Triablogue: Tim McGrew

Showing posts with label Tim McGrew. Show all posts

Monday, April 05, 2021

A Good Discussion Of Many Resurrection Issues

Last week, Jonathan McLatchie did a question and answer session with Tim and Lydia McGrew on Jesus' resurrection. A lot of issues came up during the discussion, and it's worth watching.

You may also want to occasionally check Lydia's YouTube channel for updates, since she keeps adding new videos, like her recent ones on the historicity of the fourth gospel.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Some Examples Of Undesigned Coincidences

A series of brief videos providing examples of undesigned coincidences was recently posted to Lydia McGrew's YouTube channel. It's a good introduction to the subject. You can click on each of the video links below. For a book-length treatment, go here.

One: What An Undesigned Coincidence Is
Two: Destroy This Temple
Three: Did Jesus Need GPS?
Four: Do You Love Me More Than These?
Five: How Did King David Lose One Of His Best Friends?
Six: I Am Among You As One Who Serves
Seven: So, You're A King?
Eight: The Feeding Of The 5000
Nine: The Nazareth Inscription
Ten: Was Paul A Slacker?
Eleven: Was Timothy Jewish Or Greek?
Twelve: What Happens When You Try To Lay A Trap For Jesus?
Thirteen: What Herod Said To His Servants
Fourteen: Why Is It Hard To Get Churches Interested In Apologetics?
Fifteen: Why Would Jesus Be Rude?

Saturday, June 20, 2020

A few more tributes to Steve Hays

I recently saw some more tributes to Steve Hays that I thought would be worth linking to. However some are on Facebook so they might not be accessible to everyone. Please feel free to post more in the comments if there are others worth reading.

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Faith and Science: Observation, and Interpretation | Tim McGrew

Monday, January 27, 2020

Timothy McGrew on historicity of the Gospels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjjiW2DrbGw&app=desktop

Sunday, November 17, 2019

Do Miracles Happen Today? Dr. Tim McGrew Weighs In

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sWXFuBdMk&t=18s

Monday, November 04, 2019

The Face of Miracles

William Dembski has co-authored (with Alex Thomas) an ebook titled The Face of Miracles:

The Faces of Miracles is an eBook written by Bill Dembski and Alex Thomas. It will be presented on this blog, BillDembski.com, over the next four months (November 2019 thru February 2020), with new installments typically appearing on Mondays.

You can read the Introduction now.

I don't know if I'll agree with what Dembski and Thomas have to say, but it'll likely be quite thought-provoking. Dembski is a highly intelligent and refreshingly independent thinker.

Speaking of miracles and related phenomena (e.g. NDEs), I've most appreciated what Jason Engwer, Steve Hays, Robert Larmer, and Tim McGrew have said on these topics. I don't know what Dembski has planned, but it would be good to see Dembski interact with what they've written. Jason and Steve's material is available on Triablogue, while Larmer and McGrew have published academic articles and books (e.g. The Legitimacy of Miracle, the SEP entry on miracles).

Friday, May 24, 2019

Dr. McGrew on extraordinary claims

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Naturalized miracles

I was asked me how to respond to the counter that purported events like the Resurrection might happen, yet not be miraculous, but be due to some as of yet undiscovered natural cause or process.

One problem with that explanation is that there are so many different kinds of well-documented miracles. So an atheist must postulate so many undiscovered natural causes.

In addition, I ran the question by three philosophers who specialize in the philosophy of miracles. They indicated that it's okay to share their responses:

Naturalism of the gaps. That's not applying all evidence and inferring the best explanation. Actually, the more science progresses, the lower the probability of such a thing becomes. We now know *why* the dead do not spontaneously rise by natural causes, in ever-greater detail. Cellular death, denaturing of proteins, bacterial activity, etc.

If we discovered robots on another planet, we could hold out indefinitely for "some natural cause," but that wouldn't be rational. People are always able to be irrational (and often are irrational). That doesn't make it epistemically legitimate.

– Lydia McGrew

In our Blackwell paper, Lydia and I consider a number of such attempts to give a non-miraculous account of the evidence. The short answer is that they do not account for that evidence nearly as well as the resurrection itself does.

A slightly longer answer is that there is no better way to evaluate such hypotheses than to look at the evidence in detail and consider the hypotheses on a case-by-case basis. For some miracle claims -- the Hindu milk miracle comes to mind -- there is a superior naturalistic explanation. (Lydia recreated the Hindu milk miracle in our kitchen with a spoonful of water and a piece of unglazed tile. No statue of Ganesh was required.) For others, this option turns out not to be true.

As far as an undiscovered natural cause, anybody can postulate that possibility for anything whatsoever. Perhaps there's an undiscovered natural cause that makes it look like the Earth orbits the sun even though in fact Ptolemaic astronomy is true. Perhaps there's an undiscovered natural cause that makes it look like the Earth isn't flat even though -- surprise! -- it is. Perhaps there's an undiscovered natural cause that generates all of the evidence we have that the universe is billions of years old even though it isn't. Perhaps there's an undiscovered natural cause that makes it look like Jesus miraculously rose from the dead even though his coming back to life was just a very, very rare natural event, and it was just lucky that this purely natural event happened to look like the culmination of many centuries of increasingly specific prophecy.

