Gary Habermas Shows Why the 'Minimal Facts' of Jesus' Death Can't Establish the Resurrection

Gary Habermas is a New Testament scholar and philosopher of religion at Liberty University who has devoted much of his career to defending a historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. For over 30 years now, Habermas has collected and analyzed scholarly materials published on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, distilling them down to a core set of trends. His work has been cited by numerous Christian apologists, perhaps most notably in The Case for Christ and the debates and writings of William Lane Craig.

Recently, Dr. Habermas appeared on the Unbelievable radio show and podcast in dialogue with James Crossley on whether the "minimal facts" surrounding Jesus' death support the resurrection. Crossley is an agnostic New Testament scholar at the University of Sheffield and the author of a book called Jesus and the Chaos of History. The minimal facts are intended to be general points of agreement acceptable even to skeptics, and the two criteria Habermas gives are that they be facts with multiple lines of argument supporting them, and they share in a consensus made up of the "vast majority" of New Testament scholars.

Habermas identifies 6 minimal facts in the show, which are as follows:

1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.

2. The disciples had experiences they believed to be of the risen Jesus.

3. Some among the disciples died for their belief.

4. James, a skeptic, was converted.

5. Paul, a skeptic and persecutor of Christians, was converted.

6. The earliness of the proclamation of the risen Jesus.

One immediately noteworthy thing missing from this list is the empty tomb. To his credit, Gary concedes that the empty tomb is not a minimal fact because of the many biblical historians who dispute it. As the host, Justin, remarks, this seems contrary to what some apologists, like William Lane Craig, have attempted to cull from Dr. Habermas' work. In his book God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist, co-written with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor Craig writes: "There are at least four facts about the fate of the historical Jesus that are widely accepted by New Testament historians today." (p. 22, italics mine) Dr. Craig then goes on to articulate some of the reasons that "most scholars" accept the empty tomb.

Of course, it could be contended that this is just another way of saying that the majority of scholars favor the empty tomb as a historical fact. However, 1/3 to 1/4 of experts dissenting from a given viewpoint is not a negligible difference. Things get even sketchier when you look at the methodology behind Dr. Habermas' 2005 study and discover how that figure is calculated. The survey is not a comprehensive one of thousands of New Testament scholars, it's a survey of select literature published in German, French and English since 1975. While Gary's work offers important insights, he also has not released his data, despite requests for it, and the closest we get to an idea of how many sources he's surveyed is "more than 1400" in that 2005 study of his. Break that down over 30 years and that's a ballpark average of 46.7 studies examined per year. It's hardly a robust amount of data from which to assess the opinions of New Testament scholarship on the whole.

This methodological problem has implications beyond the empty tomb, too, for all of the six minimal facts mentioned above, as well as any other facts that could be conjured up on the same basis. So whether Dr. Habermas wants to single out 4 facts, 6 facts, 12 facts, or his exceedingly generous 21 facts, the fatal flaw remains present in all cases. Statistical analysis is only as good as your data and the method you use to analyze that data, and a study like the one published by Dr. Habermas in a religious studies journal would not pass in an introductory level Stats class (I say this from experience). Granted, it was probably not Gary's intent to do a rigorous statistical analysis, but the limitations of this research need to be noted when attempts are made at extrapolating certain trends from it. For more on this specific concern, see Richard Carrier's article, Innumeracy: A Fault to Fix.

But what real use is a list of even roughly calculated minimal facts when it requires another list of supplementary philosophical assumptions in order to support the resurrection? Near the end of the discussion on the podcast, Habermas explains that the way he sees of moving from the death of Jesus and the reports of his postmortem appearances to the involvement of the supernatural is by bringing in "worldview aspects." This is, in fact, something he notes early on in the show. Among these assumptions are conclusions about the character and identity of Jesus, and the continuation of life after death, though I would argue there are additional assumptions about the existence and nature of god. In a chapter from The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave, Robert Greg Cavin outlines still more hidden assumptions in the standard resurrection story of Jesus, which is not just revivification, but has to do with Jesus being raised as a living supernatural body sometime after his death.

At one point in the episode, Dr. Habermas refers to the resurrection allegedly supported by the minimal facts as "mundane," saying that the gospels depict the postmortem appearances as if seeing a dead friend at the supermarket, acting as normal. Yet the point by Cavin above reveals this to be naive. A mundane resurrection in that sense would be as easily dismissed as any incident of a grieving loved one hallucinating their dearly departed. There is nothing especially impressive about it. The minimal facts are where many apologists say that the resurrection differs from other allegations of resuscitation or revivification of a corpse. If the transformation of the disciples is a stand out feature of the resurrection story, it would seem to play a part in discounting the mundane nature of events as Habermas portrays it. After all, we're often told, people might see the dead after they're gone, but they generally don't go to be martyred for them. If this famous image of the disciples valiantly accepting death having seen the risen lord is as true as apologists claim it is, then the resurrection simply can't be a mundane occurrence by their own reasoning.

Does this not also say something about the exceptional kind of assumptions that are required to make a minimal facts case for the resurrection function at all? We are not talking about spotting someone in the supermarket, alive and apparently well when they'd been dead the day before. We are talking about something much less "mundane," and it's the reason why the case for the resurrection has been turned into an argument for the existence of god by an apologist like William Lane Craig. There is an element of the supernatural, a "worldview aspect," as Habermas called it. It isn't simply that Jesus appeared again to his followers, like in a daydream, it's that he miraculously rose from the dead, in a way that his followers took as a vindication of their ideas about his teachings and his identity. It meant, for them, that god not only existed, but that he was the god represented by Jesus, and Jesus was the sort of person god not only had the power to raise back to life, but wanted to raise, did raise, and had the power and will to raise into something more than just a reanimated earthly form.
 

