Several years ago, Gary Habermas wrote an article discussing some historical problems with the hallucination theory. Modern skeptics who are aware of such problems sometimes try to argue for the same sort of theory under different terminology and with some minor adjustments. Sometimes they'll use the term "vision" rather than "hallucination" and will claim that their proposal of visions can't be dismissed on the basis of problems with a hallucination theory, since they distinguish between visions and hallucinations. But is the distinction sufficient to overcome the relevant problems?
I've come across skeptics who will argue against the resurrection largely by citing alleged historical parallels to the resurrection claims of the early Christians. They'll suggest that those alleged parallel accounts should be rejected, and that we therefore should reject the Christian claims. But three questions need to be asked, questions that skeptics often ignore when they draw these parallels:
1. What reason do we have to think that the alleged parallel incidents are historical in the sense that historical individuals experienced historical visions of some sort? If Christians have to make a case for the historicity of the resurrection appearances experienced by Peter, Paul, and the other early Christian sources, then skeptics have to make a case for the historicity of the supposed parallels they're citing.
2. What reason do we have to conclude that the incident in question was naturalistic? Skeptics can't just assume that an incident was naturalistic in order to have a naturalistic parallel to offer.
3. Are the reasons we have for viewing the incident as naturalistic applicable to the incidents in early Christianity? For example, nobody denies that people can have naturalistic visions, hallucinations, or whatever we want to call them under the influence of drugs. But if it's unlikely that people such as Peter and Paul had drug-induced experiences, then citing a drug-induced vision as a parallel to the resurrection experiences of the early Christians wouldn't make sense.
Skeptics can't just cite a reported occurrence of a visionary experience, assume without evidence that some sort of visionary experience did occur, assume without evidence that the experience was naturalistic, and assume without evidence that the circumstances surrounding that experience are comparable to those surrounding the resurrection appearances in early Christianity.
Skeptics can't just cite a reported occurrence of a visionary experience, assume without evidence that some sort of visionary experience did occur, assume without evidence that the experience was naturalistic, and assume without evidence that the circumstances surrounding that experience are comparable to those surrounding the resurrection appearances in early Christianity.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the gospel accounts, I don't think it's so much that skeptics assume that the visionary experience DID occur. It's that they think it is more likely that a visionary experience occurred than it is that a man literally came to life again supernaturally after being dead.
Why is that? Well, a real resurrection is so implausible that it doesn't take much in an alternative explanation for it to rise to a level of greater plausibility. Group hallucinations are certainly rare. But they are documented. In fact they're not all that uncommon. My parents attend churches where within the last few years whole groups of people thought they were seeing gold dust come and sprinkle on themselves. You have the Marian apparitions where the sun is said to dance around and so forth. We're not talking about drug induced hallucinations here. There are no documented cases of resurrections, or miracles of any kind for that matter.
So I don't necessarily need evidence for an explanation if the alternative explanation is so implausible it is rendered nearly impossible. I keep going back to my brother's discussion of the woman with ESP. I have no evidence she perpetrated a fraud. I have no evidence that tricks of any kind are going on. But I would sooner believe that fraud occurred than I would that she really has ESP. Which would you believe? Do you believe she has ESP? If not, what is your evidence for your alternative explanation?
jon curry said...
ReplyDelete"Well, a real resurrection is so implausible that it doesn't take much in an alternative explanation for it to rise to a level of greater plausibility."
An assertion without a supporting argument.
"Group hallucinations are certainly rare. But they are documented. In fact they're not all that uncommon."
Rare but not uncommon. Uh-huh.
"My parents attend churches where within the last few years whole groups of people thought they were seeing gold dust come and sprinkle on themselves."
Notice Jon's faith in testimony.
BTW, he is also ignoring certain preconditions for a hallucination, such as prior expectation. Did the disciples expect Jesus to return from the dead?
"You have the Marian apparitions where the sun is said to dance around and so forth. We're not talking about drug induced hallucinations here."
I did a very long post on that very subject a while back. You're way behind the curve, Jon.
"There are no documented cases of resurrections, or miracles of any kind for that matter."
Yet another assertion without a supporting argument. To take one counterexample, a while back I posted some material by J. P. Moreland on his personal experience with miraculous answers to prayer.
"I keep going back to my brother's discussion of the woman with ESP. I have no evidence she perpetrated a fraud. I have no evidence that tricks of any kind are going on. But I would sooner believe that fraud occurred than I would that she really has ESP. Which would you believe? Do you believe she has ESP?"
Why should we assume that ESP is an implausible explanation for certain phenomena? Once again, I've cited a good deal of academic literature on this general subject.
All Jon is doing here is to advertise his personal prejudice and baseless opinions.
"Rare but not uncommon. Uh-huh."
ReplyDeleteThis made me laugh quite a bit. This is the kind of tiptoeing around the issue that atheists often must do to sound like their explanations have any credibility. The truth is their parallels often lack any important similarities to the NT accounts and their explanations often ignore much of the evidence from the NT.
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"As far as the gospel accounts, I don't think it's so much that skeptics assume that the visionary experience DID occur. It's that they think it is more likely that a visionary experience occurred than it is that a man literally came to life again supernaturally after being dead."
Why would we limit ourselves to "the gospel accounts"? And if a critic doesn't think that visions occurred, then he wouldn't be the sort of critic I was responding to. Your objection doesn't have much relevance to what I said.
You write:
"Well, a real resurrection is so implausible that it doesn't take much in an alternative explanation for it to rise to a level of greater plausibility."
You'll need to present an argument rather than just making an assertion. I, Steve Hays, and others have repeatedly addressed the fallacious nature of your appeal to prior improbabilities. Instead of refuting what we've said, you've repeatedly left the discussions without saying much, if anything, in response. In a previous thread responding to you, Steve Hays quoted the philosopher Stephen Davis commenting that the sort of reasoning you're advancing would lead us "to disbelieve somebody who tells the truth 99% of the time who reports that the number 893420 was the winning number in yesterday’s lottery" (http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/09/stephen-davis-on-resurrection.html). You responded, in that thread, by saying that Davis' comments "may contradict" what you had said elsewhere. Davis' comments do contradict what you've said in many contexts. And Steve and others also explained some of the other problems with your reasoning, in multiple threads. Simply saying "resurrection is so implausible" isn't enough. God wouldn't be restrained by how many times He had performed a resurrection in the past. If the resurrection in question was meant to be a unique or rare sign, as is the case with Christianity, then the uniqueness or rarity of the event cannot by itself lead us to conclude that God would be unlikely to do it.
You said:
"Group hallucinations are certainly rare. But they are documented. In fact they're not all that uncommon."
Again, you need to document your claims rather than just making assertions. You also need to address the other factor I mentioned in my initial post, namely how you supposedly know that the sort of naturalistic factors that brought about mass hallucinations in the alleged cases you're referring to also did so with the resurrection appearances in early Christianity.
You write:
"My parents attend churches where within the last few years whole groups of people thought they were seeing gold dust come and sprinkle on themselves."
You're not giving us enough information. Did everybody think they saw the same objects at the same time, and did they perceive the objects as doing the same thing? If not, then why would the event in question qualify as a "mass hallucination"? Individual perceptions that aren't shared wouldn't be a group experience. If it was a group experience, you would then need to ask whether what occurred was a hallucination. You're suggesting that it was a hallucination, but you aren't giving us any evidence to that effect.
Why couldn't it have been an optical illusion resulting from what other people suggested they should expect to see, for example? An object as simple as "gold dust" can easily be confused with something else, such as dust that isn't made of gold. After a group of people who want to experience some such event are convinced that an event will occur, then multiple natural occurrences could easily be mistaken for gold dust, such as ordinary dust or spots of light. But meeting with a man who had risen from the dead isn't so easy to be mistaken about, especially when those meetings occur in contexts in which the meeting wasn't expected, the people involved are opposed to that man and his followers, the society of the day encourages people to seek evidence that the event in question is of a physical nature, the resurrected man participates in conversations and interacts with physical objects, relevent physical evidence, such as an empty tomb, is acknowledged by both early followers and early opponents of the man, etc. Your gold dust example isn't sufficiently comparable to what occurred in early Christianity. The fact that you would cite such a ridiculous parallel reflects more poorly on you than it does on the historicity of the resurrection.
You write:
"You have the Marian apparitions where the sun is said to dance around and so forth."
Steve Hays has already addressed that subject in multiple threads. If you want to argue that the Marian apparitions in question did occur, were naturalistic, and are comparable to what occurred in early Christianity, then you need to make that case instead of just asserting it. Rather than refuting my initial post in this thread, you're doing just what I said critics often do. You're making assertions without evidence. You draw parallels without making much of a case for them.
You write:
"There are no documented cases of resurrections, or miracles of any kind for that matter."
Steve Hays and I offered you documentation for modern cases of supernatural phenomena. I offered you documentation in 2005, in our discussion on Greg Krehbiel's board. You ignored it, and when Steve offered further documentation in 2006 in this forum, you responded by saying that you didn't want to consult books or lengthy sources on the web. But your unwillingness to consult such sources isn't our problem. Furthermore, since the issue we're discussing is whether a miracle occurred, you can't dismiss the arguments for a miracle by asserting that there are no documented cases of miracles. If we had to have previous occurrences of a type of event before accepting an event's occurrence, then how would we ever come to accept any type of event for the first time?
You write:
"I keep going back to my brother's discussion of the woman with ESP. I have no evidence she perpetrated a fraud. I have no evidence that tricks of any kind are going on. But I would sooner believe that fraud occurred than I would that she really has ESP. Which would you believe? Do you believe she has ESP? If not, what is your evidence for your alternative explanation?"
Steve has already responded to your ESP example. If a woman was shown to have an uncommon ability like ESP, I would be willing to accept what the evidence suggests. Nothing in my worldview leads me to conclude that nobody could have anything like ESP. But since the issue of whether this woman has such capabilities isn't of much significance to me, I don't make much of an effort to investigate it. The miracles associated with Jesus are of far more significance. I have investigated that evidence enough to be confident about it.
Why would we limit ourselves to "the gospel accounts"?
ReplyDeleteBecause the statements I was making were only true of the gospel accounts. A lot of skeptics do in fact believe that Paul had a hallucination.
And if a critic doesn't think that visions occurred, then he wouldn't be the sort of critic I was responding to. Your objection doesn't have much relevance to what I said.
You didn't specify who you were talking about. Richard Carrier makes arguments like this. In the book "The Empty Tomb" he has a chapter on whether the body was stolen and a couple of other speculative theories. He doesn't actually hold to those theories, but thinks they are more probable than a resurrection. I am curious which skeptics you are talking about that really believe that things like the descriptions of Pentecost really happened and they are just hallucinations. Most skeptics that I know don't think Acts or the gospels are accurate on those details.
You'll need to present an argument rather than just making an assertion. I, Steve Hays, and others have repeatedly addressed the fallacious nature of your appeal to prior improbabilities.
First of all, I still don't think you know what a fallacy is. You haven't pointed out fallacies. You think you've pointed out errors. I think my position is obviously true, and the fact that you've replied to it with what in my view is an unsatisfactory response doesn't prove anything. The last word is always yours as we all know.
You responded, in that thread, by saying that Davis' comments "may contradict" what you had said elsewhere. Davis' comments do contradict what you've said in many contexts.
Christians write things in books that contradict what I say all the time. That doesn't make them right and me wrong. My point was that Steve was trying to imply that I was misrepresenting Davis. I replied that what he quoted did not show any contradiction with what I had presented from Davis. Yes, Davis may disagree with me, but that's no surprise.
Steve Hays and I offered you documentation for modern cases of supernatural phenomena. I offered you documentation in 2005, in our discussion on Greg Krehbiel's board. You ignored it, and when Steve offered further documentation in 2006 in this forum, you responded by saying that you didn't want to consult books or lengthy sources on the web.
The word "documentation" means decisive info that is usually vetted and tested. Often published. You and Steve's posts on discussion boards are not what I mean by "documentation." Perhaps something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth. There are documented cases of group hallucinations. There are no documented cases of resurrections.
But since the issue of whether this woman has such capabilities isn't of much significance to me, I don't make much of an effort to investigate it. The miracles associated with Jesus are of far more significance. I have investigated that evidence enough to be confident about it.
No, it's not of much significance to you, but it is a means of testing the principles of knowlede you are advocating here. You say that I need evidence to make a claim for an alternative explanation. But I don't think I do. I think I would be rational to sooner believe an alternative explanation such as fraud before believing this woman has ESP. According to your principles though that is irrational. I should definitely accept that she has ESP on your view, because I have no evidence of fraud or trickery. I think that is obviously wrong.
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete“Because the statements I was making were only true of the gospel accounts. A lot of skeptics do in fact believe that Paul had a hallucination.”
Then they still believe in a hallucination theory. Different critics are going to accept the historicity of the reported experiences of the early Christians to differing degrees, but if hallucinations are proposed to explain the experiences they accept, then they’re advocating a hallucination theory. As I said, then, your objection doesn’t have much relevance to what I wrote.
You tell us:
“You didn't specify who you were talking about.”
Because I was addressing a group without intending to interact with an individual within that group. You weren’t required to respond. It’s not my fault that your response made some false assumptions.
You write:
“I am curious which skeptics you are talking about that really believe that things like the descriptions of Pentecost really happened and they are just hallucinations.”
I wasn’t addressing Pentecost.
You write:
“Most skeptics that I know don't think Acts or the gospels are accurate on those details.”
You don’t seem to know much about Biblical scholarship. You often cite people like Richard Carrier and Farrell Till or some unidentified source you come across by using something like a Google search, but your concept of “skeptics” doesn’t seem to go much beyond that. Regardless, my evaluation of the evidence isn’t limited to what’s accepted by any skeptic, much less “skeptics that [Jon Curry] knows”. Most scholars accept the historicity of gospel details such as Jesus’ honorable burial and the empty tomb, even if the sort of skeptics you usually read don’t. Your preferred skeptics are so far out of the mainstream that they even deny Jesus’ existence. But even if more mainstream skeptics would disagree with me about some of the evidence I’m citing, I would still argue for that evidence.
You write:
“First of all, I still don't think you know what a fallacy is. You haven't pointed out fallacies. You think you've pointed out errors. I think my position is obviously true, and the fact that you've replied to it with what in my view is an unsatisfactory response doesn't prove anything. The last word is always yours as we all know.”
The difference is that I’m explaining how you’re wrong, whereas you frequently assert that people are wrong without any explanation. And the reason why I get “the last word” with you is often the same reason why other people who have discussions with you get the last word. You frequently leave discussions that aren’t going your way, and you often dishonestly act as if your reasons for leaving are because the people who disagree with you aren’t reasonable, you don’t have time, etc. Yet, you so often fail to explain how these people supposedly are unreasonable, and you often begin discussions in other threads just after claiming that you didn’t have time for the previous thread. Who do you think you’re deceiving?
You write:
“Christians write things in books that contradict what I say all the time. That doesn't make them right and me wrong. My point was that Steve was trying to imply that I was misrepresenting Davis. I replied that what he quoted did not show any contradiction with what I had presented from Davis. Yes, Davis may disagree with me, but that's no surprise.”
And, once again, you give us no reason to think that Davis is the one who’s wrong. Once again, you assert without evidence.
You write:
“The word ‘documentation’ means decisive info that is usually vetted and tested. Often published. You and Steve's posts on discussion boards are not what I mean by ‘documentation.’ Perhaps something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth.”
Don’t act as if you know much about scholarship. You don’t. Your lengthy record of failing to cite sources, frequently appealing to popular level works when you do cite a source, and frequently making highly inaccurate claims about the subjects you address reflects how ignorant you are of the views of modern scholarship. How often do you cite “something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth”? Not too often. But you want us to believe that you’re concerned that we meet up to that standard? Again, who do you think you’re deceiving?
Steve and I cited books and articles that have been published by reputable sources, including people who specialize in the relevant fields. The fact that our sources were mentioned by us in an online post doesn’t mean that the sources themselves are “posts on discussion boards”.
And I notice that your excuses for not interacting with our material keep changing. Initially, you said that you didn’t want to consult books. Then you said that even online articles were unacceptable if they were too lengthy. And now you’re acting as if things like the book format and length aren’t your concern. Rather, your concern is that our sources aren’t scholarly enough. Or maybe you’ll tell us that it’s all three. You want us to cite more scholarly sources, but they can’t be in book form or too lengthy in non-book form. Yes, that sounds like the sentiments of somebody who’s interested in scholarly documentation. I’m sure you’re not being evasive. As we can tell from reading your posts, you have a lot of concern for citing the best of scholarly sources. You always document your claims by the highest of academic standards. Nothing less than a scholarly Google search or an academic citation of Richard Carrier or Earl Doherty will do.
You write:
“There are documented cases of group hallucinations.”
How many times do you have to be told to accompany your assertions with evidence?
You write:
“There are no documented cases of resurrections.”
If by “documented” you have something like peer-reviewed non-Christian journals in mind, then the lack of “documented cases” isn’t of much significance. If by “documented cases” you mean cases that can be well argued by common standards of historical evidence, then whether there are such cases is what’s under dispute. As I explained to you in my last post, and you’ve ignored what I said, we don’t need to have a previous resurrection in order to believe in Jesus’ resurrection. Otherwise, how would you ever come to believe that anything (resurrection or something else) occurred for the first time? I can understand why you’d want to avoid answering that question, if you’re dishonest.
You write:
“No, it's not of much significance to you, but it is a means of testing the principles of knowlede you are advocating here. You say that I need evidence to make a claim for an alternative explanation. But I don't think I do. I think I would be rational to sooner believe an alternative explanation such as fraud before believing this woman has ESP. According to your principles though that is irrational. I should definitely accept that she has ESP on your view, because I have no evidence of fraud or trickery. I think that is obviously wrong.”
Now you’re taking John Loftus’ approach of asserting that you’re “obviously” right when you can’t produce an argument to that effect. Why should that approach convince anybody?
If “ESP” is defined as having particular abilities that this woman can be shown to possess, then what’s unreasonable about concluding that she has such “ESP”? How do you supposedly know ahead of time that nobody can have such abilities?
You suggest the alternative of “fraud”. That alternative isn’t free. It’s going to cost you something. If fraud occurs in the real world, as opposed to only occurring in the skeptic’s imagination, then it’s going to have ripples in the real world. Historical events affect history. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, making an assertion such as that Paul didn’t believe in a physical resurrection or that Jesus’ tomb wasn’t empty has consequences. We can historically examine what Paul said in his letters, what his companions and churches believed on the subject in question, what the early sources said about Jesus’ tomb, etc. If your skeptical theories logically lead us to conclude that particular things would happen historically, then you had better explain how the historical evidence lines up with your skeptical theories. Your suggestion that you shouldn’t have to produce evidence for your theories is absurd. It reflects how ignorant of the issues you are, even after publicly arguing against Christianity and interacting with people on the subject for more than a year.
jon curry said...
