One Way To Judge Skeptical Claims About Prophecy

Skeptics often object to Christian prophecy fulfillment on the basis that the prophecies supposedly are too vague, that many people could be said to have fulfilled the passages, that it's easy to fabricate alleged fulfillments by reading a later figure into the Old Testament, etc. One way, among others, of responding to such objections is to ask the skeptic to illustrate his claim with other historical figures. What sort of prophetic argument can be made for Buddha or Muhammad, for example? I've written about this subject before with regard to Muhammad, here and here. Another example of this kind of thing is the dismissive comments skeptics often make about Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy. See how much worse their explanations of the passage are. See my post here responding to Carol Newsom's commentary on Daniel, for example.

All hell breaks loose

1. A putative evidence for reincarnation are cases of individuals who have corroborated memories of a past life. I haven't examined any case-studies to verify that claim, but suppose we grant the phenomenon for the sake of argument. Christians often default to demonic possession as the explanation. Suppose we consider that first. Here's one objection:

He accentuates the fact (if it is a fact) that cases of reincarnation involve personal continuity whereas cases possession involve personal discontinuity. 

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/03/possession-reincarnation.html

A problem with Almeder's objection is the basis on which he makes those classifications. It seems to be circular. Do the phenomena themselves provide evidence for that distinction, or is he applying his classifications a priori to the phenomena, where he simply assumes the continuity/discontinuity distinction? How does he know possession is inconsistent with less continuity?

There are, however, other objections to the demonic explanation. Offhand, there's no reason to assume a correlation between a particular demon and a particular decedent whose memories a living person shares. Why would a demon have such intimate knowledge of the decedent? The demon might have such knowledge if both the decedent and the living person who shares those memories are possessed by the same demon, but we'd need evidence that's the case.

2. A more direct explanation for why some people have memories of dead people (assuming, ex hypothesi, that's the case) is that the souls of damned (i.e. human souls) sometimes take possession of the living. 

Some Christians object because they don't think the damned are allowed to contact the living. But there's no theological reason to deny that possibility. The church age is a mixed up time. The saints and the damned aren't separated in this life. The realm of light makes incursions into the realm of darkness while the realm of darkness makes incursions into the realm of  light–like a lighthouse at night. 

The ability of damned souls to contact the living doesn't mean hell has a back door, if we're using "hell" in the technical sense of the final state of the damned. An absolute separation between the two groups only takes place at the day of judgment, not the moment of death.

Carnival mirror

If atheism is true, then there's no guiding, overarching intelligence to coordinate what happens or how we perceive reality. So for all we know, it's like each of us was born in a coma. The world we perceive is a comatose delirium. Indeed, each of us was born into a separate comatose delirium. 

Or, to vary the metaphor, it's like each of us was born standing in front of a mirror. All we perceive is the world reflected in the mirror. And for all we know, it's a carnival mirror. Indeed, each of us was born standing in front of a different carnival mirror. And the other people we see, the "us", aren't real people but belong to the "world", the distortions, of the carnival mirror. 

Consider the horror of that scenario. Stop and think about that nightmarish scenario. (Indeed, a never-ending nightmare is yet another illustration.) Let the horror of that scenario seize you. 

Most atheists (in the West) don't think that way because they operate as if atheism's false and there is a guiding, overarching intelligence to coordinate what happens and how we perceive reality. Buddhism is a prominent exception. Certain strains of Hinduism share the same skepticism because, even though they aren't atheistic, the kind of God they believe in isn't the ultimate reality.

I won!

There's an odd quality to debates with unbelievers. They "succeed" in shielding themselves from Christianity. They put up enough barriers that they "succeed" in walling themselves off from the evidence. They "won". Christians failed to persuade them. 

But it's like someone diagnosed with curable cancer who convinces himself that homeopathic therapy is the way to go. His doctor futilely pleads with him to undergo conventional cancer therapy. But the patient thinks he "won" the argument. 

Yet it's not the doctor who has a personal stake in the outcome. He's not the one with cancer. 

Plagues, locusts, and floods

The following is an excerpt from an email from someone named Wyoming Doc who is married to a Chinese woman. Wyoming Doc frequents Rod Dreher's weblog.

I have not been able to comfort my wife in some time. I have never seen her like this. She is a profoundly educated and worldly-wise woman. However, she has now reverted to her people’s former religion of Zen Buddhism – in a way that I find beautiful and scary at the same time. Her grandmother made sure she and her siblings knew their old ways, even in the Maoist China in which she grew up.

She has made from scratch these beautiful garments for herself and our kids. She calls them “mercy garments” — I get the feeling it is something like our version of “sackcloth and ashes”. When this all started, she looked me right in the eye and said, “We Chinese have forgotten our old traditions and our blessed ancestors. They are now telling us that they have not forgotten us.” She has constructed a Buddhist shrine in our front room – pic enclosed – and every evening it is covered in votive candles – and she and the kids bow and perform rituals, and chant. It is like Gregorian chant – but a bit different.

This weekend, I saw the look from the abyss in her eyes once again. If you recall, when her fortune teller wrote her last fall, he stated that the plague would begin in the winter and that Lunar New Year would not be celebrated. The next thing he said would happen would be the complete destruction of the crops — and this would be accomplished with locusts.

You can only imagine the look in her eyes – and the gushing of tears – when Mandarin TV announced that the locust swarms from Africa had arrived in Xinjiang, were gathering strength, and had not been this bad in decades.

[Rod Dreher: The locusts really are there. Here’s today’s agricultural news.]

