Contra Van Evans on the Resurrection

 

Recently, a philosophical theist named Eric Van Evans has been explaining his reasons for doubting the Resurrection of Jesus in various forums.   

Van Evans is a teacher of some sort, and is intelligent and fairly even-keeled.  But I don't think he has even begun to come to grips with the full case for the Resurrection of Jesus.  I'll respond to his comments in one recent post line by line, noting important facts and factors he has missed, along the way.  

“It’s rather striking how many people today take the resurrection as literal history.”

Perhaps more striking is how many people, when faced with several early accounts that record the same event from within a few decades of its occurrence, choose to deny that it happened.  Not irrational, necessarily, but such choices demand an explanation. 

“What I’ve noticed is that this belief often seems less like a conclusion reached at the end of an evidential investigation, and more like a starting point driven by a prior worldview.  There’s also a deep psychological dimension here.  We have a profound desire for meaning, justice, and the triumph of life over death.  A story where death is defeated satisfies one of our most ancient longings, that is, to survive death.”

This paragraph has nothing to do with history, but appears to be a psychological analysis of those with whom Eric disagrees.  Notice he uses the words “we” and “our” rather than “your” and “their,” as if he were including himself in this portrait – but he is not. 

As for psychology, I think the truth of the gospels is revealed both explicitly and implicitly.  (Origen saw the need for this.)  On the explicit level, there is a vast network of evidences supporting the truth of the gospels which historians and other scholars can seek out.  The gospels also carry an inchoate truth-telling quality that often resonates with ordinary people who lack time or capability to analyze why they perceive the gospels as truthful.  By analogy, one can test a person’s psychosomatic reactions to questions and determine whether they’re telling the truth – but also on a personal level, face to face, one can gauge another person’s honesty informally, and often quite accurately.  People can be good liars, but we can also be pretty good about detecting efforts by others to deceive us. 

“But looked at strictly as a historical claim, the resurrection demands that we judge every natural explanation (grief hallucinations, visionary experiences, bereavement phenomena, memory reshaping, myth-making, theological reinterpretation) as *less* probable than a man returning from the dead and ascending physically into the sky.”

The topic under discussion is the Resurrection, not the Ascension. 

And it sounds as if Jesus is said to have risen by some fluke of Nature.  But the hypothesis is that God raised him from the dead.  Of course spontaneous resurrections after three days of death are extraordinarily improbable – comparably as improbable as that our early universe should appear in the low-entropy state it actually enjoyed.  But the hypothesis is that the God responsible for Creation is also responsible for Easter.  Given God, Paul asks the Athenians, why do you find a miracle incredible?    

Also, Christians do not compare these explanations in the abstract, but in a concrete and particular case.  Eric’s argument takes roughly the form of, “The claim that a man was assassinated by respectable gentlemen including a close personal friend who all stabbed him with knifes demands that we judge every other explanation (killed in a random mugging, died of heart attack, story-telling, lies by enemies, never lived at all) as *less* probable than that citizens and statemen would conspire to murder the most popular man in Rome with their own hands – and on the Ides of March, rather than on any of the other 364 days of the year.”

No.  We believe such things because there is historical evidence that Julius Caesar was assassinated by his colleagues, and that Jesus rose from the dead.  We are not comparing probabilities in the abstract: if we did, EVERY historical event would be far-fetched.  Are not billions of alternatives more a priori probable than the career of Donald Trump? 

In short, to paraphrase Chesterton, we are asked to disbelieve an extraordinary story that has some evidence for it, in favor of an ordinary story that has none.  

But those points can be counted as framing.  Eric then takes a far more serious misstep:    

“Every part of our background knowledge about biology, neurology, and human psychology pushes us toward natural explanations, however messy or incomplete they may be.”

This begs the question, and contradicts a great deal of “background knowledge,” apart from which the Resurrection story cannot be evaluated.    

For one thing (elephant in the room), miracles sometimes do seem to happen.  I have heard from many people who say they experienced them, who were talking privately, gave specific details, and seemed honest.  I have read many detailed accounts from apparently credible missionaries, along with entire books by Craig Keener and Eric Metaxas describing numerous modern miracles.  I have run across others while reading about important historical events.  Furthermore, when I ask audiences how many have had such experiences, typically about 40% raise their hands. 

Why should we ignore that vast historical experience?  To deny it all based on some abstract theory of “human psychology” is just to beg the question.  As if skeptical theorists weren’t human, too! 

Yes, we know about Entropy.  Yes, it is a law of the universe.  But the claim Christians are making, and Eric supposes himself to be challenging, is not that Entropy is unreal, or that people spontaneously rise from the dead, but that God chose to raise the most famous, influential, and wise man in history, who had a unique relationship to God, to set in motion a liberating movement that would sweep the world, as a fulfillment of many prior promises and future plans.  What makes matters particularly odd, is that Eric says he believes in the existence of God, and accepts that miracles may happen, so cannot claim the excuse of atheism for question-begging talk about the normal course of "biology." 

