History and miracles

This is a sequel to two previous posts:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/04/boyd-on-inerrancy.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/04/is-resurrection-more-important-than.html

I'm going to respond to some statements by Nick Peters, both in response to me and other commenters:

Also, in my apologetics endeavors, I am very careful with when I deal with Bible contradictions. I will normally address some for other Christians, but too often many atheists have this idea that "If I find one contradiction in the Bible, I can throw the whole thing out." That's a terrible way of doing history and would require we pretty much scrap all of ancient history. I ask that they just at the start treat the Bible like any other document. Of course, I hope that they would come to see its divine inspiration and Inerrancy, but I am fine with them starting where they are.Yet I do not deny for a moment that resurrection is the more important belief. If Inerrancy is false, well I have to change my view of Scripture, but not my view of who Jesus is or if Christianity is true. If the resurrection is false, my entire worldview is changed. We're not saying to reject Inerrancy. Not at all. We're saying it's not essential and the way you can know what Jesus did can also be done just by historical research. You can treat the Bible like any other historical document and still come to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.If someone wants to come to Jesus and says "I'm convinced Jesus is the God-man who died and rose again, but I'm not sold that Jonah was in the belly of a big fish for the time he was" I'm not going to tell them to wait. They need to come now.

This conflates several issues that need to be distinguished:

i) We need to distinguish between defensive apologetics, and offensive apologetics or personal evangelism. 

In reference to offensive apologetics or personal evangelism, you can't make a direct appeal to the authority of Scripture since the unbeliever rejects the authority of Scripture. For the unbeliever, that's not a given. So the Christian apologist must reason for the authority of Scripture in that context. That's a conclusion rather than a starting-point.

ii) But in defensive apologetics, the Christian apologist can and should take the inspiration of Scripture for granted, since defensive apologetics isn't confined to common ground with the unbeliever, but what Christians believe. 

iii) In principle, a Christian apologist can ask or challenge the unbeliever to grant the inspiration of Scripture for the sake of argument, and explore the consequences of that postulate. 

iv) On a related note, it's necessary to distinguish between apologetic strategy or apologetic method, on the one hand, and Christian theology, on the other hand. 

Even if we think, as a matter of apologetic method or strategy, that we should bracket inspiration and simply treat the Bible like any other historical document, even if we think the inspiration of Scripture is inessential as an apologetic presupposition, it hardly follows that inspiration is essential from the standpoint of Christian theology.

v) Apropos (iv), it is essential to Biblical theism that God is a God who speaks as well as acts. A God who communicates to and through humans. Divine inspiration/revelation is no less important to the Biblical worldview than the Resurrection. Both involve core notions of God's activity in the world.

Likewise, inspiration/inerrancy is arguably indispensable to the distinction between true and false prophecy. And that's a key distinction in Biblical theology.  

A religion in which God raises Christ from the dead, but God doesn't communicate to and through humans (e.g. prophets, apostles) is not the Judeo-Christian faith. 

vi) There are "progressive Christians" who distinguish between inspiration and inerrancy. They hold some diluted view of inspiration which allows for errors in Scripture. Be that as it may, bracketing inspiration in toto, to simply treat the Bible as a historical document, whatever its merits as an apologetic method or strategy, is wholly inadequate unless we can reintroduce inspiration/revelation into Christian theology at a later stage of the apologetic argument.

vii) Merely treating the Bible as a historical document is deceptively simple. For Bible history isn't just a matter of historical events, but miraculous events. In that regard, unbelievers raise one of two objections:

a) Some unbelievers insist that methodological naturalism is essential historiography. Therefore, as a matter of principle, they preemptively discount the record of Scripture when it reports a miracle. 

b) Some unbelievers allow for historical evidence for miracles in theory. However, they maintain that the prior probability of a miracles is so vanishingly small that historical testimony for miracles can never surmount the overwhelming presumption to the contrary. A naturalistic explanation, however improbable, is always more probable than a supernaturalistic explanation. 

Therefore, simply approaching the Bible as a historical document isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. That's instantly complicated by these objections. So a Christian apologist who takes that tack will be immediately plunged into a debate over methodological naturalism and/or the probability of miracles. 

viii) Nick hasn't explained how he gets from the Bible as a generally reliable historical source to the Bible as inerrant/inspired.

ix) There are traditional ways of arguing for Scripture that don't just treat the Bible as a historical document. Take the classic argument from prophecy. To be sure, that has its own complications. The apologist must establish the priority and fulfillment of the prophecy. 

But that's an argument that which the Bible as divinely inspired right from the outset–without, however, begging the question. For the apologist proceeds to make a case for prophetic corroboration. 

x) The question of apologetic method/strategy is also distinct from the question of whether Christians need a fallback position, short of inerrancy and short of apostasy, to soften the landing in case they either lose faith in the inerrancy of Scripture or were never convinced in the first place. Even if we agree with that, it's a separate issue from apologetic method/strategy.

xi) Apropos (i), the threat that if I find one mistake in Scripture I will chuck the Christian faith, assumes that there's a viable alternative to the Christian worldview. Many apostates make fairly minimal adjustments to their worldview after they defect from the faith. That's because they are philosophically superficial. They continue to take many things for granted which naturalism is unable to justify. 

Rather than lowering the bar of Christian theology, we should raise the bar of atheism. There are atheists who are more candid and probing about the radically skeptical consequences of atheism (e.g. Hume, Quine, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dennett, Rosenberg, Benatar, Paul & Patricia Churchland). It would be better to point out that if you jump ship (i.e. Christianity), there's no lifeboat waiting for you to conduct you to safe harbor. Rather, you're diving into the shark-infested waters of nihilism. Conversely, we can turn that into a presuppositional argument for Biblical theism. 

xii) If an unbeliever says he can't take Jonah's fish miracle seriously, instead of giving him a pass, we should question him on why. Does he object to that miracle because he objects to miracles in general, or is there something about that miracle in particular which he finds incredible? If so, what?

xiii) There's the specter of lowballing the unbeliever in Nick's apologetic strategy. Instead of leveling with the unbeliever about what the Christian faith commits him to, we try to get him hooked, then reveal the hidden surcharges after the fact. Is that really preferable to being upfront about the whole package deal? Otherwise, we're guilty of false advertising.