Christian apologist Glenn Peoples & the Insufficiency of Evidence for the Resurrection

Intro:

Christian apologist Glenn Peoples has finally gotten around to part 2 of his series reviewing atheist historian Richard Carrier's online version of his case arguing that the apostle Paul and the early Christians probably believed in a super-physical resurrection where Jesus got a new and improved body and left his old one behind (and hence no empty tomb as legendarily portrayed in the gospels).  Specifically Peoples is evaluating Carrier's arguments for the general insufficiency of evidence for the resurrection.

Peoples says:

...Carrier is not here giving an argument against the resurrection of Jesus. He is only arguing that if Jesus physically rose from the dead and Christianity is true, God is “stingy” and doesn’t share his revelation with as many people as need it.

It is logically possible for there to be a resurrection of Jesus and for no one in particular to have to know about it.  However, Peoples needs to actually offer a good reason to expect the "morally perfect god" to be stingy in order to properly dislocate the ideas from each other.  Just because there are Christians all over the spectrum on that claim doesn't mean they have a good case for other lesser expectations.

Peoples says:

Carrier thinks that a written sign in the sky (e.g. on the moon) would count as enough to show all humanity that the Christian God exists. But of course, as soon as we introduce the medium of language, we have to say that the sign is not really universal after all. Aside from the fact that not everyone of Jesus’ time was literate, even if they had been, the question arises: Which language should that message have been presented in? And how could people read it if it was on the moon (which in many night skies would not be large enough to read).

It is surprising that James Hale, J. P. Holding, and Glenn Peoples all seem to so easily forget what kind of a god they are supposed to be dealing with especially in light of the proof of concept of the miracle of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-13) since such technicalities did not stand in the way.  It's called magic, people.

Peoples says:

Similar problems present themselves for Carrier’s bizarre example of miraculously indestructible Bibles [...]  It is difficult to believe, on reading this, that this is the supposedly sophisticated intellectual case of a PhD historian against Christianity.

Peoples apparently has no problem with many miraculous claims peppered throughout the Christian scriptures, but Carrier's suggestion of an indestructible Bible to show which books are actually from a god finally meets with skepticism?  lol

Peoples says:

...it would not be good enough for the sign to be accessible to Chinese people who lived centuries later... 

...it would consign all those non-Greek speaking people of the ancient world to damnation. 

...they would not get the message to people who lived prior to the writing of the New Testament, nor would they get the message to illiterate people.

Peoples seems to just be digging himself into a deeper hole with his responses.  Jesus clearly favors gospel knowledge over ignorance with the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20) and yet the Bible indicates that for some bizarre reason Adam and Eve were allowed to have kids who could subsequently be misinformed by their wayward parents.  Yahweh focused on just one nation of Israel in the ancient world while all the others went along their merry evil ways.  And then with the evangelical ignition of Christianity, despite its success as the world's largest religion, still has managed to miss significant portions of the population in the last 2,000 years.  Yahweh is supposedly head over heels for free will and yet apparently doesn't equally value those free will decisions being informed decisions even though we should expect him to.  Lots of excuses can and have been made and Christians are all over the place on the issue, but the hypothesis that Judeo-Christianity is just a successful religion is more probable on these terms than any of those lowered expectations and ad hoc excuses that can get quite elaborately unevidenced (like apologist William Lane Craig's soul shell game where evil souls are all born in ungospeled nations).

Peoples says:

...perhaps [Carrier] would have been open to the realisation that virtually any outlandish fictional scenario he could concoct where God puts on some amazing show for a huge audience would still be subject to someone raising their hand and saying “but what about those people? They would still miss out!”   

Yeah...how about that omnipresent Jesus showing up and talking to everyone.  That was hard.  Moving on...

Peoples says:

At most, the conclusion that Carrier could justify is that God doesn’t meet his standards of generosity. But a Christian like this would be justified in detecting an air of arrogance to this. For Carrier, he might say, is assuming to know not only what he would do if he had Carrier’s existing knowledge plus God’s power. He is presuming to know what he would do if he had God’s knowledge and God’s power, which is to effectively say that he currently possesses God’s knowledge.