The miracle of the resurrection is the saving grace of many Christians. To Paul it gave hope for a life beyond death and for a righting of the wrongs faced in this life. Entertaining the historicity of the resurrection without the supernatural and metaphysical assumptions behind it is practically unimaginable, not only for atheists and skeptics but for believing Christians, too. This brings us to the awkward position of either asking each other to buy into our philosophical presuppositions, or leaving things at a set of bare minimal facts that is by itself incapable of showing anything except what it already contains. The minimal facts are, one might say, minimally interesting. Even if we put aside the troubling concerns with the methodology that undergirds them, they aren't what's really doing the work in winning minds. Rather than minimizing background assumptions and asking us to buy into some ample facts, the apologetic case for the resurrection minimizes the facts and asks us to buy into some ample assumptions.

Belief is Not a Dirty Word

On a recent episode of the Unbelievable podcast, an atheist science teacher going under the pseudonym Elliot George explained why he advocates abandoning belief - not specifically belief in god, but belief of any sort, presumably even the belief that it's wrong to hold beliefs. In substitution for belief, George prefers us to say that we 'think' a certain way, or that a certain claim is 'indicated by the evidence.' At some point, he thinks, science supersedes belief. After all, we don't say we believe in gravity, do we?

Not so fast. A belief, as it is commonly used, is simply a disposition we have towards a given proposition. Put another way, my belief that pressing the keys on my keyboard will produce letters on my screen that can be assembled and organized into this blog post just means I hold it to be true that I can write this post by utilizing my keyboard. Beliefs may be informed or uninformed, supported or unsupported, justified or unjustified. No evidence interprets itself, and even science operates on the basis of certain beliefs (thoroughly examined and tested) about how data can be collected, evaluated, and formulated into conclusions that may tell us more about the world in which we live.

A strong case can be made that none of us are capable of avoiding the formation of beliefs, regardless of what we call them or how cognizant we are of them. Sincere Kirabo touches on this in a recent blog entry:

Kant’s postulation of noumenon (“das Ding an sich”, or “the thing in itself”) holds that “what is” (noumenon) is separate from phenomenon, the thing as it appears to an observer. Kant’s insight, while not without its own flaws, does rightfully allude to subjectivity contra objectivity. This demarcates the difference between how one views the world – our perceptions based upon upbringing, inculcated core beliefs, limited personal experience, culture, biology, environmental influences, prevalent developments and notions of our time period – and objective reality, the world wholly unadulterated by human cognitive biases, fallacious thinking and skewed perspectives. This applies to everyone – me, whoever’s reading this, whoever isn’t reading this, the president of Montenegro, and so on.

The notion that we perceive an objective, unfiltered reality in any capacity has long been regarded as dead within both the fields of philosophy and psychology. Thanks in large part to all the numerous avenues for self-deception that we continually discover, a persistent and nagging question remains as to how accurately our ideas of things model the things in themselves. On its own, this seems to practically demand the recognition of something like beliefs - our attitudes about the world around us, distinct from, but hopefully informed by, the actual world around us. To return to the example of gravity, the more justification a belief receives, the more reason we have to regard it as true, and following the standard description of knowledge as justified true belief, we come to accept gravity as known rather than merely believed, yet knowledge remains itself a subset of belief.

Should we value any beliefs, though? It would seem next to impossible to avoid acting on any beliefs, but even beyond this there are many things we apparently wish to esteem, like companionship, intellectual pursuits, and artistic endeavors. All of these stem from beliefs which are motivating to more than a few of us. It's hard to imagine anyone doing anything without some underlying belief to instigate it. And as mentioned already, the very thought that beliefs should be eschewed rests upon at least one belief. To the extent that 'thinking' on evidence resembles belief, it looks trivial indeed to play semantic games.

It's easy to understand why some non-theists like George are not fond of belief. Innumerable religions have deemed those belonging to other views to be "unbelievers" or "disbelievers." Even if strictly accurate, the terms carry with them somewhat of a negative connotation, to the degree that many atheists are routinely treated as if they believe nothing at all. However, attempting to turn belief into a dirty word is unlikely to accomplish much on that front, and a fair amount of the intent seems directed at marginalizing religion and religious associations no matter what the cost, when there has been nothing especially 'religious' about belief for hundreds of years, as Dan Linford notes in addressing John Loftus on this same issue. What we ought to want to avoid above all is sacrificing in the vicious cause of eradicating religion those things that help us to understand ourselves and our world.

Beliefs can be ugly, naive, and irrational, but they can also be beautiful, intricate, and sensible. Somewhere along the way, it seems that for certain people the lack of belief in gods has progressed to desiring the lack of all beliefs. While this might appear a useful argumentative tactic in staving off being put on the defense, it just is not tenable and will end up causing more problems in the long run. I think it's very worthwhile to have conversations about things like belief and faith, if for no other reason than to achieve even the smallest disassociation between tough questions about meaning and language and markedly religious concepts. It's one thing to leave open the possibility that we need to believe in something beyond ourselves, and it's quite another thing to dispute that we need to believe in a personal, omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect creative mind. Perhaps by obliterating any such distinction, these 'anti-beliefers' are actually doing more damage than good, merely offering another excuse for both sides to circle the wagons.

Stop Pretending Your Standard is God's Standard

It always amuses me when Christians try to defend their beliefs by essentially belittling their own powers of reason and observation. 'I don't know if I trust myself enough to think I can figure it all out on my own.' 'I think it takes tremendous faith to believe you know better than god.' While statements like these largely straw-man the atheist position, they also reveal one major assumption behind most forms of theism that actually played a pretty big role in my own loss of faith. 

Most recently, I heard David Robertson give voice to this assumption in his second debate with Matt Dillahunty on the UK Christian radio show Unbelievable. David said he doesn't judge Jesus by his standards, he judges Jesus by Jesus' standards. When Matt rightly called this out as circular, noting that even Satan would look right by Satan's own standards, David disagreed and denied that he's in a position to judge, being that he can't trust himself absolutely. Fortunately, he has god's standard to rely on instead - or so David thinks.

