A Reply To Paul Tobin On Chapter 6 Of The Christian Delusion (Part 1)

Paul Tobin has started a response to chapter 6 of The Infidel Delusion. His opening article has an introduction and a reply to Steve Hays, and he'll be replying to me and to Paul Manata later. But I want to address some of his comments in that first article, even though they weren't directed at me in particular.

He writes:

Firstly, given my thesis, it is quite strange to see that the “rebuttals” are based mainly on quotations from evangelical scholars and publications with frequent references to my not “interacting” with “evangelical scholarship.” An important point of my article in the book, and something I will continue to emphasize below, is that evangelical scholarship is not mainstream and not supported by a consensus of scholars who do not hold the same pre-suppositional biases.

As I pointed out repeatedly in The Infidel Delusion, the authors of The Christian Delusion often reject the views of most scholars. They sometimes even follow a scholarly minority far smaller than Evangelical scholarship (e.g., the view that Jesus didn't exist). And why limit ourselves to scholarship, if we're to judge the significance of majority opinion? Most of the contributors to The Christian Delusion are atheists. That puts them in a tiny minority among humans in general, both historically and in the modern world. Why do they interpret the evidence we all have access to, related to the existence of God or gods, so differently than such a large majority?

Scholarly opinion often changes, sometimes quickly and sometimes without much or any good reason. In the past, scholarship on Biblical issues was more conservative than it is today. And sometimes modern scholarship takes a conservative turn, as Gary Habermas' research suggests concerning recent resurrection scholarship, for example.

We should keep in mind that Tobin has framed the discussion around Biblical passages he wants to criticize. That would tend to highlight the passages for which we have the least evidence. Conservative scholars often hold a more positive view of those passages because of conclusions reached by means of other passages and other lines of evidence. As I mentioned in response to Robert Price in chapter 10 of The Infidel Delusion:

"Both Christians and their critics appeal to possibilities in some contexts. Something that can be classified as a possibility in one sense can be classified as a probability in another sense. If you isolate a harmonization of two Biblical passages from the larger context of the evidence for Biblical inerrancy, for example, then the harmonization can be considered only a possibility rather than a probability in that situation. But if the evidence for inerrancy is taken into account, the harmonization can be considered probable in that context. All of us are trying to harmonize all of the relevant data in order to maintain a consistent worldview. One system can be more likely overall in spite of the unlikely nature of some element of it when considered in isolation." (p. 146)

As I documented on the same page, Price himself repeatedly appeals to possibilities rather than probabilities. Thus, it's insufficient for Tobin to make comments such as the following:

Secondly, most of the “rebuttals” amount to no more than suggesting or speculating other possible explanations than the ones I have presented. This is something I have pointed out in my book The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager (pp. 212-214) Evangelicals seems to have difficulty understanding the difference between the concepts of possibility and probability- just because an hypothesis is possible does not mean it is the most probable explanation for something.

It's not as though skeptical speculations about how all of the external sources are wrong about the authorship of a Biblical book, how resurrection witnesses hallucinated, etc. commend themselves on their face as the most likely interpretations of the evidence.

If conservative scholars are correct about the larger context of the evidence for Biblical accuracy, then accusing them of appealing to possibilities instead of probabilities in a narrower context doesn't have much significance. Many modern scholars either ignore the larger framework conservatives appeal to or dismiss it as outside the realm of what a historian or New Testament scholar, for example, should take into account. But any conclusion we reach should take all of the relevant evidence into consideration, even if some people categorize some of that evidence as philosophical, theological, or something else other than historical. If a scholar is convinced that Jesus' resurrection is a historical event, for instance, then labeling that conclusion as philosophical or theological doesn't suggest that the scholar in question ought to ignore the implications of the event when considering other historical matters.

And a scholarly trend might be mistaken for some other reason. I would argue that there's a tendency to neglect external evidence while giving too much weight to highly speculative theories based on internal evidence, for example.

The New Testament scholar Craig Keener gives us some examples of unhealthy tendencies in modern scholarship:

"No one familiar with the urban society of the eastern empire will be impressed with the isolation Gospel scholars often attribute to the Gospel 'communities.'...Whereas the conservative [Bible] introductions often arrive at predictably conservative conclusions, they interact with less conservative scholars, whereas some of the traditional critical introductions completely ignore the contributions of conservative scholarship....Besides any skills John [author of the fourth gospel] had acquired, he undoubtedly would have had help; even the most literate normally used scribes, and Josephus’s staff included style editors to improve his Greek. John would have been an unusual writer if he published the work entirely by himself....No other author of antiquity could survive the nit-picking distinctions on which NT [New Testament] scholars, poring over a smaller corpus, often thrive. As a translator of Euripides for the Loeb series notes, Euripides’ 'plays, produced at times widely apart, and not in the order of the story, sometimes present situations (as in Hecuba, Daughters of Troy, and Helen) mutually exclusive, the poet not having followed the same legend throughout the series.' He would not fare well in the hands of our discipline." (The Gospel Of John: A Commentary, Vol. 1 [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003], p. 42, n. 145 on p. 98, pp. 101-102, 125)

D.A. Carson and Douglas Moo, after addressing the external evidence for John's authorship of the fourth gospel, comment that "Most historians of antiquity, other than New Testament scholars, could not so easily set aside evidence as plentiful and as uniform." (An Introduction To The New Testament [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2005], p. 233)

Tobin writes:

The main point is this, no serious (i.e. non evangelical) scholar today considers the stories in Genesis 1 and 2 to be anything more than different creation myths “cut and pasted” together by a later scribe to form an uneasy narrative.

I don't know why Tobin so often refers to Evangelical scholarship. What about conservative Catholics, Jews, etc.? Since those of us who wrote The Infidel Delusion are Evangelicals, we agree with that segment of scholarship more than others. But Evangelical scholars aren't the only scholars who are generally conservative about the Bible, and liberal and moderate scholars sometimes agree with conservative conclusions.

Near the end of his article, Tobin appeals to the concept that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We responded to that notion in The Infidel Delusion (in chapter 11, in appendix 2, etc.), and Tobin doesn't interact with any of our comments on the subject.