Monday, July 08, 2013

UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus


I'm going to comment on a book by Chris Hallquist: UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus.

I believe Hallquist has a philosophy degree from Notre Dame.  Notre Dame has a top-rated philosophy dept., so this book ought to be the best that an atheist can mount against the miracles of Jesus. 

One way to judge a book like this is to start at the end: consult the bibliography. Who does Hallquist rely on? Who does Hallquist target?

On the one hand, Hallquist trains much of his fire on popularizers like Norman Geisler, Peter Kreeft, Tim LaHaye, Josh McDowell, Ravi Zecharias, and Lee Strobel. However, these hardly represent the most scholarly or sophisticated representatives of the position he is opposing. He's picking easy targets.

On the other hand, he relies on sources like James Randi, John Loftus, Robert Price, Richard Carrier, Paul Kurtz, Michael Shermer, Bart Ehrman, Susan Blackmore, Carl Sagan, Joe Nickell, Orson Welles, and Snopes.com. There's a heavy reliance on material by CSICOP. Ironically, Hallquist is very gullible when it comes to trusting his secular sources. He's just as credulous as pilgrims to Lourdes. 

If you want an idea of what-all is missing from his research, just compare his bibliography with my bibliography on the same basic subject:


Some other things caught my eye. There's the use of dated sources, such as the first (1965) edition of Metzger's The New Testament: It’s Background, Growth, and Content–even though Metzger produced a third revised and expanded edition in 2003.

In chapter 3 he tries to impugn the reliability of the NT as a witness to the historical Jesus, but he hasn't begun to engage the range of evangelical scholarship. 

There are some howlers along the way. For instance, he says: "Scholars who reject dating Acts c. 62 AD generally opt for a date in the 70’s or 80’s. This puts us at the edge of modern life expectancy, and life expectancies weren’t what they are today back then." 

But, of course, that's an average based on things like high infant mortality. It doesn't mean many individuals didn't live a long time back then, if they survived childhood. 

He also has a section on D. D. Home, where he says "The fact that we have much better sources for Home’s (almost certainly fraudulent) feat than for Jesus’ feat is an excellent reason to reject the latter."

But researchers like Stephen Braude don't consider Home to be a fraud. So the comparison backfires.

In chapter 5, he tries to evaluate Christ's miracles by comparing them to faith healers like Peter Popoff and Kathryn Kuhlman, as well as Lourdes. But there are glaring problems with this comparison:

 i)As a matter of principle, many Christians don't believe in contemporary faith-healers. They are cessationists. So even if Kuhlman was a failed faith-healer, that doesn't furnish any counterevidence to dominical miracles.

ii) Conversely, even charismatics admit that some faith-healers are charlatans, just as some doctors are quacks. 

iii) Kathryn Kuhlman wasn't Jesus Christ. We don't expect her to be able to do what God Incarnate can do. Hallquist is comparing the incomparable. 

In chapter 6 he spends time on alleged alien abductees, to undermine eyewitness testimony. However, in my own study, there's a correlation between "alien abductions" and Old Hag syndrome. So I incline to an occultic interpretation. 

3 comments:

  1. But researchers like Stephen Braude don't consider Home to be a fraud. So the comparison backfires.

    If anyone is interested, there are interviews of Stephen Braude and Rupert Sheldrake at the Closer to Truth website (a PBS show with Robert Lawrence Kuhn).

    There are many more interviews that are also interesting. Including ones of:

    Alvin Plantinga
    J.P. Moreland
    David Hunt
    Richard Swinburne
    Peter van Inwagen
    Robin Collins
    Thomas Flint
    William Dembski
    William Lane Craig
    Oliver Crisp
    Alister McGrath
    Robert Saucy
    Gregory Boyd
    Quentin Smith
    Leonard Susskind
    Nick Bostrom

    iii) Kathryn Kuhlman wasn't Jesus Christ. We don't expect her to be able to do what God Incarnate can do. Hallquist is comparing the incomparable.

    Kuhlman repeatedly said both in her books and on TV that she had never and could never heal anyone. She attributed any healings in her meetings to Jesus Christ. She also never hesitated to acknowledge that there were many who were not healed in her meetings; as well as repeatedly admitting she didn't understand the reasons why some were healed and others weren't.


    In chapter 6 he spends time on alleged alien abductees, to undermine eyewitness testimony. However, in my own study, there's a correlation between "alien abductions" and Old Hag syndrome. So I incline to an occultic interpretation.

    There are many testimonies of people who claim to have suffered from alien abductions (sometimes for many years) who also claim that they were able to stop them completely or consistently resist them by calling on and invoking the name of Jesus. If these testimonies are true, then they would also suggest that (at least some) cases of abduction are demonic.

    Here's a link to a website page that contains over 100 such testimonies.

    Here' a link to a blog on testimonies of angelic and demonic encounters.
    http://misclane.blogspot.com/2013/04/evidence-and-testimonies-of-demonic-and.html

    Here's a link to a blog on the worldwide phenomena of alleged visitations of Jesus and/or angels (either in dreams or while awake) among Muslim peoples.
    Alleged Visions, Dreams and Visitations of Jesus to Muslims

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  2. An Open Letter to Chris Hallquist: Stop Embarrassing Atheists Before a Watching Christian Audience by John Loftus http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2013/07/an-open-letter-to-chris-hallquist-stop.html

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  3. Mike Licona shares a testimony of a Yale educated (master of Divinity) friend of his who goes and ministers to people in Afghanistan, Iran, India, the underground churches in China et cetera. On one occasion in China he was speaking to former Muslims who converted to Christianity. They asked him for some advice about a spirit that had been visiting them and harassing them. They say the spirit looks like a guy with long gray hair wearing a white robe. He often materializes out of nowhere and threatens to kill them and families. He says his friend didn't believe them at first and thought they were a little strange. But before he was supposed to speak to them, he asked to use the washroom and they told him where it was. In the hallway on the way to the washroom all of a sudden everything went dark, and out of nowhere the spirit flies up to him and grabs him by the neck and starts choking him. He told Licona that he felt the spirit was going to kill him; he felt that he was dying. But he was able to utter, "You want to kill me, but I have come now to destroy you in the name of Jesus." At that point the spirit let him go and flew away. He proceeded to go and use the washroom. Then when he returned, the people he was supposed to speak to told him, "You saw him [didn't you?]". He asked, "How did you know?" They said, "Because your face is really white with fear."

    http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=261

    DIRECT MP3 LINK HERE (at around 42 minutes into interview):
    http://www.archive.org/download/ConversationsFromThePaleBlueDot002-MikeLicona/002-MikeLicona.mp3

    Around 10 minutes later he recounts a story of a female friend who had a paranormal experience of a friend one night and the next day she discovered she had died. In another telling of the story during a debate with Richard Carrier, Licona says that his friend hadn't thought about her friend in a long time.

    Mike Licona describes how when he was young his father (who was an ex-Mason) would often do interviews about why Masonry is incompatible with Christianity. Often when his father would do those interviews they would experience poltergeist like activity in their house. He gives various examples include an object (towel?) that twirled in the air when no human being holding it.

    At 33 minutes and 25 seconds into the mp3 audio.
    http://www.apologetics315.com/2009/07/is-god-active-in-world-today-gary.html

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