ReplyDelete"I think my position is obviously true."
Well, I guess that pretty well settles it. What can Jason or I possibly offer that would overcome the crushing force of Jon's irresistible logic?
"The word 'documentation' means decisive info that is usually vetted and tested. Often published. You and Steve's posts on discussion boards are not what I mean by 'documentation.' Perhaps something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth."
I see. Let's apply Jon's rule of evidence to a couple of concrete examples. As I recall, someone in this combox recently said "My parents attend churches where within the last few years whole groups of people thought they were seeing gold dust come and sprinkle on themselves."
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find this claim vetted, tested, or published in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And, if memory serves, someone also said, in this very combox, that "Richard Carrier makes arguments like this. In the book "The Empty Tomb" he has a chapter on whether the body was stolen and a couple of other speculative theories."
And how many of Carrier's essays on Christianity been vetted, tested, or published in respectable encyclopedias like the Anchor Bible Dictionary or refereed journals like Novum Testamentum or the Journal of Biblical Literature?
What Jon really means is that no miracle is a documented miracle unless it receives the seal of approval from someone like Michael Martin, Paul Kurtz, James Randi, or Martin Garden, for whom a miracle is never, ever a live option.
"There are no documented cases of resurrections."
A couple of basic problems:
i) He skews the issue by the use of the plural, as if the Resurrection, if it were true, would be a naturally occurring event like a lunar eclipse.
ii) He is also backpedaling. His original claim was far more sweeping: "There are no documented cases of resurrections, or miracles of any kind for that matter."
And I cited, as one counterexample, J. P. Moreland's discussion of answered prayer. Here's the full reference:
http://www.trueu.org/Academics/LectureHall/A000000425.cfm
Moreland does two things:
a) He lays down criteria for answered prayer;
b) And he cites some personal examples.
But Jon would rather retreat into a tendentious, double standard by rigging the definition of "documentation."
His evasive maneuver is a transparent, backdoor admission that he can't handle any counterevidence to his secular faith-commitment.
Oh, and while we're on the subject, does Jon think that Wikipedia articles on the church fathers, written by some anonymous contributor who may have absolutely no academic credentials, and whose views are subject to nothing resembling peer review (except in the sense of one amateur reviewing another amateur), conform to his definition of "documentation"?
ReplyDeleteJason, your comments are simply evasive. You're not addressing my main points. You are disputing what is not being denied and ignoring what I am denying.
ReplyDeleteSteve, in answer to your question, no Wikipedia would not be considered "documentation" in the sense that I intended the word. It's better than J.P. Holding generally speaking, but it's not considered to be a "written or printed paper that bears the original, official, or legal form of something and can be used to furnish decisive evidence or information."
My anecdote about my parents also would not qualify as "documentation" in that sense either. I didn't claim that it was. My anecdote would not qualify in a setting like a court of law as decisive evidence that all sides would agree was decisive and had established something like a group hallucination.
As far as group haluccinations though, Mike Licona and Richard Carrier discussed in their debate a group hallucination documented in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Licona did not dispute that the group hallucination occured. He was familiar with the Brittanica documentation and discussed it at length. It was accepted by both sides that group hallucinations had occurred based upon the documented evidence.
With that in mind, and bearing in mind that cases of the miraculous have never been documented in that sense, the claim of resurrection is more initially implausible than the claim of a group hallucination.
Stephen Davis gets it, as we can see from the link Jason provided. You guys will not get it though.
Using my wonderfully documented expert source, I have determined that the surname "Curry" is only posessed by 0.035% of the population of America; which thus makes it highly unlikely that Jon Curry's last name really is Curry.
ReplyDeleteMuch more likly is the name "Smith." This is held by over 1% of the population, which seems small until you realize that you'd run into 29 Smiths before you'd run into a single Curry.
Just for fun, I looked at some of the fellow Tbloggers. "Hays" exists in only 0.013% of the population. And my last name only occurs in 0.011% of the population. But the real kicker: "Engwer" is so rare that it shows up as a 0.000% name (ranked 85,449th most popular). Yet there is nearly 10% of the population with names less common than that!
Alas, Paul is not one of them, as Manata does not show up anywhere in the search.
With such unlikely percentages, we must stick with what is most certain: namely (pun intended) everyone's last name is really "Smith" and neither Jason nor Paul exist.
I rest my case.
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"Jason, your comments are simply evasive. You're not addressing my main points. You are disputing what is not being denied and ignoring what I am denying."
Yet again, you're making assertions without any accompanying evidence.
You write:
"My anecdote about my parents also would not qualify as 'documentation' in that sense either. I didn't claim that it was. My anecdote would not qualify in a setting like a court of law as decisive evidence that all sides would agree was decisive and had established something like a group hallucination."
We don't need something that would "qualify in a setting like a court of law as decisive evidence that all sides would agree was decisive". But your anecdote from your parents doesn't just fail to meet up to that standard. It also fails to meet up to the lower standard that would be necessary to support your argument in this thread. I explained why in a previous response. You didn't interact with what I said.
You write:
"As far as group haluccinations though, Mike Licona and Richard Carrier discussed in their debate a group hallucination documented in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Licona did not dispute that the group hallucination occured. He was familiar with the Brittanica documentation and discussed it at length. It was accepted by both sides that group hallucinations had occurred based upon the documented evidence."
As my original post in this thread explains, and as I explained to you again since then, arguing that group hallucinations can occur would only be one step in an argument that the early Christians experienced group hallucinations. You would have to take the further step of arguing why we should think that a group hallucination is what happened in the particular circumstances in question. You keep asserting that multiple single and group hallucinations would be more likely than appearances resulting from a resurrection, but you never justify that assertion. You refer to factors such as the lack of documented cases of prior resurrections, but you don't interact with what we've said about the problems with citing such factors to justify your conclusion. There's more involved in determining the "initial plausibility" you keep referring to, and you can't stop with that alleged initial plausibility even if we were to agree about it.
Furthermore, you're misrepresenting what happened in the Carrier/Licona debate. At the ninth minute of the third hour of the debate, Licona repeatedly refers to how hallucinations are individual experiences, like dreams. At the eighteenth minute of that same hour, Carrier answers a question about whether individuals in groups can have similar hallucinations. Carrier himself explains that if we could get in the minds of the people involved, the hallucinations wouldn't be the same. They can only be similar. He uses an example, from the Encyclopedia Britannica, involving people lost at sea. Multiple people could think that they all saw a boat, and through speaking with each other they could conclude that it was the same boat. Carrier doesn't claim that the group would be sharing a hallucination. Rather, he claims that they might be able to convince each other that their separate hallucinations were something they experienced in common, even though they actually weren't sharing the experience.
But the example Carrier uses is problematic, for reasons I've repeatedly addressed in the past. As Gary Habermas and Michael Licona explain:
“Let us suppose that a group of twenty people is sailing across the Atlantic Ocean when the ship sinks. After floating on the ocean for three days with no sleep, food, or fresh water, and with the strongest desire for rescue, one member points to a large ship on the horizon that he is hallucinating. Will the others see it? Probably not, since hallucinations are experienced only in the mind of the individual. However, let us suppose that three others in the group are so desperately hopeful of rescue that their minds deceive them into believing that they see the ship as well. As their imaginary ship approaches, will they all see the same hull number? If they do, it is time for the entire group to begin yelling at the top of their lungs because the ship is real.” (The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2004], p. 106)
And:
“U.S. Navy SEALS are arguably the most elite fighting force in the world. Before becoming a SEAL, the candidate must complete a grueling ‘Hell Week.’ All of the candidates are put through intense exercises and experience extreme stress during the week on only a total of three to five hours of sleep. As extreme fatigue and sleep deprivation quickly set in, most of the candidates experience hallucinations. According to several SEALS interviewed, most hallucinations occur while the candidates, as a team, paddle in a raft out in the ocean. One believed that he saw an octopus come out of the water and wave at him! Another thought he saw a train coming across the water headed straight toward the raft. Another believed that he saw a large wall, which the raft would crash into if the team persisted in paddling. When the octopus, train, and wall were pointed out by the candidates to the rest of the team, no one else saw them, even though they were all in the same frame of mind. Most of them hallucinated at some point, but none of them participated in the hallucination of another.” (ibid.)
In past posts, I've gone into detail about how implausible it would be to think that groups of people repeatedly had coordinated hallucinations of the risen Jesus. 1 Corinthians 15 alone mentions three different appearances to groups. How likely is it that all of the people involved would hallucinate at the same time and would either happen to have nearly identical hallucinations or not realize that they were hallucinating in a significantly different manner? If one person thought he saw Jesus ten feet away to the north, and that Jesus said nothing, whereas another person thought he saw Jesus five hundred feet away to the east, and that Jesus did say something, it would be easy for the people involved to realize that their experiences didn't align. The more people there are involved, the more difficult it would be for them to mistake their individual hallucinations for a shared experience. It would be even more difficult for them to persist in that belief after initially arriving at it, since differences could easily come to light upon further reflection. The number of people involved in the group resurrection appearances was in the double or triple digits for at least a few of the appearances. The concept that such large groups would repeatedly hallucinate at the same time and with highly similar hallucinations each time, without realizing that they weren't having the same experience, is absurd. You aren't addressing such difficulties. Instead, you're just making a vague reference to some comments made in a debate between Carrier and Licona, and your vague reference to that debate leaves out some significant information that undermines your argument.
After Richard Carrier's comments, Michael Licona responded. He pointed out, beginning at the nineteenth minute of the same hour, that the encyclopedia article Carrier cited was more than forty years old and that science has advanced since then. Licona then goes on to deny that the article gives us a case of mass hallucination. Rather, he explains it as I do above and as he explains it in his book with Gary Habermas, quoted above. All that Licona agreed with was the fact that there was such an encyclopedia article and that it involved people having similar hallucinations, not a shared hallucination.
Earlier in this thread, I explained that I was asking you for evidence of shared hallucinations, not separate hallucinations that are similar. I responded to your gold dust example by making that distinction. I said:
"Individual perceptions that aren't shared wouldn't be a group experience."
So you can't claim that you didn't know what I was referring to. You can't cite Carrier and Licona to support shared hallucinations, since both of them said that they were referring to similar hallucinations, not ones that were shared. And if you want to claim that you had similar rather than shared hallucinations in mind all along, then why didn't you correct my alleged misunderstanding earlier in the thread? I've repeatedly referred to people having similar hallucinations in the past. My quotes above from Gary Habermas and Michael Licona's book have been posted by me repeatedly. I've repeatedly acknowledged that people sometimes have similar hallucinations, and I've discussed at length some of the problems with proposing similar hallucinations to explain what happened in early Christianity.
In addition to making misleading and unsupported claims about hallucinations, you've told us that a resurrection is "so implausible it is rendered nearly impossible". You still haven't justified that assertion. As we've explained to you repeatedly, the fact that there weren't previous resurrections doesn't lead us to the conclusion that Jesus' resurrection is "so implausible it is rendered nearly impossible". You keep making assertions that you don't justify.
Notice how Jon keeps moving the goal post every time he's challenged:
ReplyDeleteFirst: "There are no documented cases of resurrections, or miracles of any kind for that matter."
Then: "The word 'documentation' means decisive info that is usually vetted and tested. Often published. You and Steve's posts on discussion boards are not what I mean by "documentation." Perhaps something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth. There are documented cases of group hallucinations. There are no documented cases of resurrections."
Then: "Steve, in answer to your question, no Wikipedia would not be considered 'documentation' in the sense that I intended the word. It's better than J.P. Holding generally speaking, but it's not considered to be a 'written or printed paper that bears the original, official, or legal form of something and can be used to furnish decisive evidence or information. My anecdote about my parents also would not qualify as 'documentation' in that sense either. I didn't claim that it was. My anecdote would not qualify in a setting like a court of law as decisive evidence that all sides would agree was decisive and had established something like a group hallucination."
First we have no documentation of resurrections or miracles of any kind.
Then we have no documented resurrections. Miracles of every kind drop out of sight.
Moreover, documentation is now defined as "decisive info that is usually vetted and tested...Perhaps something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth."
Then we have documentation redefined as "written or printed paper that bears the original, official, or legal form...[what would] qualify in a setting like a court of law as decisive evidence that all sides would agree was decisive and had established something."
Two problems with his escalating redefinitions:
i) It excludes a lot of his own material, the material over at DC, the Secular Web, and so on.
ii) It's absurd to define documentation as something which "all sides agree was decisive."
This is just a made-up definition. And it isn't true to his own example. In a court room, both the defense and the prosecution don't necessary agree on what constitutes "decisive evidence." Indeed, that's often a primary point of contention.
Jon tries to impose on the Christian a phony and arbitrary definition which Jon himself can't stick to.
"As far as group haluccinations though, Mike Licona and Richard Carrier discussed in their debate a group hallucination documented in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Licona did not dispute that the group hallucination occured. He was familiar with the Brittanica documentation and discussed it at length. It was accepted by both sides that group hallucinations had occurred based upon the documented evidence."
This is not what they say in their book:
"Today we know that hallucinations are private occurrences, which occur in the mind of an individual. They are not collective experiences. In a group, all of the people may be in a frame of mind to halucinate,but each experiences hallucinations on an individual basis. Nor will they experience the same hallucination. hallucinations are like dreams in this way...a hallucination cannot be shared," G. Habermas & M. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel 204), 106.
This is followed by four other objections to the hallucination hypothesis (pp106-09).
So, perhaps Jon would like to "document" his summary of what Habermas and Licona believe about group hallucinations.
Yet again, you're making assertions without any accompanying evidence.
ReplyDeleteI've often taken the time to do that and you respond by ignoring the point and evading again and again. I repeat what I've already stated that you continue to ignore and you just ignore again. So no, I won't be detailing my claims again and again and again.
You can't cite Carrier and Licona to support shared hallucinations, since both of them said that they were referring to similar hallucinations, not ones that were shared.
Are you suggesting, Jason, that skeptics argue that all supposed witnesses had a shared hallucination in the sense that if we could get into their minds we would see exactly the same thing? Who are these skeptics? I've already asked which skeptics you had in view with regards to events skeptics might consider to be related to hallucinations and you responded with evasion, talking about how I don't know much scholarship and many skeptics accept the historicity of the empty tomb and burial as if that was somehow relevant to the conversation.
Now, should I ask this again and again and again? If I don't, does that mean I "left the conversation because things weren't going my way"?
First we have no documentation of resurrections or miracles of any kind.
ReplyDeleteThen we have no documented resurrections. Miracles of every kind drop out of sight.
Are you suggesting these statements are inconsistent? Are you suggesting I've changed my view? I don't get your point here?
Moreover, documentation is now defined as "decisive info that is usually vetted and tested...Perhaps something published in respectable encyclopedias and so forth."
Then we have documentation redefined as "written or printed paper that bears the original, official, or legal form...[what would] qualify in a setting like a court of law as decisive evidence that all sides would agree was decisive and had established something."
The first was simply a definition in my own words. For the second one (which you've sort of truncated and pasted my words from elsewhere in the post) I looked the word up at dictionary.com. They look pretty similar. What's the problem?
i) It excludes a lot of his own material, the material over at DC, the Secular Web, and so on.
Yeah. So what? You shouldn't consider your posts here to be "documentation" in the sense that I mean. I know you think everything you write is decisive and obviously true to all but those rebelling against God, but it ain't so.
This is just a made-up definition.
It's from the dictionary.
This is not what they say in their book:
I wasn't quoting his book.
"Today we know that hallucinations are private occurrences, which occur in the mind of an individual. They are not collective experiences. In a group, all of the people may be in a frame of mind to halucinate,but each experiences hallucinations on an individual basis. Nor will they experience the same hallucination. hallucinations are like dreams in this way...a hallucination cannot be shared," G. Habermas & M. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel 204), 106.
This is where I'd like to know which skeptics Licona and Habermas are addressing. And I'd also like to know if Jason is simply following their straw man lead. Which skeptics claim that if we got into the mind of the hallucinator we would see the exact same thing? Of course hallucinations are private occurences. The question is can multiple people hallucinate things such that after talking with each other they would believe they had seen the same thing. I think this is what the skeptic would mean by a group hallucination. Perhaps for one hallucinator Jesus has a bright glow around his head and for another hallucinator there is no glow, but Jesus is wearing a blue sash. All they know to say to one another is that they had seen Jesus. They don't think to test it and make sure they saw exactly the same thing. And maybe perhaps because of their desire to want to see Jesus one person says "Did you see Jesus sit on that rock" and the other person though he didn't actually see that might convince himself that he did. This is what the skeptic is saying.
As if a skeptic's view is anything like the claim that one person is dreaming and another person is in the same dream and is involved. That is just plain embarassing. I have to wonder about someone that would so badly misrepresent an argument.
You can straw man all day long and suggest that skeptics argue that it's as if in the mind of the hallucinator the same exact scene is taking place. I'd be shocked that this is the skeptical argument and I will wait for Jason to detail which skeptics it is that make this ridiculous argument. And when Jason ignores my question I might ask one more time. And then maybe I'll call it quits.
At the beginning of this thread, I referred to how skeptics sometimes cite vague parallels to the resurrection appearances in early Christianity without justifying those parallels. Jon Curry has responded by citing some vague parallels of his own that he's failed to justify.
ReplyDeleteHe cited a vague anecdote about gold dust that he heard from his parents. When challenged on the details, he didn't respond.
He made a vague reference to Marian apparitions. When challenged on the details, he didn't respond.
He made a vague reference to a case Richard Carrier and Michael Licona discussed in a debate. When challenged on the details, he didn't respond.
Now Jon tells us that he's going to "call it quits" if Steve and I (especially I) don't name some skeptics who have argued that the same hallucination can be shared by multiple people. There are some problems with Jon's request:
1. He ignores his opponents' material much more than they ignore his. He's in no position to demand that his opponents interact with his material.
2. The merits of the arguments being used by both sides of this dispute are much more significant than whether Steve and I can name any skeptics who use the argument Jon is asking about. The fact that Jon would keep refusing to offer a justification for his arguments, yet would tell us that he's going to leave the discussion if we don't do something as relatively trivial as giving him the names of skeptics who use a particular argument, reflects how frivolous Jon is in his approach to these discussions. He's focusing on this issue of naming people because he thinks that no names can be given. Since he can't defend his position on the more significant issues, he wants the discussion to focus on something less significant that he thinks would go his way.