The Industrial Heartland is now on its knees. If this locust plague begins to spread from Xinjiang into Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia and Sichuan, that would put the Chinese breadbasket on its knees. That is where all the rice and wheat and other grains is grown. My wife’s fortuneteller by the way, stated that after the crops were ruined in the spring, the flooding would begin in the summer.

Again, my wife is a highly educated woman — a degree from their premier university — and up until now has been very secular in her life. I have this feeling that if my wife is behaving this way, it is probably going on all over China.

What is that going to mean for Xi Jinping and the People’s Republic? What would happen in America if large parts of the “Tribulation meme” inexplicably started to come true — what would that do to our cultural and civic life?

Now that China is the 2nd largest economy in the world – what effect will be had when things start to crater? What would the world be like with 1.5 billion Chinese in rebellion or even a Civil War?

[Rod Dreher: I remind you that Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, is one of the places in China where the persecution of Christians by the Communist regime was most severe...This could be a turning point in Chinese history. The early church gained respect and affection among the Romans in part because of the compassion its members showed the sick and dying during a plague time.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/camus-church-china-the-plague-covid19

Yoga memory

Such phenomena as instincts, child prodigies, love at first sight, and déjà vu are sometimes said to be evidence for reincarnation, but they obviously have little probative value, since it is quite possible to give convincing explanations of these phenomena that do not involve reincarnation. More serious as evidence for reincarnation is the phenomenon of yoga memory - the experience of certain people, usually children, who claim to be someone else reborn and to "remember" the previous life. Consideration of such cases was almost entirely unsystematic and anecdotal until the recent work of the medical doctor Ian Stevenson, who in several books intelligently discusses various cases of yoga memory.¹⁹

There are two issues here. The first is whether the cases Stevenson discusses can be relied upon. To my knowledge, no one accuses Stevenson of dishonesty, but criticisms of his methods and conclusions have been raised. For one thing, in the vast majority of the cases that Stevenson discusses, there was contact between the two families - the family into which the child was born and the family the child claimed via yoga memory previously to belong to - before Stevenson was ever on the scene. For another, Stevenson seems to dismiss far too easily the possibility of fraud on the part of the child. For a third, Stevenson has never even attempted to answer the objections of his several critics, and proceeds as if these critics did not exist.²⁰

The second issue is this: assuming Stevenson's cases (and other cases of yoga memory) are genuine in the sense that there was no deliberate fraud, egregious error, etc., what is the most sensible explanation of those phenomena? One explanation, of course, is reincarnation. But are there other, more plausible explanations?

Suppose that telepathic communication between human minds occurs (and I myself have neither knowledge nor even any particularly firm opinion on the matter). If so, there is the possibility that those who have experienced yoga memory have learned what they know about the past person whom they claim to be identical to by telepathic communication with living humans who know those same facts about the deceased person. This may be completely unknown to the person who is having the yoga memory. Indeed, here is a crucial conundrum for reincarnation: claims based on purported yoga memory will be believable only if they can be verified; verification will normally be achieved via the testimony of people who are in a position to know the relevant facts; but that always opens the possibility that the yoga rememberer was somehow in telepathic communication with those same people. So the point is this: one great difficulty for reincarnation is the fact that the strongest evidence for it admits a variety of explanations.

(Davis, Stephen T. After We Die: Theology, Philosophy, and the Question of Life After Death, pp 26-27.)

Curse God and die!

I'd like to talk a little bit about Buddhism in this post.

1. When I say Buddhism I mean Theravada Buddhism because (to my knowledge) it's the most conservative and oldest form of Buddhism. The original Buddhism.

   I regard Mahayana Buddhism more like Buddhism if Buddhism were Catholic. Mahayana Buddhism strayed far from any semblance to primitive Buddhism. It's an ostentatious corruption of Buddhism. Like a simple house turned into Elvis' Graceland.

   In fairness, it’s worth dealing with all forms of Buddhism, inasmuch as all have adherents trapped in falsehood, so it’s worth explaining their falsehoods to them so that they might know the truth. However I’ll focus on Theravada Buddhism here.

2. It seems to me Buddhism is anti-natalist in the sense that anti-natalism is its ultimate goal.

   That's not to say Buddhists are against humans having children and giving birth, per se. That's because Buddhists believe the non-self (anatta) - despite its logical inconsistencies - could be reborn into something besides the human form (e.g. lower animals), which, if so, would perpetuate its suffering. In fact, its suffering may be arguably worse than if it existed in the human form. Nevertheless human birth is a means to a goal in Buddhism.

   The endgame for the Buddhist is to reach nirvana. To reach nirvana is to reach non-being, to extinguish oneself, to annihilate oneself. And therefore to end all rebirths. That's anti-natalistic in the end.

3. All this plays out in a larger context. Buddhism recognizes evil and suffering, but in order to escape evil and suffering, Buddhism denies desires like joy, love, pleasure. Buddhism denies self. Buddhism denies life. Buddhism denies God. Buddhism escapes evil and suffering by denying everything.

4. By contrast, Christianity regards God, creation, and the self as good, but we are fallen creatures inhabiting a fallen world. Like a beautiful cathedral fallen into a terrible state of disrepair. Christianity's message is that God the architect has come to redeem and repair this once majestic cathedral in order to rebuild it better than ever.

   However Buddhism's message is the architect will destroy the cathedral, burn it down to dust and ashes, to be swept away by the howling winds, and finally the architect himself will commit suicide. As Ripley said in Aliens: "Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

   Both Christianity and Buddhism see life under the curse, but Christianity turns the curse into a blessing, good from evil, whereas the counsel of Buddhism (like Job's wife) is to "curse God and die!" (Job 2:9).