The problem is that such a position is entirely untenable. Whatever one believes about divine revelation, it cannot be the case that revelation is ever given in a completely uninterpreted, unfiltered, and direct way. The process of revelation, whether denoting anything true or not, always involves a sender and receiver; divine beings (god, angels, etc.) send revelations, which we human beings receive. To suppose otherwise is not just to move beyond revelation, but to suppose that there is no real distinction between humans and the divine, that we are synonymous with god in some sense. Perhaps, like Bishop George Berkeley thought, we are only ideas in the mind of god. Of course, such a radical view has plenty of its own problems, not least of which would be asking which divine mind we do inhabit.

If revelation has to be transmitted to us, by its nature, then what guarantee is there that it's transmitted accurately? More to the point, even if it is transmitted accurately, what guarantee is there that we've received it accurately? We know of many cases of transmitted information getting 'lost in translation' - radio signals, written texts, cultural norms, computer codes, even genetic material. Where there are senders and receivers, there are often errors occurring at several points along the way. Mr. Robertson likely finds it plausible that believers in other faiths might have malfunctioning receptors, could have been sent a corrupted message, or perhaps received their beliefs from a dubious source. What makes him think, against these alternatives, that he has truly received god's standard through divine revelation?

As I'd bet, there are only two responses someone like David would give. His revelation is trustworthy because god has protected its transmission, or his revelation is trustworthy because it has the sort of evidence and reasons it would need to be trustworthy. If the latter is the case, David must either admit there is, in fact, some personal standard he's using to make judgments about revelation, or he must continue to deny this and, in effect, retreat to the former response. However, the former response is nothing but an assumption - an article of faith - until support is given for it. When that support is provided, it will either be based on god, as ascertained by revelation, or it will have to be based on something independent of god. So round and round it will go till Robertson arbitrarily decides to stop questioning and rely on faith, or till he decides to join the rest of us who recognize the inescapable nature of perception, and finally starts talking standards of belief in a manner we can actually understand and assess.

I want to be clear, though, that I am not insinuating that we should fully trust our own senses to guide us to the truth. The problems I've noted as arising from methods of transmission arise in more areas than just religious revelation. There are many conceivable situations where it's not a good idea to depend on our intuitions and common sense, and psychology tells us there is much about the way our minds work that can cast doubt on the accuracy of such easy means of decision-making. Yet if we take these situations to indicate a general unreliability about ourselves, the conclusion that necessarily follows is not Christian theism, but solipsism. If we can't trust ourselves to reason about matters involving god, we certainly can't trust ourselves to reason about divine revelation. Nonetheless, a great many theists do, including David Robertson. The irony is that even his statement about not being in a position to judge Jesus by his own standard is itself a judgment call, as it is to judge that the sentence 'Jesus is good' comes from a divine source.

What I find particularly appalling about all of this is not the flawed reasoning, or even the hypocrisy behind it, but the way Christians like David use it as a platform on which to exalt themselves in false humility. The obvious implication is that someone who follows the perfect standard of an all-knowing, all-good god is in a better epistemic position than someone who doesn't. Though I can't deny this in principle, I can deny the naive substitution of one's own standard with 'god's standard', as Robertson attempts to get away with. If one wants to claim that the rule they live by is divine, let them state their case and support it with reason and evidence. If one wants to make the less fantastical claim that they try to make their own standard comport with a divine rule of law, this, too, at least is fertile ground for discussion.

But, please, stop pretending that your standard is god's standard rather than your own.

How Not to Defend the Moral Argument for God (Part 2)

In my previous post, I discussed a few problems I see in the second premise of the moral argument for god's existence, as popularly formulated by William Lane Craig. I'll rehash the argument here again, for the sake of clarity:

1. If god does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, god exists.

I chose to begin my critique with the second premise because I wished to point out that even if one does believe in objective moral values, Craig and Koukl fail to adequately justify 2. Of course, if one accepts the second premise, as I do, it doesn't matter much how it is justified by apologists. In a debate, however, it is incumbent upon the speaker to support their premises. Were I engaged in a formal debate on this subject, I would grant the second premise while drawing attention to its poor justification, if only to show that the non-theist can better account for the reality of objective moral values. Thus, in this second part, I will focus on the first premise. In my opinion, this is the best way to deal with the moral argument for god.

Let's say, hypothetically, that we are ethical intuitionists, like Dr. Craig. Remember that the moral argument deals with moral ontology, not moral epistemology. In our hypothetical scenario, we believe that we can apprehend moral truths, and we believe that these truths are intrinsic in nature. The atrocities of Nazism are intrinsically wrong, we would claim, and by definition, intrinsic values are objective, not being reliant on any relations to other things. They would be wrong even if the Nazis had won the war and brainwashed or killed everyone. This is practically the spitting image of the kind of morality Craig professes to have when he talks of the Holocaust being wrong "even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them." [1]

What objections could be raised against this stance? Craig could argue that objective values have to be grounded in something external to human beings - god, in his view. Yet this response would seem to ignore the meaning of intrinsic value. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines intrinsic as

belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing. [2]

If we say that human life is an intrinsic good, normally we mean that human life is good in and of itself. It is good independently of any opinion or belief to the contrary. Dr. Craig asserts that human beings do have intrinsic value, [3] but also claims that moral values are grounded in the character of god. [4] This appears to be a contradiction in terms, because if values come from god, then they cannot, by definition, be intrinsic, since they are determined by something outside of the thing itself. Rape is wrong not in-and-of itself, but because it is not in accordance with god's character. In a response to Luke Muehlhauser, Craig explains that he sees intrinsic value in a bit of a different way:

...persons have intrinsic value in that they are not merely means to be used for some end but are to be treated as ends in themselves. So we might well ask, "But why are human persons intrinsically valuable?" and the answer will be because God is personal. [5]

Craig's understanding of intrinsic value is arguably weaker in contrast to my own, supported by dictionaries and countless philosophers and ethicists. It is particularly weaker in how it addresses the view of objective values as ensuring that "something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so." [6] In that "anybody", Dr. Craig makes an unstated exception for his personal god, and what guarantee do we have that god would never change his mind about moral issues? According to most strains of Christian theology, god's moral prescriptions on unclean foods and circumcision were altered - overturned in every practical sense of the word - by the time of Jesus. As a divine command theorist, Craig believes that god's moral commands flow from his character. But what does it mean to suggest that the circumcision and food laws were effectively neutered once Jesus came around? If god's commands loosened up, does that mean his character changed too?

