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Monday, January 02, 2006

The confutation of atheism-6

“Apparantly you’d rather water down Justin’s specification that what the Christians believe about Jesus is no different than what they believe about their gods, instead of taking Justin seriously…”

The fact that Justin may be a reliable source for what 2C Christians believed does not necessarily make him a reliable source for what 1C Christians believed. The NT is a 1C document.

Justin is also an authority on what 2C Jews of his acquaintance believed. That doesn’t make him an authority on what 1C Jews believed.

“But Justin Martyr was about 1900 years closer to the sources than are you ‘moder comparative mythologists’. Until you have some serious evidence to dispute Justin’s argument from parallels, the pagan-copy-cat-thesis stands. ‘NOTHING DIFFERENT’, remember?”

Justin is writing as an apologist, not an exegete. Justin is not an authority on Second Temple Judaism—the intellectual milieu within which the NT was composed. Justin is not an authority on the original intent of the Gospel writers.

As an apologist, Justin is seeking a point of common ground with pagans. That is known as audience adaptation. His accommodation has nothing to do with exegesis. It is simply an apologetic strategy for reaching his audience. And it comes naturally to him since he was raised as a pagan rather than a Jew.

“All that need be established is that Jesus fits the motif and that at least SOME of the parallels to jesus, existed BEFORE Jesus did, which is what Justin does for us when he cites retro-active demon activity before Christ to explain why Christ, coming later, looks so much like them. He would hardly refer to the activity of demons BEFORE THE BIRTH OF JESUS, in creating those parallels, if it is true, as apologists say, that the pagan stories mimicking Jesus only came AFTER Christianity.”

Justin is no authority on the history of Greco-Roman mythology. He is only an authority on Greco-Roman mythology as it was disseminated in his own time and place. Ancient writers had a very shaky grasp of historical chronology. Justin is no expert on when or where a given Greek or Roman myth originated.

Modern scholars often have a much better grasp of historical chronology and cultural diffusion than do ancient writers.

“I already explained that. Justin was citing the parallels to show that Jesus should be believed by the Greeks, if their criteria for a true god-man was virgin-birth, miracles, resurrection, ascension, etc. If that was the case, Justin is arguing that that Jesus is “in no way inferior” to them. Yet while he uses the close parallels in a different way for a different audience, that doesn’t erase a single one of them.”

Which bears out my point about audience adaptation and apologetic strategy.

“God appeared as a man many times in the Old Testament, so the only thing going for the “she was still a virgin after conception” is the question begging reliance on Matthew and Luke, who records in this case are the very question at issue.”

No, God appears as an angel in the OT. And in the NT accounts of the virgin birth it is the Holy Spirit who comes upon Mary.

“This is a general statement, which cannot be logically used to refute a specific statement, and Justin cites numerous specific parallels which merit closer inspection than just saying humans have a tendency to think the same way about stuff all over the world.”

True, and conservative scholar has subjected the alleged parallels to minute scrutiny and found them entirely wanting.

“I fail to see how any of this refutes my ‘present is key to past’ principle. Your professor wouldn’t even be able to compile his notes for that lecture nor could you even know what college you are supposed to be attending let alone what class you should be sitting in, if you reject ‘the present is the key to the past’. Sounds like pretty solid criteria to me.”

Dave continues to indulge in his bait-and-switch tactic. I don’t think any of us would deny that the past resembles the present. But that is not interchangeable with a closed causal continuum. As Jason and I have pointed out on more than one occasion, a Christian can well believe that God continues to perform miracles.

The fact that Dave constantly blurs this elementary distinction shows what a weak hand he has.

“If one of my friends said they won the Lottory for 10 million, I’d call him a liar to his face until he showed me a ridiculously sized bank account in his name.”

This says a lot about his choice of friends. With an attitude like that it’s surprising that he has any friends left.

Despite the odds, people do win the lottery. Despite the odds, it’s inevitable that someone will win the lottery—sooner or later. For Dave’s initial reaction to be the accusation that his friend is a liar until proven otherwise shows just how deeply irrational his atheism truly is.

“You have thousands of eyewitnesses to the appearance of Mary in Fatima Portugal, and you don’t believe ONE of them because you say they have seriously misinterpreted the evidence. So YOU are your own worst enemy when it comes to having thousands of eyewitness reports of a miracle.”

Let’s remember that Jason was responding to the following statement:

“That's exactly right. If 6,000 people swore on a stack of bibles that they saw someone walking on water, I would rest upon the confirmed physical laws to laugh in their faces.”

So Jason was responding to the knee-jerk assertion that eyewitness testimony can never, under any circumstances, overthrow Dave’s commitment to the principle of uniformity.

Jason’s position is not that we should always believe eyewitness testimony. There are additional considerations, to be weighed on a case-by-case basis. What I think Jason is objecting to is the preemptory dismissal of eyewitness testimony, however great the quality or quantity.

The confirmation of a physical law is, itself, dependent on human observation over time.

“The readers should know, also, that Jason E’s latest arguments in this thread are largely repetitions of what he argued earlier.”

Even if this were true, it is often necessary to repeat oneself when your opponent has raised an objection which you’ve answered, and he ignores your answer.