5. It might be instructive to know Siddhārtha Gautama aka the Buddha called his one and only son Rāhula which is related to a "fetter" or an "impediment". The Buddha considered his son an impediment to reaching nirvana, for his own son would fetter him to love, which in turn would open him to continued evil and suffering. Hence the Buddha dare not love his own son if he is to reach nirvana, non-being, self-obliteration.

   However, in Christianity:

   She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us). (Mt 1:21-23)

   and

   Behold, a voice from heaven said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased!" (Mt 3:17)

Thoughts without a thinker

The self in Buddhism

1. The soul aka self doesn't exist in Buddhism. Only the non-self exists - the anatman. To my knowledge, that's the case in all major schools of Buddhism, viz. Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism.

2. What is perceived to be the "self" in Buddhism consists of a collection of states or a bundle of perceptions. These are like psychological states or perceptions. We can simply call them "aggregates". These aggregates are known as khandhas.

3. There are five khandhas: form/body, sensations, perceptions, mentations/cogitations, and awareness. These aggregates or khandhas are the entirety of what constitutes the self, but the reality is there is no "self". Afaik, it's not even that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that the whole is the sum of its parts.

4. Indeed, modern Buddhists often use the ship of Theseus to illustrate how the self doesn't really exist despite its aggregates or khandhas. We're atoms in motion, but these atoms in motion are constantly being replaced by other atoms in motion.

5. Suffering is caused by one being attached to or clinging onto (tanha) these aggregates. Suffering is extinguished (nirvana) when attachment (tanha) to these aggregates (khandhas) is relinquished.

Evaluation

Unrequited longing

A sequel to my earlier post:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/05/god-soul-and-meaning-of-life.html

In this post I comment on some other statements by Thaddeus Metz, God, Soul and the Meaning of Life (Cambridge 2019):

The stronger version of the argument is not that God and a soul are unintelligible, but that they must be insofar as they are deemed to be necessary for life’s meaning (Metz 2013b). The claim is that the logic of supernaturalism as a theory of meaning requires spiritual conditions to be quite different from what exists in the physical world and hence to be beyond what we can conceive. On the one hand, in order for God (or a soul) to be the sole source of meaning, God must be utterly unlike us. The more God were like us, the more reason there would be to think we could obtain meaning from ourselves, absent God. On the other hand, the more God were utterly unlike us and radically other, perhaps for being atemporal or absolutely simple, the less clear it would be whether we could truly understand His nature or how we could obtain meaning by relating to Him.

i) That's not self-explanatory. Why must God be utterly unlike us to be the sole source of meaning? That's hardly self-evident. Where's the argument? 

ii) Conversely, how does it follow that "the more God is like us, the more reason there'd be to think we could obtain meaning from ourselves, absent God"? What if God is like us in some respects but unlike us in other respects? 

iii) The idea of timeliness isn't beyond what we can conceive.  

It's difficult to evaluate this objection because it needs to be unpacked in much greater detail even to know what the claim amounts to . 

The last salient argument against extreme supernaturalism has been the most common one for naturalists to make, and it is less complicated than the other two. It is the contention that meaning, at least in life, intuitively seems possible despite atheism, even when such meaning is construed objectively and not merely subjectively. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful merely in virtue of the activities they performed, even if we suppose there is no all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful spiritual person who is the ground of the universe and who will grant eternal bliss to our spiritual selves upon the deaths of our bodies (Trisel 2004: 384–5; Wielenberg 2005: 31–7, 49–50, 2016: 31, 33–4; Norman 2006). Supposing for the sake of argument we are currently living in an atheist world, we remain inclined to differentiate between lives devoted to long-distance spitting, creating a big ball of string or living in an experience machine, on the one hand, and those exemplifying morality, enquiry or creativity, on the other. Meaning is absent in the former cases and present in the latter ones, which can constitute ends higher than pleasure that merit pride or admiration upon their realization.

The argument is powerful, having convinced even many religiously inclined theorists of meaning. For example, one has said that it is ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that some meaning would be possible even if there were no God and a soul (Quinn 2000: 58), while another remarks that it would be ‘incredible’ (Audi 2005: 334) to think that no meaning would accrue from beneficent relationships in themselves. A recurrent example is rescuing a young girl from severe injury; surely, that would be a meaningful deed to perform, even if a perfect being does not exist and we will die along with the inevitable demise of our bodies, so the argument goes (Trisel 2004: 384–5; Audi 2005: 341–2).

It's counterintuitive considered in isolation, but in combination with naturalism, his paradigm examples cease to be meaningful. In a godless universe, how you choose to live your life is arbitrary. 

This is analogous to eliminative materialism. The position is absurd to the point of self-refutation, but it's driven by a larger commitment to physicalism. The way to dissolve the counterintuitive impression is not to say some ways of living are meaningful even in a godless universe, but to say that since some ways of living are meaningful, we don't live in a godless universe. 

‘Only a religion with a creator God offers the possibility of compensation for the badness of my wasting my life’

That raises an interesting issue. There are men and women who convert late in life. It's too late for them to make up for the lost years in this life. 

A different sort of argument for moderate supernaturalism appeals to a ranking of what human beings characteristically want. By this argument, the moderate supernaturalist will grant that a naturalist sort of meaning could satisfy some of our ‘surface desires’ (Seachris 2013: 20, n. 47), or at best our mid-level needs, longings and wishes. However, he will maintain that only a supernatural meaning could satisfy ‘profound desires anchored in the core of our being’ (Seachris 2013: 20, n. 47), ‘fundamental human aspirations’ (Cottingham 2016b: 136) or ‘the voracious human hunger for meaning’ (Haught 2013: 176; see also Seachris 2011: 154, 2013: 14; Goetz 2012: 44, 47; Cottingham 2016b: 127).