3. Given their knowledge and experience in the field of resurrection studies, Habermas and Licona are credible if they claim to have heard skeptics use a particular argument, even if they don't give any names of skeptics. Giving names would add weight to what they're saying, but it would be unreasonable to conclude that they're probably or certainly wrong just because they didn't mention any names. Even if they didn't have any names in mind, people often remember arguments they've heard without remembering who was making the argument.
4. Habermas and Licona weren't claiming to be responding to a particular skeptic. They were addressing the nature of hallucinations. Their book is aimed at a general readership. The fact that they explain that hallucinations can't be shared by multiple people doesn't mean that they're accusing skeptics of using the argument that hallucinations can be shared. As I documented in a previous post, they go on to explain, later on the same page of the book that Steve quoted, why multiple individual hallucinations wouldn't be a plausible explanation of the resurrection appearances. Since some of the readers of their book may not know much about hallucinations, it makes sense for them to begin by discussing the general characteristics of a hallucination, followed by a discussion of theories skeptics might propose in light of those characteristics. To conclude that Habermas and Licona are accusing skeptics of arguing that hallucinations can be shared, on the basis that they explained to the reader that hallucinations aren't shared, doesn't make sense. To sustain his criticism against Habermas and Licona, Jon will need to a.) explain where he thinks they accuse skeptics of using the shared hallucination argument and b.) explain why we're supposed to reject that accusation.
It's true that I (not Habermas and Licona) have asked Jon whether he's referring to shared hallucinations when he discusses "group hallucinations". As I explained in my last post, Jon failed to clarify his use of the term "group hallucination", even when asked for clarification. He repeatedly used the term in a way that seemed to be meant to challenge what Steve and I were arguing. The fact that I asked Jon if he was referring to shared hallucinations doesn't logically imply that I'm accusing skeptics of arguing for shared hallucinations. And if I was making that accusation, and I wasn't able to name any of those skeptics, that inability to name them would weaken my claim, but it wouldn't refute the claim. As I said above, people can accurately remember hearing an argument without remembering who they heard it from.
Jon writes:
"I've already asked which skeptics you had in view with regards to events skeptics might consider to be related to hallucinations and you responded with evasion, talking about how I don't know much scholarship and many skeptics accept the historicity of the empty tomb and burial as if that was somehow relevant to the conversation."
I don't know what you're referring to. Are you referring to what I said in my initial post about skeptics who distinguish between visions and hallucinations? Or are you referring to your own comments about "things like the descriptions of Pentecost"? If the latter, then you'll need to clarify your question further, since, as I explained to you earlier, I wasn't referring to Pentecost. If you would answer the questions we ask you instead of ignoring so much of what we write, then you might get more answers to your own questions. You didn't clarify your Pentecost comment, so how could I further interact with it?
When will you address the questions we've asked you? I would suggest that you go back to the initial posts in this thread and notice how many unsupported assertions you've made and how many of our responses you've ignored.
You write:
"The question is can multiple people hallucinate things such that after talking with each other they would believe they had seen the same thing. I think this is what the skeptic would mean by a group hallucination. Perhaps for one hallucinator Jesus has a bright glow around his head and for another hallucinator there is no glow, but Jesus is wearing a blue sash. All they know to say to one another is that they had seen Jesus. They don't think to test it and make sure they saw exactly the same thing."
You're ignoring some significant problems with your illustration, problems that I've discussed in this thread and elsewhere. If a group of ten people or more than five hundred people, for example, all thought that they were seeing Jesus at the same time, their hallucinations wouldn't just differ in things as minor as whether there's "a bright glow around his head". There would also be more significant differences, such as one person thinking that Jesus appeared in one direction and another thinking he appeared in the opposite direction; one thinking Jesus spoke a particular message and another thinking he spoke some other message; one thinking that Jesus is two feet away, within reach, and another thinking He's twenty feet away; etc. Such significant differences would be apparent through the actions of the hallucinators, not just through their later discussions with each other. Michael Licona gave an example in his debate with Richard Carrier, a debate you apparently have watched. He gives the example of one hallucinating Navy SEAL swinging his oar at an octopus he thinks he sees in front of him, whereas another Navy SEAL tells him that there's no octopus there. Even though both men were hallucinating, they saw significantly different things. For you to propose that ten, eleven, or hundreds of resurrection witnesses who were together in a group only differed in their hallucinations in minor ways is absurd. And you aren't giving us any reason to think that the witnesses were in a state in which they would hallucinate and that they would hallucinate at the same time. You keep ignoring the most significant problems with your theories.
"Are you suggesting these statements are inconsistent? Are you suggesting I've changed my view? I don't get your point here?"
ReplyDeleteYou presented two different denials. When challenged on both, you suddenly dropped the denial about miracles generally, and only wanted to talk about "resurrections" (plural).
I offered you a concrete counterexample (Moreland on prayer). You chose to ignore it because you can't handle the evidence.
"The first was simply a definition in my own words. For the second one (which you've sort of truncated and pasted my words from elsewhere in the post) I looked the word up at dictionary.com. They look pretty similar. What's the problem?"
Really? When I do a search for "documentation" in dictionary.com, the definitions I pull up are far less specialized.
Anyway, this is just a stalling tactic on your part.
Because you can't debate the evidence, you resort to semantic escape maneuvers.
"Yeah. So what? You shouldn't consider your posts here to be 'documentation' in the sense that I mean."
It's fine with me if the stuff at DC or the Secular Web fails to measure up to your definition. You're cutting your own throat in your attempt to slit ours.
"It's from the dictionary."
Care to give us some verbatim quotes?
"I wasn't quoting his book."
Of course not. Because you'd then have to do something resembling genuine research. Like buying a used copy of their book from Amazon.com, or getting it via interlibrary loan, or checking out the freebie stuff at Gary's blog.
Instead you resort to a radio debate in which Habermas and Licona were blindsided by a sweetheart deal between Carrier and the host.
Despite the ambush, they did pretty well fielding questions off-the-cuff, and within the time limits of a radio show, even though they didn't come with prepared answers to these objections.
"This is where I'd like to know which skeptics Licona and Habermas are addressing."
Now you're changing the subject. That's because, unlike me (or Engwer), you can't back up your claims.
I quoted directly from their book. You have nothing to counter that material. So you change the subject.
"And then maybe I'll call it quits."
In other words, you're a quitter.
That's what people like you do when they make claims they can't back up. Losers are quitters, and quitters are losers.
Your post here talks about the views of "modern skeptics." My first comment attempted to focus your attention on exactly what skeptics believe, and not be too vague, so I talked about arguments skeptics make regarding hallucinations when they speak about the gospel accounts, and how skeptics don't usually think that visions actually occurred, but are more probable than the resurrection explanation. The reason I distinguish here is because what skeptics say about the gospel accounts is not necessarily what they say about Paul's letters. You can't just mish mash arguments together and apply them to things they were never intended to apply to. I'm trying to understand your criticisms and really see how they apply to what skeptics actually say.
ReplyDeleteYou replied and said that such a skeptic "wouldn't be the sort of critic I was responding to."
So I asked who these critics are that you are responding to? Who thinks that such events as Pentecost are historical and are explained by skeptics with the hallucination explanation?
You responded by saying that "You don't seem to know much about Biblical scholarship" and "my evaluation of the evidence isn’t limited to what’s accepted by any skeptic, much less “skeptics that [Jon Curry] knows" and "Most scholars accept the historicity of gospel details such as Jesus’ honorable burial and the empty tomb."
It's pretty obvious to me that this is a dodge. I'm inclined to ask you the same question you asked me. Who do you think you're deceiving? But then I remember who the audience is here and I have my answer. You are probably successfully deceiving everyone reading.
It's true you've asked me questions I haven't answered. I do that because I want to focus on one issue at a time. I could respond to your questions about the gold dust example. But right now I think another point is more important to press. So with regards to the gold dust you have the last word at this moment. You use this as an excuse to ignore the one or two points that I am trying to press. It's almost like you don't actually want conversations to happen? Ask dozens of questions that all require lengthy replies and in this way obscure the main point here. Who do you think you're deceiving? Oh yeah. Everyone.
But you'll notice that I don't quote you and pretend to reply to your questions and actually fail to reply as you do.
The main point in my view is your criticisms of "modern skeptics" and how they apply to the hallucination theory. I continue to focus on that and you continue to come up with excuses for dodging (I haven't answered other questions on other issues, somewhere there's another post in another thread where a Christian contradicted me, blah, blah, blah). And on and on the dodging goes, such as your most recent post:
The merits of the arguments being used by both sides of this dispute are much more significant than whether Steve and I can name any skeptics who use the argument Jon is asking about.
The merits of the arguments being used by "both sides"? Which side is the skeptical side? If you can't name any skeptics that hold to the "side" you attribute to them, isn't that relevant? Or is it good enough to say "Dreams are not shared experiences. Game, set, match. Skeptics are clearly out to lunch." And when I say "Excuse me, which skeptics think dreams are shared experiences or Christian hallucinations were shared in the same way" you say "That's irrelevant."
He's focusing on this issue of naming people because he thinks that no names can be given.
I don't know if names can be given. I just want to know who these skeptics are. And if you can point them out to me I will join you in critiquing them. If you can't point them out I will critique you. I will ask you to familiarize yourself with skeptical arguments before critiquing them. You don't seem to read skeptics in their own context, but read them through the lens of Christians and I think this is what is leading you down this fallacious path and making you look bad.
Given their knowledge and experience in the field of resurrection studies, Habermas and Licona are credible if they claim to have heard skeptics use a particular argument, even if they don't give any names of skeptics.
And here is a virtual admission of my previous point. Stop trusting Christians to give you a fair presentation of skeptical arguments and read skeptics in their own context. Your previous point of my "ignorance of Biblical scholarship" is very ironic to me in light of your straw man argumentation against skeptics that results from your ignorance of the views you critique due to your unwillingness to read their books.
If the latter, then you'll need to clarify your question further, since, as I explained to you earlier, I wasn't referring to Pentecost. If you would answer the questions we ask you instead of ignoring so much of what we write, then you might get more answers to your own questions. You didn't clarify your Pentecost comment, so how could I further interact with it?
Well, since I had said "I am curious which skeptics you are talking about that really believe that things like the descriptions of Pentecost really happened and they are just hallucinations" and since the topic of this post is skeptical arguments about hallucinations I think it is pretty obvious that I'm talking about things that skeptics might argue were hallucinations in the book of Acts, and not "Jesus’ honorable burial and the empty tomb". You're either really stupid or you're deceptive, and I don't think you're really stupid.
Notice that Jon is backpedaling. He originally cited Habermas and Licona favorably in support of his own position:
ReplyDelete"As far as group haluccinations though, Mike Licona and Richard Carrier discussed in their debate a group hallucination documented in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Licona did not dispute that the group hallucination occured. He was familiar with the Brittanica documentation and discussed it at length. It was accepted by both sides that group hallucinations had occurred based upon the documented evidence. With that in mind, and bearing in mind that cases of the miraculous have never been documented in that sense, the claim of resurrection is more initially implausible than the claim of a group hallucination."
So he cited them when he thought their position confirmed his position. But as soon as Jason and I reference material to the contrary from their book and Gary's website, Jon responds this way:
"And here is a virtual admission of my previous point. Stop trusting Christians to give you a fair presentation of skeptical arguments and read skeptics in their own context. Your previous point of my 'ignorance of Biblical scholarship' is very ironic to me in light of your straw man argumentation against skeptics that results from your ignorance of the views you critique due to your unwillingness to read their books."
Now Jason is faulted for making use of Habermas and Licona, even though Jon made that very same appeal when he thought it was working in his favor.
But having been challenged, and unable to refute the material which Jason and I referenced, he suddenly reverses himself. Why should Jason take Jon's arguments seriously when Jon doesn't take his own arguments seriously?
This is not a debate between Jason and Jon. Rather, this is a debate between Jon and Jon. When Jon contradicts himself, we can sit on the sidelines and watch him hemorrhage from self-inflicted injuries.
Sometimes I really wonder why I bother, but:
ReplyDeleteNow Jason is faulted for making use of Habermas and Licona, even though Jon made that very same appeal when he thought it was working in his favor.
Jason is not being faulted for using Habermas and Licona. He is faulted for using the same straw man argument Habermas and Licona used. Let me see if I can summarize the claims I've made here.
Some skeptics argue that group hallucinations can offer a better explanation for some of the Christian evidences than a resurrection can. For the skeptic the type of group hallucination that would explain this evidence is not a hallucination that involves seperate people envisioning the exact same thing. It would be more be that they are in a state of mind such that they would hallucinate and then later they may come to believe that they had seen the same thing.
There are documented cases of groups of people hallucinating in the sense that they were all in a certain frame of mind where they came to beleive they were seeing things that they weren't. Licona agrees that this documentation exists and that this type of group hallucination (which is the type of hallucination that the skeptic is postulating) did in fact occur.
The next quote from Licona doesn't deny what I have above. It doesn't contradict what I've said. It merely states that group hallucinations do not occur in the sense that everyone sees the exact same thing. In that sense group hallucinations are individual events and not shareable, much like dreams.
I agree with both pieces of information we have from Licona so far:
1-Group hallucinations in the sense that the skeptic defines it have been documented
2-When people hallucinate they probably don't see the exact same thing
But since no skeptic denies point 2 it has no relevance. To suggest that a skeptic holds to such a position is what is called straw man argumentation, which is why I would like to see some evidence of any skeptic holding to such a view.
Since I agree with both points from Licona, why is it that you say I am contradicting myself?
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"I talked about arguments skeptics make regarding hallucinations when they speak about the gospel accounts, and how skeptics don't usually think that visions actually occurred, but are more probable than the resurrection explanation."
As before, you aren't offering any documentation. You claim that you're describing "how skeptics usually think", but you offer no evidence.
You refer to "the gospel accounts" and how skeptics supposedly "usually" think. Those are qualifiers you added. They aren't mine, and I'm the one who chose the topic of the thread.
You write:
"The reason I distinguish here is because what skeptics say about the gospel accounts is not necessarily what they say about Paul's letters. You can't just mish mash arguments together and apply them to things they were never intended to apply to."
Would you tell me where I "mish mashed"?
You write:
"So I asked who these critics are that you are responding to? Who thinks that such events as Pentecost are historical and are explained by skeptics with the hallucination explanation?"
Again, what's the relevance of Pentecost? I've explained to you that I was addressing skeptics who argue for a vision theory, regardless of how much of the material in the gospels and Acts they consider representative of visions. You keep making irrelevant objections.
You write:
"It's true you've asked me questions I haven't answered. I do that because I want to focus on one issue at a time. I could respond to your questions about the gold dust example. But right now I think another point is more important to press. So with regards to the gold dust you have the last word at this moment."
You've made that sort of claim before. You use bad arguments, then, after you're refuted, you choose some other topic you want to "focus on". You never get to the other issues. You only discuss whichever issues you think will go your way. When those don't go your way either, you leave the thread. You've done it repeatedly.
You write:
"You use this as an excuse to ignore the one or two points that I am trying to press. It's almost like you don't actually want conversations to happen?"
In other words, you can ignore what I say in threads that I initiated, but I shouldn't ignore whatever issues you want to "press". Why should I let you frame the discussions in threads that I began in a forum where I'm a moderater, especially after I've seen you make so many false claims that you never support before you decide to "press" other issues instead?
You write:
"If you can't name any skeptics that hold to the 'side' you attribute to them, isn't that relevant? Or is it good enough to say 'Dreams are not shared experiences. Game, set, match. Skeptics are clearly out to lunch.' And when I say 'Excuse me, which skeptics think dreams are shared experiences or Christian hallucinations were shared in the same way' you say 'That's irrelevant.'"
Since I didn't argue in the manner you're describing, your characterization of the discussion doesn't have much relevance. I can give examples of skeptics using the approach I described at the beginning of the thread, if that's what you're asking for. Matthew Green of Debunking Christianity, for example, distinguishes between visions and hallucinations along the lines of what I described in my initial post.
You write:
"You don't seem to read skeptics in their own context, but read them through the lens of Christians and I think this is what is leading you down this fallacious path and making you look bad."
You're mistaken, and I've corrected you on that point repeatedly.
You write:
"Stop trusting Christians to give you a fair presentation of skeptical arguments and read skeptics in their own context."
I didn't say that I was relying on Habermas and Licona. I said that they would be credible if they referred to encounters they had with such skeptics. You're responding as if I said that they did have such encounters and that they're my only source for concluding that such skeptics exist. I haven't been arguing for the existence of such skeptics, much less have I said that Habermas and Licona are my only source of information on them. You need to think and read more carefully.
In my last post, I explained to you that Habermas and Licona aren't responding to the sort of skeptic you asked about. You ignored what I said and continued to act as if they were responding to such skeptics.
You write:
"Well, since I had said 'I am curious which skeptics you are talking about that really believe that things like the descriptions of Pentecost really happened and they are just hallucinations' and since the topic of this post is skeptical arguments about hallucinations I think it is pretty obvious that I'm talking about things that skeptics might argue were hallucinations in the book of Acts, and not 'Jesus’ honorable burial and the empty tomb'."
Again, I didn't say anything about the gospels and Acts being included prior to your mentioning of them. Some skeptics do accept the historicity of some portions of Acts and argue that Paul had a vision resulting from an epileptic seizure on the road to Damascus, for example. But, as I explained to you earlier, I was addressing the appeal to visions or hallucinations without regard to whether the skeptic in question believes that the gospels and Acts record such visions or hallucinations. You keep adding qualifiers to my comments that I didn't include.
You write:
"But since no skeptic denies point 2 it has no relevance. To suggest that a skeptic holds to such a position is what is called straw man argumentation, which is why I would like to see some evidence of any skeptic holding to such a view."
As I've explained to you, Habermas and Licona weren't responding to the "straw man" you're describing. Your assumption that they were responding to that position is erroneous. For you to keep asking for "evidence of any skeptic holding to such a view" doesn't make sense. You're ignoring much of what I explained to you in my last response.
I want to correct something I said earlier:
ReplyDelete"Michael Licona gave an example in his debate with Richard Carrier, a debate you apparently have watched. He gives the example of one hallucinating Navy SEAL swinging his oar at an octopus he thinks he sees in front of him, whereas another Navy SEAL tells him that there's no octopus there. Even though both men were hallucinating, they saw significantly different things."