The Euthyphro dilemma asks, 'is something good because god commands it, or does god command something because it is good?' Apologists frequently retort that the answer is neither; something is good when it is in keeping with god's character or nature. However, we can rephrase the dilemma as follows: 'does god inform his character, or does his character inform him?' If the former is true, we fall back into the original dilemma, because by informing his character, god determines what is moral. If the latter is true, then there is something over which god has no authority, and this challenges the omnipotence and sovereignty of god. In addition, it simply will not suffice to define goodness as consistent with god's character, because we don't know god's character. Even if goodness is an essential property of his character, we still have no actual information about that property.

Not only does moral epistemology look troubling on the theistic side, but moral ontology seems unjustifiable, too. Even if we set aside the incoherency of claiming that good flows from god's character, useless as it is in defining actual goodness, there remains the problem of scripture and reason that argues against an unchanging character. As well, if intrinsic value exists, in the fullest, most objective definition, it will be accessible apart from the existence of any god, since it only has to do with the things in themselves, and not any relations to other things. 

Craig could also possibly object to the reliability of our intuitions, if there is no god. How can we trust our faculties, he might ask. This is just as much a problem for theists as for non-theists, though. See my previous blog entry on the problem of induction. There is no reason to assume that the existence of a god would make it any more likely that we would have uninhibited access to our sensory apparatuses, and there are good reasons to suspect that, at the very least, natural selection would favor reliable sense organs over unreliable ones that might lead to our deaths.

Even so, I must admit I do not subscribe either to intuitionism or to intrinsic value. These views are capable of countering the moral argument, though, I believe, and they are close enough to Craig's own standpoint that they would not be easily rebutted.

Alonzo Fyfe's theory of desire utilitarianism is the most persuasive, realistic, and meaningful moral theory I have yet run across. Moral statements describe behaviors as well as relationships, typically relationships between certain desires. When we think about why we act or behave in some way, desire is always the reason. You want to keep your job, so you choose to act appropriately at work. You want someone to like you, so you choose to behave positively around them. You want to be in the favor of the god you worship, so you choose to adhere to its will. According to desire utilitarianism, a behavior is "good" if it fulfills certain desires, and "bad" if it thwarts certain desires. Note, the focus is not on maximizing desire fulfillment, but on seeing that certain desires are met. I say certain desires because there are some desires that would be wrong to fulfill. These wrong desires are ones that, if carried into action, would thwart the desires of others for selfish reasons. To say that murder is wrong in desire utilitarianism means that it is wrong because it thwarts the desires of the victim, the victim’s family, and the larger society that wishes to live without the threat of murder.

Moral evaluations focus on malleable desires, those that can be changed by social forces like praise and condemnation. In the example above, the murderer commits the first thwarting of desire, for the purpose of fulfilling his own selfish interests. We can judge that the murderer's desire is harmful to others rather than fulfilling their desires, and so we can determine that it is morally good to condemn murder and appropriate for law enforcement to prevent murderers from killing. The desires of the murderer are thwarted because he has (or will) "cast the first stone", and because more, greater desires will be fulfilled by thwarting his.

Although desire utilitarianism rejects moral absolutism, it does provide for moral realism and moral universalism. The question of whether or not a desire will fulfill other desires has an objective answer, and these relationships between desires are part of the real world. Different persons may hold different desires, but this does not affect the objectivity of desire utilitarianism, since it takes these differences into account. We can say that a claim is universally moral when, after considering all desires involved, we see that it fulfills more, greater desires than would be thwarted. For example, a humanitarian desire can be called universally moral because it tends to fulfill more, greater desires than it thwarts.

Does this theory meet Craig's criterion for objective moral values as meaning that "something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so"? I would argue that it does. A desire is either fulfilled or thwarted, and that will remain true in spite of any beliefs to the contrary. But what about Craig's scenario - would the Holocaust be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and successfully brainwashed and/or killed all dissidents? Desire utilitarianism can look at the mountains of good desires thwarted by Nazism, as well as the oceans of bad desires it fulfilled and would continue to fulfill to reach such a hypothetical point, and can offer a resounding "yes". 

Contrast this moral approach, based on the intentions and actions of the Nazis, with the approach advocated by proponents of the moral argument, who believe the Holocaust was wrong essentially because it was inconsistent with the vague, undefined nature of god. A god with a history of genocide (Joshua 6:21, 1 Samuel 15:2-3), slavery (Exodus 21:20-21, Leviticus 25:44-46, Colossians 3:22), and the promise of eternal, unimaginable torment for those who don't see things his way (Matthew 3:12, 13:41-42, Mark 9:47-48).

The moral argument for god fails to justify its ontological claims, and actually seems to strengthen the case for secular morality with the messy and inadequate defense that typically accompanies it. Unless one is already predisposed to the views associated with the argument, it is unlikely to be appealing.


[For more on desire utilitarianism:
Alonzo Fyfe, What is Desire Utilitarianism?
Luke Muehlhauser, The Ultimate Desirism F.A.Q.
Luke Muehlhauser, CPBD 005: Alonzo Fyfe - Desire Utilitarianism]



1. W.L. Craig, The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality (1997).
2. Merriam-Webster, entry for intrinsic.
3. W.L. Craig, Q&A #61: Abortion and Presidential Politics.
4. W.L. Craig, Q&A #208: Sam Harris on Objective Moral Values and Duties.
5. Luke Muehlhauser, Craig on Intrinsic Value, Common Sense Atheism (2009).
6. See source #1.