The problem with this reasoning is that it just does not seem true to say that human beings qua human beings desire a world with a purposive God or a blissful soul. In particular, many in the South and East Asian traditions simply do not hanker for the existence of God or a soul as construed in this Element. Literally billions of adherents to Hinduism and Confucianism, for example, have desires radically different from believers in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. If so, then a spiritual realm is not necessary for them to have a greater sort of meaning, by the logic of the present argument. Indeed, if there is in fact no spiritual dimension, and if our desires are malleable, then one would be best off letting go of desires for perfection that cannot be fulfilled (on which see Trisel 2002).

That's very superficial:

i) To begin with, most adherents are folk Hindus and folk Buddhists. They don't adhere to the austere outlook of Indian philosophy. 

ii) There's a distinction between natural yearnings and a cultural overlay. Sometimes a cultural overlay will choke natural yearnings. But the overlay doesn't reflect their natural yearings, if left to their own devices.

iii) If you think reality is indifferent or hostile to your yearnings, then you give up hope and settle for something less. You make due. But that doesn't mean you don't long for something better. 

Dialogue with a Buddhist philosopher

How should a Christian apologist argue with a Buddhist philosopher? Folk Buddhists retain many common sense beliefs, so they are easier to witness to, but Buddhist epistemology and metaphysics are quite radical, presenting less traction. 

In some cases, an individual can put themselves out of reach of evidence by retreating so far into the maze that they are hopelessly lost (barring divine intervention). So there may not be enough common ground for a Christian apologist to have a constructive dialogue with a Buddhist philosopher. 

One issue is how seriously a Buddhist philosopher or Buddhist monk actually takes Buddhist skepticism. In general, their Buddhism is the result of social conditioning. They wouldn't normally adopt such a counterintuitive philosophy. To what extent are they saying this to keep up appearances? Deep down, how many are truly committed to it? Especially if presented with an alternative?

Buddhism is a tragic worldview that reflects radical alienation from the world into which they are thrust. It's an elaborate coping mechanism. It cultivates an attitude of fatalistic resignation to an uncaring reality. And that attitude makes sense given the pre-Christian background.  

There are, of course, a variety of Buddhist schools of philosophy. It's not monolithic, although they share a family resemblance. 

Buddhism is pre-Christian. Although classical Buddhism is atheistic, the foil is Hindu polytheism and pantheism. It didn't develop in opposition to Christianity. And while Buddhist philosophers can try to retool traditional arguments to deflect Christianity, that's rather ad hoc. If they were starting from scratch, with Christianity on the table, would Buddhism even have a foothold?  

One of the ironies of Buddhist atheism is the mythological deification of Buddha: 

The most articulate recent spokesman for this position has been Paul J. Griffiths, e.g., in his On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). There, and in his seminal article, "Buddha and God: A Contrastive Study in Ideas about Maximal Greatness" (Journal of Religion, vol. 69, 1989, pp. 502-529), Griffiths seems to argue not only that Buddhists did adopt an increasingly God-like conception of Buddha, but that they had to, since religious theorizing about the ultimate is driven by the need to maximize that which is regarded as highest, truest, or most real. Without going into the strengths and weaknesses of this provocative idea, I would note that it is eerily reminiscent of the ontological argument for God's existence, but applied to the realm of intellectual history. Jackson, Roger (1999) "A Theology And Buddhalogy In Dharmakirtis Pramanavarttika," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 16 : Iss. 4 , Article 2, p499n7. 

Here atheism comes full circle to reunite with robust theism. Perhaps the most consistent–albeit extreme–version of Buddhism is Buddhist idealism:

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198746973.001.0001/oso-9780198746973-chapter-11

http://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/comparativephilosophy/s1/The-Problem-of-Other-Minds-in-Buddhist-Epistemology-M.-Inamo.pdf

However, even a radically antirealist position like Buddhist idealism offers a number of openings for Christian apologetics in terms of certain a priori and/or transcendental arguments, viz. 

• Argument from logic

• Argument from design

• Argument from reason

• Argument from numbers

• Argument from simplicity

• Argument from contingency

• Argument from counterfactuals

There's still the challenge of how to bring that down to earth in terms of Christianity's claims about historical redemption, but establishing the necessity of God is a preliminary step. 

There's also the question of whether philosophical Buddhism is skeptical to the point of self-refutation, viz. :

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-india/#Ske

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contradiction/#LNCBudTet

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/#6.1

If so, then it can't provide a standard of comparison to judge Christian theism. 

On the one hand, Buddhist philosophy appeals to intellectual pride and autonomy. On the other hand, it represents a despairing and desiccated worldview. Christian apologetics can exploit the emotional fault-lines. 

Escape from time

I think Buddhism makes a certain amount of sense in its original setting. It arose in a pre-Christian culture, so the available options were awful. From a pre-Christian standpoint, life is characterized by irredeemable suffering. For some people, it's suffering from the get-go. Others get off to a better start, but incrementally, sometimes dramatically, and inevitably, lose more and more of what little makes life worthwhile. In Buddhism, time is your enemy, so the only solution is a radical solution: to escape time by ceasing to be. 