I remembered Licona's comments incorrectly. It was another person who thought he saw an octopus. From what I remember of Licona's comments during his debate with Richard Carrier, the one who was swinging his oar thought he saw a dolphin (or dolphins). Licona and Habermas give multiple examples of how these Navy SEALs hallucinated. They saw different objects, and I was confusing two of the accounts.
You refer to "the gospel accounts" and how skeptics supposedly "usually" think. Those are qualifiers you added. They aren't mine, and I'm the one who chose the topic of the thread.
ReplyDeleteYes, they are qualifiers I added, because I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. I'm trying to get you to look at the specifics of the view you critique. With regards to hallucination theories of skeptics what they think of the gospels is not what they think of Paul's letters. As I make statements about what skeptics believe it is important to make the distinctions, but for some reason you don't want me to make distinctions. Why? Your complaints don't make a lot of sense.
Would you tell me where I "mish mashed"?
It's not that you've mish mashed. It's that I don't want to mish mash. I'm making statements about what skeptics believe and as I do I need to make distinctions to present their views fairly. Are you interested in a fair understanding of the skeptical view?
Again, what's the relevance of Pentecost? I've explained to you that I was addressing skeptics who argue for a vision theory, regardless of how much of the material in the gospels and Acts they consider representative of visions. You keep making irrelevant objections.
When I raised the issue of Pentecost I said "I am curious which skeptics you are talking about that really believe that things like the descriptions of Pentecost really happened and they are just hallucinations. Most skeptics that I know don't think Acts or the gospels are accurate on those details."
In other words, there is a distinction between later writings (the Gospels and Acts) and earlier writings (Paul's letters) that needs to be kept in mind when considering the views of skeptics. What they think of the earlier works is not necessarily what they think of later works. You keep focusing on Pentecost like I'm only talking about that event. That's not the issue.
Again, getting into the specifics is helpful if you want to offer an effective critique. Let me use use Carrier to illustrate why I make these distinctions.
Carrier thinks Paul had some sort of vision. He bases that on Galatians and other writings from Paul. But what of Acts account of Paul? Carrier thinks Acts is not reliable. So when Acts talks about Paul's conversion experience it talks about two companions that may have heard a sound or maybe not that were with Paul. Carrier's actual view is that those people weren't there, so he wouldn't bother trying to explain their response. He may go ahead and assume they are historical for the sake of argument and offer an explanation, but he doesn't think that story is historically accurate, whereas Galatians is more likely to be historically accurate. So the arguments about hallucinations are going to differ for the skeptic depending on which hallucination you are trying to explain and what is the historical reliability of the source document.
So I started in my first posted with an "As far as the gospel accounts" statement, and you've been complaining about it ever since. Your response just makes no sense to me. If you want to understand what skeptics are actually saying, you should be interested in understanding why they might argue one way in one case and another way in another.
Since I didn't argue in the manner you're describing, your characterization of the discussion doesn't have much relevance.
Here is what you said from before:
Earlier in this thread, I explained that I was asking you for evidence of shared hallucinations, not separate hallucinations that are similar. I responded to your gold dust example by making that distinction. I said:
"Individual perceptions that aren't shared wouldn't be a group experience."
So you can't claim that you didn't know what I was referring to. You can't cite Carrier and Licona to support shared hallucinations, since both of them said that they were referring to similar hallucinations, not ones that were shared. And if you want to claim that you had similar rather than shared hallucinations in mind all along, then why didn't you correct my alleged misunderstanding earlier in the thread?
If you aren't arguing as I described, why are you critical of me for offering evidence of group hallucinations that are similar? Why are you asking for evidence of shared hallucinations? Isn't it because you think skeptics argue in favor of shared hallucinations?
Why does Steve offer the quote from Licona and Habermas that talks about how people don't share the same hallucination like they don't share the same dream? Why does Steve say that this contradicts what I had said? Isn't it because he thinks, as you do, that skeptics like myself do in fact beleive that people may have had shared hallucinations in the sense that they had the same dream? And isn't it a fact that you cannot name even one skeptic that in fact holds such a view?
You can't name a skeptic that argues for shared hallucinations, yet I'm supposed to provide evidence of them? Why would I do that when I don't think they occur? If you read skeptics and understood them, you would know that they do not argue for shared hallucinations and you would not expect me to defend them. But you read Christians to get information about what skeptics believe, and that leaves you where you are right now.
I'm not so sure I believe you when you say Licona and Habermas aren't arguing against skeptics when they talk about dreams being a shared experience. I seem to remember the same point being made by Licona in one of his debates. Something like "Hey I'm having a dream here. Come join me in my dream" as if that was the skeptical view. But I'm not certain I'm remembering that right.
But even if I were to grant that Licona is not arguing against a skeptic, but is merely explaining some facts about hallucinations generally, this doesn't change the fact that you guys are misapplying it, thinking that it contradicts me or that it contradicts the skeptical position. If you would read skeptics in their own context you would avoid these mistakes.
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"Yes, they are qualifiers I added, because I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. I'm trying to get you to look at the specifics of the view you critique. With regards to hallucination theories of skeptics what they think of the gospels is not what they think of Paul's letters. As I make statements about what skeptics believe it is important to make the distinctions, but for some reason you don't want me to make distinctions. Why?"
I posted about hallucination theories in general. You responded by saying that "what they think of the gospels is not what they think of Paul's letters". Nothing in my original post depended on that distinction. You made assertions about what skeptics "usually think" and went on to ask me for documentation that skeptics have viewed passages in the gospels and Acts as resulting from hallucinations. You never documented your claim about what skeptics "usually think", and your request for documentation on my part was irrelevant to what I had been arguing.
You write:
"It's not that you've mish mashed. It's that I don't want to mish mash. I'm making statements about what skeptics believe and as I do I need to make distinctions to present their views fairly. Are you interested in a fair understanding of the skeptical view?"
Since nothing in my argument suggested "mish mashing", and since I've repeatedly addressed distinctions between how skeptics view the gospels and how they view Paul's letters, who were you addressing? People who haven't read much of what I've written and were making false assumptions that my argument didn't suggest? Your "interest in a fair understanding of the skeptical view" is ridiculous in a context in which there was no indication that anybody didn't understand the skeptical view. And, as I explained before, given the ignorance of scholarship that you've demonstrated in your posts, I want to know how you can speak for what skeptics "usually" believe. You've read some material by people like Richard Carrier and Robert Price, who are far out of the mainstream and don't specialize in the relevant fields. But how familiar are you with more mainstream scholarship?
You write:
"You keep focusing on Pentecost like I'm only talking about that event. That's not the issue."
Bringing up Pentecost, as you did, is misleading in two ways. Pentecost didn't involve resurrection appearances, and my argument doesn't depend on the belief that some of the events in the gospels and Acts were hallucinations. Some skeptics do view events in the gospels or Acts as visionary, but my argument doesn't depend on the inclusion of the gospels and Acts.
You write:
"If you aren't arguing as I described, why are you critical of me for offering evidence of group hallucinations that are similar? Why are you asking for evidence of shared hallucinations? Isn't it because you think skeptics argue in favor of shared hallucinations?"
No. You began with the phrase "group hallucinations", without the "that are similar" qualifier. I asked you for clarification of what you were arguing, and you initially ignored that request. The term "group" is unnecessary and potentially misleading if you're just referring to multiple people hallucinating independently. And you also repeatedly used the singular "group hallucination", which is even more misleading if you didn't intend to convey a shared hallucination. If you had multiple hallucinations in view, why did you repeatedly use the singular? The examples you began with, involving gold dust and Marian apparitions, are ridiculous and have multiple problems. As I explained in my initial response to you, you've given us no reason to think that a hallucination occurred in either case, especially given how easily something like an optical illusion or mistaken impressions could account for your gold dust anecdote. If you understand the issues so poorly, and you use a term like "group hallucination" and ignore requests for clarification, then it's reasonable for me to respond by explaining that hallucinations can't be shared. For you to interpret my comments as a claim that I'm responding to other skeptics who have argued for shared hallucinations is unreasonable. It's also unreasonable for you to read the same assumption into what Gary Habermas and Michael Licona wrote.
You write:
"Why does Steve offer the quote from Licona and Habermas that talks about how people don't share the same hallucination like they don't share the same dream? Why does Steve say that this contradicts what I had said? Isn't it because he thinks, as you do, that skeptics like myself do in fact beleive that people may have had shared hallucinations in the sense that they had the same dream? And isn't it a fact that you cannot name even one skeptic that in fact holds such a view?"
First of all, I'm not Steve. Second, you're not "skeptics". If professor X at university Y is a skeptic and is highly knowledgeable about a subject, it doesn't follow that you therefore are highly knowledgeable about it as well. The knowledge that other skeptics have can't be transferred to your account just because you're a skeptic. You're judged as an individual. When you begin your comments in this thread with material like your gold dust anecdote and a vague appeal to Marian apparitions, you're demonstrating that you're highly ignorant of the subject under discussion. You were then asked for clarification, and you didn't respond. Steve's reasons for concluding that you were arguing for shared hallucinations probably were along the lines of the reasons I've mentioned above regarding why I asked you for clarification. And when Steve told you that he had shared hallucinations in mind, you made no attempt to correct him. Instead, you said that "group hallucination" occurs and that Richard Carrier and Michael Licona agreed with you about that fact. Not only did you not tell Steve that he supposedly was misunderstanding you, but you even used the singular "hallucination", which more naturally suggests one shared hallucination rather than multiple independent hallucinations that occurred around the same time. Given the ignorance of this subject on your part that you demonstrated in your initial post, your repeated refusal to offer any clarifications, and your use of the misleading singular "group hallucination", it's understandable that Steve would have had the impression he had. It wasn't until later in the thread, after I documented that Richard Carrier denied that he had a shared hallucination in view, that you explicitly claimed agreement with that position.
But, again, I'm not Steve. How does criticizing Steve for supposedly misunderstanding your view justify your claim that I should document skeptics arguing that hallucinations can be shared?
You write:
"If you read skeptics and understood them, you would know that they do not argue for shared hallucinations and you would not expect me to defend them. But you read Christians to get information about what skeptics believe, and that leaves you where you are right now."
You've made that claim repeatedly, even after being corrected repeatedly. I read the writings of skeptics. That's why we're having this discussion. I've also read articles by skeptics that you've suggested that I should read and have explained to you why I disagree with those articles. You've participated in threads in which I've interacted with other skeptics. The idea that I "read Christians to get information about what skeptics believe", because I asked you whether you believe in shared hallucinations, is absurd. There's no logical connection between the two.
The fact that some other skeptics are knowledgeable about hallucinations doesn't prove that you must be, just because you're also a skeptic. If you were as knowledgeable as you profess to be, you wouldn't have entered this thread with ridiculous material like your gold dust anecdote. I began this thread with a reference to how some skeptics recognize that they can't support an argument for hallucinations. That's why they argue instead for visions that they distinguish from hallucinations. And I was the one who documented that Richard Carrier, a skeptic, denied that he was arguing for shared hallucinations. After I offered that documentation, you said that you agree with that position. But I was referring to skeptics who distance themselves from the concept of shared hallucinations before you even entered this thread and before you eventually claimed explicitly that you agree with such skeptics.
You write:
"I'm not so sure I believe you when you say Licona and Habermas aren't arguing against skeptics when they talk about dreams being a shared experience."
Saying that you aren't sure whether you believe me isn't enough. You've accused Habermas and Licona of using an argument that you claim that they shouldn't have used. As I told you before, you need to a.) document that they've used it and b.) document that it's wrong. To do the latter, you would need to prove that they've never encountered skeptics who use the argument in question. The fact that Richard Carrier and some other skeptics you've encountered have distanced themselves from the concept of shared hallucinations doesn't prove that Habermas and Licona must not have ever encountered skeptics who do advocate the concept. The portion of their book that Steve quoted doesn't claim to be responding to skeptics who argue for shared hallucinations. If they do claim to be responding to such skeptics elsewhere, then you can address that issue with them, but it isn't Steve's responsibility. You drew a false conclusion from what was quoted from their book. That's your fault, not mine or Steve's.
We're now several posts into this thread, and you still haven't defended your ridiculous gold dust anecdote, your vague appeal to Marian apparitions, your assertions about how a resurrection is "so implausible that it doesn't take much in an alternative explanation for it to rise to a level of greater plausibility", etc. You've used a lot of ridiculous arguments that multiple people have refuted, and you keep ignoring those responses while trying to focus the discussion on far less significant issues. And you're even wrong on those less significant subjects.
Nothing in my original post depended on that distinction.
ReplyDeleteWell, I guess I would be repeating myself, but since I'm putting some meat on the views of the supposed "modern skeptics" you are critiquing, it is necessary for me to make distinctions when I describe their views. That's probably a problem for you because obfuscation is your goal, but I really have no choice if I want to present their views fairly.
No. You began with the phrase "group hallucinations", without the "that are similar" qualifier.
Why is it necessary to apply a qualifier when this is the only type of "group hallucination" skeptics would hold to? My mistake is that I thought that when you started talking about "mass hallucinations" you had some idea about the "hallucination theories" of "modern skeptics." I expect you to respond to actual views from skeptics not the views of skeptics that exist only in your own mind. I falsely assumed you had actual arguments in view, rather than straw men. Since I didn't clarify a distinction between your fallacious view and the actual view, and assumed you would only critique the actual view, somehow this is my fault.
I asked you for clarification of what you were arguing, and you initially ignored that request.
It wasn't clear to me at that point that you were attributing this fallacious view to "modern skeptics." When it did become clear to me I immediately responded and corrected your fallacies in my 3/5 7:38 pm post. Am I again at fault for your fallacies because I didn't recognize your fallacies soon enough?
The term "group" is unnecessary and potentially misleading if you're just referring to multiple people hallucinating independently.
It's not misleading if you are familiar with skeptical argumentation and do not concoct skeptical arguments based upon Christian documentation.
The examples you began with, involving gold dust and Marian apparitions, are ridiculous and have multiple problems.
Let me nip your straw man in the bud before I get blamed for not correcting you. It is not my view that the gold dust or Marian apparitions are genuine. It is my view that people can come to beleive that multiple people saw things on the basis of hallucination type experiences.
If you understand the issues so poorly, and you use a term like "group hallucination" and ignore requests for clarification, then it's reasonable for me to respond by explaining that hallucinations can't be shared. For you to interpret my comments as a claim that I'm responding to other skeptics who have argued for shared hallucinations is unreasonable.
So the fault is mine. I "understand the issues so poorly" that you feel it necessary to ask about a completely absurd view that nobody holds and has never been mentioned by me or any other skeptic that you can think of?
The fact remains that we wouldn't even be discussing "shared hallucinations" if you understood what skeptics think about hallucinations. This really has no business even being on the table. You bring it up and you need clarification on these nonsensical views because you don't know enough about the views you critique.
Steve's reasons for concluding that you were arguing for shared hallucinations probably were along the lines of the reasons I've mentioned above regarding why I asked you for clarification. And when Steve told you that he had shared hallucinations in mind, you made no attempt to correct him.
The whole reason we're talking about "shared hallucinations" is because you brought it up. I never said I adhere to "shared hallucinations." I never said that any skeptic adheres to such a view. When asked for clarification and documentation about group hallucinations, I used the Carrier-Licona exchange which is not an example of a shared hallucination, but is an example of the type of group hallucination a skeptic would adhere to. Even after this point both you and Steve continue to press the issue about "shared hallucinations." Steve offers the quote from Licona and Habermas as if it refutes my notion of a group hallucination? Why? Isn't it because he wants to attribute this position to me, as you do, even though I've never said I adhere to such a view? And what would ever give you the idea to do such a thing? Isn't it because you think this is the skeptical view? It isn't. It's not my view.
The idea that I "read Christians to get information about what skeptics believe", because I asked you whether you believe in shared hallucinations, is absurd. There's no logical connection between the two.
Really? Then why would you bring up the issue of "shared hallucinations"? I didn't bring it up. I never said anything that suggested it. I offered the source of my knowledge of the documentation and that had nothing to do with shared hallucinations? Why are we discussing it? Where did you get such a notion? From reading skeptics in their own context or from reading Christians like Licona?
Saying that you aren't sure whether you believe me isn't enough.
It's enough for now. I'm confident that what I'm saying is true, but I'm not certain. I will find out.
We're now several posts into this thread, and you still haven't defended your ridiculous gold dust anecdote,
All right. Let's talk about it. Here are your questions from before:
Did everybody think they saw the same objects at the same time, and did they perceive the objects as doing the same thing?
I don't know. I was unable to interview all of the people that supposedly saw it.
If not, then why would the event in question qualify as a "mass hallucination"?
You can call it whatever you want to call it. The bottom line is we have reports of multiple people seeing things that I would probably believe were not in fact supernatural as they claim. I'm sure you would suspect the same thing. The issue is not "Can I establish that people really had what the dictionary would define as a hallucination." The issue is, can I naturalistically explain this report partly by hallucination and partly by other means. That's what skeptics are doing with regards to the NT.
Individual perceptions that aren't shared wouldn't be a group experience.
That of course depends on what you mean by group experience. When multiple people come streaming out of the church saying they saw gold dust, I call that a group experience, even if they didn't perceive precisely the same thing.
If it was a group experience, you would then need to ask whether what occurred was a hallucination. You're suggesting that it was a hallucination, but you aren't giving us any evidence to that effect.
Again, my goal is not to prove that a group hallucination occurred, but to show that such an exeprience can be shown to have naturalistic explanations, possibly partly due to hallucination and partly to do with other factors.
Why couldn't it have been an optical illusion resulting from what other people suggested they should expect to see, for example? An object as simple as "gold dust" can easily be confused with something else, such as dust that isn't made of gold. After a group of people who want to experience some such event are convinced that an event will occur, then multiple natural occurrences could easily be mistaken for gold dust, such as ordinary dust or spots of light.
I agree.
But meeting with a man who had risen from the dead isn't so easy to be mistaken about,
And here is where those distinctions come in that for some reason you don't want to hear about. Which meetings are we talking about? Paul's letters or the gospels? Most of the experiences in the gospels are not explained with the hallucination theory, but with the view that the gospels are not historically accurate.
What of I Cor 15? Here the questions you ask of the gold dust are directly applicable here. Did everybody think they saw the same thing? As with me and my gold dust example, you don't know. What was the nature of the appearance and could it be confused with something else that has a naturalistic explanation? You don't know. You don't know anything about what was seen by the 500.