How Not to Defend the Moral Argument for God (Part 1)

The moral argument for the existence of god has been around for quite some time, and has faced plenty of criticism since its inception. However, the form of it commonly used in debate by William Lane Craig and other apologists is often met with unfortunately weak responses, despite significantly lacking in support of its premises. The argument is usually stated as follows:

1. If god does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, god exists.

This argument carries a hefty burden of proof because of the second premise. If objective moral values don't exist, then the moral argument fails. Yet it isn't up to the atheist or skeptic to prove that these objective values are not real, it's up to the apologist to justify his second premise. Unless reason is given to think that 2 is correct, the opponent of the moral argument is well within rights to object that there is no grounds for assuming the existence of objective values. The only way 2 could be justified is if it is (i) such an observed fact of the natural world that it can be considered a given, or if (ii) the apologist endeavors to demonstrate it through another argument.

An example of a premise that could be accepted on (i) would be something like "Socrates was a man", from the famous Socrates syllogism (1. All men are mortal, 2. Socrates was a man, 3. Therefore, Socrates was mortal). Enough people are familiar with the story of Socrates, and there is enough evidence from history describing the figure as male, or human, that this premise can be accepted as a given. There is no need for the argument's proponent to demonstrate it, since its truth is readily discernible to anyone who might wish to check. Another example of (i) could be the premise "All men are mortal", as it has many centuries of observation, death records, and the like in support of it. One could say that premises of the type (i) variety might be called obvious.

Many non-theist opponents have objected to the moral argument on the basis of conflicting opinions on morality. Theodore Drange made this move in his debate with Craig, as did a caller named Bill on a recent Unbelievable podcast episode addressing questions to apologist Greg Koukl. In my view, this is a weak response for exactly the reason theists give: differences of perspective on moral matters do not rule out the possibility of objective values. As Koukl notes, we may each see different colors on an object, but it doesn't mean there is no color there. More importantly, though, the moral argument does not deal with moral epistemology, or how we know what moral values are, but only deals with moral ontology, or the perceived reality of moral values. It will not refute the argument to raise examples of immoral acts in scripture or in history, because the argument centers around the existence of objective values, not the content of them.

Still, the second premise of the moral argument is anything but obvious. All that we generally consider as obvious - the shape of the earth, human mortality, gravity, the identity of Socrates - has a wealth of evidence behind it. It isn't simply that we feel the earth is round, or we strongly suspect that humans die, or we have no reason to think that gravity isn't real. It's that time after time, we've observed these phenomena around us, going back a long, long, long while ago in history. It's that experiments have been conducted to help verify the truth of these ideas, and we have held them up against the backdrop of prior knowledge and existing theories to see what best fits the picture as we've ascertained it thus far. Can any of us honestly say that objective moral values are obvious in this sense? What observations have we made about them, what experiments have we done, how have they fared against additional information?

Funny enough, the obviousness of objective moral values can also be challenged by sort of reversing the moral opinions objection. A majority does not make an obvious truth. It could be contended that even if every man, woman, and child on Earth were to think morality is objective, this would do little on its own, apart from the kind of evidence just mentioned. After all, Dr. Craig makes a very similar point in practically all of his debates on the existence of god; he wants morality capable of saying that anti-Semitism is wrong "even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them." [1] While he may rest this on theistic assumptions, the principle behind it should still hold true, that the prevalence of an opinion does not tell us anything about whether or not the opinion is true. For that we need other means of evaluation.

So we have good reason to think that (i) cannot be used to justify the second premise of the moral argument. What about (ii)? In the Unbelievable episode referenced above, Greg Koukl asserts his belief that our agreement on certain moral issues is evidence that we share a moral sense or a moral intuition about right and wrong. Our deeply felt general repulsion to the idea of torturing young children is, in his view, reason to think that it isn't just wrong for us, but wrong for everyone at any time, any place, and in any circumstance. Justin Brierly, the host, explains that he can't imagine a situation in which it would be right for someone to torture a young child, insinuating that it therefore must never be right. Craig has echoed these sentiments in debates like the one he had with Professor John Shook. During the Q&A segment, Craig defended the moral argument by saying:

The moral argument is an appeal to our moral experience, and so it's not just a matter of liking the conclusion or not... I think that in our moral experience we do apprehend moral oughts, we ought to do this or we ought not to do that, we apprehend a distinction between good and evil... we ought to pay attention to our moral experience and take it seriously, and if we do, then I think we'll see that the moralist is wrong when he says that moral values are just relative to individuals, societies, or whatever... [2]

I don't know that any relativist would deny that most human beings form moral judgments. What non-objectivists seem to dispute is whether those moral judgments correspond to anything substantial or not. Thus, moral experience exists even to the relativist - it's only a question of what significance it should be given.

Craig agrees that the Nazis believed themselves to be on the side of right and goodness, [3] but he thinks that their moral experience misled them. He ventures into the territory of moral epistemology in his debates to emphasize the strength of objective as opposed to subjective values, but his moral argument can't tell us anything about what god would condemn or praise. What reason does Craig have for preferring the moral experience of modern Christians to that of the German Christians who participated in the Holocaust? What of the medieval Christians like Martin Luther, who wrote the infamous propaganda piece On the Jews and Their Lies, encouraging the demolition of Jewish businesses, synagogues, houses, and schools, as well as forbidding the Jews from preaching and having access to their religious texts?

Craig, Koukl, and Brierly all seem to belong to the ethical intuitionist camp. Ethical intuitionism is the view that moral truths can be known by intuition, without resort to inference. Presumably one's own intuitive sense is the one that matters most - we generally don't have access to others' intuitions - posing a problem of consideration for others. What exactly resolves conflicts between different intuitions under the ethical intuitionist view? It isn't altogether clear. The irony is that this looks an awful lot like subjectivism in denial of itself. We each have our own intuitions... but if yours conflict with mine, well you're just wrong. Why? Because I intuit it! This may be closer to the truth than you think, considering how Craig responded to Sam Harris during the Q&A segment of their debate, in the following exchange:

Harris: This is the kind of morality that you get out of divine command theory that, again, offers no retort to the Jihadist other than, "Sorry buster, you happen to have the wrong god."

