Response to Law III

A few days ago, I responded to some of Dr. Stephen Law's arguments against the Resurrection, both here and on his blog.  Law answered back, and we went a few rounds, with helpful contributions from some readers. I think Law made a couple good points, but those points were almost lost in a cloud of rhetorical cliches, careless assertions, unexamined assumptions, and half-forgotten references.  In a way, I admire Law for wading in against (initially) unknown on-line opponents.  The tricky thing for an eminent scholar in these forums, is that one clearly can't take as much time in a casual conversation, as for, say, an exchange of ideas in a journal.  So one either has to opt out of such conversation, or risk a few hasty claims, from time to time. And the more eminent (therefore busy) one is, the more hasty one must be.  So I admire eminent scholars who wade into the fray, regardless of their dignity.  And I think it's a good idea to test one's ideas like this.

Anyway, I think Law's arguments, at least at this stage, do more to illustrate why the Resurrection is credible, than to undermine it.  Here I post an interesting recent round of debate from below in one place where it's easy to find, which also allows me to add highlighting and links, and hopefully make it more readable.   

Marshall - Law: Is the Resurrection Epistemic White Noise?

Stephen Law, editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Journal and professor at the University of London, argues here that many accounts of apparently miraculous events are to be expected, on naturalistic premises, even if nothing supernatural is going on.  He suggests that the story of Jesus resurrecting from the dead is no surprise, then: a naturalist would expect such odd tales to turn up, from time to time. 

I reproduce (I) his argument below, (II) give my initial reply to it, and then (III) his response to that.  Finally, (IV) I explain why I still think his argument fails (though the objection is of value to the discussion, and worth further investigating), plus a few brief comments on why I think the evidence for the resurrection remains convincing. Readers may well pick up points I miss, and I welcome other perspectives. 

Against Stephen Law: Miracles and the Parable of Bert

The editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal Think, Stephen Law, has just posted an article called "Evidence, Miracles, and the Existence of Jesus," arguing that the occurance of miracles in the Gospels undermines the credibility of those documents, and even the likelihood that Jesus ever really lived.  (This article was originally published in  Faith and Philosophy last April.)

I am inclined to respond by asking, "What took you so long?"  As Machen observed the better part of a century ago, the "liberal Jesus," who told people to be nice, made few ostentatious claims about himself, and having died, remained politely in the grave, never was so very plausible.  Morton Smith observes that not only every Gospel, but every layer of Gospel material, portrays Jesus as having worked miracles.  And by the standards of David Hume (Law begins his paper with a quick bit of what John Earman has called "genuflecting at Hume's altar" [Earman: 2000, Preface], speaking of Hume's allegedly great contributions to the debate over miracles), one cannot countenance anything that smacks of a miracle, or anything in the neighborhood of a miracle. 

But in my opinion, Law does not understand what a miracle is (neither does Hume), and therefore literally doesn't know what he is talking about.  Nor has he fully taken in the empirical nature of the Gospels, and the quality of the evidence they carry.  He may even have overlooked some important matters going on in the world today.  For these reasons, his critique, I will argue, fails.  Indeed, his critique helps shed light on the uniquely persuasive character of the Gospels.   

(Note: an updated version of this argument can now be found in my book, Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels, along with much else.)