Enfield Miscellany (Part 2)

(For an explanation of what this series is about, see part 1 here. I'll cite Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes below. I'm using "MG" to refer to a tape from Grosse's collection and "GP" to refer to one from Playfair's. MG13A refers to tape 13A in Grosse's collection, GP44A refers to 44A in Playfair's, and so forth.)

Apports And Teleportation

Objects would often appear in a paranormal way, such as by seemingly falling from a ceiling. Probably the most significant apports in the case were the ones that occurred on May 30, 1978, which I've discussed before (e.g., here) and are discussed in Playfair's book (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 226-27). A particularly significant episode on another occasion involved a large number of objects appearing from the ceiling and walls of the main bedroom upstairs, witnessed by a few members of the family, including Peggy Hodgson (MG84A, 4:28). The items included marbles, pieces of plastic, and Legos. Apparently, a lot of them came out of the ceiling and walls in rapid succession within a short period of time. The poltergeist would sometimes make coins appear, often dropping them from a ceiling. Talking to the poltergeist voice on one occasion, Grosse commented, "But I want to know how you make them [coins] come into this house and drop from the air onto the floor. I mean, we've seen this happen, and I've got some of those pennies." (GP24B, 4:55) Playfair refers to how John Burcombe saw a coin drop in front of him (GP26B, 23:43). Billy Hodgson saw a coin fall from a ceiling as well (MG59B, 49:25). Peggy and Margaret Hodgson saw some plastic spoons appear in a standing position (GP51A, 5:30). Shortly after (6:59), Peggy discusses an incident in which some ice cubes from the Nottinghams' house teleported through a wall into the Hodgsons' kitchen. In another context, Peggy was looking for Billy's socks, and they apparently were teleported to her and dropped at her feet while she was in one of the other bedrooms by herself (MG48A, 42:49, 44:02)! Peggy also mentions that a coin dropped around the same time the socks appeared. There were many other such incidents, like the teleportation of a cushion onto the roof on December 15, 1977, which I've discussed before. I'm just providing several examples here.

Snowman

The poltergeist voice calls Grosse "snowman" on one occasion (MG51A, 14:27). I don't think it called him or anybody else a snowman at any other point. He responded by saying he's never been called that before, and he didn't seem to understand why the voice was doing it. I suspect the poltergeist was referring to Grosse's resemblance to Sam the Snowman from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas program:

They have similar mustaches, and both wear dress clothes. I don't remember ever seeing a photograph or video of Grosse at the Hodgsons' house without a suit and tie. (Even when wrestling with Janet while she was in a trance state!) Those kinds of similarities are probably enough to explain the voice's comment, especially since the comment was made during a Christmas season (December 19, 1977), and the voice made television references in other contexts.

Interview with James N. Anderson, author of DAVID HUME

https://www.booksataglance.com/author-interviews/interview-with-james-n-anderson-author-of-david-hume/

The Bad Roots And Fruits Of Polygamy In Scripture And History

Southern Seminary recently put out a brief video by Peter Gentry on polygamy in the Bible. He makes some good points, and his argument is somewhat reminiscent of an article Matthew Schultz wrote on polygamy several years ago. You can also read my thread here that addresses polygamy in the Old and New Testaments and in patristic Christianity.

For a discussion of some of the reasons why it's important to be informed about polygamy in our culture, see this article by Andrew Dugan of Gallup. He not only notes that polygamy has become significantly more accepted by Americans in recent years, but also explains that their change in opinion seems to have been influenced by television (and surely other sources of a similar nature). He notes that acceptance of polygamy is especially high among the non-religious, being accepted by almost a third of those who don't affiliate themselves with any religion.

That article by Dugan was written in 2017. Here's a listing of Gallup's results on moral issues year-by-year. Polygamy went up to 19% acceptance in 2018 and is at 18% this year.

The Mirror Or The Mask

Lydia McGrew's book on literary devices and the gospels, The Mirror Or The Mask (Tampa, Florida: DeWard, 2019), just came out. It makes some references to Steve Hays and Triablogue.

taking a break

I've been blogging nonstop for 15 years. I'll probably take a break for Christmastide.