Craig: But that’s exactly your retort, Sam, that God has not issued such a command, and therefore, you’re not morally obligated to do it.

Note that Craig doesn't correct Harris' description of his view or even offer any defense at all. He simply tries to turn the question back on Harris. 

Ethical intuitionism might also commit the is-ought fallacy. David Hume articulated the fallacy as a response to early intuitionists like Samuel Clarke, who thought that feelings, not reason, guide us to moral truths. Hume distinguished between the passions and reason, and argued that deriving an "ought" from an "is" must be accompanied by a line of argument connecting the two. In other words, it is fallacious to use a fact of the world to insist on how something should be, unless a rational explanation draws the two together. To Hume, Clarke's feelings were a fact of his experience that he adopted as moral truths without any legitimate reason.

Predictably, intuitionists think they avoid this problem. Brian Zamulinski, an evolutionary intuitionist (yes, you read that right), defends his beliefs in the excerpt below.

Inference is an intellectual movement from proposition to proposition. Apprehension is the acquisition of a belief in response to a state of affairs. Our ability to apprehend states of affairs is not fundamentally an ability to make inferences, no matter what sorts of inferences. It is an ability to see that such and such is the case. With evolutionary intuitionism, we intuitively apprehend the fact, say, that torture is wrong. We do not infer the belief that torture is wrong from other propositions. Since inference is not involved, the impossibility of inferring an "ought" from an "is" is not relevant. [4]

We draw an inference any time we form a conclusion based on what we know or what we assume to be true. To look at the fact that all men are mortal, that Socrates is a man, and then conclude that Socrates is mortal, is to draw an inference from existing knowledge and experience. Zamulinski's idea that we apprehend states of affairs without resorting to inferences is a bold and unsubstantiated claim. We make use of inference for knowledge acquisition in many other areas of life, so why assume that morality is an exception? Even if it seems like we apprehend moral truths with no consideration of known facts or existing beliefs, the long-term influences on our thinking from culture and other venues make it extremely unlikely that this impression is accurate. It all looks rather convenient, really. Intuition is just 'seeing things as they are', like Alvin Plantinga's faith is so properly basic that it needs no justification.

Methinks this is why Koukl and company argue so strongly about grounding moral values, because their intuitions are in need of grounding. If we intuitively apprehend moral truths, how are we able to do this aside from inference and reason? Where do these moral truths come from, if not from the natural world around us? The only way for these theists to convince themselves that their intuitions aren't just subjective is to attach them to a god who affirms what they feel. However, as we'll see in the next part, the first premise of the moral argument runs into plenty of problems of its own.




1. W.L. Craig, The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality (1997).
2. John Shook v. William Lane Craig Debate: "Does God Exist?" YouTube.com.
3. See source 1.
4. B. Zamulinski, Evolutionary Intuitionism (2007), p. 112.

What's the Probability of Resurrection?

Once a week I tune in to the UK Christian radio podcast Unbelievable to hear debates and discussions between believers and non-believers (sometimes between two or more believers). Generally speaking, it has quite a fair format and covers current trends in religion and atheism, from the release of popular new books to the publication of scholarly materials to subjects brought up in the news. The latest episode features Calum Miller and Chris Hallquist in dialogue on an issue that's particularly interesting to me: the probability of the resurrection.

Christian philosopher and apologist Richard Swinburne has attached a 97% probability to the resurrection. How did he arrive at such a high number? Though I have not read Swinburne's book where he makes this claim, the guests and host on Unbelievable dive into some discussion of it. Swinburne uses a mathematical formula from probability theory known as Bayes' theorem. The theorem is a way of calculating the likelihood of something given certain prior conditions. To use an example from a Scientific American article, suppose that 99% of sick people who take a medical test will test positive, and 99% of healthy people who take it will test negative. The doctor has informed you that only 1% of people in the country are sick. You take the test and receive a positive result, and you want to know what the chances are that you are actually sick. Bayes' theorem will give you the answer.

For the sake of space, I won't work out the problem here, but the important thing to understand is that Bayes' theorem depends on knowing certain prior conditions or probabilities. It's simple to ascertain and easy to verify the chances of getting a specific test result, finding out whether someone is sick or healthy, and determining how much of the population is afflicted with an illness. In many cases, these sorts of statistics and data are kept on record by physicians and health organizations, for example. If one miscalculates the odds of being sick after testing positive, it's not that difficult to weed out the mistake from the information provided. But what about when we're trying to determine the probability of something that isn't well known or documented, like a miracle?

One of the most frequent criticisms leveled at Swinburne is that he plays fast and loose with the prior probability of the resurrection. If there is a god, he argues, it's reasonable to assume that it would become incarnate to pass on its teachings to humanity. To validate the incarnation's authority, he continues, god would use a "super-miracle". [link] Someone like Jesus, Swinburne believes, is a prime candidate for god's stamp of approval in the form of resurrection.

On the podcast, Hallquist raises an excellent point that Miller never does address, to my recollection. The mere existence of a god should not lend much credibility to any miracle story, because in addition to competing miracle claims - like the miracles of Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism, etc. - which many Christians reject, there are Deists and many other stripes of believers who do not think their god works in the world to perform miracles. Even if a god exists, why think it acts in nature? Why single out the resurrection as being particularly likely out of all the miracles it could conceivably perform? With all the unnecessary suffering and evil in the world, perhaps the god that exists is an evil god and would have no motivation to raise Jesus from the dead. Why not take the theology of Muslims and Jews into account, who consider doctrines like the trinity and the incarnation to be blasphemous? There's a good argument to be made that, in many ways, Jesus does not resemble the Jewish messiah described in the Tanakh. If the Hebrew god exists, perhaps it sees the Jesus of the gospels as a false prophet rather than its son, and would be against resurrecting him. 