Oh here we go...  As I said over on Peoples' blog:

Alas, the standard retort to this is, “why should god listen to you?” or “who do you think you are to know better than god?” etc. as though we are not in a position to have to judge reality as best we can based on what we think we know. In other words, Christians are taking to it from a defensive position [and expecting others to have] to prove something wrong, whereas skeptics are taking to it from the position of needing to make the best positive case for any worldview based on what we know. If metaphysical naturalists took the same dishonest route of Christians, we’d shut down the conversation with something like, “Who do you think *you* are to pretend like you know enough about reality to say it couldn’t have happened by chance?” There may be some truth to that, but if everyone gets to say that kind of thing, that’s gridlock and we’re stuck with agnosticism all around. Which isn’t, btw, Christianity.

See also my FAQ over at the Richard Carrier wiki for a more elaborate version of this answer.

Peoples says:

Of course claims of miracles in other contexts counts as evidence for those miracles, and evangelicals have no reason to say otherwise. How could it not count? Evidence is any consideration at all that makes an event more probable than it would otherwise have been. Therefore, testimony is evidence. It should be clear to anyone that testimony of miracles worked by Vespasian clearly count in favour of such miracles happening – they make them more likely than they would be if there were no testimony of the miracles. But saying that if we allow the possibility of miracles then we have to believe all such testimony is clearly unwarranted. It is akin to saying that if we believe in crime then we have to believe every allegation of crime.  It’s a strange line of argument for a historian to make.

Carrier probably means to say that if we have to believe in this bad evidence for the supernatural, then we have to believe in all bad evidence for the supernatural.  The bottom line is this:  I've never seen any miracles.  And the only human institution qualified to evaluate that type of claim beyond my personal ability to do so (since it's a big world) is the scientific establishment.  And despite the scientific establishment being over half religious and cognitively favorable to such claims, there's no consensus in favor of even a single one of that nature or even an ongoing split debate despite there being numerous opportunities for Bible validating claims to be tested (which have been investigated).  Also, there are obviously many confirmed reasons to expect that humans would generate belief artifacts from their poor command of the human experience.  So until I have what I like to call a Miles Bennett Dyson level experience, I'm going to go with anything ranging from "I don't know" to, "That's probably false."  Maybe miracles happen, but I don't have any good reason to think so.  And I'm in a horrible epistemic position to sort out what they would mean even if they do happen.

Peoples says:

...the naiveté of Carrier’s suggestion that we have to experience events of a certain type ourselves in order to ever be justified in believing that they have occurred is not a tenable stance to take. It is to effectively declare as a matter of principle that any claim that a truly unique event has occurred in history must be dismissed not only as false, but literally impossible.   

I think Peoples is overstating Carrier's case.  Our brains work on past experience and we are always comparing past experience to incoming information to deduce whether we think it is plausible and believable or not.  It is completely reasonable to take our objections seriously or we have literally no way of disbelieving anything we hear about.  It's obviously a fallible process, but guess what epistemology is hard.

Peoples says:

Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy, but in spite of prolonged observation of the Rubicon in modern times, no Caesars have ever been observed doing such things.

That's weak.  People do cross rivers and wage wars, so that type of experience is commonplace.  Now if Caesar flew across the Rubicon and shot everyone with death lasers...that would be a horse of a different color, now wouldn't it?

Peoples says:

It’s not that I agree that Carrier has really answered his critics before they offer their criticisms, it’s that Carrier himself simply wheels out arguments (such as this one against miracles) that have been criticised – “already answered,” if you like – many times over in the literature since Hume’s argument was first published, and yet he does not seem interested in going back and reading the literature on the argument against miracles to address those criticisms.

I won't be defending that our experience of the uniformity of nature somehow proves that "violations" of it cannot occur.  Carrier does not make that case either, even though Peoples seems to assume Carrier does because his comments vaguely resemble Hume's.

Peoples says:

Of course! If dead people rose all the time as part of the ordinary, observed course of nature, then the fact that Jesus rose from the dead would not be miraculous or significant.

So if we had good evidence that miracles occur, that would mean Yahweh was doing it wrong!  Evidence = bad.  Seems legit.  lol

Peoples says:

Lastly, the absurdly prejudiced characterisation of the writers of the Gospels as – for want of better terms – ancient dummies so stupid that they just didn’t know that dead people stay dead – is characteristic of the worst type of historical ignorance coupled with arrogance. Whatever scientific knowledge the authors of the New Testament might have lacked, they certainly knew that dead people do not just get up and walk away! So the quality of the witnesses as ignorant or living in a “backwater” country is really not a factor here.

lol, I always have to chuckle at this when apologists complain about skeptical prejudice since the gospel of Mark (Mark 6:30-38; 6:51-52; 7:18; 8:1-4; 8:15-21; 9:10) actually does portray the disciples as just that stupid.  Actually arguably stupider than that.  They can't seem to figure out that Jesus can do magic tricks despite being in his presence and watching him doing them over and over again.  He continually chastises them for just how dull they are.  This doesn't really even make any sense from a skeptical perspective at face value since it is just really bizarre.  However Carrier's review of Dennis MacDonald's "The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark" does seem to give a good explanation of why this would be.  Regardless, if we take the gospels as basically true, we have to accept that the disciples were really stupid.  Additionally, see Carrier's "Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels" for the historical perspective justifying skepticism of our sources (as opposed to literary opportunism of Mark).

