Faith and Science: Observation, and Interpretation | Tim McGrew

Hume's Critique of Reported Miracles | Tim McGrew

Are undesigned coincidences fabricated?

One objection to the Gospels as historical sources is the claim that these aren't four independent biographies. rather Matthew and Luke simply copy Mark for some of their material, while John invents other stuff. Likewise, that Matthew and Luke embellish Mark's stories. 

It is, of course, true, that Luke uses Mark as one of his sources while Matthew is very familiar with Mark. But there's more going on.

When two or more observers witness the same event, their respective accounts will sometimes dovetail in subtle ways. Between 23-26 min mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QqWPcq8z0&t=5s

Peter Williams has a clear exposition. I'm going to piggyback on his exposition. The basic idea is that undesigned coincides reflect independent knowledge of the same event. 

Critics like Richard Carrier have responded by claiming that Matthew, Luke, and John invented the "undesigned coincidences" to give these accounts the appearance of factuality. In historical fiction, the author sprinkles his story with factoids to make it seem more true to the time and place.

However, a basic flaw in that response is that undesigned coincidences are far too subtle for the vast majority in the audience to catch. To begin with, most members of the original target audience for the Gospels didn't own personal copies of the Gospel. That's why the the public reading of Scripture is an ancient custom of the church. We're talking about listeners rather than readers. They heard the Gospels read aloud. Imagine mentally comparing and contrasting the Gospels at the level of undesigned coincidences. How realistic is that? 

But even when we get to the era in which many Christians have private copies of the Bible, the coincides are too oblique for the vast majority of Christians to notice. You must be an extremely attentive reader to pick up on the coincidences. If the purpose of undesigned coincidences was to make the accounts look factual, this is a completely ineffective method inasmuch as precious few readers are sufficiently observant to register the coincidences. What historical fiction authors do that? 

Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Q&A Panel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06NtOP84rXo&app=desktop

Rounding Off My Response to Richard Carrier On Undesigned Coincidences (Part 6)

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/04/rounding-off-my-response-to-richard.html

External Coincidences and Acts of the Apostles: Responding to Richard Carrier (Part 5)

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/03/external-coincidences-and-acts-of.html

Is Redaction Usually the Better Hypothesis? Responding to Richard Carrier (Part 4)

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/03/is-redaction-usually-better-hypothesis.html

Who Has Fabricated Data -- Lydia McGrew or Richard Carrier? (Part 3)

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/03/who-has-fabricated-data-lydia-mcgrew-or.html

Can Scribal Errors Account for Undesigned Coincidences? Responding to Richard Carrier (Part 2)

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/03/can-scribal-errors-account-for.html

Yes, Richard Carrier, There Are Undesigned Coincidences (Part 1)

http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2020/03/yes-richard-carrier-there-are.html

Indefinite social distancing

Tim McGrew

Here's an article that suggests things I can't endorse.

I'm all in favor of flattening the curve. I'm doing my part to promote–and to model–early voluntary measures to that end.

But the costs at multiple levels are already very high. And we are going to have to come to grips with the fact that certain proposals now on the table -- such as that we maintain, perhaps with little breaks, something like the present level of social distancing for 18 months–would come with a catastrophic price tag in human lives.

From farming to food distribution and logistics to infrastructure and public works to ventilator manufacture, large-scale, long-term slowdowns are going to create grave problems. Some people who would otherwise have lived out normal lives are going to die, not from COVID-19 itself, but from the domino effects from these other issues.

I have doubts whether we can maintain even the current level of closure for three months, both because of the dire economic costs and because people simply won't abide by it. If we do it for that long, assuming that the virus has been brought under control, we will find when we go back to our normal levels of social contact that many businesses are shuttered permanently. A vast number of people will be out of work. Some simple things to which many of us have been accustomed will be unavailable or prohibitively expensive, and maybe not just for the short term. Extrapolating those consequences to 18 months simply boggles the mind.

I don't have a solution to sell you. There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs and compromises. But some trade-offs are worse than others. It is going to take both knowledge and wisdom for us to figure out a long-term strategy.

https://www.facebook.com/tim.mcgrew.77/posts/2802734166443152

Do Miracles Happen Today? Dr. Tim McGrew Weighs In

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

McGrew/Gilson on the Gospels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecrt7EqBRdc

Was Jesus Buried in Joseph of Arimathea's New Tomb?

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2019/03/was_jesus_buried_in_joseph_of.html

Did Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot of the cross?

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2019/03/did_jesus_mother_and_the_belov.html

Was there a guard at Jesus’ tomb?

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2019/02/guest_post_was_there_a_guard_a.html

Special providences

I often write about coincidence miracles. In an earlier age these went by the name of special providences. Here's a nice compact definition:

What used to be called "special providences," in which the extraordinary element lies not in any obvious violation of the causal closure of the physical world but rather in the auspicious timing of apparently independent events. Timothy McGrew, "Arguments from Providence and from Miracles: The State of the Art and the Uses of History," J.Walls & T. Dougherty, eds. Two Dozen (of so) Arguments for God (Oxford 2018), 345.

Agency detection

Atheists dismiss reports of answered prayer and miracles as, at best, coincidence. Sometimes they invoke the law of large numbers. 

But do atheists have any principled way to distinguish a coincidence from a noncoincidence? If they don't, then it's arbitrary for an atheist to automatically discount reports of answered prayer or miracles as sheer coincidence. Before proceeding, I'll quote two concrete examples: 

Nature miracles

Graham H. Twelftree, ed.  The Nature Miracles of Jesus: Problems, Perspectives, and Prospects.  Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017

Craig Keener offers what is the most impressive chapter in the volume.  As he has done in his major two-volume work on miracles and in several subsequent journal articles, Keener offers a representative collection of examples (including some new ones) of well-documented and very credible contemporary parallels to the major categories of the nature miracles in the Gospels:  instantaneous, helpful changes in the weather after public Christian prayer or prophecy, multiplication of food, extraordinary fish catches, water turning into wine, and walking on water.  Other miracles could only happen after certain modern inventions—a life-saving journey in a car filled only with water after it had run out of gas to make it safely to the next village in the central African bush, for example.  

Tim McGrew focuses on the resurrection of Humean arguments in New Testament scholarship in an age when most philosophers have recognized their illegitimacy.  He rehearses the major fallacies in each of them and reminds us that Hume’s critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth century already highlighted these flaws.  More interdisciplinary work is needed so that scholars in one discipline will come to recognize the contributions of the other.  But McGrew also finds Keener’s approach part of a growing body of literature that has documented miracles even in the Western world, even under the scrutiny of hospital doctors.  Ironically, it may turn out that we can accept Hume’s stricture that we must have analogies in our own experience of reported events to be able to accept them because of the mounting contemporary evidence that miracles like those in the Gospels still happen.

It should come as no surprise, in light of my own writings, that I find Keener’s and McGrew’s contributions the most valuable of the collection.  I have personally witnessed inexplicable healings and have had analogies to nature miracles described to me by close friends and family members in contexts that make them virtually impossible to doubt. 

Craig Blomberg

https://denverseminary.edu/resources/news-and-articles/the-nature-miracles-of-jesus-problems-perspectives-and-prospects/

How to think about miracles