Even if we accept Swinburne's prior condition of  a god existing - for the sake of argument - there are many problems that seem to stop his argument dead in its tracks before ever getting to the resurrection. Remember, all of this must be taken into account to constitute a fair treatment of the prior probability of resurrection. Along with assessing what might count in favor of resurrection, we have to consider all that would count against it, and this is where things become mired in speculation, in my opinion. How do you derive statistical probabilities from things like religious doctrines and facts of the universe that have varying interpretations? If the prior probability of resurrection rests on theistic assumptions, then the entire argument seems to be an exercise in self-justification for Christians, and will be persuasive to no one else.

Like many believers, Calum Miller says he finds naturalistic explanations of the resurrection to be more incredible and outlandish than the idea that god raised Jesus from the dead. Yet some of these are attested in the historical record, like the accusation against the disciples of stealing the body of Jesus. It may be widely dismissed by biblical scholars today because of the guards at the tomb mentioned in one measly gospel, or because the theory doesn't explain the postmortem appearances (whoever decided there had to be one neat, over-arching thematic explanation for everything?), but there are objections to the resurrection hypothesis, too, of a far more devastating nature, in my view.

Several times throughout the podcast, Brierly and Miller bring up what apologists often call a 'naturalistic bias'. They ask Hallquist if he is ruling out miracles altogether from the git-go, on some atheistic commitment to the impossibility of divine intervention. What amuses me about this is how much the Christian explanation is emptied of what little thrust it might have when the assumption of a god is removed. Miller claims that, in his mind, the case for resurrection is strong enough to stand apart from assuming the existence of god, but I have to ask what in particular would compel one to conclude that Jesus was raised from the dead.

The postmortem appearances? Despite Paul mentioning 500 witnesses, we have testimony from exactly none of them, nor do we have their names or any way of verifying their integrity and their story. The gospels mention Jesus appearing to all of his disciples at various times after his death (John 20:26-28, Luke 24:13-16, Matthew 28:16-17), but again we have no written testimony from any of these figures. The only individual to personally report witnessing Jesus after his death is the apostle Paul, though his experience is depicted as a vision (Acts 9:1-9), not quite what the gospels depict for figures like Peter, John, and Mary. Hallucinations are not uncommon among human beings, and with the Book of Acts portraying Peter and Paul as being visited by Jesus upon falling into a trance (10:9-16, 22:17-21), there are alternate explanations to the extraordinary one of actually seeing a man risen from the dead.

The empty tomb narrative? According to the Two-Source Hypothesis, there may actually be just one empty tomb story, in the Gospel of Mark, which was used as source material by the authors of Matthew and Luke. However, the last few verses of Mark are widely recognized by biblical scholars as a late interpolation. [link] The original text of the gospel seems to end at 16:8, when the women flee from the tomb after being told that Jesus has risen, and they "said nothing to anyone." Mark's gospel has been dated to ~70 CE, approximately 37-40 years after the alleged death of Jesus. An empty tomb would also beg of many natural explanations, generally, such as relocation of the body, theft, or even a misidentification of the tomb - all arguably more plausible than resurrection, since history has no short supply of such experiences.

What about the disciples' willingness to die for their faith? Hallquist rightly remarks that the stories of martyrdom are on even shakier ground than the gospel accounts, and brings up Candida Moss' book The Myth of Persecution. The biggest counter-point to this argument all too often goes unstated, though. In short, there is no reason for the skeptic to presume that the disciples knew what they were dying for was false. Many devout religious believers have gone to the gallows for their faith before, including a lot of non-Christians. It could have been, for example, that Jesus' body was relocated or stolen by someone who didn't die a martyr's death, and perhaps wasn't even a disciple. The early martyrs (assuming they were in fact martyred at all) could have remained blissfully unaware of the trickery, going to their deaths no less sincere.

The probability of the resurrection, a priori or a posteriori, is quite low when one seriously considers all the objections to be made. But that's a generous way of putting it. I'm not about to be so bold as to attach any specific number to how unlikely it is, though, partly because I wouldn't know where to begin. There are certainly ways the evidence could be more convincing, like more independent corroboration, dates closer to the purported event, personal written/reported testimonies, a surviving empty tomb with a long history of veneration, and so on. Yet this isn't what we have, nor would it do much to offset the force of the naturalistic explanations, which still far outweigh resurrection in terms of real world experience.

The Atheist Prayer Experiment?

Back in 2010, Christian philosopher Tim Mawson published an interesting paper under the title, "Praying to stop being an atheist." From the abstract:

In this paper, I argue that atheists who think that the issue of God's existence or non-existence is an important one; assign a greater than negligible probability to God's existence; and are not in possession of a plausible argument for scepticism about the truth-directedness of uttering such prayers in their own cases, are under a prima facie obligation to pray to God that He stop them being atheists. [link]

Recently, Mawson was called upon by Justin Brierly, host of the Christian radio/podcast show Unbelievable, to help turn his challenge into an unofficial 'experiment.' During September and October 2012, each atheist who signed up was asked to pray sincerely to god for a few minutes a day for a full length of 40 days. In that time, several contributed their thoughts to the show's forum, to Brierly by email, and through their own individual blogs. Finally, the participants were then asked to report their belief (or lack of belief) at the end of the 40-day period. The results can be found on the show's website [link], and are discussed both in text and over the course of two episodes. Out of 71 participants, only 2 converted after praying.

I've been a regular listener to Unbelievable for several months now, but my reaction to the atheist prayer experiment has been mixed ever since it was announced. To their credit, Mawson and Brierly were immediately forth-coming on the unscientific nature of the project. They also acknowledged the concerns of many Christians who felt that the experiment was too open to interpretation, perhaps even in violation of the command to not put the lord to the test. So, long before things began, it was made abundantly clear that, whatever the results, no conclusion can be rationally drawn from the study about whether or not god exists. One might wonder then, as I have, what the point of the atheist prayer experiment actually was.