Peoples says:

But does the Gospel of John depict Thomas as rational and wise for refusing to believe until he had made direct observation? Not at all. Recall that when Jesus has shown himself alive again to Thomas, he chides him in John 20:29- “Do you believe because you see me? How happy are those who believe without seeing me!” It is strange then, to see Carrier preface this comment with “above all.” 

What's strange is seeing Peoples think he is improving his case by appealing to the fact his source-books reprimand interest in evidence and instead favor credulity!

Peoples says:

The Jewish community, its diversity notwithstanding, did not teach that the Messiah would die for our sins and then be resurrected. The Jewish hope was that the Messiah would claim David’s throne and wield political power, making Israel great.  [...]  Not only do we know that first century Jews were strongly opposed to religious syncretism, then, we also know that even if they had been so inclined, there just aren’t good candidates in the pool of myth and legend that would readily have been morphed into a Jewish Messiah who was crucified, died, was buried and resurrected three days later.

In another place, Carrier says:

Religious syncretism is the process of combining ideas from several sources, often the most popular or useful ideas in the air, into a new whole, making for a new religion. All religions are produced this way. Christianity therefore certainly was as well (it would go against all prior probability to claim otherwise, and against all the evidence as well). Judaism had a prominent component of sacrifices atoning for a nation’s entire sins, a belief in the holy spirit making Jewish kings into the sons of god (see Not the Impossible Faith, chapter 9), and a tendency toward ascetic denigration of sexuality. Paganism had a prominent component of dying-and-rising savior gods, who likewise offered ways to cleanse their followers of sins and thus procure them entry into paradise–not necessarily by their death, but always in some way, and in many cases through baptismal rituals long predating Christianity’s adoption of the same or similar ritual (see The Empty Tomb, p. 215, n. 210); and pagans had many traditions about virgin born sons of god. Note what happens when you combine the Jewish side with the pagan: you get Christianity. This is actually almost certainly what happened, and thus should not even be in dispute.

And as Carrier describes in his first debate with Mike Licona, it may have been just the right innovation contrary to what everyone else was doing that allowed Christianity to succeed.  Other Jewish sects expected some military force that would never happen, and Christianity somehow invented a heavenly temple and a new sacrificial system that the Romans could not touch.  So having an unfalsifiable alternative that satisfied similar spiritual yearnings of the time would make perfect sense.  

Peoples says:

Now, it’s true that after the resurrection of Jesus, Paul declared that Jesus had risen from the dead “according to the Scriptures.” 

Ah ha!  And yet this forces Peoples to belittle the connection:

What Scriptures did Paul have in mind. The reality is that there is precious little in the Old Testament to suggest any such thing. 

...go back into the Old Testament with this conviction and find allusions and parallels to the resurrection of Jesus there. 

The question is not whether or not people with knowledge of Jesus’ death and resurrection could, in principle, find references in the Hebrew Scripture that they could attach to the resurrection of Jesus. 

There is not a single Jewish source in the first century world to suggest any such reading of the Scripture.

And with that Peoples seems to be saying that the whole Jesus as Messiah and Old Testament prophecy thing is a huge retconning/tea-leaf-reading sham.  Good job.

Peoples says:

The view that the disciples literally invented the resurrection of Jesus out of nothing and then went around proclaiming him as risen – knowing full well that this was a lie – and ultimately being willing to suffer and die for this deception, has virtually nothing to commend itself.

You'll have to show me where Carrier argues that.

However, it is a little narrow-minded to think there aren't religious people who fervently believe in their core doctrines and yet find no problem selling the general public a more elaborate tale that they think helps promote their basic spiritual values.  And these people might also be willing to be martyred for it aside from the pious fraud they thought was perfectly justified.  The fallacy of the modern Christian apologist is to assume that the apparently lesser, more modest beliefs (whatever those may have been) were not just as valid to them as the more elaborate beliefs they passed on to later Christians.  There have been all sorts of religious people throughout the ages and we can't necessarily be sure what type we are dealing with based on their propaganda thousands of years in hindsight.