The outlook of Buddhism reflects existential nihilism. Logically speaking, consistent Buddhists ought to be antinatalists. In practice, that's what celibate Buddhist monks are–although I'm sure that behind-the-scenes, many Buddhist monks are sexually active. 

In a sense, both Buddhism and Christianity are future-oriented, but they have radically different views of the future. Christianity has a more positive view of the present, but acknowledges that for many people, this life is grim. Even in a fallen world, there are many natural goods, but these aren't evenly distributed. 

From a Christian standpoint, time is your friend–at least in reference to the afterlife (assuming you die in the faith). The best is yet to come. In Christianity, you escape suffering, not by oblivion, not by escaping time, but by escaping into a better time. A bit like those time-travel scenarios where the present is hellacious, but with your time-machine you can go backward or forward to a time of your choosing, when things were better (or got better). 

Reproduction machines

Had an impromptu debate with an apostate on Facebook

Michael 

What Doctrines do Atheists hold? I would prefer to describe myself as a Humanist because that does tell you something about my beliefs and values. If I called you a non-Buddhist, all that would tell you is some of the things a don't believe.

Hays 

Typically, atheists are physicalists. In addition, they believe the universe is a closed system:

Many ontological naturalists thus adopt a physicalist attitude to mental, biological and other such “special” subject matters. They hold that there is nothing more to the mental, biological and social realms than arrangements of physical entities. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#MakCauDif 

In the final twentieth-century phase, the acceptance of the casual closure of the physical led to full-fledged physicalism. The causal closure thesis implied that, if mental and other special causes are to produce physical effects, they must themselves be physically constituted. It thus gave rise to the strong physicalist doctrine that anything that has physical effects must itself be physical. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#RisPhy

There is no ultimate reason for why things happen, although there are causes. This life is all there is. No immortality. No immortal soul. No resurrection of the body. Humans are fleeting, fortuitous combinations of particles. What we believe and cherish is the result of blind evolutionary conditioning and social conditioning. That's pretty standard. Some atheists toy with Platonic realism. Many atheists reject moral realism.

Engaging Buddhism

https://voice.dts.edu/tablepodcast/buddhism/

Reflections on reincarnation

1. I rarely write about Hinduism and Buddhism because it's fairly specialized. Reincarnation is neglected in Christian apologetics because most Christian apologetics is focussed on challenges to Christianity in the West. 

2. Before addressing the specifics, I'd like to make a general observation. Not all paranormal claims are mutually consistent. Compare reincarnation with crisis apparitions. There are reports of dead relatives appearing to a loved one to warn them or give them encouragement during a crisis. But if that's true, then how can reincarnation be true? According to a standard paradigm, reincarnation involves a memory wipe. When a person is reborn, they forget their past lives. Start all over again. 

That rules out crisis apparitions. The dead relative has moved on. Been reincarnated. Started from scratch in a new body, as a baby. Immersed in a new life history. 

They don't remember their loved ones from past lives. At this point they are younger than their children. Reincarnation resets the lifecycle. Your late mother can't appear to you as your late mother. She's now a little girl. 

Reincarnation and crisis apparitions can both be false, but they can't both be true. And I think there's unambiguous evidence for crisis apparitions, whereas the evidence for reincarnation is ambiguous at best. 

3. To my knowledge, apologists for reincarnation offer three lines of empirical evidence: déjà vu, transgenerational birthmarks, and memories of a past life. 

4. Déjà vu

i) I think this is the weakest evidence. Not just weak evidence for reincarnation, but weak evidence that it's even paranormal. 

In my own life I've had déjà vu experiences. One time, sitting at a fast food joint, years ago, I suddenly had the intensive feeling that I'd done this before. I'm pretty sure that I hadn't done it before in this life. But since the establishment was built in my lifetime, it wasn't even possible for me to have been there in a past life. So whatever the explanation, it can't be reincarnation.

Likewise, I've lived in at least two consecutive locations where I had déjà vu experiences. But both of them were built in my lifetime, so that can't be chalked up to a past life. And even if they hadn't been constructed in my lifetime, what are the odds that in a past life I lived in both places–not to mention both places in succession?

iii) Moreover, the sensation I've had is more like a time loop than remembering a past life. It's not the sensation that I was in the same place in a different life, but that this life is repeating itself. 

iv) Sometimes our minds play tricks on us. That's my explanation. 

But assuming for argument's sake that déjà vu demands a paranormal explanation, telepathy is a simpler explanation. What if one person's memories occasionally leak into another person's mind? 

5. Transgenerational birthmarks

i) The claim is that babies sometimes reproduce the unique birthmark of a dead person, like an ancestor. In fact, this has become a TV trope:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReincarnationIdentifyingTrait

ii) I haven't studied the literature in sufficient depth to know if such a phenomenon actually exists. Of course, the appeal is circular. If some babies reproduce the birthmarks of a dead person, then those aren't unique birthmarks.

iii) However, let's stipulate for discussion purposes that the phenomenon exists and demands a paranormal explanation. How would reincarnation be an explanation for replicated birthmarks? On a standard paradigm of reincarnation, the soul (mind, consciousness) transfers from the dead body to a new body. A body-swap scenario. But how would that cause any physical traces? 

iv) Why would reincarnation duplicate birthmarks rather than duplicating the body? If the body is not a double, why the same birthmarks? 

v) What reincarnation have to do with heredity? Why would someone be reborn in the body of a lineal descendent? Isn't reincarnation just the idea that the same soul is reembodied? But that's not a genetic or genealogical relation–as if, to be reincarnated, you must be a reincarnated ancestor. Assuming (ex hypothesi) that reincarnation is true, why can't the soul transfer to a body in a different family tree? To my knowledge, reincarnation is usually treated as independent of lineage. 

vi) It would be interesting to know if there's a history of witchcraft or necromancy in these families. If a baby has the birthmarks of a dead ancestor, is that a family curse? Was the baby hexed? Are the dead (damned) casting a malevolent influence on the living? 