A flat earth

https://historyforatheists.com/2016/06/the-great-myths-1-the-medieval-flat-earth/

How To Concisely Argue For A Traditional View Of Jesus' Childhood

There are a lot of ways to argue for a traditional view of the childhood of Jesus, and we've been making those arguments for a long time. But it's often helpful to be able to argue concisely for what you believe. That can be hard to do when a subject is as large and complicated as the earliest years of Jesus' life. We are addressing years of his life, after all, unlike the narrower focus of Easter, for example. But here are a few summary arguments I recommend using:

- Reliable sources on Jesus' childhood were available to the early Christians and their opponents for a long time. Close relatives of Jesus lived for more than half a century after his birth. For a discussion of the credibility of the early reports about Jesus' relatives in general, see here. Regarding how long individuals like Mary and James lived, see here and here. And those relatives held some prominent positions in the early church, as we see in Acts, Galatians 1:19, 2:9-12, 1 Corinthians 9:5, the letters of James and Jude, etc. Keep in mind that Jesus' relatives were critical of him at times, so his enemies would have had an interest in and ability to get information about his background from those relatives. Some of Jesus' neighbors, coworkers, and contemporaries in places like Bethlehem and Nazareth also would have lived past the time of his death, even for decades in some cases. The same is true of the religious authorities and others who opposed him and had him executed. Just as the early Christians passed on information from generation to generation, so did their enemies. The early Christians and their opponents produced many documents in the earliest decades of Christianity, not just the ones we possess today, as I argue here. And see here for some comments from Larry Hurtado about how the literacy of the early Christians is often underestimated.

- We have a lot of evidence for a traditional view of Jesus' childhood. Much of what the early Christians report about the childhood of Jesus meets modern historical standards, like multiple attestation, the criterion of embarrassment, and the criterion of coherence. For some examples, see here and here.

- There's a significant lack of support in the ancient sources for skeptical alternatives to a traditional Christian view of the childhood of Jesus. For example, the early opponents of Christianity not only don't seem to have opposed the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus, but even corroborated it. Not only does Celsus not agree with the popular modern notion that the virgin birth claim didn't arise until decades after Jesus' death, but he even attributes the claim of a virgin birth to Jesus himself (in Origen, Against Celsus, 1:28). See here for a further discussion of how inconsistent many modern skeptical views of the virgin birth are with ancient non-Christian sources. For more examples of what ancient non-Christian sources said about Jesus' childhood, see here. On the modern skeptical assertion that Luke's census account is radically inaccurate, see this post. On modern skeptical claims about the authorship of the gospels, see here. And so on. As with the other two points above, you'd have to be selective in choosing one or more examples to illustrate the point, but we've provided many to choose from.

To summarize these three points even further:

1. the presence of reliable sources
2. the presence of evidence for a traditional Christian view
3. the absence of support for skeptical alternatives among the ancient sources

And you could make it even easier to remember as: presence, presence, absence.

The importance of these three points can be seen by thinking about how easily the relevant circumstances could have been different than they are and what implications would follow if they were different. What if individuals like Mary and James hadn't lived as long as they did, the earliest Christians hadn't shown so much interest in writing, etc.? What if there wasn't so much information about Jesus' childhood that meets the evidential standards for historically reliable material? What if the early opponents of Christianity had made significantly different claims about Jesus' childhood, such as by corroborating the Christian claims much less than they did?

This approach I've outlined doesn't cover every issue, and you still have to address whatever objections are raised. It's a good way to start a discussion and summarize your view, even if it doesn't end the discussion.