He is also ignoring an enormous amount of data that ought to be set into the background of this investigation, of which records of miracles are only the tip of the tip of a huge iceberg. 

In an article that has been read tens of thousands of times but never (so far as I know) been effectively refuted, I argued thirteen years ago that many facets of background knowledge make the resurrection of Jesus remarkably probable a priori.  Eric does not mention the categories of facts in that article, which I argue render the Resurrection of Jesus exponentially more likely than that of some other famous person, say Gandhi or Martin Luther King.  Nor did he mention them in his debate with Pallman.  He seems never to have taken such important facts into account.   

If my arguments are correct, the Resurrection may exceed almost any other miracle in prior probability.    

“So, to affirm the resurrection as a literal historical event isn’t just to endorse a miracle. Rather, it’s to say: ‘All normal explanations are more improbable.’  We have (to) remember that these people were prone to all sorts of cognitive biases, memory distortions, and emotional motivations. Think about it: grief, hope, the desire for meaning after a traumatic event like Jesus’ crucifixion could easily make these people interpret dreams, visions, or memories as literal encounters with a risen figure.”

David Hume made similar arguments against miracles in general.  Christians have refuted those arguments for centuries, and skeptics seem to have ignored those refutations for just as long.  Tim McGrew’s article on “Miracles” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy mentions many such responses.    

What is striking in the gospel accounts is the initial disbelief, even shock, of those who meet Jesus.  They thought he was dead, for good reason.  There is little trace in the historical records of the sort of self-delusional wishful thinking Eric posits.  

Fishermen know about Entropy.  When I worked as a young man aboard Mys Obrucheva, a Russian fishing trawler, we understood that once the fish came on deck, the men working in the factory had a limited time to gut, clean, and freeze the hake and rock cod, or our catch would go bad.  (Even in the relatively cool climate of the US West Coast in early spring.)  Jesus’ followers were mostly fishermen, living in a hot climate, therefore intimately familiar with the normal course of Nature upon flesh and blood.  (Indeed, people in general were less able to avoid the sight of death then than we are.  They knew what happened next.)    

And if the posited cascade of psychological events leading to belief in resurrections were so likely as Eric supposes, why didn’t the family and friends of John F. Kennedy claim that Kennedy had risen from the dead?  If probability is related to frequency, and such a course is probable, then we should find many such accounts about major figures who had died traumatically.  There have been claims that certain Indian gurus came back to life.  Ancient Greeks often claimed that a deceased great man ascended into heaven as a spirit.  

So show us your best gospel, a historical account about someone else in the ancient world who was allegedly raised to life.  I have carefully examined claimed parallels, and in Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels, show how stretched they invariably turn out to be.  Claims about Apollonius of Tyana, the most popular alleged parallel, are outright amusing, when you actually read Life of Apollonius of Tyana.  I have analyzed and debunked many such alleged parallels, especially in Jesus is No Myth, and have always found the exercise intellectually stimulating.  

Human beings do suffer from cognitive biases.  But that observation is a double-edged sword.  All our knowledge depends on human observations.  If we are too skeptical OR too gullible, we must remain eternally ignorant, and civilization becomes impossible.  Skeptics and Christians alike can serve as witnesses in court, but must be cross-examined.  History has demonstrated that skeptics can be as gullible as anyone. 

And not all the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection wanted it to happen.  (None seem to have really expected it, despite Jesus’ warnings.)  Paul was biased against not for Christianity, before he met the risen Christ.  He had colluded in murder, after all: a powerful motivation to not admit his crimes.  And how eager were the disciples to be crucified like their leader?  They must have felt strong disincentives to publicly proclaim this miracle if they lacked rock-solid evidence.  It is, at least, naïve to simply assume all the motivation lay on the side of credulous faith, even to the point of mass self-delusion.  It is even more unreasonable to credit people so allegedly gullible and pathologically fearful, for production of the world’s most remarkable biographies, full of incomparably profound truth, as even many great non-Christian thinkers have conceded. 

“Add in centuries of oral transmission, community reinforcement, and the human tendency to mythologize, and the story can grow in power and certainty even if the original event wasn’t actually observed.”

Here is Eric’s second really big blunder, which shipwrecks his argument entirely.  Or maybe second and third. 

No “centuries of oral transmission” passed between the resurrection of Jesus and its first reports.  There weren’t even the “generations” which skeptical NT scholars often claim.  The gospels were written within the lifespan of some, at least, of Jesus’ first disciples.

Scholars set the production of the gospels at between 50-100 AD, roughly speaking.  So “centuries” is out right away.  As with every mobile group of reformers or revolutionaries, most of Jesus’ followers would have been younger than him.  Some were almost certainly in their teens.    