6. Past life memories

i) Suppose for argument's sake that reincarnation is true. Suppose someone underwent 100 past lives. In fact, that's a conservative estimate. How would they remember 100 life histories? Wouldn't their recollection be hopelessly scrambled? How would they remember what they did in each life? Who they knew in each life? 

Memory has a sense of relative chronology. You remember childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, &c. You remember that some things happened to you before other things. 

But if you underwent 100 past lives, how could you possibly keep the timelines straight? Assuming that some people remember events before they were born, that would actually constitute prima facie evidence that reincarnation is false, since it's hard to see how you could keep all those life histories separate in your mind.

ii) An alternative explanation is that those aren't your memories. You're tapping into someone else's memories. They are invading your mind. That doesn't require all the machinery of reincarnation, so it's a simpler explanation. 

iii) To my knowledge, Hinduism has a dualist anthropology while Buddhism has a physicalist anthropology. In Buddhism, humans have no perduring soul. So how is reincarnation even possible? Who's the you that's reincarnated? Weren't you extinguished at the moment of death? A new brain and body won't be you, but a blank slate. 

The view from the prison cell

Clearly in a sense Buddhism is atheistic. There is no creator God who set everything in motion, and there is no providential God who hovers over his creation and who is prepared to intervene when things go drastically wrong. For the Buddhist, there is no ultimate meaning to life in this sort of way. Life just is, always has been, always will be. That is the nature of things…Buddhism is certainly not unique in basically accepting the universe as it is and going from there. M. Ruse, Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford 2015), 182,184.

To my knowledge, that's an accurate summary of the Buddhist outlook. Since, according to Buddhism, reality is grim and you can't change reality, the best thing you can do is to change your attitude towards reality. Come to terms with grim reality. Lower your expectations. Learn to cope with despair. Make a mental adjustment to your hopeless situation, like a life sentence to life. Have a potted plant on the barred window sill of your prison cell. Logically, when exposed to the Gospel, Buddhists should jump at the chance to exit their prison cell. 

How to suffer well

His father died in an airplane crash when Groothuis was eleven.

The particular cruelty of this disease is that you slowly lose your mind–and you're aware of it slipping away [in reference to his wife].

We have hope, but it's deferred.

Sixty of the psalms are laments…I'm grateful for the lament we see in Scripture–it's God helping us learn how to suffer well.

Compare Jesus with Buddha. The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism is suffering. It's not that there is suffering in a good world, but life is suffering. The Buddha's answer is to escape the world and enter nirvana through a change of consciousness–to depersonalize yourself and sort of float out of the world. There's no resurrection, no redemption, no savior. 

There's a difference between meaningless suffering and inscrutable suffering.

There's a verse in Ecclesiastes that says there's a time to give up [Eccl 3:1,6]…The Swiss psychiatrist Paul Tournier said that wisdom is knowing when to resist and when to surrender. 

I know too much to turn back from being a Christian.

Time after time, when I begin to lose sight of that [hope], I go back to apologetics–to the clear and compelling reasons to be confident that God exists, that Jesus is his unique Son, that the resurrection actually occurred, and therefore his promises to us–promises of hope and eventual healing–are true.

God has allowed me to see the world through tears, which is maybe the most authentic way to experience it.

I'm hanging by a thread, but, fortunately, the thread is knit by God. 

Doug Groothuis, "When Miracles Don't Happen," L. Strobel, The Case for Miracles (Zondervan 2018), chap. 13.

Religious pedigree

This post is occasioned by the question of whether Ahmadis are real Muslims. Because the late Nabeel Qureshi was the most high-profile Muslim convert to Christianity, Muslim apologists attempt to discredit his witness by claiming that Admadis aren't real Muslims. 

Since I'm not Muslim, I don't have a personal stake in that debate. But here's a defense of the Muslim pedigree of the Ahmadiyya sect.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qasim-rashid/10-fabrications-muslim-leaders-need-to-stop-making-about-ahmadi-muslims_b_5854492.html

This also goes to the question of whether Islam is essentially violent. Is the jihadist tradition baked in the cake? 

But it goes to larger questions, like Newman's theory of development. How do we distinguish authentic developments from inauthentic developments? 

From what I can tell, the Ahmadiyya sect is a variation or extension of Shia Islam, with its doctrine of the hidden Imam or occultation of the Madhi. But that just pushes the question back a step. Is Shia Islam an authentic or inauthentic development? When I read Muslim writers like Henry Corbin, René Guénon, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, with their esotericism and Neo-Platonism, a chain of intermediary Intelligences, and other paraphernalia, that's far removed from the provincial outlook of the 7C desert founder. Yet Ibn Sina was very eclectic. Conversely, Ibn Rushd was passionately Aristotelian. Are these authentic or inauthentic developments?  

Are members of the LDS the true Mormons, or members of the RLDS? 

Which is more authentic: Theravada Buddhism or Mahayana Buddhism? In Buddhist tradition, Gautama undergoes legendary embellishment, morphing into a surreal figure that's far removed from the historical Buddha. 

What about Hinduism? That's such a mishmash. 