What you do know is that we have examples of reports of appearances to large numbers of people that we just know are not reliable. Steve makes this point well in his post on Fatima:
However, the appeal to thousands of eyewitnesses is misleading. There’s a big difference between 50,000 eyewitness reports, and reports of 50,000 eyewitnesses.
and Steve quoting an expert:
“These are probably involved in Lucia’s later statements (since 1936) about the message and promise of Fatima…To claim the assistance of the Holy Ghost in writing down supplementary material twenty-five yeas after the event makes any further discussion difficult,”
and again:
“Père Tonquedec, with his vast experience as an exorcist in Paris, strongly advises against concluding that a vision must be genuine if the visionary is sincere and seems incapable of deceiving anyone”
and again:
“Whether what the visionary saw does or does not have a meaning for one’s own spiritual life is a matter for one’s own free judgment. Certainly there is no obligation to attach much importance to such things when classic mystical doctrine warns the visionary himself against attributing too much value or significance to these experiences…The principle always remains valid that supernatural agency is not to be presupposed but must be proved…With such occurrences, therefore, there is more danger of error in credulity than in scepticism, especially in unsettled times” (81).
I couldn't have said it better myself. My examples of Fatima and gold dust are "ridiculous" you say. If by "ridiculous" you mean that they are obviously not genuine supernatural occurences, I might agree. What does that say of I Cor 15?
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"Well, I guess I would be repeating myself, but since I'm putting some meat on the views of the supposed 'modern skeptics' you are critiquing, it is necessary for me to make distinctions when I describe their views."
You've been inconsistent in sometimes claiming to know which skeptics I'm critiquing and sometimes claiming to not know. Regardless, your "meat" has consisted of banal observations that nobody was disputing and absurdities like your gold dust anecdote. You have yet to demonstrate that any of your "meat" advances the discussion in any significant way.
You write:
"Why is it necessary to apply a qualifier when this is the only type of 'group hallucination' skeptics would hold to?"
As if you know that every skeptic who exists is knowledgeable about hallucinations? What about when you claimed that no gospel manuscripts for the first few hundred years had an author's name attached? Or when you referred to Eusebius as living in the second century? Or when you claimed that the phrase "I, Paul" in documents like 1 Corinthians is a "dead give away" of forgery? Since knowledgeable skeptics don't make such ridiculous claims, should I have assumed that you couldn't possibly have been wrong on such issues? When you enter a discussion about hallucinations with material as absurd as your gold dust anecdote, you refuse to clarify your position when asked to do so, and you repeatedly use the singular "group hallucination", it's reasonable to conclude that you're so ignorant of the subject that you might be arguing for shared hallucinations. The issue isn't whether some skeptics you know of are knowledgeable of hallucinations. Rather, the issue is whether we had reason to question your knowledge of the subject. We did.
You write:
"It wasn't clear to me at that point that you were attributing this fallacious view to 'modern skeptics.' When it did become clear to me I immediately responded and corrected your fallacies in my 3/5 7:38 pm post. Am I again at fault for your fallacies because I didn't recognize your fallacies soon enough?"
You're mistaken. I didn't attribute belief in shared hallucinations to "modern skeptics". My first post, the one that originated this thread, addresses skeptics who distance themselves from hallucinations and argue instead for visions that they distinguish from hallucinations. I also went on to document Richard Carrier's rejection of shared hallucinations. Due to your demonstrated ignorance of the subject of hallucinations (and your demonstrated ignorance on so many issues related to Christianity), I asked you whether you had shared hallucinations in view. For you to conclude that my asking you whether you believe in shared hallucinations is equivalent to my attributing that belief to "modern skeptics" in general is nonsensical. You keep trying to equate criticism of you with criticism of skeptics in general. As I've explained to you repeatedly, the two can't be equated.
You write:
"It's not misleading if you are familiar with skeptical argumentation and do not concoct skeptical arguments based upon Christian documentation."
You're suggesting that we should have ignored what we knew about your ignorance, ignored what your language suggested, etc. and should have assumed that you were as knowledgeable as other skeptics on the subject. Again, since your being a skeptic doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that you'll be as knowledgeable as other skeptics are on every issue, and since you entered this discussion by making some highly ignorant comments about hallucinations, why should we have given you the benefit of the doubt? Did you deserve the benefit of the doubt when you repeatedly made absurd claims about the textual record in previous threads, for example, claims that other skeptics haven't been making? The idea that it's inconceivable that you would make ridiculous claims that other skeptics aren't making is contradicted by your past behavior.
And I'm still waiting for you to document that all skeptics know that hallucinations can't be shared. There are millions of skeptics in the world, and I doubt that more than a small fraction of them have gone into detail about what they think is plausible with regard to hallucinations. Sometimes a scholar like Gerd Ludemann will go into some depth on the subject, but most of my experience with online skeptics has been far more vague. Reference to hallucinations will be made without getting into much detail. How do you supposedly know that all skeptics reject the concept of shared hallucinations?
You write:
"Let me nip your straw man in the bud before I get blamed for not correcting you. It is not my view that the gold dust or Marian apparitions are genuine. It is my view that people can come to beleive that multiple people saw things on the basis of hallucination type experiences."
I never suggested that you believe that such things are "genuine", so the straw man is yours, not mine. And your use of the term "hallucination type experiences" is misleading. You didn't use that term originally. You cited such cases when hallucinations were being discussed, not "hallucination type experiences". Here's what you originally said:
"Group hallucinations are certainly rare. But they are documented. In fact they're not all that uncommon. My parents attend churches where within the last few years whole groups of people thought they were seeing gold dust come and sprinkle on themselves. You have the Marian apparitions where the sun is said to dance around and so forth. We're not talking about drug induced hallucinations here."
I explained to you, in my first response, why classifying something like your gold dust anecdote as a "group hallucination" is unreasonable.
You write:
"You can call it whatever you want to call it. The bottom line is we have reports of multiple people seeing things that I would probably believe were not in fact supernatural as they claim. I'm sure you would suspect the same thing. The issue is not 'Can I establish that people really had what the dictionary would define as a hallucination.' The issue is, can I naturalistically explain this report partly by hallucination and partly by other means."
The issue isn't what I "want to call it". You cited it in the context of discussing "group hallucinations". Something can be "not supernatural" without being a hallucination. You've given us no reason to think that the people in your parents' church were hallucinating individually on separate occasions, much less that they all hallucinated in a highly similar manner around the same time. Even if they had thought that they had seen gold dust around the same time, mistaking ordinary dust or spots of light, for example, for gold dust is absurdly distant from thinking that you've seen a resurrected man. You've cited an anecdote from your parents that you know little about, for which you have no evidence that anything hallucinatory occurred, and it was the first example you cited when discussing "group hallucinations". And we're supposed to believe that you're knowledgeable on the subject? We're supposed to assume that you know what knowledgeable skeptics know about hallucinations?
Your reference to how you can explain the gold dust incident with a hallucination theory is irrelevant. Many incidents can be explained as involving hallucination, but it doesn't therefore follow that we have evidence that a hallucination probably occurred.
You write:
"That of course depends on what you mean by group experience. When multiple people come streaming out of the church saying they saw gold dust, I call that a group experience, even if they didn't perceive precisely the same thing."
Did you ask your parents (or other relevant sources) about such details? Were you told that people "came streaming out of the church saying they saw gold dust"? Or are you just assuming such a scenario? If it did occur, it still wouldn't answer the question of whether seeing the gold dust was itself a group experience. If the leaving of the church or the reporting of the seeing of gold dust occurred in groups, it doesn't therefore follow that everybody thought they saw the same gold dust at the same time. Maybe there are more details that would make your anecdote more relevant, details you don't know about or haven't told us, but that's your problem, not ours. Your original portrayal of the incident was inadequate, and you've been slow in giving additional details.
You write:
"Again, my goal is not to prove that a group hallucination occurred, but to show that such an exeprience can be shown to have naturalistic explanations, possibly partly due to hallucination and partly to do with other factors."
That's not enough. Something can be naturalistic without involving a hallucination. And the possibility of hallucination isn't enough. Many events in life can be said to possibly involve hallucination or, to use your latest phrase, "hallucination type experiences". But you cited your gold dust anecdote in the context of discussing "group hallucinations". If you can't show that it's probable that highly similar individual hallucinations were experienced by a group of people, then you aren't providing anything that has much relevance to the context of this thread.
You write:
"Which meetings are we talking about? Paul's letters or the gospels? Most of the experiences in the gospels are not explained with the hallucination theory, but with the view that the gospels are not historically accurate."
As I explained before, different skeptics accept differing degrees of material in the New Testament. But, as I also explained before, what skeptics believe only limits me in the context of describing their beliefs. I can go on to argue against their beliefs and expect them to interact with the evidence I cite against their belief system. I've given many reasons in many threads in this forum for accepting the resurrection material in the gospels and Acts. You've participated in some of those threads and have often left the discussions without much interaction with the evidence against your position.
You write:
"What of I Cor 15? Here the questions you ask of the gold dust are directly applicable here. Did everybody think they saw the same thing? As with me and my gold dust example, you don't know. What was the nature of the appearance and could it be confused with something else that has a naturalistic explanation? You don't know. You don't know anything about what was seen by the 500."
You agreed with me that ordinary dust or spots of light could be mistaken for gold dust, such as by means of an optical illusion. What object would have been mistaken for the risen Christ? Your claim that we "don't know anything about what was seen by the 500" is ridiculous. Their experience is part of a widely circulated creed involving appearances of a well known contemporary figure. Jesus was a public figure who had recently been publicly executed. Paul tells us that most of the more than 500 were still alive more than twenty years later, and it would be unreasonable to suggest that their experience was included in a creed and circulated for so long without their knowing about it or without their recognizing that people were misunderstanding what they had experienced, if such a misunderstanding had occurred. They were included in a list of witnesses of the resurrected Christ, so we know that they thought they saw a particular individual. We also know that they saw that individual "at one time" (1 Corinthians 15:6). We know that Jesus came out of a Jewish background in which the mainstream view of resurrection was of a physical nature, and we know that 1 Corinthians 15 itself is highly Jewish in its language, context, and concepts. We know that the concept of an individual resurrection prior to the end times wasn't commonly expected, and we know that the early Christians considered these appearances to be of major significance. There's a lot that's stated or implied in 1 Corinthians 15, even though it's in the form of a creed and an epistle. We wouldn't expect it to read like a Greco-Roman biography, but it does give us enough information to make a hallucination theory highly unlikely. I explained why earlier in this thread. See my previous comments on people seeing Jesus in different directions, Peter's presence for at least three of the appearances, etc.
You write:
"What you do know is that we have examples of reports of appearances to large numbers of people that we just know are not reliable. Steve makes this point well in his post on Fatima"
You're ignoring factors Steve mentioned that undermine your argument. Did you read his entire article or just part of it? If you read the entire thing, then you ought to know that there are multiple problems with your comparison.
I assume you're referring to the "dancing sun", since you mentioned that earlier and since the alleged Marian appearance wasn't to "large numbers of people". You mix the two in your comments, but they shouldn't be mixed.
So, regarding the "dancing sun":
- You highlighted the phrase "twenty-five years after the event" in one of your citations of Steve's article. But the creed of 1 Corinthians 15 dates within several years of the event. Paul delivered the creed to the Corinthians when he met them, and he himself had received it earlier. It didn't originate at the time when he met the Corinthians, much less did it originate when 1 Corinthians was written.
- Multiple people present at the Fatima event denied that anything happened. Some who thought they saw something expressed doubt. The "dancing sun" wasn't seen in other locations. There is no parallel with regard to 1 Corinthians 15. We don't have such contrary evidence for 1 Corinthians 15.
- As Steve's article explains, and as I've mentioned before, the "dancing sun" that you referred to in your first post in this thread can be explained naturalistically, as something like an optical illusion. Similarly, as you've acknowledged, something like the gold dust in your gold dust anecdote can be explained easily as an optical illusion or mistaken impression. An optical illusion involves a distorted view of an actual object. Are you going to argue that some actual object was repeatedly mistaken for Jesus in an optical illusion? Did Peter, for example, mistake some object for the risen Jesus three times? What object?
- Prior expectations are pivotal in hallucinations. The Fatima environment had the element of prior expectation. But the resurrection of one individual before the end times wasn't commonly expected in ancient Judaism. And somebody like Paul, an enemy of Christianity, wouldn't have been expecting to see Jesus.
- The appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 weren't one incident. They were multiple incidents spanning enough time to allow Peter to be present during at least three of them either alone or with different groups of people.
- The appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 include appearances to people who were opposed to Christianity. What parallel would you cite from Fatima?
- Thinking that you've met a resurrected man is in a different category than thinking you've seen a natural object in the sky moving. The man would be within reach in terms of moving toward him to touch him and/or speaking with him, and Jewish views of resurrection would make it highly likely that attempts were made to touch the resurrected man and to observe his interactions with the physical environment around him. There surely would have been attempts to speak with him as well. The idea that individuals and groups of people would repeatedly think they saw a resurrected man without attempting to communicate with him is highly unlikely. Meeting a man has far more potential for interaction than seeing an object in the sky does. People would attempt to speak with a man, touch him, etc. They wouldn't do that with an object like the sun. And the sun is simpler in appearance. People are going to share a highly similar expectation of what the sun would look like, whereas independent hallucinations of a resurrected man would offer far more potential for noticeable differences. Different people would think he had different attributes as a result of his resurrected body, was moving his body in different ways, was wearing different clothing, was saying different things, etc. The sun is a simpler, more distant object.
- As Steve explained in his article, in another point you've ignored, naturalists can't claim to know that "obviously" (to use your terminology) nothing supernatural occurred at Fatima. You'll need to present more of an argument to support your conclusion than claiming that it's "obvious". If a naturalistic explanation doesn't align well with the data, you can't just assume that something naturalistic must have occurred anyway.
- The people involved in Fatima had far less motivation to question their experiences than the resurrection witnesses did. Their leader hadn't been just recently publicly beaten, humiliated, and executed, and they weren't experiencing the likes of 2 Corinthians 11. Since the resurrection appearances were post-crucifixion, and since somebody like Paul would have known what was at stake as a result of his own involvement in persecuting the church, it can't be argued that the consequences were only known later. The people who claimed to see the risen Christ did so in an environment in which they would have to pay a high price for it, and they knew it. They were likely to be more self-critical than the people involved with Fatima.
You're ignoring major differences between Fatima and 1 Corinthians 15. You claim that it's "obvious" that nothing supernatural occurred in any element of Fatima, but you don't present an argument to that effect. Unlike Steve Hays, who allows the possibility of a supernatural element, you tell us that it's "obvious" that none is involved. But you don't justify that assertion.
And, as I said above, I've given many reasons to accept the resurrection accounts in the gospels and Acts, not just 1 Corinthians 15. You've repeatedly left discussions relevant to those other passages. Your attempts to dismiss such evidence are about as trite as your attempts to dismiss 1 Corinthians 15. You assume absurd degrees of apathy, forgetfulness, and carelessness among the earliest Christians and their enemies and propose theories so ridiculous that they're to the left of the Jesus Seminar. That's why you frame the discussion by telling us that:
"a real resurrection is so implausible that it doesn't take much in an alternative explanation for it to rise to a level of greater plausibility...So I don't necessarily need evidence for an explanation if the alternative explanation is so implausible it is rendered nearly impossible."
I, Steve Hays, and others have explained why your assertion about the implausibility of a resurrection is erroneous, and you've repeatedly failed to justify your assertion. But you wouldn't be trying to set things up so that you can propose theories that "don't take much", for which you "don't necessarily need evidence", unless you knew that your theories are highly implausible.
JON CURRY SAID:
ReplyDelete"Steve offers the quote from Licona and Habermas as if it refutes my notion of a group hallucination? Why? Isn't it because he wants to attribute this position to me, as you do, even though I've never said I adhere to such a view?"
Jon has all this backwards. I wasn't attributing any particular position to him. Rather, he was attributing a particular position to Licona and Habermas. I quoted them to refute what he attributed to them.
Pity that Jon can't remember his original argument.
"What you do know is that we have examples of reports of appearances to large numbers of people that we just know are not reliable. Steve makes this point well in his post on Fatima"
As Jason points out, Jon is confounding different events. There was the apparently public event of the sun-miracle, and then there were (said to be) private Marian apparitions to Lucia.
There's no compelling reason to assume that the sun-miracle was a mass hallucination. Indeed, as Jaki explains, it might well have been a meteorological phenomenon.
It was not a Marian apparition. Rather, it was interpreted as a confirmation of a Marian prophecy.
As per the claim of the Marian apparitions to Lucia, these could be hallinciations. But they would not be mass hallucinations.
Or they could be occultic.
Finally, we only have Lucia's testimony about the Marian apparitions to her.
"and Steve quoting an expert"
Jon is disregarding the structure of my essay. It has a two-part structure:
First, I discuss Fatima on Catholic grounds, then on my own grounds.
Jon is quoting from the first part. This doesn't necessarily represent my own position, or the best available explanation.
But when I'm evaluating a Catholic miracle, it makes sense to judge it, in part, by Catholic criteria, whether or not I myself would apply those criteria to the actual or alleged event.
In my essay I went out of my way to draw a series of careful distinctions. Jon is blurring these distinctions.
Well, Jason, I think your reasoning is quite poor here, but I don't think I'll take the time to demonstrate that. But I'm curious. In your mind would that mean that I've conceded that I'm doing very poorly and it is an admission of the error of my ways? Do you think I don't know how to resond to what you've said. In the same way do you think I don't know how to respond to what you've said about how the resurrection is not initially implausible? And failing to respond to you is proof of that?
ReplyDeleteJon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"Well, Jason, I think your reasoning is quite poor here, but I don't think I'll take the time to demonstrate that. But I'm curious. In your mind would that mean that I've conceded that I'm doing very poorly and it is an admission of the error of my ways? Do you think I don't know how to resond to what you've said. In the same way do you think I don't know how to respond to what you've said about how the resurrection is not initially implausible? And failing to respond to you is proof of that?"
Why should I answer your questions when you frequently refuse to answer my questions and the questions others ask you? Why do you post here? You're highly ignorant of a lot of the issues you write about. You repeatedly refer to how you don't have time to post responses to people. You've repeatedly shown reluctance to get and read books and sometimes don't want to read other sources either, even posts you're responding to. You claimed, earlier in this thread, that you think that "everyone" here is being deceived by me. If you know the issues so poorly, don't have much time to post here, don't want to spend much money or time on books, articles, and other resources produced by Christians, and think that "everyone" here is misled by people like me, why do you continue to post?