Outro:

Carrier's entire argument (a good hundred pages) on this topic can be found in chapter 5 of the skeptical anthology "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave."  Note, what he argues there is compatible with his new case in the forthcoming mythicist book, "On the Historicity of Jesus" as he explains here in the Spiritual Body FAQ.

Dr. Richard Carrier vs. Dr. Douglas Jacoby on the Divinity of Jesus

Intro:

This is one of Carrier's better debates. I think he did an excellent job. It was a long one though, clocking in at 3 hours, and there were over 23 questions asked from the audience by my count, mostly directed at Carrier. This debate is up there with his performances with Mike Licona and was interactive enough to tease out his views properly on the topic in relation to common Christian incredulity. It was also interesting listening to a Christian apologist gush all over the Jesus character in the NT while trying to maintain the pretenses of making an argument. On the other hand, it does seem that Carrier may want to work on his atheist "bedside manner," since most of his Christian audience seemed to spend most of their time being perpetually offended by their own continued misunderstandings of his positions.

The actual video should be available eventually, but here is the audio on youtube:

I think Carrier speaks well for himself for the most part, but I would like to throw my two cents in where some issues Jacoby brought up were left under-addressed and give some of my own commentary.  Be sure and check out the organizer of the event's review (Cameron English), "Debate review: Jacoby vs. Carrier" and also AIGBusted's review, "Re: Carrier-Jacoby Debate."

Jesus is so amazing, ZOMG!

• I had a project planned eons ago which was going to be a "Red Letters Commentary" on everything the Jesus character says in the gospels which would have been a great reference piece for this debate. Christians often enough profess to be amazed at Jesus' teachings and I wanted to have a series of posts I could point to that would show with thick doses of common sense that, "No, you've just been culturally primed to accept anything Jesus says regardless of actual merit." It would be a tantalizing opportunity to be able to read the words of an actual god incarnate, but I'm not about to pretend to be blown away if in fact I'm not. It takes too many excuses and arbitrary filters to make Jesus seem somewhat passable, and by that point you no longer have a positive case. Just a defensive one.
• There are many stupid or questionable things that Jesus says in the gospels. Just as one example, Jesus is accused of performing miracles by the power of Satan. Jesus asks rhetorically, "How can Satan drive out Satan?" It's called a ruse. Duh. If Satan wanted someone to buy evil teachings, he might have a fellow demon inhabit someone and then cast that demon friend out to "prove" that only not-Satan would teach these evil things. One would have to be completely oblivious to the con artists of the world to think what Jesus was saying is particularly clever (Carrier has similar things to say about this instance and Jesus as a not-so-great philosopher generally). Which leads us to...
• To perceive Jesus as sinless, one would have to beg the question on all the moral issues that he brings up. Advocating eternal punishments for finite crimes strikes many of us as pure evil. Telling people to hate their families, to cut off limbs and pluck out eyes, that lust is a thought crime, calling divorce and remarriage a sin, validating all the morality of the Old Testament, and advocating a number of other morally extreme teachings isn't exactly "blameless" in my book. It's rather demonic.
• As far as sinful actions and inactions go, Jesus condemns cities that he says would have repented if only he'd shown them magic tricks. He confronts people with information that they'll be judged more harshly for afterward, knowing they were going to reject it. He commands that all of his followers do similarly knowing that they will be making it worse for most people by telling them about a message that will condemn them given the overall trend will be to reject that message. Is this supposed to be all praiseworthy activity?
• Further, how in the world would we know Jesus wasn't thinking impure thoughts? How many historical figures' sins are actually necessarily recorded by history? How many religious figures are portrayed as more blameless than they actually were by their devoted followers? To see Jacoby ignore common sense and assert what is clearly just a reaction to doctrine and not the actual texts is baffling.
• As a challenge to Christian apologists who want us to believe there is something to Jesus' words beyond their own cognitive biases (or that skeptics are subject to their own anti-Jesus cognitive biases) I would propose that they fund a scientific study that would be a double blind sayings contest. Jesus' words would be removed from their Christian context and pit against many other sayings from many other philosophers and influential religious figures. Then you'd have lots of demographics of people rate how they feel about the passages to see who is really the most challenging, gracious, transforming, and really really remarkable of them all. If I'm not mistaken, something like this was done for the Koran, since it claims that its texts are extra special, but Muslims couldn't tell the passages apart from other passages. Muslims obviously inappropriately think the Koran is amazing, Mormons think the Book of Mormon is amazing, Taoists think the Tao Te Ching is amazing, and Evangelicals think the NT is amazing. As I've noted, I see many reasons to be unimpressed by the character Jesus in the gospels. If Evangelicals really want to sell us on something they want us to believe is something more than just a culturally primed arbitrary response to under-deserving texts (as is obvious in all these other cases), they'll need to do something like this scientific double blind sayings study to see if people are naturally impressed with Jesus on his actual merits. Otherwise, Jesus doesn't seem to have said anything any 1st century apocalyptic prophet couldn't have said on a good day.
• It is a bit curious that Jesus, according to Jacoby, is so infinite that he "can't be fit in a box" as well as so ignorant that we can't tell him from an ordinary human of the 1st century (who doesn't know local geography, cosmology, germ theory, or when exactly the end of the world will be). I'm still trying to figure out the "infinite" part of Jesus.
• If having some good comebacks that have been compiled after the fact by devoted writers is a good litmus test for divinity, I'm going to have to say that I'm now officially worshiping Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (and ignoring that their writers had anything to do with it, of course).