– Timothy McGrew

I think you will find that in chapter four of The Legitimacy of Miracle I discuss that suggestion at length. The basic point is that the progress of science has made such a suggestion less convincing rather than more. The more we know about human physiology the harder it becomes to suggest such a counter. Similarly with other miracles. We know, for example, a lot more about the chemistry of wine than we did two thousand years ago but that makes it harder, rather than easier to give a natural explanation of how water could turn into wine at the spoken word of Jesus. If one is positing some natural process for such an event or the resurrection then one needs to explain why that process only worked in that unique instance. Note also that positing such a process is simply a promissory note. Presumably, the only reason to trust such a promissory note is the inductive argument that science has been successful in the past. This fails, however, in that it makes no distinction between nomological and historical science. The fact that pigeons are easy to catch does not provide a good inductive argument that foxes are easy to catch. Analogously, the fact that regular law-like events are susceptible of natural explanations provides no reason to think that events such as the resurrection, Jesus walking on water, the virgin birth, or the origin of life are susceptible of natural explanations. So the progress of science argument really cuts the other way. Everything we know makes natural explanations of such events less plausible than more.

The alternative for the naturalist is to suggest not that there is some repeatable identifiable natural process that will explain why dead people generally stay dead, but Jesus did not, but rather to claim Jesus's return to life was a chance event. Given the reluctance of scientifically literate naturalists to accept the chance origin of life - because the probabilities are so minuscule they are desperately attempting to find some natural process that will not have to invoke chance - such an alternative smacks of hopelessness.

– Robert Larmer

Friday, February 15, 2019

Dichotomized faith

Lydia

Philosophers of science are well aware that a theory does not need to have answers to all anomalies in order to be well-supported and rationally accepted. We have ample, to my mind overwhelming, evidence, quite independent of our response to the question of the Canaanite slaughters, that God exists, that He is loving and all-good, that His goal is to redeem mankind, and that Jesus is God the Son who reveals the loving Father to us. That means that we can handle points where we do not know the answer while still retaining a robust confidence in the truth of Christianity. It is a brittle and irrational approach that says, "You must have an answer to everything or else your faith is vain and not founded on fact." Being an evidentialist, as I am, does not at all mean having to have all answers to all questions. On the contrary, it means viewing the totality of the evidence one has and trying, to the best of one's ability, to come to an intelligent and judicious conclusion. I believe that any fair-minded inquirer who investigates the evidence for Christianity will come to believe it to be true. This means believing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the one true God and is a necessarily good and perfect God, worthy of all worship.

Tim McGrew on street epistemology

http://capturingchristianity.com/cc008-tim-mcgrew-and-i-discuss-street-epistemology/

Tuesday, May 08, 2018

On minimalism, the resurrection, and more: Response to Dr. Craig's podcast

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2018/05/response_to_dr_craigs_podcast.html

There's a striking contrast here between Craig's engagement and Licona hiding under his bed.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Quest for the historical Licona

Over at veracityhill.com, Kurt Jaros is initiating a series in which he attempts to rebut the alleged misrepresentations of Michael Licona by the McGrew clan. Unfortunately, Kurt is operating with a woodenly literal ipsissima verba paradigm of the historical Licona. But what if the McGrews actually operate with an ipsissima vox paradigm, in the exemplary tradition of Thucydides? Indeed, a "broad view" of ipsissima vox?

Unfortunately, Kurt's allegations suffer from a flat reading of the McGrews. He's failed to make due allowance for narrative art, narrative plot, and the McGrewian sense of irony. Their analysis of the historical Licona is not a misunderstanding or misrepresentation, but a dynamic equivalent transmogrification, so that even if they don't look at all alike, yet beneath the surface, at a deeper level, they bear almost exactly the same meaning.

Tim McGrew fielding atheists, part deux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtZQFChmSqw

Monday, April 23, 2018

Collusion?

Today I saw Timothy McGrew's presentation on the Gospels at the Stand Firm conference:

http://projectthreesixty.org/index.php/2018/04/23/why-are-there-differences-in-the-gospels/

He did that last month (March 24). I did two posts on the same subject this month (4/18 & 4/19):

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-broad-view-of-ipsissima-vox.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/04/silly-putty-jesus.html

There's so much conceptual overlap between his presentation and my two posts. We both quote from the two Wallace papers. We use very similar arguments.

A redaction critic would assume some literary interdependence. I redacted him or he redacted me.

But he didn't have access to my posts since his presentation was given 3 weeks before, while I didn't have access to his presentation, which was only uploaded onto the internet today (at least, that's when I first saw it). And I only had access to the Wallace papers as of 4/17.

What are the odds that my posts are independent of his presentation, and vice versa? What are the odds the we're both quoting from Wallace's two articles, less than a month apart? Just coincidental? How to account for the parallels.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the timing actually precludes comparing notes. That illustrates the pitfalls of redaction criticism.

Why are there differences in the Gospels?