Really Jason, I wouldn't expect you to respond. You quote me and act like you can respond, and you put lots of verbiage on the page, but you often don't respond at all as we've seen here. An ad hominem diatribe works as a substitute for an acutal answer as we've already seen more than once here. I've come to expect that.
ReplyDeleteThe point of the question is more to point out the illogical nature of your typical claim that I leave discussions because things are going badly for me. We're at 28 comments already, and I think anybody that is semi neutral would recognize that there are other reasons why I might discontinue. You think it shows that I'm unable to respond, but that's just illogical.
Skeptical acquantances have asked me the same thing that you've just asked. Why post here? All the triabloggers do is heap abuse and personal insult. Why do it? I put up with it because I learn this way. I like to see what the arguments are against my view and for it. I hold my nose through all your personal invective and hope to gain in understanding through it all.
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"Really Jason, I wouldn't expect you to respond. You quote me and act like you can respond, and you put lots of verbiage on the page, but you often don't respond at all as we've seen here. An ad hominem diatribe works as a substitute for an acutal answer as we've already seen more than once here."
More assertions without evidence.
You write:
"The point of the question is more to point out the illogical nature of your typical claim that I leave discussions because things are going badly for me. We're at 28 comments already, and I think anybody that is semi neutral would recognize that there are other reasons why I might discontinue. You think it shows that I'm unable to respond, but that's just illogical."
I never claimed that a person's leaving a discussion proves, by itself, that the person is "unable to respond". In your case, we have your lengthy record of false claims, demonstrable ignorance of a high degree on the issues being discussed, many highly questionable assertions made without any attempt at offering supporting evidence, etc. When somebody thinks that Jesus didn't exist, claims to have "dead give away" evidence that documents like 1 Corinthians and Philemon are forgeries, places Eusebius in the second century, asserts that no gospel manuscripts had an author's name attached for a few hundred years, cites an anecdote he heard about people seeing gold dust as an example of group hallucination, etc. (such absurd claims made by you could be multiplied and have been documented by me and by others in multiple threads responding to you), and this person frequently leaves threads when they aren't going well for him, what should we conclude about his probable motives for leaving those threads? What if he doesn't just leave threads when responding to one person, but when responding to other people as well? What if he sometimes claims to not have time to respond further, but then posts in other threads shortly thereafter, as if he does have time for the other threads? Is it possible that his leaving these threads is unrelated to his ignorance of the issues and the fact that he's losing the disputes that are occurring in the threads? Yes, that's possible, but it seems unlikely. Whatever your motives for leaving, we don't have to know why you leave these threads in order to know that your arguments are frequently ridiculous and that you were losing the disputes in the threads when you left them.
You write:
"All the triabloggers do is heap abuse and personal insult. Why do it? I put up with it because I learn this way. I like to see what the arguments are against my view and for it."
If "all we do" is "heap abuse and personal insult", then what are you "learning" here? When I document that you initially referred to your gold dust anecdote in the context of discussing "group hallucination", and I explain that it can't be shown that it's probable that a group hallucination occurred, am I "heaping abuse" on you? When you misrepresent what happened at Fatima and what Steve was arguing in his article on the subject, and Steve corrects you, is that "personal insult"? Your latest post is a criticism of me and of the other contributers to this blog, and you've criticized the readers of this blog and Christians more generally in other contexts. Why is it that our criticisms of you are "ad hominem", "abuse", "insult", "invective", etc., but your criticisms of us aren't?
I never claimed that a person's leaving a discussion proves, by itself, that the person is "unable to respond".
ReplyDeleteBut you do often make the point that I "leave discussions." What does that prove? And is it important to you to get the last word? If you are determined to have it, you will have it. Anybody that is determined to have it can do it. In your mind does it make you feel like you've won if you get the last word? In fact it may only mean that one person is just more determined and has more time on their hands.
What if he doesn't just leave threads when responding to one person, but when responding to other people as well?
Again, what would that prove? Someobody has to leave every conversation at some point. Otherwise the discussion will continue indefinitely.
If "all we do" is "heap abuse and personal insult", then what are you "learning" here?
Well, you're right. It can't be "all" that you do. If that was all you did, there would be no room for your other fallacies, such as your many red herrings, your frequent straw men.
But seriously, of course you do have worthwhile things to write, which is why I interact with you, and why I avoid some of the other triabloggers. It looks like you compile a list of errors I've made so you can have an excuse to ignore questions or engage in straw man arguementation. I was mistaken about the existence of a manuscript and because of you I am now informed. That for me is a great thing, and illustrates why I spend time here.
In your case, we have your lengthy record of false claims, demonstrable ignorance of a high degree on the issues being discussed, many highly questionable assertions made without any attempt at offering supporting evidence, etc. When somebody thinks that Jesus didn't exist
Another question for you, which I suppose you can feel free to ignore. Are Richard Carrier and Robert Price highly ignorant?
Your latest post is a criticism of me and of the other contributers to this blog, and you've criticized the readers of this blog and Christians more generally in other contexts. Why is it that our criticisms of you are "ad hominem", "abuse", "insult", "invective", etc., but your criticisms of us aren't?
And here we have another example of one of your fallacies. This is a red herring. Even if it were true that I've engaged in ad hominem, this wouldn't show that you haven't engaged in ad hominem. You should just own up to your mistakes and address my points before changing the subject to my mistakes. You don't reply to what I say.
You'll respond and say that I don't respond to you. But the difference is, when I don't respond to you, I don't quote you and then put verbiage underneath it so that it appears that I am responding. I don't try to mask that I'm failing to respond. That's what you do.
So let's talk about my ad hominem. I don't mind responding directly. Can you do the same?
I explained what I meant by the word "documentation" and you respond with "Don’t act as if you know much about scholarship. You don’t." And then "Again, who do you think you’re deceiving?"
In the same post I had asked you which skeptics you had in view and you responded with "You don’t seem to know much about Biblical scholarship. You often cite people like Richard Carrier and Farrell Till or some unidentified source you come across by using something like a Google search, but your concept of “skeptics” doesn’t seem to go much beyond that."
I thought you were using ad hominem to evade questions and I said so in the next post and ignored what you had posted. After a couple of more posts I finally said "It's pretty obvious to me that this is a dodge. I'm inclined to ask you the same question you asked me. Who do you think you're deceiving? But then I remember who the audience is here and I have my answer. You are probably successfully deceiving everyone reading."
So you call me a deceiver, and when I respond to you in the exact same way you cry foul? In your world if Child A repeatedly name calls Child B and Child B finally replies in the exact same way, do you only punish Child B? What I'm doing is I'm applying the same fallacy you engaged in right back at you. Not because I think this is a reasonable way of having a discussion, but because it illustrates the unreasonable nature of your statements by using the exact same statements you use and applying them to you. Notice what I had said. "I'm inclined to ask you the same question you asked me." This is the road you choose, not the road I choose. I prefer to stick with the facts and the arguments. You prefer the fallacious road. Engage in red herrings and point out every other error I've made in the past as if it's relevant here. Call names. Misrepresent arguments. Ignore the point of questions while giving the appearance of replying. And get the last word so that you can illogically claim that this somehow shows that I've failed to reply.
I've made errors of fact. You have as well, but more frequently you make errors in thinking. Errors in fact can be corrected. If you know the facts and can think logically you can come to correct conclusions. If you know the facts but can't think logically, then you still can fail to come to the correct conclusions.
Special pleading is another big problem of yours in my opinion. I'm ignorant you say. But when I debated RC's you never pointed out my ignorance. And I was more ignorant of RC-ism than I am of evangelical Christianity. When my criticisms are directed at Catholics, you have no problem. No name calling is directed at me. Eric Svendsen posts what I've written on his website. James White does the same. No complaints. Suddenly when my criticisms are directed at your views, suddenly this shows my ignorance. One standard for RC's and another for you.
I've pointed out before that your charge of ignorance is another example of special pleading in another way. Supposedly I'm too ignorant to reject Christianity. Having read dozens of books from evangelical Christians, attended apologetics conferences, and taught classes at my church, I'm just too ignorant. What of those that embrace your faith. Since they are almost always far less informed about evangelical Christianity or skepticism than I am, does this mean that they are too ignorant as well and are not justified in the change they make? I don't recall you ever answering this one, though I've put it to you several times.
When Irenaeus makes claims you approve of and claims to get his information from those that heard it from the apostles, that's great and you think that makes it very reliabe and Irenaeus trustworthy. When he claims that Jesus lived into his 50's and gets that from those that heard it from the apostles, that's ridiculous. One standard from claims that support your views. Another for those that oppose them.
When I make this point you offer a red herring, and say I do it to, accepting some things that Irenaeus claims and rejecting others. Even if this were true (it isn't. I consistently do not accept claims on the basis of Irenaeus testimony because I find him unreliable) it would again be a logical fallacy. If I act illogically and accept claims on the basis of Irenaeus unreliable testimony, this wouldn't justify you in doing so. This is another fallacy, so common in your posts.
Back to the special pleading, in this post we have Steve quoting approvingly a critic that says that there is a BIG difference between 50,000 eyewitness reports and reports of 50,000 eyewitnesses. That's a great criticism when it comes to reports that support Roman Cathlic claims. When it's reports about evangelical claims, suddenly that criticism doesn't work. Suddenly there are supposed important distinctions that render that moot, and suddenly Steve is not necessarily approving of the criticisms, but is merely using RC's against themselves. But the criticism is either valid or it isn't. If it isn't, Steve shouldn't use it against RC's, even if it is from an RC. RC's don't beleive something just because another RC says it.
I was unaware of the existence of a particular manuscript and I mistakenly read a document about Eusebius report of the Easter controversy and thought he was involved. It was an error in fact, and I admit it. But I can confess my errors and recognize that they don't affect my overall position. You frequently resort to name calling, offer red herrings, you special plead, you engage in straw men and excuse it by pointing to me being unaware of a manuscript as if that justifies it. You don't think logically. These errors of yours (which you don't admit, while I admit mine) actually do affect your overall position.
Jon Curry writes:
ReplyDelete"But you do often make the point that I 'leave discussions.' What does that prove?"
I've already answered that question.
You write:
"In fact it may only mean that one person is just more determined and has more time on their hands."
I've already addressed your claims about time constraints.
You write:
"It looks like you compile a list of errors I've made so you can have an excuse to ignore questions or engage in straw man arguementation."
Why should anybody be concerned with what you think something "looks like" when you offer no evidence? And why are you concerned with "ignoring questions" when you leave so many discussions and have ignored so many questions that I and others have asked you in this thread?
You write:
"Are Richard Carrier and Robert Price highly ignorant?"
No, but their knowledge is accompanied by a lot of bad judgment, and some of their readers have even worse judgment and less knowledge.
You write:
"And here we have another example of one of your fallacies. This is a red herring. Even if it were true that I've engaged in ad hominem, this wouldn't show that you haven't engaged in ad hominem."
The red herring is yours. I didn't suggest that your engaging in ad hominem would show that I haven't done so.
You write:
"So you call me a deceiver, and when I respond to you in the exact same way you cry foul?"
How did I "cry foul"? I deny that I've been deceptive, and I deny that your professed concern about "ad hominem" is consistent with your behavior. I didn't say that I agree with you that it's wrong to refer to a person as a deceiver, to criticize them for being ignorant, etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But you've claimed that it's "ad hominem", and I'm criticizing you for being inconsistent. I'm not being inconsistent, since I haven't professed the same standards you've professed.
You write:
"I prefer to stick with the facts and the arguments."
Is that why you just put up a post consisting of several paragraphs of criticism of me? Why have you ignored so much of what other people have said about issues surrounding the resurrection in this thread, yet you find time to post so much material about how you disapprove of my behavior?
You write:
"Notice what I had said. 'I'm inclined to ask you the same question you asked me.' This is the road you choose, not the road I choose."
How does saying that you're "inclined" to do something in one post logically lead to the conclusion that all of the other relevant criticisms of us that you've written in this thread were only meant to reflect how you would write if you were to take our approach? If your "inclined" comment doesn't apply to all of your criticisms of me, Steve, etc., then how do you explain those other criticisms?
You write:
"I've made errors of fact. You have as well, but more frequently you make errors in thinking."
So you claim, once again without evidence.
You write:
"Special pleading is another big problem of yours in my opinion."
If I made the same comment about you, would that be "ad hominem"? Didn't you say, above, that you "prefer to stick with the facts and the arguments"?
You write:
"I'm ignorant you say. But when I debated RC's you never pointed out my ignorance."
I never said much of anything about your comments on Roman Catholicism. If you had frequently made claims about Catholicism comparable to denying Jesus' existence or suggesting that 1 Corinthians is a forgery, I would have considered you highly ignorant, and rightly so.
You write:
"Eric Svendsen posts what I've written on his website. James White does the same."
I don't know what posts you have in mind. I know that Eric posted one article you wrote, and I know that he later banned you from his discussion board. How would the fact that he posts something you wrote related to Catholicism logically lead to the conclusion that you must not be highly ignorant on other subjects?
You write:
"Having read dozens of books from evangelical Christians, attended apologetics conferences, and taught classes at my church, I'm just too ignorant."
I've addressed that line of reasoning in past threads, and you've repeatedly ignored what I said. Again, something like the number of books you've read doesn't tell us enough. We also need to know about the quality of the books, how well you read them, how honest you're being in applying what you read in them, etc. I've documented many examples of your ignorance from the arguments you've used in our discussions. The fact that you read "dozens of books from evangelical Christians" is about as significant as a Holocaust denier referring to the dozens of books he's read.
You write:
"What of those that embrace your faith. Since they are almost always far less informed about evangelical Christianity or skepticism than I am, does this mean that they are too ignorant as well and are not justified in the change they make? I don't recall you ever answering this one, though I've put it to you several times."
I've addressed that question before, but you seem to either not read or forget a lot of what's written in response to you. A person can know less than you do on some subjects, yet have better judgment than you have. They make more of less. I've never said that knowledge is the only factor involved.
You write:
"When Irenaeus makes claims you approve of and claims to get his information from those that heard it from the apostles, that's great and you think that makes it very reliabe and Irenaeus trustworthy. When he claims that Jesus lived into his 50's and gets that from those that heard it from the apostles, that's ridiculous. One standard from claims that support your views. Another for those that oppose them."
You're, once again, repeating an argument I've already addressed. You ignored my response when I posted it earlier. Here's one of the multiple threads in which I addressed how one claim of Irenaeus is distinguished from another:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/10/is-testimony-of-irenaeus-not-positive.html
You write:
"If I act illogically and accept claims on the basis of Irenaeus unreliable testimony, this wouldn't justify you in doing so. This is another fallacy, so common in your posts."
As I've explained to you before, it would be absurd to reject Irenaeus' testimony on every subject because of an error on one subject. The fact that the age of Jesus can be referred to as an "apostolic tradition" doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that all other claims by Irenaeus that can be classified as such are unreliable. When you err on a matter of history, should we conclude that all of your claims about any historical matter are therefore unreliable? Your reasoning is ridiculous, and I don't know of a single patristic scholar or historian who accepts it.
Contrary to what you claim, I haven't cited your inconsistencies in order to justify my behavior. Steve Hays has corrected you when you've made similar claims about his documentation of your inconsistencies. We can criticize you for being inconsistent without intending that inconsistency to justify an alleged inconsistency on our part.
You write:
"Back to the special pleading, in this post we have Steve quoting approvingly a critic that says that there is a BIG difference between 50,000 eyewitness reports and reports of 50,000 eyewitnesses. That's a great criticism when it comes to reports that support Roman Cathlic claims. When it's reports about evangelical claims, suddenly that criticism doesn't work."
Who denied that there's "a BIG difference between 50,000 eyewitness reports and reports of 50,000 eyewitnesses"? No Christian here has denied it in any context.
You write:
"I was unaware of the existence of a particular manuscript and I mistakenly read a document about Eusebius report of the Easter controversy and thought he was involved. It was an error in fact, and I admit it."
As I documented, on textual issues you weren't just wrong about "a particular manuscript". You were wrong about the general nature of the reliability of the New Testament text, and you repeatedly made false claims about individual facts relevant to the textual record. And the fact that you've sometimes admitted to being wrong after the error was documented still leaves us with the question of why you made the error in the first place. You keep telling us about how you've read dozens of Christian books, taught in a church, etc. But if those books were good quality books, and you read them well and applied the information properly, why would you be so ignorant of the textual record, think that Jesus didn't exist, suggest that 1 Corinthians was a forgery, place Eusebius in the second century, etc.?
You write:
"You frequently resort to name calling, offer red herrings, you special plead, you engage in straw men and excuse it by pointing to me being unaware of a manuscript as if that justifies it. You don't think logically. These errors of yours (which you don't admit, while I admit mine) actually do affect your overall position."
So you assert, at the end of a post several paragraphs long, in which you continue to ignore many of the issues discussed in this thread. You make time to post paragraph after paragraph of personal criticism of me, Steve, and others, yet you claim to "prefer to stick with the facts and the arguments".
The red herring is yours. I didn't suggest that your engaging in ad hominem would show that I haven't done so.
ReplyDeleteNow you're heaping straw man on top of red herring. I didn't say you suggested my ad hominem's would show that you haven't engaged in ad hominem. I said you engaged in a red herring. That means you changed the subject. You quote my comment about your ad hominem's, but rather than reply to it you change the subject to my ad hominems. That's a red herring. You want to talk about my ad hominem's? That's fine. But don't pretend that this is a response to what I said.
How did I "cry foul"? I deny that I've been deceptive, and I deny that your professed concern about "ad hominem" is consistent with your behavior. I didn't say that I agree with you that it's wrong to refer to a person as a deceiver, to criticize them for being ignorant, etc. I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
OK. Excuse me for thinking that you thought fallacies really didn't have a place here.
I do think charging people with ignorance and deception, expecially when the charges are used as a substitute for an answer to a direct question, like my question about which skeptics you had in view, is a problem. It is an obvious fallacy, and in my view that's not a good way to have a conversation, but if you disagree, there's not much I can do about it. Like I said, I did it back because I was following your lead, thinking that you might recognize a fallacy when it is directed back at you. Apparently not. The fact of the matter is, I have no idea if you are trying to deceive. I don't know you that well and I don't claim to. You think you know me enough to call me a deceiver, but you don't.
I'm not being inconsistent, since I haven't professed the same standards you've professed.
Obviously we do have different standards when it comes to fallacies.
Is that why you just put up a post consisting of several paragraphs of criticism of me? Why have you ignored so much of what other people have said about issues surrounding the resurrection in this thread, yet you find time to post so much material about how you disapprove of my behavior?