Should we believe in the Bible with or without miracles?

• This is misdirection on Jacoby's part. The issue is that we live in a modern world where miracle claims are common and good evidence for them is not. In conjunction with that, people making stuff up, or believing things based on bad evidence is well evidenced. So the Bible should have miracles in addition to our modern world having miracles. For example, the Bible would be a lot more credible if only Christian evangelists could heal amputees in the modern world.

Jacoby argues the early church didn't feel free to make stuff up, because they had issues that the gospels didn't conveniently address.

• So...because it's not comprehensive they couldn't make up the painfully transparent polemics against unorthodox doctrines of the day? Might there not be other reasons why not every single issue isn't put into the mouth of Jesus? All it means is that they may not have felt completely at liberty to add whatever they wanted. It depends on the mechanisms of the broad category of "making stuff up." What if they were getting their content via dreams, visions, or feelings and subjectively it just so happened that not all issues were addressed through that filter? The psychology of mysticism is not necessarily an efficient process.
• Carrier, in email says: "We actually *don't know* what the big issues were in the latter half of the first century, and have only vague information about the early second century. It's also assuming a monolithic top-down church with a consistent agenda, when in fact it was hundreds of diverse communities and sects with different interests from each other, and the Gospels just represent four of those communities (just as other Gospels, e.g. Thomas, represent yet others; and for most, we have no Gospel at all to tell us what their concerns were). [...] the authors of the Gospels had specific goals they were trying to accomplish; they were not writing "church manuals" to address every issue whatever. They only cover the biggest and most common issues (e.g. dealing with intra-family tension, creating symbolic models for baptism, creating evidence of Jesus' divinity and resurrection), and in most cases are responding to each other rather than arguments outside the Gospels. Finally, no non-fundamentalist scholar agrees with Jacoby. They all concur that sayings are being fabricated (especially in John, to argue against and for specific issues John's authors deemed important; but also in Matthew, whom everyone recognizes is trying to write an anti-Mark, and his main goal is to support the Torah-observant Jewish Christianity, and has put words in Jesus' mouth to that effect; likewise Luke, who is inventing things to whitewash the conflict between Matthew and Mark). For example, Gregory Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy (1995) and David Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community (1998) and Boris Repschinski, The Controversy Stories in the Gospel of Matthew: Their Redaction, Form and Relevance for the Relationship between the Matthean Community and Formative Judaism (2000), and Richard Pervo, The Mystery of Acts (2008). Those show how real scholars treat the evidence, including the fact that each author had specific agendas, to which other issues took a backseat for them, being not their specific interest or important enough to them to squeeze in."

We learn from Jacoby that the ancient Jews were monolithic in their beliefs as well as diverse in a whatever-serves-Christian apologetics kind of way.