Day and night on the flat earth

This is an issue I keep coming back to, in part because it's gaining ground in "evangelical" scholarship, and in part because it's open to different lines of attack. In this article, Paul Seely attempts to document a monolithic view of the cosmos in primitive, pre-scientific cultures: "The Geographical Meaning of 'Earth' and 'Seas' in Genesis 1:10." WTJ 59 (1997) 231–55. The point I've always made is that the textbound orientation of scholars who support this view has the wrong starting-point. For one thing, there are ancient pictorial representations of the cosmos that are inconsistent with other pictorial representations, as well as inconsistent with observable reality. 

Scholars who espouse flat-earth cosmography disregard the observable world in which ancient people lived. Let's recap one example I've given. The phenomenon of the seasons makes no sense on a flat-earth model. On that model, there should be one season year round. It's a static system. There's no room for variation in the angle or duration of sunlight. As a boy, I used to notice that sunrise and sunset lay further apart on the horizon in summer and closer together in winter. 

Now let's take a related example. The length of day and night isn't just variable by season but latitude. At one extreme are equatorial regions while at the other extreme is the Arctic circle, with polar days and polar nights. 

It might be objected that ancient people lacked a comparative frame of reference to notice the variation. They lived in the same area. 

But that's not true. There were ancient mariners who sailed up and down coastlines. They were in a position to observe rapid changes in the duration of day and night as they sailed up and down coastlines. Changes that didn't correspond to seasons, but location. Once again, that's incompatible with a flat-earth cosmography. 

Ancient mariners would disseminate stories about their adventures. People would be interested in stories by ancient mariners about their discoveries. 

My point is that even from a prescientific standpoint, there were multiple lines of evidence that falsify flat-earth cosmography. Some of these are blatant while others are more subtle. Some require you to think about the incongruence. Not everyone is thoughtful. But some people are. 

I didn't get the answers

Churches need to do more apologetics. That said, apostates can't blame it on the church. Take the initiative. There's no lack of apologetic material, much of which is a mouse click away, available for free. But people are so passive and lazy. Moreover, asking the wrong people. Why think the people who attend your church are qualified to answer tough questions when they have no training in the relevant fields.

It's like saying, "I was having car trouble, so I asked all my friends what the problem was and how to fix it, but none of them had good answers, so I lost my faith in automechanics". Did it ever occur to you to ask an automechanic?

Or like saying, "My dog was sick. I asked all my friends what was wrong with her but none of them had the answer so I lost my faith in veterinary medicine!" Uh...what about asking a veterinarian?

Predestined regret

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/11/calvinism-and-the-problem-of-contrition/

Another way to approach it that if I have regrets, God predestined me to have regrets, so there's no tension between my regret and God's decretal will. 

By the same token, there's no inconsistency in God willing one thing at one time, then willing something else at a later time, because each serves its purpose at its respective time. Like a screenwriter willing that a character initially be a villain, then, during a later plot development, willing that the character has a life-transforming experience which makes him act heroic. 

What the original objection overlooks is the instrumental value of regret. Consider people whose epitaph is "I regret nothing". That's a cringingly superficial outlook on life. A related motto is "Never look back!" In fairness, some folks have such wretched lives that there may be some wisdom to the advice in their case.

Consider two brothers who take each other for granted. They don't dislike each other, but there's no rapport. They aren't close. And there's no urgency since they have decades ahead of them.

Then one day there's a phone call from the ER saying one of the brothers died in a traffic accident. In an instant it goes from seeing each other every day, or being able to see/talk to each other whenever they want, to never seeing each other for the rest of the surviving brother's life. In a fateful moment it goes from total access to total inaccess. 

The surviving brother is overwhelmed with regret, because it's too late to make up for all the lost opportunities. However, it's not useless. Having learned from bitter experience, he can apply that retrospective insight to other neglected (or future) relationships in his life. 

Boy with no brain

https://www.christian.org.uk/news/boy-with-no-brain-continues-to-defy-expectations/

Inerrancy is the enemy!

As is well-known, there are believers who lose their faith in Christianity when they lose their faith in biblical inerrancy. As a result, there's an increasing number of apologists–with W. L. Craig as the ringleader–who regard inerrancy as expendable–a "house of cards". By the same token, they regard inerrancy as a stumbling block to conversion. On that view, inerrancy should be permanently bracketed. 