The difference is, I'm up front about the issues I address. You ignore my questions, but don't admit it. You quote me and reply with personal attacks instead of offering real answers to my questions. That's why what you do is fallacious.
I was up front when I said that I was done and not interested in replying to your recent arguments relating to hallucinations, but had some questions about what you think my leaving the conversation would prove. That lead you to respond with a number of personal insults that were completely unrelated to my question. My response simply affirmed that you do engage in a lot of personal attacks, and that I thought this was common here, but worth it in my view. So you started discussing the type of things you do here, and I'm replying to those claims.
So the subject has become your behavior, and also mine. So if that is the subject of the conversation, I have no choice but to talk about your behavior.
You on the other hand respond to direct questions that have nothing to do with my behavior or my supposed ignorance with charges of deception and ignorance. That is why what you do is fallacious. It is totally beside the point.
If you made a point about I Cor 15, and about how the creed can be dated within a few years of Jesus death, and I responded by talking about fallacies and errors you've made in other posts on different subjects, and all the while completely ignored your question, that would be a fallacy. This is what you do, and it is not what I do. This is the difference between when you talk about my supposed ignorance and deception and me talking about fallacies you've committed in the past.
How does saying that you're "inclined" to do something in one post logically lead to the conclusion that all of the other relevant criticisms of us that you've written in this thread were only meant to reflect how you would write if you were to take our approach? If your "inclined" comment doesn't apply to all of your criticisms of me, Steve, etc., then how do you explain those other criticisms?
Which criticisms do you have in mind? You talked about how I criticised you and the readers, so I assumed you had my comments that I referred to in view. If you have problems with other comments I've made, tell me which ones and I will address them. And I won't dodge the question by referring to problems I have with other comments you've made a long time ago on other subjects.
If I made the same comment about you, would that be "ad hominem"? Didn't you say, above, that you "prefer to stick with the facts and the arguments"?
As I said above, the subject of our discussion is now your behavior and mine, not something like your recent arguments regarding hallucinations. If I responded to that by discussion your special pleading on other subjects, that would be ad hominem. And a red herring.
I never said much of anything about your comments on Roman Catholicism. If you had frequently made claims about Catholicism comparable to denying Jesus' existence or suggesting that 1 Corinthians is a forgery, I would have considered you highly ignorant, and rightly so.
You just said that Carrier and Price are not ignorant even though they deny that Jesus existed, but now you're again saying that I should be called ignorant if I don't think Jesus existed. Which is it?
I don't know what posts you have in mind. I know that Eric posted one article you wrote, and I know that he later banned you from his discussion board.
Eric banned me? I wasn't aware of that.
I'm curious if this comment has any relevance to the conversation though, or if it is another red herring. Why did Eric ban me? Did he ban me while I was a Protestant and he thought I was too ignorant to effectively critique Rome? In that case, this comment would have relevance. If he banned me because after I became a skeptic he decided that I was somehow a problem, then I don't see the relevance of the point here.
How would the fact that he posts something you wrote related to Catholicism logically lead to the conclusion that you must not be highly ignorant on other subjects?
Sure, it doesn't PROVE it. But it does indicate that there has been a shift in your view about my ignorance. What can explain this? I'm saying that your conclusion that I'm ignorant is influenced by your desire to believe I'm ignorant and not an objective view of facts. People that we both knew and respected treated me as if I was not ignorant. After I wrote my review of Sungenis book I informed you that I was writing a review of B.C. Butler's critique of George Salmon. You were very interested and said that you thought it would be valuable. My church installed me in positions of leadership and teaching. Every indication prior to my de-conversion was that I was not ignorant, but was in fact informed and valuable. Suddenly now that I hold a different view some of the people that treated me as if I was informed and valuable are now calling me ignorant and other names. What can account for this sudden change? My explanation is that you want to believe I'm ignorant now and you didn't have any desire to believe it before. What is your explanation for the sudden change?
I've addressed that line of reasoning in past threads, and you've repeatedly ignored what I said. Again, something like the number of books you've read doesn't tell us enough. We also need to know about the quality of the books, how well you read them, how honest you're being in applying what you read in them, etc.
But this doesn't explain the behavior of people like you, James White, Eric Svendsen, the elders at my church (a church that you would certainly consider to be an excellent church), all of my friends and acquantances, at least one of whom you have interacted with on discussion boards and also treated them like they were informed, valuable Christians. All of my friends and acquantances treated me like I was the expert. If there was a question about what the Bible taught or what the response would be to a certain criticism, I was the one that was asked. That's still true now even though I'm no longer a Christian. How do you explain this? Is everyone just crazy? Or do you think I'm lying?
Is it your position that I am more ignorant of evangelical Christianity than the average Christian? And by "Christian" I mean someone you would call a "true" Christian. I would be more than willing to put your claim to the test if this is what you believe.
A person can know less than you do on some subjects, yet have better judgment than you have. They make more of less. I've never said that knowledge is the only factor involved.
What are the "making more" of? They don't know more than me. They don't understand logical reasoning better than me. They've never even heard of Irenaeus, Polycarp, Papias, or in many cases even Martin Luther. They don't know what special pleading is, or what modes tollens means. They are not more informed than me nor better at reasoning than me by any standard I can imagine. But my supposed ignorance is a huge problem for you, but theirs isn't. What's the story?
Ignorance is a relative term. Everybody is somewhat ignorant. Nobody knows everything about any subject. But with regards to Christianity, I am less ignorant than 99% of Christendom. Why am I to be criticised for ignorance, but Christians aren't? It appears you are again guilty of a double standard. The truly ignorant are not criticised for ignorance if they agree with you, and the truly informed are called ignorant if they disagree with you. This is called special pleading.
As I've explained to you before, it would be absurd to reject Irenaeus' testimony on every subject because of an error on one subject.
I haven't said otherwise. Another straw man.
When you err on a matter of history, should we conclude that all of your claims about any historical matter are therefore unreliable? Your reasoning is ridiculous, and I don't know of a single patristic scholar or historian who accepts it.
This is another straw man. I haven't said that ALL of his claims are unreliable on ANY historical matter. I've said that he's unreliable when he conveys supposed apostolic traditions. See here:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/09/anonymous-gospels.html
This same non-reposne which you've offered before, and was a straw man then as it is now, still does not deal with my charge of special pleading. Irenaeus claim about Jesus age is not credible, regardless of his claim of getting it via the apostles, but his claim about the Gospel of John is credible because of his claim of getting it via the apostles. One standard when you like the claim, another when you don't. That's special pleading.
We can criticize you for being inconsistent without intending that inconsistency to justify an alleged inconsistency on our part.
Fine. You've already indicated that you like engaging in fallacies and don't think there is anything wrong with it. I assumed you thought fallacies were a problem and took your response of "you do it too" to be a red herring. As I've shown here, I do not approve of it, and in the cases where you've claimed I have done it I've shown that I haven't. If I have done it, then I think I shouldn't.
Who denied that there's "a BIG difference between 50,000 eyewitness reports and reports of 50,000 eyewitnesses"? No Christian here has denied it in any context.
You didn't respond to the quote directly, but made general comments about my quotes from Steve such as "Have you read Steve's entire article" and "He has other factors that undermine your argument." It sounds to me like you don't like that claim as it applies to I Cor 15, but you do like it as it applies to Fatima. One standard for you, another for them. That's special pleading.
Jon Curry said:
ReplyDelete"I didn't say you suggested my ad hominem's would show that you haven't engaged in ad hominem. I said you engaged in a red herring. That means you changed the subject."
Here's what you said:
"Even if it were true that I've engaged in ad hominem, this wouldn't show that you haven't engaged in ad hominem."
Why would you explain that your use of ad hominem wouldn't show that I haven't engaged in ad hominem if you didn't think I was suggesting the contrary?
You write:
"You want to talk about my ad hominem's? That's fine. But don't pretend that this is a response to what I said."
Your treatment of other people is relevant, because it suggests the insincerity of your objections to how you're treated. If you treat people in a manner similar to how you claim we shouldn't treat you, then why should we take your professed objections seriously? We don't consider our criticism of you inappropriate. And if your behavior suggests that you've repeatedly treated people in the same manner, then we have reason to doubt that you take your objections seriously either.
You write:
"Like I said, I did it back because I was following your lead, thinking that you might recognize a fallacy when it is directed back at you."
As I explained earlier, you didn't just criticize me, Steve, and others in response to the same criticism of you. Even if we take your word that you were just imitating me when you posted some of your comments, that explanation wouldn't address other comments you've made along the same lines. I gave you some examples earlier. I'll give some below as well.
You write:
"Obviously we do have different standards when it comes to fallacies."
Yes, you criticize me as if I hold standards that I don't hold, which doesn't make sense.
You write:
"You ignore my questions, but don't admit it. You quote me and reply with personal attacks instead of offering real answers to my questions."
I've answered far more of your questions than you've answered of mine. And while you keep complaining about "personal attacks", you've been spending most of your recent posts engaging in personal criticism while continuing to ignore many of the issues surrounding the resurrection of Christ that were raised early in the thread.
You write:
"I was up front when I said that I was done and not interested in replying to your recent arguments relating to hallucinations, but had some questions about what you think my leaving the conversation would prove....So the subject has become your behavior, and also mine. So if that is the subject of the conversation, I have no choice but to talk about your behavior."
In other words, you chose to leave the issues related to the resurrection unaddressed, but you supposedly "have no choice" but to keep discussing issues of personal criticism. You do have a choice. And your choice is to ignore the issues surrounding the resurrection while putting up multiple lengthy posts of personal criticism.
You write:
"Which criticisms do you have in mind? You talked about how I criticised you and the readers, so I assumed you had my comments that I referred to in view. If you have problems with other comments I've made, tell me which ones and I will address them."
I've repeatedly given you examples in the past. Remember, these are comments you've made that are along the lines of what you've objected to. I don't agree with your standards, so I'm not claiming that I consider every one of these comments inappropriate by my standards. But given how you complain about how you're treated, you ought to consider these comments you've made objectionable. See the following thread for examples of your personal criticisms of Steve Hays:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/10/is-testimony-of-irenaeus-not-positive.html
You made many judgments about Steve that are along the lines of what you object to when the judgments are applied to you.
In another thread, when I documented that John Crossan affirmed the physicality of Christ's resurrection in Paul's letters, you responded by calling Crossan a "flake". If somebody called you a "flake", I doubt that you'd consider it acceptable. You'd probably complain about how you're being mistreated, as you often do.
Earlier in this thread, you referred to my "straw man argumentation against skeptics that results from your ignorance of the views you critique due to your unwillingness to read their books". You were claiming to know that I'm ignorant and that I don't read skeptics' books. You also claimed to know the reason why I supposedly don't read their books: I'm "unwilling". I think you'd complain if anybody made such comments about you and your motives.
You went on, in the same post, to quote me as follows:
"If the latter, then you'll need to clarify your question further, since, as I explained to you earlier, I wasn't referring to Pentecost. If you would answer the questions we ask you instead of ignoring so much of what we write, then you might get more answers to your own questions. You didn't clarify your Pentecost comment, so how could I further interact with it?"
Here's part of what you wrote in response:
"You're either really stupid or you're deceptive, and I don't think you're really stupid."
In what you quoted, I didn't refer to your being deceptive, nor did I add any comments like "you're either really stupid". So, you can't claim to have been imitating what you were responding to. If you can comment that I'm "either really stupid or deceptive", then your complaint about how it's wrong for people to suggest that you're deceptive rings hollow.
I could give more examples, and I have given other examples in our previous discussions. You have a lengthy record of treating people in a manner you claim is unacceptable when you're at the receiving end of that treatment.
You write:
"You just said that Carrier and Price are not ignorant even though they deny that Jesus existed, but now you're again saying that I should be called ignorant if I don't think Jesus existed. Which is it?"
You asked if Carrier and Price were "highly ignorant", in response to my application of that term to you. I responded by saying that I don't consider them highly ignorant, though they do often exercise bad judgment. Given their education and the content of their writings, for example, I don't think their denial of Jesus' existence is a result of ignorance as much as it is in your case. Ignorance isn't the only factor that could lead somebody to deny Jesus' existence. But it seems to be much more of a factor with you than it is with people like Carrier and Price.
You write:
"Why did Eric ban me? Did he ban me while I was a Protestant and he thought I was too ignorant to effectively critique Rome? In that case, this comment would have relevance. If he banned me because after I became a skeptic he decided that I was somehow a problem, then I don't see the relevance of the point here."
He banned you from the old board, not the current one, when you were still a professing Christian. He did the banning, not me, so I don't know what all of the factors were, but I think it was over your unreasonableness in discussions with Calvinist participants in the forum regarding Reformed theology.
You write:
"Sure, it doesn't PROVE it. But it does indicate that there has been a shift in your view about my ignorance."
My approval of an article you wrote about justification doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that I shouldn't accuse you of being highly ignorant on issues like whether Jesus existed.
You write:
"I'm saying that your conclusion that I'm ignorant is influenced by your desire to believe I'm ignorant and not an objective view of facts."
No, Jon, your frequent errors on church history, the textual record, and other subjects, your frequent reliance of sources like Wikipedia for information, your pattern of following highly dubious theories rejected by almost every relevant scholar, etc. do suggest that you're highly ignorant on issues relevant to your skepticism.
You write:
"People that we both knew and respected treated me as if I was not ignorant."
Ignorant of what? Your knowledge of some errors in a book on justification by Robert Sungenis doesn't suggest that you must not be ignorant on issues like Jesus' existence and Biblical authorship.
You write:
"My church installed me in positions of leadership and teaching. Every indication prior to my de-conversion was that I was not ignorant, but was in fact informed and valuable."
Again, in what context? Your knowledge of the doctrine of justification, for example, doesn't logically lead us to the conclusion that you must be knowledgeable on an issue like whether the virgin birth was derived from Horus mythology or whether Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. You've demonstrated yourself to be highly ignorant on such issues, and the fact that you wrote some good material on the doctrine of justification doesn't change that fact.
You write:
"Suddenly now that I hold a different view some of the people that treated me as if I was informed and valuable are now calling me ignorant and other names."
You ought to stop being so careless with the term "calling names". Saying that somebody is "ignorant" isn't name-calling as far as I've seen that term commonly defined. In my experience, people who refer to "name-calling" usually have something in mind like calling somebody a "jerk", "moron", or such. A term like "ignorant" isn't in the same category, and you yourself have used it in response to me, as I've documented above.
You write:
"All of my friends and acquantances treated me like I was the expert. If there was a question about what the Bible taught or what the response would be to a certain criticism, I was the one that was asked. That's still true now even though I'm no longer a Christian. How do you explain this? Is everyone just crazy?"
I'm not responsible for what other people have said about you. I stand by what I've said about you. Somebody who makes highly inaccurate claims about the textual record, Biblical authorship, the church fathers, etc. as often as you have is significantly ignorant. If that person is repeatedly shown that he's ignorant on these subjects, yet he often refuses correction and continues to post ignorant claims on public message boards, then there's nothing wrong with telling him that he's ignorant. The fact that you aren't as ignorant on some other subjects doesn't change what I've just said, nor does the fact that other people have commended your knowledge on some subject or another.
In addition to your comments above, you've also said the following about your background:
"I believed for years because I was indoctrinated to believe as a young child, as are many people. I'd sing 'Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.' I'd see as Christians would beg and plead with others to convert and guilt people that didn't tow the line. That has an effect on people. I didn't want to see the inconsistencies and the unrealistic nature of the gospel accounts because like a lot of cultists I was conditioned to not see such things. It's a hard nut to crack. And maybe I'm a little slow." (http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/12/does-gospel-of-mark-contradict-infancy.html)
That doesn't sound like much of an "expert" to me.
You write:
"Is it your position that I am more ignorant of evangelical Christianity than the average Christian?"
That depends on the subject. And I don't claim that the average Christian is highly knowledgeable. I do think that the average Christian has better judgment than you do on some of the issues that have been discussed in this forum. I doubt that the average Christian would think that historical witnesses commenting on Biblical authorship can be dismissed as easily as you think they can be, that the average Christian would fail to see the implausibility of the theory that Jesus didn't exist after having that implausibility explained to him so often, etc.
You write:
"But my supposed ignorance is a huge problem for you, but theirs isn't."
I don't know what you mean by "huge problem". I've commented on your ignorance when writing responses to you. I've also commented on the ignorance of many Christians when writing on other subjects.
You write:
"Why am I to be criticised for ignorance, but Christians aren't?"
When did I say that Christians aren't to be criticized for ignorance? I haven't. I've written about the subject repeatedly.
You write:
"I've said that he's unreliable when he conveys supposed apostolic traditions. See here: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/09/anonymous-gospels.html"
And I addressed the erroneous nature of your argument in that thread and in another I linked to above.
You write:
"Irenaeus claim about Jesus age is not credible, regardless of his claim of getting it via the apostles, but his claim about the Gospel of John is credible because of his claim of getting it via the apostles."
When did I argue that Irenaeus' claim about Johannine authorship "is credible because of his claim of getting it via the apostles"? I didn't. I gave multiple reasons for trusting what Irenaeus reported. You're still misrepresenting the issue.
You write:
"You didn't respond to the quote directly, but made general comments about my quotes from Steve such as 'Have you read Steve's entire article' and 'He has other factors that undermine your argument.' It sounds to me like you don't like that claim as it applies to I Cor 15, but you do like it as it applies to Fatima. One standard for you, another for them. That's special pleading."
No, it's another example of your bad reasoning. My mentioning that other factors are involved doesn't mean that I reject the factor you mentioned as far as it's applicable. If those other factors make 1 Corinthians 15 significantly different from Fatima, as Steve and I have demonstrated, then what's wrong with my saying so?
I am sorry to have delayed my response so long, but I've been overwhelmed at work lately and have not had time to respond. Normally I wouldn't respond at all just because I don't think it is worth it, and also because my delay makes the discussion difficult. However, I want to add one more response because I had indicated that I would provide you with some information and I indicated I wouldn't ignore charges of ad hominem that you came up with against me. So I will offer this one last response, and then I will not respond again.
ReplyDeleteYour response to me with regards to ad hominem argumentation is basically that you "don't hold the same standards as me" and I've also engaged in the ad hominem as I define it.
As I've pointed out before, I don't think that matters. Ad hominem is ad hominem. If I've done it, then I'm guilty of it. This doesn't absolve you. You shouldn't do it whether I do it or I don't. So the question is, what is ad hominem?