• Or rather, it seems Jacoby is exercising a "no true Jew" fallacy where all the good and faithful Jews would never entertain unethical pagan beliefs (though the discussion wasn't about ethics) and would never be influenced by pagan culture. We'll have to call these Super Jews, since no one in the history of cultural influences has ever managed to be completely uninfluenced by surrounding culture.
• Or, just as there are fights over who is the true "orthodox" Christians today where each of these groups perceives themselves as being true to their roots in the only proper way, there's no reason to think that the ancient Jews wouldn't have had their own version of those kinds of disputes. Jews are just as human as the rest of us and their perception of pagan religious concepts may not have been an "all or nothing" assault on Judaism. Or at least, not every single self-respecting orthodox Jew would see those concepts in the same light. They might reason any number of things. Since they wouldn't likely perceive paganism as a naturalistic phenomena, they could have pulled something valuable from whatever spiritual insights that complimented or elucidated their understanding of Judaism.
• Far too often it seems Christians have conditioned themselves to not be able think in hypothetical "normal" terms on this issue even though we are all aware of how mundane human behavior plays out.  The skeptics aren't saying anything extraordinary about human behavior that isn't necessarily guided by some Holy Spirit keeping a target group on ideological track.  In the long history of disagreeing with each other, people diverge from whatever you think that official group is without it necessarily having to do with their own sins.

Were the disciples immediately ready to make stuff up about the resurrection?

• Jacoby admits that legends can spring up quickly (like overnight), but he says that this doesn't apply to Christian origins since Jesus' disciples were completely demoralized by his death. However, this argument simply trusts the source material too much. It is as though someone later writing the story isn’t going to try to dramatically punch it for posterity. They'd exaggerate the highs as well as the lows to try to tell what they feel would be a more emotionally credible tale.
• And especially if the disciples were making stuff up in order to have a flashier story that appeals to the masses to propel a more modest divine moral message they still really did believe in, they would have just fabricated the part about them not expecting a resurrection as well. It is possible to alter more than one thing as it turns out. The history of religion is peppered with plenty of pious fraud, I'm sure.

Why didn't the appearances of Jesus merely confirm that Jesus was dead like visions of people who have been killed normally do?

• Um...maybe because Jesus' body was accidentally misplaced and so the tomb was found empty leaving a strong impression on superstitious minds that subconsciously wanted to find a way to repent of their cowardice and redeem themselves? Maybe because Jesus was delusional, really thought he was divine, and had already planted the suggestion that he was really going to rise? Honestly, that all visions are the same and have the same monolithic impact on every group of people ever is just stupid.

Is Carrier exercising "parallelomania?" to explain away the uniqueness of Jesus?

• This is the stock apologetic response to any application of “parallels” regardless of what is actually argued. "I’m subjectively not convinced, therefore you must be seeing parallels everywhere they aren’t.” "Meanwhile, pay no attention to all the ridiculously biased things I’ve said propping up Jesus." I get really tired of this accusation like just mining all the differences somehow negates all the obvious similarities. You have Christians explaining away all the parallels just as much as you have them implausibly accommodating them as though Yahweh meant to do that. It doesn't have to be precisely Star Wars or the Matrix to show the obvious impact on so many movies after each of them was made.

Carrier may need to work on his atheist "bedside manner."

• Carrier could profit from prepping his audience and padding his usage of the term "schizotypal." It was very clear from the reactions of Jacoby and the predominantly Christian audience throughout the debate that they all felt like Carrier was slandering them with something like "you are all crazy." Of course, that's not what Carrier ever said (and this actually reflects a form of ableism on the part of the Christians), he wasn't even referring to modern Christians, and he clarified more than sufficiently several times, but that didn't stop the many carred train of Christian offense. The fact is we all live in a world where there are actually schizotypal cults and inferring that an ancient religion may have been started by one (based on the kinds of things they say they were doing) is meant to be a description of reality. Not an insult.
• Also Carrier's very clinical response to the miracle claim of the boy who was dragged by a truck and torn up quite a bit and then was apparently okay a week later seemed to strike people in the audience and Jacoby as very cold and insensitive. Obviously Carrier was just being obvious and telling them how he'd investigate. It could have used some empathetic padding though.
• There also seems to be that collective Christian audience emotion that builds up in Carrier debates that could be diffused ahead of time that centers around anything Carrier says about his own salvation and willingness to believe on the kind of evidence he thinks is reasonable. It's quite humorous and predictable (and demonstrated by relief based cheers and applause when Carrier's opponent says something against it that they've been dying to hear), but it seems like perhaps he could find a way to pop that bubble ahead of time so that Christians aren't fixating on it while he's talking about other things.

What about Jacoby's accusation of Carrier's skeptical prejudice against the early Christian visions and revelations?