But there's a flip side to this. A paradox that hasn't received the same attention. There are believers who'd lose their faith in Christianity if inerrancy is true. Their faith requires a fallible Bible because there's too much in Scripture they find intolerable. They disagree with many biblical teachings, viz. exclusivism, eternal punishment, spanking, "slavery," "misogyny," "homophobia," "genocide," &c. Inerrancy poses a threat to their faith, not if it's false, but if it's true. There are things in the Bible they're just not prepared to accept, and biblical fallibility gives them the elbow room they require to avoid a hard choice. Not because the offending teachings might be wrong, but because their truth is incompatible with a progressive worldview. So the can't afford for Scripture to be too true. Ultimately, they need a different religion than biblical theism, and biblical fallibility gives them the loophole to have a designer religion. 

Of course, a religion that conveniently changes whenever you change your beliefs can't be objectively true. It becomes a mirror rather than a guidepost. It takes its lead from you, not vice versa.  

Fires At Enfield

Poltergeist cases often involve fires that are paranormal in some way (fires that start, proceed, and/or stop paranormally). In her doctoral thesis (187), Anita Gregory mentions that at least one incident involving fire was reported at the Hodgsons' house as early as the night of August 31, going into September 1, 1977. So, fire incidents were occurring in the Enfield case much earlier than is suggested in Playfair's book (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 187) and elsewhere.

It's useful to have some knowledge of the layout of the Hodgsons' house, so go here to see a floor plan. I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's Enfield tapes, using "MG" to designate Grosse's tapes and "GP" to designate Playfair's. MG30B refers to Grosse's tape 30B, and GP15A refers to Playfair's tape 15A, for example.

As far as I recall, all of the fire incidents occurred in the kitchen, for whatever reason. (Click here for a photograph of the kitchen. The man in the photo is John Burcombe, and he's facing the living room. The back hallway is behind him.) It may be that the poltergeist needed something found only in the kitchen to produce these phenomena or preferred to do it in the kitchen for some other reason. There could be a psychological factor involved, such as a tendency to associate fire with kitchens (stoves, matchboxes kept in kitchens, etc.). Whatever the reason for only producing these events in the kitchen, Peggy Hodgson noted at one point that the poltergeist fires used to happen after they'd left the kitchen, but now happen while they're there (GP52B, 7:39).

Razon de la esperanza

https://razondelaesperanza.com/2014/06/29/resena-de-macarthur-fuego-extrano-por-craig-keener/

Weak Christian Responses To Weak Christmas Objections

A site affiliated with the BBC recently ran a story by Spencer Mizen on the historicity of a traditional Christian view of Jesus' childhood. It repeats a lot of claims that are frequently made. I'll point those who are interested to my collection of resources on Christmas issues. To Mizen's credit, he often cites Ben Witherington's defense of a traditional Christian perspective. But Witherington, at least in what Mizen quotes, just repeats common observations that don't go into enough depth. Christians, especially scholars like Witherington, never should have been so focused on such insignificant arguments to begin with, and it's even worse when they keep repeating those arguments each year. I'll cite one example to illustrate the problematic nature of how the issues are approached by both Mizen and Witherington:

Matthew and Luke both tell us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and that his mother, Mary, was a virgin when she gave birth. But these are the only episodes of the nativity story in which the two accounts converge….

For some academics, the discrepancies between Luke and Matthew’s accounts cast further doubt on the nativity’s historical credibility, but not everyone agrees. “If the evangelists were going to make up a story about the origins of Jesus, and keep their story straight, you would expect their stories not to differ in detail,” argues Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. “The fact that they do, suggests we are dealing with two independent witnesses talking about the same events, with the same core substance affirmed by both.”