There are different ways to analyze the question:

1. One criterion is logical consistency. For instance, modern Catholicism has undergone drastic reversals on major issues. Take salvation outside the church. The whole raison d'être for the priesthood is the presupposition that saving grace is channeled through the sacraments. To be saved, to be in a state of saving grace, you must receive valid sacraments. To receive valid sacraments, you must receive them from validly ordained priests. And valid holy orders is contingent on apostolic succession, the Roman episcopate and papacy. 

Once, however, you say that people can be saved apart from the sacraments, then the whole rationale for the sacraments, priesthood, episcopate, and papacy begins to unravel. And it's not just the occasional exception. Contemporary popes are verging on hopeful universalism. 

Likewise, contemporary popes are increasingly pacifistic. On a related note is their opposition to the death penalty. 

Yet another example is the contrast between the policies of anti-modernist popes regarding evolution, historicity and traditional authorship of Scripture and popes from Pius XII onward. 

From a logical standpoint, we can say these are inauthentic developments. "Inauthentic" in the sense that they are not valid inferences from traditional positions. To the contrary, they are logically inconsistent with traditional positions. 

2. Another criterion is truth. Muhammad, Swedenborg, Sun Myung Moon, and Joseph Smith were false prophets. From an alethic standpoint, it's nonsensical to ask what represents a true development of a false premise. All the sects of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Mormonism are factually false. That, however, is distinct from the question of logical development (see above).

From a Protestant perspective, Biblical revelation is our touchstone of truth. That's a way we distinguish authentic from inauthentic developments. 

3. Finally, there's the criterion of historical development. That's a loose criterion, but not meaningless. 

Let's use the metaphor of a card deck. The standard deck with 52 French cards. Four suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. 

Many card games are based on that standardized card deck. Even though different card games have different rules, what they all share in common is the same card deck. 

Compare that to Tarot cards. That's a different deck.

Another differential factor is the card sequence. That depends on the shuffle. How the game plays out dependends on the sequence of the cards that are dealt. If you reshuffle the deck, the game will play out differently. Likewise, if you deal from the bottom of the deck rather than the top of the deck. And, of course, how skilled the players are will affect the outcome.

In terms of truth and logical consistency, many developments in modern Catholicism are inauthentic. They are, however, distinctively Catholic developments in the sense that given the hand they dealt themselves, there are only so many ways to play that hand. The Catholic deck has certain cards that can be combined or recombined in different ways. A theological paradigm generates the available options. 

Catholicism has always been eclectic and syncretistic. It's possible for Rahner or von Balthasar to accentuate and elaborate a particular strand of Catholic tradition. Tradition can take on a life of its own, detached from fact and logic. 

But certain developments are not in the cards. Different religious traditions play with different decks of cards. If you reshuffled the deck, historical theology would take a different turn. 

Dropping the metaphor, if Christianity had originated in ancient China or India or Mesoamerica, that would reshuffle the deck. Church history would take a different course. Because Christianity originated in the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, historical theology interacted with, and adapted to, Greek philosophy as well as indigenous socio-economic, scientific, and political influences or challenges. 

As the Christian center of gravity shifts to the global south, that will reshuffle the deck. Closed questions in theology will be reopened. New heresies will arise, which generally duplicate old heresies. Christians in the global South will have to assess for themselves whether the legacy of Western theology represents an authentic development of the authoritative source (Scripture). 

The logistics of reincarnation

Recently I was considering some additional, internal problems with reincarnation:

i) If accounting for how some people allegedly remember past lives is a problem, then there's the opposite problem of accounting for why most folks have no recollection of former lives. That vastly outnumbers the people who say they remember a past life. So that poses a dilemma for the reincarnational explanation. 

ii) Reincarnation poses daunting logistical problems. Consider the timing. On the one hand, new bodies only become available for souls to reincarnate at the moment of conception. Conversely, souls only become available when the host dies. 

Since the timing of when people die and when people are conceived is random, how is it possible to coordinate the transfer of preexisting souls to new bodies? If reincarnation is true, wouldn't there be shortages in either direction? Bodiless souls and soulless bodies? Souls waiting for a body to become available and bodies waiting for a soul to become available? 

What's the mechanism that synchronizes death and conception so that a soul is freed up at the moment of death at the same time a couple in some part of the world succeeds in fertilizing an ovum? 

In theory, reincarnation could happen between conception and birth. But there's still going to be a logjam or bottleneck since there's no correspondence between when someone happens to die and when a baby happens to be conceived. Those are causally and chronologically independent events.

And what about preemies? Moreover, we keep pushing back viability. So the window for souls to reincarnate a new body is narrowing.  

Does every religion have its own Superman?

Argument from Superman: Every religion has its own Superman argument. Moroni, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, even Lao Tzu, are all claimed to have proved their religious teachings supernaturally true by miraculous demonstrations of their power. “Our Superman exists; therefore our God exists.” 

http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11868#superman

This is Richard Carrier's attempt to "destroy" an argument for God. But so many things go awry in his comparison:

i) In the same post, he accusing Christians of cherry-picking the evidence, yet he himself is cherry-picking the evidence. There are founders of notable cults or religious movements who aren't' claimed to have proven their teachings supernaturally true by miraculous demonstrations, viz. Anthroposophy, Aum Shinrikyo, British Israelism, Chabad, Jehovah's Witnesses, Moonies, Nation of Islam, Raëlism, Scientology.

ii) Carrier seems to be listing founders of religious movements. If that's his intention, then it's unclear why he includes Moroni on the list. Obviously, that's an allusion to Mormonism. However, the founder of Mormonism is Joseph Smith, or perhaps more accurately, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were the cofounders of Mormonism. As for reputed miracles, it would be necessary to sift the documentary evidence. Keep in mind that Smith was a classic conman. His reputation precedes him. You'd must also consider whether his cronies had a financial stake in vouching for him.  