• If credulity is a virtue, then skepticism must be a prejudice, right? Rather than continuing to call Carrier "prejudiced" (3 times in the debate, I think), it would have been more appropriate for Jacoby to reiterate his own arguments that were meant to show that these visions were likely the real deal.
• I would have said this to Jacoby up front: The visions in the NT, from our epistemic vantage point, are indistinguishable from arbitrary hallucinations mistaken as the real thing that are ubiquitous in religion and humanity in general and I will be speaking as though this is a given, based on our modern understanding of what we know is possible, until sufficient evidence is presented that it was more than that. Carrier did indeed explain this, but he also kept using definitive language that the Christians were clearly fixating on as though his word use was supposed to be his argument rather than the actual argument he presented more than once.

Is Carrier a hypocrite for not diagnosing himself as delusional for having an encounter with a demon?

• This is the same ableism stuff as pointed out above as though you are a bad person for having a hallucination. This is about explanatory power, not insults! And "schizotypal" is not an insult!
• As I pointed out to Christian apologist J. P. Holding (and apologist Steve Hays made the same accusation of anti-supernatural bias in "This Joyful Eastertide"), in my post "Leaning Tower of Preterism" the Christian worldview does not tell you what is just a sleep paralysis hallucination and what is the real deal. As a Christian I was open to the demonic interpretation of my vicious sleep paralysis hallucinations that threw me around the room and crushed me in mid-air, and threw me back down into my bed. But I also knew it could just be a powerful dream (it's not like there were bruises when I woke up). Maybe Jacoby, Holding, and Hays have a secret decoder ring for that kind of thing, but Carrier and I do not. Even Jacoby admitted at one point that Christians can be at times a bit superstitious.

Jacoby says that Carrier's philosophy is too narrow-minded to come to the correct conclusions and that Christianity is about relationship, not science.

• The problem is that the relationship is also about truth claims that are difficult to appraise with the standards of evidence typical of believers of many different religions and sects and denominations in those religions. If I want to know that my special religious feelings actually mean what I think they mean, I have to be honest about everyone else's religious feelings as well and not exercise special pleading about my own. I'd need better evidence and that takes us into the world of all the sophisticated forms of argument and evidence that takes place between believers and other believers as well as non-believers. This isn't just to convince others since you'd necessarily need to know the answer to these questions yourself.
• Also, if I want to know that my prayers are being answered rather than me being deceived by coincidence, confirmation bias, and having a horrible statistics processing brain, I have to turn to something like the scientific studies which are aimed at greatly reducing those kinds of factors. For Christians to assert that they don't need that kind of rigor is to be intellectually irresponsible.
• I do agree though that humans shouldn't have to be masters of the epistemic universe in order to have reasonable beliefs about gods, however, it is very clear from the mass confusion of the religious world that such levels of rigor are required. When you have two or more mutually exclusive arbitrary explanations for something, you have to raise your standards and look for better evidence and argument to discern which is correct. The fact humans are put in this position actually argues against Christianity as it is quite an inhumane predicament for a shepherding god to put all of us in.

Q and A

Though these are numbered by the question, I may be commenting on any random thing said during that particular period.

Question 1:

Is Mr. Sermon-on-the-Mount really coming back for revenge on Judgment Day?

• Um...yes, this is the Jesus-is-a-nice-guy myth for Christians and atheists who have only read the Sermon on the Mount and neglected everything else the guy supposedly said. The turning the other cheek and forgiving your neighbor stuff is all good fun in this life, but Judgment day is supposed to be about catching up on all the justice that fell through the cracks. If sending the bad people to eternal suffering isn't revenge, I'd hate to see what Jesus thinks revenge would look like. Two eternities perhaps? Carrier had no reason to back down on his comments.

Question 2:

David Fitzgerald! Moving on...

Question 3: Does Jesus not know about germs when he says washing your hands doesn't matter?