Ad hominem simply is Latin for "to the person." It occurs when you are engaged in an argument and your response is not about the argument, but is about the person. You say that you "don't have the same standards as me" when it comes to ad hominem. But it doesn't matter if your standards are mine or not. Ad hominem is ad hominem. If you respond to arguments with claims about the person making the argument, you engage in ad hominem, no matter what standards you claim to hold to. I've documented your frequent use of ad hominem. The facts of the matter don't change even if your standards are different from those of standard logic textbooks.
See the following thread for examples of your personal criticisms of Steve Hays:
Responding to arguments with personal criticisms is a fallacy. This is what you do. But this doesn't mean that it is never permissible to discuss personal traits. Steve treats John Loftus in a very obnoxious way, and that is the subject I brought up and wanted to discuss. I wasn't going to discuss whether he was at fault in his divorce or whether his wife was at fault. I have no knowledge on that subject. I brought up a totally off topic issue and wanted to discuss it. That is, I wanted to discuss Steve's rude behavior. I did not use those points as cover to show that Steve's arguments were faulty. It seems in the majority of our discussions you sprinkle in name calling. Not because you want to divert from the isse we're discussion and discuss a seperate topic (whether in general I am ignorant, or whether in general my arguments are worthy of ridicule, etc). This is the manner in which you actually go about responding to arguments. It's a fallacious mode of discussion, and I find it to be quite common in your posts.
In another thread, when I documented that John Crossan affirmed the physicality of Christ's resurrection in Paul's letters, you responded by calling Crossan a "flake".
I did not call Crossan "a flake." See the link:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/11/unreasonable-reasons.html
You claimed he believed that Paul taught that Jesus appeared in a physical body to him, and I quoted him as indicating the opposite. You responded with evidence that in fact he did believe Paul taught Jesus appeared in a physical body. If you're right then Crossan presents two opposing viewpoints, to which I replied that he sounds "flaky" i.e. he's wishy washy on the issue, and hence he is not a good example of a liberal that believes Paul taught that Jesus' appearances were in a physical body. That is quite different from "calling Crossan a flake".
Notice, my use of the word "flake" is about your argument. Your best example of a liberal that agrees with you is someone that is at best wishy washy on the issue, and hence your best example is a very poor example and hence your point is invalid. Your claim that Paul is "clear" about his belief in a physical resurrection is belied by the fact that you can't name a critical scholar that agrees with you, whereas I can name many critical scholars, and even tenured professors at evangelical schools that reject your position, which at a minimum shows that Paul's view is not so clear.
You were claiming to know that I'm ignorant and that I don't read skeptics' books. You also claimed to know the reason why I supposedly don't read their books: I'm "unwilling".
As I've said many times before, this is the road you choose, not the road I choose. You make many statements about my motives and mindset. Whether or not you are "unwilling" is certainly a statement about your motives and is "to the person." But this is not my preference. It's tough not to respond in kind when you are repeated subjected to ad hominem argumentation.
Here's part of what you wrote in response:
"You're either really stupid or you're deceptive, and I don't think you're really stupid."
In what you quoted, I didn't refer to your being deceptive, nor did I add any comments like "you're either really stupid".
Obviously I'm not calling you stupid. I'm calling you deceptive. You've called me deceptive repeatedly. How do you expect me to react to such taunts?
But it seems to be much more of a factor with you than it is with people like Carrier and Price.
You are not interacting with the contradiction you made and I pointed out.
He banned you from the old board, not the current one, when you were still a professing Christian. He did the banning, not me, so I don't know what all of the factors were, but I think it was over your unreasonableness in discussions with Calvinist participants in the forum regarding Reformed theology.
So you are unaware if your point about Eric banning me has any relevance to our discussion. Then why bring it up?
Your knowledge of the doctrine of justification, for example, doesn't logically lead us to the conclusion that you must be knowledgeable on an issue like whether the virgin birth was derived from Horus mythology or whether Paul wrote 1 Corinthians.
Even if one parallel to Horus turned out to be invalid, this doesn't show that the many other parallels don't still exist. On this issue you are straining at gnats while swallowing the camel.
As far as I Corinthians and my points about detecting forgeries, I recently heard portions of Bart Ehrman's lectures on the pseudo-Pauline epistles offered by The Teaching Company. He lists a few techniques that forgers would use to hide their own deciet. I have transcribed that section for your benefit here. Notice his very first reason, which is a reason you find to be so absurd, and about which you said that "knowledgeable skeptics don't make such ridiculous claims".
"Forgers used a variety of techniques to hide the traces of their deceit. Simply claiming to be somebody carried a lot of weight in most texts, especially in religious texts, in which you wouldn't expect an author to fib about it. If you read a text which says "I Moses am writing to use these words" or that says "This is the vision which I, Abraham, saw" most readers are simply going to take the author at his word. And so simply claiming to be somebody is a kind of technique.
Secondly, forgers would make sure that what they wrote was basically in the style of the author they were trying to imitate. They wanted to make sure that nothing in the writing would tip their hand. And so forgers would typically try to imitate the style, using the vocabulary, using many of the same catch phrases of the author that they were claiming to be.
And third they would typically add elements of verisimillitude. For example, off the cuff remarks that make it sound as though something has just occurred to the alleged author. Where an author might say something like "Please, remember to bring the manuscripts that I left behind in Ephesus" to an alleged audience, to an alleged recipient of the letter.
One of the ways of putting verisimillitude into a text was for an author to make an emphatic insistence that he himself actually is the author. Sometimes, of course the author doth protest too much.
One of the ways of throwing an audience off the scent of ones own deciet was by telling the reader not to read documents that had been forged in the name of the author. You wouldn't expect a forger to say "don't read documents that are being forged." Well in fact this happens somewhat commonly in forged documents. One of the most interesting instances of this is in a Christian book written of the 4th century which is called The Apostolic Constitutions. It's called The Apostolic Constitutions because it's a book which claims to be written by the apostles of Jesus immediately after the resurrection. We know it wasn't written immediately after the resurrection because it reflects knowledge of later Christianity. Clearly this wasn't written by the apostles of Jesus. Yet within this book these "apostles of Jesus" warn their readers not to read books that falsely claim to be written by the aposltes of Jesus. Well, why would they do this? So that you wouldn't suspect that they themselves are forgers."
The last two paragraphs repeat arguments I've also made. Are those ridiculous as well? Is Bart Ehrman a knowledgable skeptic?
As far as your other comments about my ignorance, yes logically it's possible that I'm very ignorant about Christianity despite the fact that you thought my critiques of Rome were pretty good, that everyone we all know treated me as if I was knowledgable, that my church installed me in positions of teaching and leadership, that acquantances that I know even today always come to me to get answers about what Christianity teaches. That's about all your response amounts to. It's logically possible. You know what else is logically possible? Possibly I'm not quite so ignorant as you'd like to believe. Possibly you treated me this way and others treated me this way because they acted in a manner that was consistent with the belief that I am knowledgable. Generally actions speak louder than words, and we see your words, but your actions betray the true reality of the situation. That's possible too, right? Not only is it possible, it makes much better sense of the actions of those around me. Of course an error makes better sense of your convoluted explanations of Mt 16 and Mt 24, but that hasn't stopped you before.
In my experience, people who refer to "name-calling" usually have something in mind like calling somebody a "jerk", "moron", or such.
This is just completely wrong headed. Nobody is going to engage in ad hominem in the textbook form "You're a moron, therefore you're wrong." Using terms like "jerk" and "moron" would expose the illogical nature of the fallacy by exposing the logical underpinnings, which is entirely counter productive for the person engaging in the fallacy. Ad hominem fallacies rely on subtelty to win the day. What you do is precisely what a person that is engaging in ad hominem fallacies in the real world would do. Again, it doesn't matter if you think I'm inconsistent in failing to meet this standard as well. It is still fallacious.
When did I say that Christians aren't to be criticized for ignorance? I haven't. I've written about the subject repeatedly.
You are not interacting with my point. My point is, you don't object when an ignorant person converts from skepticism to Christianity, but you do object when a far less ignorant person converts from Christianity to skepticism. I'm not saying you never criticise Christians for being ignorant generally. I'm talking about whether are not they are too ignorant to justify a change in opinion.
As promised, I have listened to the Licona Carrier debate, and in fact Licona does use the straw man "come join me in my dream" line as if it is a response to Carrier's position. So I believe you and Steve were following his straw man lead and suspect that he is doing more than just "explaining general things about how visions operate" but in fact is engaged in straw man argumentation as you have. I pick Carrier up mid sentence, and I pick Licona up also mid sentence in his immediate reply to what I have from Carrier.
Carrier-unless you see it as not the God of the universe, but of natural hallucinations of them believing that they were seeing the God of the universe. The actual God of the universe would have done things radically differently, at least I would expect.
Licona-this couldn't have been a vision because the others participated as well, and it's just like dreams in that way. You couldn't wake up your wife in the middle of the night and say "Honey I'm having this dream we're in Hawaii, join me in my dream and we'll have this free vacation."
Licona does seem to think that his point about how hallucinations are not like dreams is a valid response to the claims from Carrier, and therefore he shows himself to be guilty of a straw man, and not simply explaining the nature of hallucinations as you claim.
Jon Curry wrote:
ReplyDelete"Ad hominem simply is Latin for 'to the person.' It occurs when you are engaged in an argument and your response is not about the argument, but is about the person. You say that you 'don't have the same standards as me' when it comes to ad hominem. But it doesn't matter if your standards are mine or not. Ad hominem is ad hominem."
You're mistaken. The phrase "ad hominem" is defined in different ways in different contexts. Sometimes it carries a negative connotation, and sometimes it doesn't. Whether it's something bad depends on the context. See, for example, Steve Hays' discussion of this subject with Jonathan Prejean a few months ago:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/12/et-tu-prejeanus.html
Whether criticizing a person is acceptable depends on the context. If a person has a record of lying, for example, then it can be appropriate for somebody responding to that person to inform the audience that there's reason to doubt his sincerity.
You write:
"Responding to arguments with personal criticisms is a fallacy. This is what you do. But this doesn't mean that it is never permissible to discuss personal traits. Steve treats John Loftus in a very obnoxious way, and that is the subject I brought up and wanted to discuss. I wasn't going to discuss whether he was at fault in his divorce or whether his wife was at fault. I have no knowledge on that subject. I brought up a totally off topic issue and wanted to discuss it."
You acknowledge that you "brought up a totally off topic issue" in order to "discuss personal traits". You seem to think that you're justified in doing so as long as you aren't claiming that your "discussion of personal traits" refutes arguments that it doesn't refute. I would say the same about my criticisms of you. I haven't claimed that my criticisms of you refute unrelated arguments.
You write:
"It seems in the majority of our discussions you sprinkle in name calling. Not because you want to divert from the isse we're discussion and discuss a seperate topic (whether in general I am ignorant, or whether in general my arguments are worthy of ridicule, etc). This is the manner in which you actually go about responding to arguments. It's a fallacious mode of discussion, and I find it to be quite common in your posts."
More assertions without evidence.
You write:
"If you're right then Crossan presents two opposing viewpoints, to which I replied that he sounds 'flaky' i.e. he's wishy washy on the issue, and hence he is not a good example of a liberal that believes Paul taught that Jesus' appearances were in a physical body. That is quite different from 'calling Crossan a flake'."
So, it's acceptable for me to call you "flaky", as long as I don't call you "a flake"? You repeatedly complain that I'm "name calling" when I apply terms such as "ignorant" to you, yet you tell us that it's acceptable for you to refer to people as "flaky".
You write:
"Your claim that Paul is 'clear' about his belief in a physical resurrection is belied by the fact that you can't name a critical scholar that agrees with you, whereas I can name many critical scholars, and even tenured professors at evangelical schools that reject your position, which at a minimum shows that Paul's view is not so clear."
You've repeatedly ignored the evidence I've cited for Paul's belief in a physical resurrection. Instead, you cited one conservative scholar against the position, and I responded by citing multiple liberal scholars in support of my position. I named Crossan, but I also cited an article by Gary Habermas that refers to others. You tried to dismiss my citation of Crossan on the basis that he was inconsistent on the issue, but whether the scholars were consistent in their position wasn't an issue you initially raised. You only mentioned it later, in an attempt to dismiss what I cited. And since Murray Harris (the scholar you cited) has been inconsistent on this issue as well, then your new standard undermines your own argument. Regarding Murray Harris' inconsistency, see:
http://www.ses.edu/journal/articles/2.1Geisler.pdf (page 12)
http://www.pfo.org/batl-end.htm
http://home.hiwaay.net/~contendr/4-15-96.html
http://ctlibrary.com/493
You write:
"It's tough not to respond in kind when you are repeated subjected to ad hominem argumentation."
In other words, you've repeatedly been inconsistent with your own professed standards.
You write:
"Obviously I'm not calling you stupid. I'm calling you deceptive. You've called me deceptive repeatedly. How do you expect me to react to such taunts?"
As I explained, I hadn't referred to you as deceptive in the comments you were responding to, when you called me deceptive. But even if I had called you deceptive on that occasion, I'm not the one who's been arguing that it's wrong to refer to a person as deceptive. If you're going to claim that it's wrong, and you're going to keep complaining about how you've been "insulted", "attacked", etc. on the basis of such things, then you shouldn't engage in that behavior you're criticizing. But you have engaged in such behavior, repeatedly.
You write:
"So you are unaware if your point about Eric banning me has any relevance to our discussion. Then why bring it up?"
I said that I don't know what all of his reasons were for banning you. But his banning you is relevant, since you were referring to how he thought you were reasonable enough to post one of your articles. He also thought that you were unreasonable enough to ban you from his forum. That's relevant.
You write:
"Even if one parallel to Horus turned out to be invalid, this doesn't show that the many other parallels don't still exist."
I gave multiple examples of errors in the Horus article you linked to. In one of our discussions, you cited the article in the context of discussing the virgin birth, so that was the issue of primary relevance, but the article you cited is wrong on other issues as well. You cited the article, despite its multiple errors that were so easy to discern.
You quote Bart Ehrman commenting that, for forgers, "simply claiming to be somebody is a kind of technique". Nobody denies that forgers often "claim to be somebody". That's not what I criticized you for. Rather, I criticized you for claiming that the phrase "I, Paul" in letters like 1 Corinthians is a "dead give away" of forgery. The fact that Bart Ehrman said that forgers "claim to be somebody" isn't equivalent to his saying that claiming to be somebody is a "dead give away" of forgery. To the contrary, Ehrman writes the following regarding Pauline authorship of 1 Corinthians:
"No one doubts, however, that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians." (Misquoting Jesus [San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005], p. 183)
You go on to quote Ehrman addressing other issues than the one I mentioned. He discusses forgers' attempts to make their work appear to not be forgeries. I never denied that a forgery can include such material. Nothing in Ehrman's comments contradicts what I argued. Saying that forgers attempt to imitate that which is genuine doesn't tell us whether a document like 1 Corinthians probably is a forgery.
You write:
"As far as your other comments about my ignorance, yes logically it's possible that I'm very ignorant about Christianity despite the fact that you thought my critiques of Rome were pretty good, that everyone we all know treated me as if I was knowledgable, that my church installed me in positions of teaching and leadership, that acquantances that I know even today always come to me to get answers about what Christianity teaches. That's about all your response amounts to."
No, that's not "about all my response amounts to". In addition to what I've already said about what you mention above, I'll repeat what you said about your own background in another thread:
"I believed for years because I was indoctrinated to believe as a young child, as are many people. I'd sing 'Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.' I'd see as Christians would beg and plead with others to convert and guilt people that didn't tow the line. That has an effect on people. I didn't want to see the inconsistencies and the unrealistic nature of the gospel accounts because like a lot of cultists I was conditioned to not see such things. It's a hard nut to crack. And maybe I'm a little slow." (http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/12/does-gospel-of-mark-contradict-infancy.html)
In this thread, you want to portray yourself as more knowledgeable. In the other thread, you had other motives. Nothing in your response refutes what I said about this subject in my last post.
You write:
"Of course an error makes better sense of your convoluted explanations of Mt 16 and Mt 24, but that hasn't stopped you before."
So you claim, but you repeatedly ignored much of what I said about those passages, and you eventually left the discussions.
You write:
"My point is, you don't object when an ignorant person converts from skepticism to Christianity, but you do object when a far less ignorant person converts from Christianity to skepticism. I'm not saying you never criticise Christians for being ignorant generally. I'm talking about whether are not they are too ignorant to justify a change in opinion."
Conversion to Christianity, from a Christian perspective, doesn't depend on something like historical argumentation. We believe in private revelation, the work of the Holy Spirit, and other factors that wouldn't be demonstrable in a forum such as this one. A person can be justified in converting to Christianity without knowing much about a subject such as the authorship of John's gospel or the historicity of the empty tomb. But since you're portraying yourself as a significantly knowledgeable person, and you keep involving yourself in public discussions about issues such as the ones I just mentioned, you're not in the same position as somebody who merely "converts from skepticism to Christianity". You haven't just "converted from Christianity to skepticism". You've gone public about it, have claimed to have a significant amount of knowledge about issues related to Christianity, and have repeatedly involved yourself in public discussions of such matters, despite repeatedly being shown that you aren't prepared for such discussions.
You write:
"As promised, I have listened to the Licona Carrier debate, and in fact Licona does use the straw man 'come join me in my dream' line as if it is a response to Carrier's position. So I believe you and Steve were following his straw man lead and suspect that he is doing more than just 'explaining general things about how visions operate' but in fact is engaged in straw man argumentation as you have."
First of all, Steve cited a passage in a book by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona. He wasn't citing the debate you're discussing. You've taken some comments we've made about the book and have transferred them to the debate. And, as I've told you repeatedly, if you want to argue that people like Michael Licona and Gary Habermas have never met any skeptics who argue for shared hallucinations, then you need to document that assertion. You haven't documented it, and you can't. You just assume that because some skeptics you've read don't use that argument, then somebody like Michael Licona or Gary Habermas cannot have come across any skeptics who use it. You've given us no reason to accept your assumption. Even if they had never come across such a skeptic, what would be wrong with their thinking that some people, whether skeptics or not, may be ignorant of some of the characteristics of hallucinations? The fact that some skeptics you've read acknowledge that hallucinations can't be shared doesn't result in the conclusion that a Christian should never make the point that hallucinations can't be shared when discussing the subject or should never think that a skeptic might mistakenly hold such a view. I've explained these things to you repeatedly, but you keep ignoring large portions of what people write in response to you.
We're long into this thread now, and you're still ignoring large amounts of material written in response to you by me and others. You spend a lot of time writing about "ad hominem", how knowledgeable you supposedly are, etc., yet you repeatedly ignore issues of much more significance.