If Jesus died in 30 AD, after three years of ministry, how much further time on earth might his followers anticipate?  Some argue that life expectancy was extraordinarily low in the 1^st Century, so Jesus’ disciples would probably have died young.  But the main reason life expectancy was low, was because of infant mortality, which killed about half of children (in densely-populated regions) before the age of five.  For the human race to reproduce, most adults must have retained a reasonably long life expectancy, with added dangers in childbirth for females, especially to very young woman, and battle or murder (state or private) for males.  That people often lived into their 60s, 70s, and even 80s, is also demonstrated by the biographies of ancient scientists, for instance. 

Among the large post-millennial cohort of Jesus’ followers, one would expect many to survive until 70-90 AD, and a few past 100 AD.   So there is nothing extraordinary in the notion that the youngest disciple contributed to the Gospel of John in 90 or 95 AD.  And Paul’s claim that of 500 eyewitnesses, most were still alive when he wrote II Corinthians, is demographically credible.   

The evidence Bauckham gives in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that the gospels were, in fact, based on eyewitness accounts – which Eric has not mentioned – is far more credible than talk about “generations,” or Bart Ehrman’s “Chinese whispers” analogy, which I refute in Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels.

Do the gospels LOOK like eyewitness accounts?  We have described rich patterns of evidence, internal (“forensic”) and external, which show that they almost certainly are.  In Jesus is No Myth, I describe thirty separate patterns of evidence which converge on the strong historicity of the gospels.  Others, like NT Wright, Bauckham, Craig Blomberg, Lydia McGrew, and Tom Gilson, have described some of those patterns in much greater detail, or found other supportive patterns. 

Eric tells his readers they must read opposing arguments before dismissing them.  He has made this point emphatically.  Good!  I tell my students the same.  And Eric says he has read some Christian arguments for the resurrection.  But in attacking the historical claim that lies at the foundation of the Christian faith, he dismisses that claim without showing awareness of these mountains of evidence. 

“None of what I’m saying here proves Christ didn’t rise from the dead.”

That’s for sure.  In fact, it doesn’t lay a glove on the Christian case for the Resurrection, or show much awareness of that case. 

“Maybe he did!  Who knows.  It just shows why, from a historical perspective, relying solely on human testimony from decades later is quite tricky. If you think about it deeply, this sounds exactly like a story that people would want to believe so badly. It’s absolutely human to its core. It’s the kind of story that ancient people would cling to. I am fully convinced that in any other context, we would not accept such an event as real. I have no doubt. But this one? Somehow, we do.”

Here Eric retreats to his original psychological line of reasoning.  It would be better to deal with the evidence more carefully. 

And what does Eric know about “how ancient people would think?”  He recently objected to arguments from authority, to people who say, “I’m a professor at MIT, so I’m right about X.”  But I’m sorry, the Internet aside, people do not all have an intellectual right to offer an opinion on every subject.  Don’t ask me where pistons go, how to fix your computer, or what “offside” means in soccer.  I don’t know. 

I have spent a lot of time reading ancient writers, and far from finding them inclined to “cling to” stories about resurrections, I find them scoffing at such tales.  NT Wright finds the same, having read more than I have.  St. Paul’s audience in Athens also scoffed.   

Eric has not shown that ancient people did, in fact, tend to invent or “cling to” such stories – Wright says they did not, and he has been recognized as among the most sophisticated historians of early Christianity, even by secular writers. 

Neither has Eric shown that the ad hoc psychological mechanisms he posits to have caused belief in the resurrection are either present in the earliest accounts, or tend to create resurrection stories where they are active. (Aside from an expectation that Jesus would soon return.)  

He has not shown much awareness of the historical evidence for the Resurrection, at least not in this short article.

Neither has he explained why, believing in God, we should be super skeptical about miracles, so any report (a la Hume) of a miracle must Ihe seems to imply) be inherently less probable than even the most unevidenced and unlikely materialistic explanation.

Nor has he mentioned evidence that miracles do, in fact, sometimes occur, given by the likes of Craig Keener, and many others.   

Nor again has he taken into account the five factors I describe, which make the resurrection of Jesus vastly more likely, even before we look at all that evidence, than that of any other famous man or woman. (Indeed, he later posits the story of a teacher from New Jersey supposed to parallel the life of Jesus, without drawing any such a priori parallels.) 

In addition, he overlooks the dozens of patterns in the gospels, and in historical and archeological research, which set the gospels securely on an historical foundation.  (Evidence that really does “demand a verdict.”)    

So set the rather patronizing psychology aside, Eric, and treat the miracle that began the Christian faith historically.  Begin by reading the books you seem to have overlooked, in your efforts to “understand the other side of the argument.”  Because there is a whole lot more to that argument than you have addressed so far, and it logically must be taken into account.