There's some truth to Witherington's response, but the core substance that Matthew and Luke have in common is far larger than Mizen suggests. Christians seldom make that point, and it's even rarer for them to make the point as persuasively as they should. See my article here that discusses forty examples of agreements between Matthew and Luke. The number of agreements is significant, but so is the nature of the agreements, as I discussed in another article:

Matthew and Luke agree about Jesus' childhood in ways that meet the criterion of embarrassment. They agree in exercising restraint in contexts in which it would have benefited them to have not been so restrained. They agree on unusual details that couldn't have been anticipated by Old Testament Messianic expectations, the culture of their day, or some other such source. They agree on points that add coherence to what we read in Paul, Mark, and other early sources.

Anybody who's interested in getting more information about these issues can read the two articles I've linked above. Even conservative Christian scholars typically cite less than half the agreements between Matthew and Luke that they could mention, often citing numbers as small as eight or ten, if even that many. The nature of the agreements is typically underestimated as well. Mizen bears more responsibility than Witherington for the problems with the article I'm responding to. But we wouldn't be getting so many articles like that if Christians were putting more effort into arguing as they should on these issues.

Tips on parenting

Generally good advice, although, in the age of film and TV drama, we have to strike a balance. It can't all be literary fiction. Film is not an inferior art form to the novel. Also, he has a Catholic bias. 

Tony Esolen

Enchanting the world ...

Or rather, allowing the world, which is an enchanted place, to be present to your children in all its wonder ...

Or again, how to scrub away the grime of DISENCHANTMENT, which grime is the stock in trade of our schools ...

I've gotten some requests recently about what to do to work against the grime. Here are my recommendations:

1. Get your kids the hell out of the schools.

2. Find the list of the Thousand Good Books, by John Senior. A very fine list it is. I might have a couple of quibbles here and there, but in general it is terrific.

https://d2y1pz2y630308.cloudfront.net/15750/documents/2017/10/John%20Senior%20The%20Thousand%20Good%20Books%20List.pdf

3. Get your kids outdoors. Do things. Make things. Play games. Visit people. Find food and cook it.

4. Teach your boys to chop wood, hunt, fish, find their way in the woods, etc.; if your girls are interested, take them too.

5. Learn to play a musical instrument. Learn the stars in the sky. Get a pair of binoculars and use them. Get a small telescope. Things like those ....

6. As for BOOKS: Anything by Charles Dickens -- or rather EVERYTHING. Dickens is the greatest creator of literary characters this side of Shakespeare. For that one capacity, he can even stand the comparison with the Bard. Nobody else can, with the possible exception of Dante -- for characterization, I mean. Dickens is a comic genius, and is underrated, because anybody can read him. Read the other great novelists of the 19th century: Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope, Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathanael Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol ...

7. Don't ignore art, music, and poetry. Get the 19th century, before the 20th century meltdown in poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, etc. Poetry delivers a lot in a small space: it is TNT. Read Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Read Browning's dramatic monologues: "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb etc.", "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "An Epistle of Karshish," "Andrea del Sarto," "Caliban Upon Setebos," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "How It Strikes a Contemporary," "Cleon," ....

8. Don't go down the Lord of the Flies route, for starters. Lord of the Flies is a great work of art and thought. But it is not for beginners. It is not for your disillusioned young people, nor is Walker Percy, nor is Fitzgerald, nor is Orwell ... Not for starters. They come later ...

Do miracles have a higher burden of proof?

This is something I frequently discuss because it's a mainstay of atheism. Atheists typically say there's an overwhelming presumption against miracles. In addition there are Christian Bayesian theorists who say miracles have a higher burden of proof, but it's not insurmountable. Let's take a couple of comparisons.

Suppose I'm abducted and sedated. Next thing I know I wake up in the middle of nowhere. A wilderness with a river nearby. Is it safe for me to wade in the river?

Some rivers are hazardous.  Some rivers are frequented by crocodiles, anacondas, electric eels, or bull sharks.

What's the antecedent probability that the river is safe or hazardous to wade in? Unless I know where I am, I have no frame of reference. There's no presumption one way or the other to overcome.

I can't begin to calculate the probabilities in a vacuum. I need to know where I am. 

