting on I Cor 15:8 Jacob Kremer argues that the "of all" refers to all the Easter witnesses listed in I Cor 15:5-8, and not simply to "all the apostles" just mentioned in v 7. He further argues that even if "last of all" might in theory mean "least of all the apostles" (a sense of values), it reflects the "then" of vv 6-7 and clearly carries a temporal meaning (36).

Charles K. Barrett faces the same question and decides more emphatically for the temporal sense of "last of all." (37) Similar opinions are expressed by Grosheide ("Paul was the last to see the glorified Lord with his own eyes, in order that he might be a true apostle") (38), Morris ([Paul] "thinks of himself as the last in the line of those who have seen the Lord") (39), Wand (the "historical accuracy [of Paul's preaching] was guaranteed by a number of witnesses of whom Paul himself was the last") (40), and Rengstorf (41). Finally, Gordon Fee states that the appearance to Paul "was a unique and gracious gift that occurred after the time when such appearances were understood to have ceased" (42)

The conclusion seems well supported: Paul understood the risen Lord's appearance to him to be, both in fact and in principle, the last of a series. With his special case such experiences ended.

(30) Beda Rigaux (Dieu l'a ressuscite: Exegese et theologie biblique [Studii Biblici Franciscani Analecta 4; Gembloux: Duculot, 1973] 123) is one of the few authors to note the significance of the difference between the aorist tense of "he died," "he was buried," and "he appeared" (four times) and the perfect tense of "he has been raised" (I Cor 15:4). The perfect indicates the beginning but not the completion of an act. The aorist tense, however, locates an event in the sphere of past history, among things that happened, so as to be over and done with. Kessler similarly notes how the aorist tense of ophthe (I Cor 15:5,6,7,8) indicates a closed series of events (Sucht den Lebenden, 152). Grammars of NT Greek agree that in the first century A.D. the aorist indicative normally pointed to something that had simply come about, without being continued or repeated (Maximilian Zerwick, Biblical Greek [ed. Joseph Smith; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1963] 77; Friedrich Blass and Albert Debrunner, A Grammar of New Testament Greek (ed. Robert Funk; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961] 176). In our case, while the present impact of the resurrection itself continues (perfect tense), the appearances of the risen Christ, like the death and burial (all in the aorist) tense, are once-and-for-all events of the past that are not repeated.

(37) C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on The First Epistle to the Corinthians (HNTC; New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 334-44: "The last of the witnesses of the risen Christ was Paul himself. It is true that 'last of all' could be taken to mean 'least in importance', and would agree with verse 9; but at the end of a list punctuated by then…then…then, the other meaning of the word must be accepted." ("The Uniqueness of the Easter Appearances" CBQ 54. 1992, p. 295-297)

7. I simply don't like this dichotomy between historical explanations and other truths. The question of God's existence, and whether or not God would want to raise someone like Jesus is relevant to the question of the resurrection of Jesus. I don't care about what bounds a historian can or can't cross. This question is obviously interdisciplinary. Historians make clumsy statements about epistemology all the time. They have no problem borrowing from that field. Why not philosophy of religion? If the evidence strongly favors theism, and the idea of Jesus being in a more precise reference class than other historical figures to whom miracles are attributed, then any historical explanation's prior probability is affected by both of those things. 

8. Robinson's view of Pauline influence on the Gospels is radical, and is worth challenging in light of Licona's own work on the historical reliability of the Gospels, but it isn't even touched! Likewise, her portrayal of a potential sharp disconnect between Paul's fundamental gospel and that of the Jerusalem apostles has fallen dramatically out of favor in recent years, but Licona doesn't even touch it.

9. Robinson's view on individual testimonial evidence seems to be radically skeptical, and yet Licona doesn't defend any rigorous view of the reliability of testimony. This happens far too often on the resurrection of Jesus. The general reliability of testimony, especially in an environment of critical examination of claims tied to honor status in society, and the founding of a new religion are very important considerations. 

Musings on Jesus' Passion Predictions....

On the hypothesis that Jesus was God incarnate (HI), how surprising is it that he would predict his imminent death and vindication?

On the ~HI, how surprising is it that he would predict his imminent death and vindication?

On the resurrection hypothesis (R), how surprising is it that Jesus would predict his imminent death and vindication?

On ~R, how surprising is it that Jesus would predict his imminent death and vindication?

A worry I have is that these predictions also support certain naturalistic hypotheses that need to generate expectations for the resurrection. (This naturalistic hypothesis can be ruled out for other reasons, but his predictions may be evidence in favor of it).

It seems to me that correct predictions are strong evidence that Jesus was divine, but that already seemingly bakes the resurrection into the proverbial cake. It also seems to me that a prediction simpliciter “charges” the religious context to make us take the evidence for this resurrection a bit more seriously, but I haven’t figured out how exactly that's going to work probabilistically.