Maroni is reputedly the angel who appeared to Joseph Smith. But if, by Carrier's logic, that makes Moroni the founder of Mormonism, does that make the Angel of the Lord who appeared to Moses (Exod 3) the founder of Judaism? It's hard to see that Carrier is using a consistent principle when he includes Moroni on his list. Perhaps Carrier is simply confused. Maybe he meant to say Joseph Smith, but because he associates Moroni with Mormonism, he confounded Smith with Moroni. 

iii) If his intention is to list founders of religious movements, it's questionable to classify Moses as the founder of Judaism. Assuming Judaism has a founder, Abraham is as much a founder of Judaism as Moses. Perhaps we might classify Abraham and Moses as cofounders of Judaism. But Abraham didn't perform miracles. David is another central figure in Judaism, but David didn't perform miracles. It would really be more accurate to say Yahweh was the founder of Judaism. 

iv) There are no miracles attributed to Muhammed in the Koran. It's only in later Muslim tradition that Muhammad undergoes legendary embellishment as a miracle worker. 

v) "Superman" suggests an agent with innate superhuman abilities. By contrast, Moses is empowered to perform miracles. Moses is not a "Superman" in his own right. He's just an ordinary human being. 

vi) By contrast, Jesus does haven't innate superhuman abilities. That's because Jesus is God Incarnate. But that makes Jesus unique compared to the other founders on the list. So that example is disanalogous rather than analogous.

vii) Moreover, Jesus performed many public miracles. There were multiple witnesses. Furthermore, Jesus was a 1C figure, for which we have multiple 1C sources. Carrier needs to show comparable evidence in the case of Buddha and Lao Tzu. 

viii) It's true that miracles are attributed to Buddha. Buddha undergoes legendary embellishment. That's true in part because the sources for the historical Buddha are so far removed from his own time. They aren't reliably connected to the historical Buddha. As such, they can take on a life of their own.

In addition, Buddhism is mainly a religion of ideas rather than events, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian faith, which is primarily a religion of events rather than ideas. Buddhism was never essentially rooted in a historical figure. In principle, Buddhism could still exist even if Buddha never existed, for Buddhism is based on Buddha's "insight" regarding the problem of suffering. He's the founder of that religious movement because he's the first person to have that particular take on the problem of suffering (the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path). But, in principle, anyone could independently hit upon that idea. By contrast, Christianity is subject to historical controls. 

ix) I don't rule out the possibility that some Buddhist or Taoist adepts might exhibit paranormal phenomena. The occult is a potential source of paranormal phenomena. That wouldn't disprove Christianity, for Christian makes allowance for supernatural agents other than God, including evil spirits. 

To Appreciate Christmas, Read The Quran

I want to expand on Steve's recent post about competing miracle claims. One way to falsify the ridiculous skeptical suggestion that Christianity's miracles aren't significantly different than the competing miracles of other belief systems is to set Christianity next to each of its primary competitors, one-by-one, and see how they contrast. Islam, the second largest religion in the world and, in that sense, Christianity's biggest competitor, provides a good illustration. Contrast Jesus' credentials to the lack of credentials for Muhammad. Contrast Biblical prophecy to the Quran's lack of anything comparable and the pathetic nature of Islam's attempts to come up with something comparable. Contrast Muhammad's credibility problems to the credibility of early Christian leaders like Paul and James (former opponents who converted upon eyewitnessing the resurrected Christ and died as martyrs) and Luke (a demonstrably reliable historian who goes into a lot of historical detail in his writings). Contrast the vagueness and lack of historical context, names of individuals, place names, etc. in the Quran to the large amount of such details in the gospels, Acts, Paul's letters, and other Biblical documents. And so on. The idea that the credibility of Christianity and that of Islam are comparable is absurd. The claim that the two are comparable undermines the credibility of the person making the claim.

I referred to how large Christianity and Islam are. Their size doesn't, by itself, prove that either is true. But it is a significant factor that should be taken into account. The fact that Christianity is the largest religious movement in the history of the world gives it a lot of plausibility as a candidate for a Divinely-revealed religion, more than any of its competitors. The vast majority of Christianity's competitors down through the centuries either don't exist any longer or are far smaller. The largeness of Christianity takes on even more significance when you consider how the religion's growth was so unlikely and fulfills some unusual prophecies. I wrote about this subject several years ago in a couple of posts at Christmastime (here and here). The opening of Isaiah's Suffering Servant prophecy (52:13-5) is especially striking. You wouldn't expect a Jewish Messiah to initially be rejected by most of the Jewish people, then become widely accepted among Gentiles, including Gentile rulers. (For more about the Suffering Servant prophecy in general, see here. Not only is Jesus' rejection by the Jewish people and influence on the Gentile world beyond reasonable dispute and something that continues to unfold in modern times, but other aspects of Jesus' life that fulfill the prophecy are also highly evidenced: his crucifixion, the earliness of the belief that his death was intended to make atonement for the sins of others, etc. Isaiah's prophecy is detailed enough to single out Jesus among the billions of people who have lived throughout history.)

You'll have a greater appreciation of Jesus and his prophecy fulfillments at the time of his birth and his other miracles if you contrast them to what we see in Islam and other competitors. The large majority of those competitors are on the ash heap of history while Jesus grows increasingly "great to the ends of the earth" (Micah 5:4).