But, beyond that, Jason has, in fact, brought in a good deal of additional supporting material to substantiate his original arguments:

The Christian philosopher William Craig, who specializes in the study of Jesus' resurrection, has written some good responses to the sort of reasoning we're seeing from Dave Wave:

"The problem here can best be understood, I think, as a disagreement over what sort of explanations constitute live options for a best explanation of the facts. According to the pattern of inductive reasoning known as inference to the best explanation, in explaining a body of data, we first assemble a pool of live options and then pick from the pool, on the basis of certain criteria, that explanation which, if true, would best explain the data. The problem at hand is that scientific naturalists will not permit supernatural explanations even to be in the pool of live options. By contrast, I am open to scientific naturalistic explanations in the sense that I include naturalistic explanations in the pool of live options, for I assess such a explanations using the standard criteria for being a best explanation rather than dismiss such hypotheses out of hand. But [atheistic scholar Gerd] Lüdemann is so sure that supernatural explanations are wrong that he thinks himself justified in no longer being open to them: they cannot even be permitted into the pool of live options. But, of course, if only naturalistic explanations are permitted into the pool of live options, then the claim or proof that the Hallucination Hypothesis is the best explanation is hollow. For I could happily admit that of all the naturalistic explanations on tap, the best naturalistic explanation is the Hallucination Hypothesis. But, of course, the question is not whether the Hallucination Hypothesis is the best naturalistic explanation, but whether it is true. After all, we are interested in veracity, not orthodoxy (whether naturalistic or supernaturalistic). So in order to be sure that he is not excluding the true theory from even being considered, Lüdemann had better have pretty good reasons for limiting the pool of live options to naturalistic explanations. So what justification does Dr. Lüdemann give for this crucial presupposition of the inadmissibility of miracles? All he offers is a couple of one–sentence allusions to Hume and Kant….Now Lüdemann's procedure here of merely dropping names of famous philosophers is sadly all too typical of theologians….Hume’s argument against miracles was already refuted in the 18th century by Paley, Less, and Campbell, and most contemporary philosophers also reject it as fallacious, including such prominent philosophers of science as Richard Swinburne and John Earman and analytic philosophers such as George Mavrodes and William Alston. Even the atheist philosopher Antony Flew, himself a Hume scholar, admits that Hume’s argument is defective as it stands. As for philosophical realism, this is in fact the dominant view among philosophers today, at least in the analytic tradition. So if Lüdemann wants to reject the historicity of miracles on the basis of Hume and Kant, then he’s got a lot of explaining to do. Otherwise, his rejection of the resurrection hypothesis is based on a groundless presupposition. Reject that presupposition, and it’s pretty hard to deny that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of the facts." ("Visions of Jesus")

"Contrary to [Michael] Goulder, it is not the case that a supernatural explanation should be considered only 'when totally at a loss for a natural one' (p. 102), for, after all, any explanation has some explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, etc. To say that one must be totally at a loss is a subterfuge for saying that we should never consider a supernatural explanation. Rather, as [Stephen] Davis suggests, one may adopt a supernatural explanation just in case all natural explanations fail to meet as successfully the criteria for a best explanation as a supernatural one. Davis goes on to explain that a proper understanding of the concept of miracle involves neither a violation of natural laws nor denial of the scientific method (pp. 74-75; cf. p. 105). Davis rightly recognizes that at root the question of miracles is whether supernaturalism is tenable, or a live option (p. 76)." (in Paul Copan and Ronald Tacelli, editors, Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? [Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000], p. 203)

Regarding alleged pagan parallels to the virgin birth account, Craig Keener has written:

"Yet most alleged parallels to the virgin birth (see Allen 1977: 19; Soares Prabhu 1976: 5-6; cf. Grant 1986: 64) are hopelessly distant, at best representing supernatural births of some kind (Barrett 1966: 6-10; Brown 1977: 522-23; Davies and Allison 1988: 214-15; Hagner 1993: 17; even further are ancient biological views, e.g., Arist. Gen. An. 3.6.5; Ep. Arist. 165). Certainly pagan stories of divine impregnation, which typically involve seduction (e.g., Ovid Metam. 3.260-61) or rape (Ovid Metam. 3.1-2), bear no resemblance to a virgin birth. Even most proposed Jewish parallels (Daube 1973: 6-9; cf. also 2 Enoch 71; Gen. Rab. 53:6) are too late or on closer examination have little merit (cf. Brown 1977: 523-24); Philo’s claims that God supernaturally opened wombs (Schweizer 1975: 33; cf. Vermes 1973: 220) probably simply imply that only God can provide conception (cf. Gen 30:2; cf. Meier 1991a: 221-22)." (A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999], pp. 83-84)

Ben Witherington comments that "most scholars" think that the infancy narratives are more like Jewish infancy narratives than pagan birth legends (in Joel B. Green, et al., editors, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels [Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1992], p. 60). Darrell Bock writes that there’s a "consensus" among scholars to reject the view that the virgin birth was derived from pagan mythology (Luke, Volume 1, 1:1-9:50 [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994], n. 4 on p. 103).

And if Dave Wave wants to cite Justin Martyr, he ought to include what Justin said elsewhere about the uniqueness of the virgin birth account:

"Now it is evident to all, that in the race of Abraham according to the flesh no one has been born of a virgin, or is said to have been born of a virgin, save this our Christ." (Dialogue With Trypho, 66)

As Craig Blomberg explains:

"A careful reading of the patristic evidence suggests that indeed the vast majority of early Christians did believe that the type of information the Gospel writers communicated was historical fact, even as they recognized the more superficial parallels with the mythology of other worldviews" (cited in Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2004], p. 327, n. 27)

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