• Jacoby insists that the context is a religious one and hence Jesus is just making a religious argument. However the fact that Jesus thinks there's only a religious issue at stake with washing hands is the very same problem. Even washing your hands with just water is better than doing nothing.
• Religious and disease related cleanliness laws seem to be freely conflated on any other occasion so the omission is a bit glaring.
• As my good friend Daniel Calvert once pointed out a long time ago, why doesn't the OT have the simple phrase, "Boil drinking water," randomly listed in Leviticus between stoning gay people and banning multi-fabrics? Sanitation is like a huge problem in the world today and always has been.
• Apologists will exploit any accidental religious prescription that seems to have some benefit as though this shows Yahweh knows things the Jews don't, but this episode clearly pops that bubble for that perspective in the very least.
• It's interesting that Jacoby seems perfectly okay with this being yet another example of Jesus' human limitations. Normally when Jesus is limited, one could argue that knowing the details of cosmology (like that the earth isn't flat) doesn't really impact anyone, but this example here is an instance where it actually does matter quite a bit.
• Also, this:

Question 5:

Near the end, Jacoby goes off on a "science can't prove science is valid" tangent as though science isn't ultimately based on human experience and as though that means that any old axiom is legit just because someone calls it an axiom. I covered a lot of these issues extensively in my review of chapter 2 and chapter 4 of "The Christian Delusion." I'm just glad Jacoby didn't derail the entire debate with them as is the custom of other apologists.

Question 7:

Jacoby wants to say there's not enough evidence to prove cultural diffusion is responsible for a lot of the Christian memes, though cultural diffusion is an ordinary claim about human ideas and requires minimal evidence which was actually provided. On the other hand, demonstrating that Jesus was god and had magic powers requires a great deal of evidence. Me thinks Jacoby is exercising dishonest epistemic scales.

Question 8:

Jacoby says that the spiritual world is real, that there is "true evil" in the world, and that demons are real. Maybe he could have like proved that or something to support his case that Jesus isn't just the god of Christian mythology?

Question 9:

Jacoby claims that apocalyptic literature (like Jesus' claim that angels would gather souls from all over the world for Judgement day before his current generation passes away and obviously nothing like this happened at the destruction of Jerusalem) shouldn't be taken any more literally than the stars falling from the sky should be taken literally. Of course, that begs the question of whether the authors of the Bible thought the stars were just little lights pasted up on the hard dome on top of a flat earth. See my series on the primitive cosmology of the Bible.

Question 12: lulz, I love it how this lady forgives Carrier for insulting her. Carrier should forgive her for her lack of comprehension.

Question 15: I'm pretty sure this woman said something about "Bees!" (in relation to accusations of hallucinations and 1970's acid trips).

And then she exercises the success fallacy as though she is completely oblivious to every other long term successful religious movement currently alive in the world. **facepalm**

Question 17: I disagree with Carrier’s answer to questioner 17 a little bit in that it would be feasible for a creator god to design us with the need for a divine relational purpose that we could approve of upon hearing it. Obviously our ability to assign meaning is independent of that in actuality. Lots of people are assigning meaning to their lives successfully in ways that mainstream Christianity would not consider divinely approved in a direct sense. So in reality there’s compatibility with hypothetical divine purpose, but it's obviously not a necessity.

Question 18: This is actually the same as question 5 on the criteria for sorting hallucination from genuine vision. Christians are so good at having convenient lapses of imagination when it comes to distinguishing good evidence of the supernatural from bad evidence of it. Compare the levels of evidence here between this clip of That Mitchell and Webb Look where the joke is that alternative medicine has been defined into reality every hilarious step of the way and this cancelled pilot of Ronald Moore’s 17th Precinct where real pagan magic has been incorporated into everyday life because it's obviously real. Get it? Got it? Good.

Question 20: I don't know what Bible Jacoby is reading when he says that compared to other obvious mythology the gospels are giving us "just the facts." To me the gospels read like 1st century Jewish comic books.

Question 21: We have our token atheist skeptic who rolls out some random Bible contradictions. Jacoby, amazingly, responds to each one without even as much disgust as I would have had. I could disagree with his answers, but they are a bit off topic.

Closing statements:

Carrier closes with basically Loftus' outsider test for faith that's an appeal to consistent standards of evidence, which is good.

Jacoby says several things, but I only want to comment on one of them.

• In order to justify such weak standards of evidence for establishing that his god is communicating to us all, Jacoby says that sometimes his wife gives him a subtle cue that he just has to figure out and that this is just the way relationships are. But what’s the number one principle of good relationships? Good, solid communication, right? It's not primarily carried on the back of secretive, hinty, mystical nonsense. The only reason the subtle stuff works in real life is because the overt stuff has been well established in those relationships. And if the overt stuff had been well established in the god relationship, we wouldn't even have Jacoby trying to justify what he thinks is the subtle stuff would we?

Outro:

So that's it. It was an interesting and long debate, with several laugh out loud moments for me at the Christian expense. I'm sure Carrier will perfect his game further for future engagements.

Ben