To hear Mawson and Brierly pontificate over the whole thing, you'll find out that the point was something as vague as appreciating the other side, opening up minds, etc. That's all well and good, but I can't shake the suspicion that there's more to it than that. How many times have you heard a Christian tell a non-believer that if they'd only humbly go before god and ask him to reveal himself, then he would? In the second episode of the show covering the experiment, Brierly reads a remark from someone who expresses much the same attitude: 'God will give an answer. It may take days, months, or even years, but he will answer.' In fact, Justin goes so far as to quote Matthew 7:7 in defending the experiment against accusation that it's testing god: "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."

When I was a believer, I shared this conviction that god would always answer the sincere seeker. To many people, prayer is not the Magic 8 Ball which some atheists characterize it as, but it's a direct, reliable, and consistent means of communicating with the wise and all-powerful creator of all things. It would be unthinkable that god should ignore or refuse any honest heart that wants to know him. If someone persists in disbelief, it must be that they were either insincere or god is just taking his time to reach out to them. You can find a diverse mish-mash of this on a thread about the experiment on the Orthodox Christianity forum [link]. To these believers, prayer - when it's done out of humility and sincerity - is absolutely 100% foolproof. Let me say that again. Absolutely 100% foolproof.

So when Mawson and Brierly comment on the value of the atheist prayer experiment, I can't help but think that they have cards they're not showing. No, the study was not intended to prove the existence of god, but more atheists using the foolproof prayer method means more souls stand the chance of being won for god. It also means more of an opportunity to talk to atheists about the 'proper' way to pray, how god responds to prayer, and so on. The atheist prayer experiment is just another evangelism tactic, under the clever guise of an impartial study. It's no secret that atheists are big on science, and what says science more than "experiment"? I have to wonder why they picked a name that sounds so scientific, instead of a more general one (which would be more accurate, as they admit), like the Atheist Prayer Challenge, Ask an Atheist to Pray, or Pray the A Away!

Mawson's paper isn't any better. He uses the analogy of being in a dark room where multiple people have told you they previously met someone (we'll call him Tom) and spoke to him, yet you have so far not met this person. Wouldn't it be prudent of you to call out for this Tom, rather than to assume he doesn't really exist? 

Well, there are all kinds of problems with this analogy. I've known very few Christians who claim to have heard an audible voice. To make the analogy more fitting, then, say that these other people mention that Tom communicates via telepathy, and that's how they know he exists. However, simply meditating and trying to reach him telepathically won't work unless you approach him like a student approaches a teacher. If you're not to Tom's liking, he won't say hi, so be sure you're humble when you try to contact him... and cross your fingers too, just in case he doesn't see your humility the way you do. But don't expect an immediate response either, even if you are the pinnacle of humility. Tom's a very busy man and knows what's best for you - although you two have never officially met - so he will greet you all in good time. Suddenly it starts to become more prudent to question these Tom-ites than to try your own luck at telepathically reaching their strange and fictional sounding friend.

I would also disagree with Mawson's contention that atheists are "not in possession of a plausible argument for scepticism... about uttering such prayers in their own cases." The notion that we have to experience something ourselves in order to justifiably hold a contrary position is demonstrably false. Each year, the legal system rightly convicts countless criminals on the basis of DNA, phone records, video recordings, testimony, and other kinds of evidence, while the judge and jury have no personal experience of the crime at all. It seems to me that Mawson carelessly swipes away centuries-worth of arguments both for and against the existence of god, all so that he can prioritize one of the arguments for god that is extremely subjective. We can't look at the evidence neutrally - you have to come onto our turf and do it our way. 

Why stop at prayer, though? Why not just say that atheists are obligated to accept the holy spirit into their lives, since it's the only way to truly experience god, according to many Christians? It's doubtful as many atheists would have responded to that sort of challenge, and thus the evangelizing purpose would be lost. But prayer is 'harmless' and it doesn't require any commitment. As Mawson says several times, praying and not experiencing god can be used as evidence against god for atheists, so you've got nothing to lose! Rings a little familiar to Pascal's Wager, doesn't it? Of course, Mawson doesn't think getting no answer is actually an argument against his god, so it seems his aim is really about recruitment, not making any real significant point.

Finally, let's talk about the results. In the two episodes of Unbelievable that discuss the experiment, Kendra and Kelly - the converts - are contrasted with several atheists who have remained unbelievers, despite some of them having odd and interesting experiences. What you hear from each group says a lot. Kendra came to the conclusion that belief in god is more satisfying to her life than disbelief. It seems to have had little to do with prayer, which prompted some listeners to suggest that she be disqualified. Kelly, on the other hand, pregnant with her first child, prayed to god and one day witnessed a rainbow that she interpreted as a sign. She describes her former disbelief as stemming from the fact that she didn't feel she was being answered when she would pray before. The atheists who remain unconvinced offered possible alternative explanations to their experiences and reflected on their interactions with believers.

Yet another issue I have with this 'experiment' is that it misses the ultimate point atheists always try to drive home. It's not about atheism versus religion. It's not even about doubting god versus faith in god. For many atheists, their opinion on god and religion is the result of critical thinking and skepticism, which, judging from the interviews, it doesn't appear that Kendra or Kelly have much of, to be frank. I have never denied that some atheists do convert, and I don't think any atheist has denied that fact. But I am a skeptic first and an atheist second. My conclusion is not from a bad experience with Christians, or from feeling ignored when I would pray; it comes from years of study and thought, as sounds to be the case with many of those in the experiment whose views have not changed. Now, I don't deny that some intelligent atheists have become believers, but I think one has to already be in a fairly receptive and uncritical state of mind to convert after a mere 40 days (or less) of on-again-off-again prayer.

In sum, the atheist prayer experiment was a resounding success at being the only thing it was ever truly going to be: another slick marketing tool for the Christian faith.