Or take another example. Suppose a driver spots a license plate in the parking lot. What are the odds that that car would be at the same time and place he was? In principle, you could consider the number of in-state license plates, and make an educated guess about out-of-state drivers. 

But suppose the driver is a bookie on the run from the mafia, and the car with that particular license plate belongs to triggermen who are shadowing him. That drastically changes the odds.

Now in Bayesian probability theory, as I understand it, you divvy up the odds into prior and posterior probabilities. The prior improbability may be high, but that can be overcome with more specific evidence. 

But my problem is that if the probability theorist already has all the information when he begins his analysis, why bifurcate the evidence into prior and posterior compartments? Why artificially bracket off some of what he knows to assign a prior probability value, which creates a presumption that must then be overcome? What's the point? It's not like he discovered new evidence in the process of his analysis. 

I don't think it's meaningful to lay odds on miracles in the abstract. It depends on the kind for world we live in as well as specific evidence for specific reports. 

Near miss

A stock objection to Christianity is that if God existed, he'd intervene to prevent evil. But as I've remarked on more than one occasion, that's circular in the sense that there's no trace evidence for nonevents. If something never happened, it leaves no record. 

To take a concrete example, during summer break I used to go for walks at the football field of my old junior high. One time two adolescent boys, friends or brothers, were there when I arrived. They brought their Rottweiler with them. They were fooling around inside the field, I was walking around the track, while the dog was lying in the shadows beyond the track. At one point I came between the boys and the dog. It suddenly rose up and began to snarl. The boys were too foolish to anticipate the danger of taking a dog like that into the public arena. They were able to verbally retrain it, but it was clearly untrained, with a hair-trigger reaction. They had no real control over what it did. That dog was a mauling just waiting to happen.

For me, that was a near miss. If it attacked me, I would have been hospitalized...or worse. That's a concrete illustration of a tragedy that didn't happen. And it's forgettable in a way that the alternative is not. We don't generally remember a close call because it didn't come to a head. It's the tragedies that make an impression. 

Prayer mojo

I think it likely that some Christians have more prayer mojo than others. 1 Cor 12:9 refers to a gift of faith. In context, that can't mean garden-variety Christian faith, since every Christian has to have that kind of faith to be Christian in the first place. Moreover, the whole passage is about different Christians having different gifts. So it must refer to a special kind of faith. And prayer would be a natural outlet. So it's likely that some Christians have more prayer hits than others. Some Christians may well have a gift for petitionary/intercessory prayer. God makes greater demands on some Christians that others, so there can be compensations or corresponding abilities. 

BDD and amputees

A recent popular atheist trope is the taunt, "Why won't God heal amputees?" Two assumptions or motivations lie behind the taunt:

i) Candidates for miracles are ambiguous. The test is an unambiguous example which rules out naturalistic explanations. 

ii) If God healed amputees, a spectacular miracle like that would be widely reported. 

Since there's no evidence that amputees are healed, there's no evidence that a miracle-performing God exists. So goes the argument. 

I've discussed this before, but now I'd like to approach it from a different angle. There's a mental health disorder known as body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). The patient feels alienated from a body part. They imagine their body part to be defective, despite the fact that it's perfectly healthy and normal. 

Nowadays, some patients take the next step by undergoing surgical mutilation to fix the perceived problem. They have normal functional body parts amputated for cosmetic reasons. 

Suppose God routinely healed amputees with BDD. That would encourage some people to test God by becoming amputees. That would be their fallback. If I change my mind, God will restore the body part!

Would that be a better kind of world or worse kind of world? Should we expect God to encourage that behavior? 

Now a village atheist will complain that my explanation is special pleading. And I agree that if there was no good evidence for bona fide miracles, then attempts to explain away the nonoccurrence of miracles consistent with the existence of a miracle-performing God are special pleading. But to the contrary, it's atheists who obsess over one arbitrarily chosen example to be the test case who are guilty of special pleading. There's plenty of evidence for unambiguous miracles.