Welcome to 4S
4S: Season Finale
Morality of law
I don’t know if I've saved the best for last. But I have certainly saved the hardest. Last time, the subject was practical morality. I believe that all morality has to be practical. Otherwise, it is mere philosophy. Theocratic morality makes no contact with the real world for the mostpart. When it does touch on things practical, it is often in conflict with how even believers live their lives and think. When it is good, it is not unique.
The law is the ultimate expression of civic morality writ large. It is often aspirational. In some cases, it is a deterrent. In other cases, it is protective. And in all cases, a boundary of life's playing field. It tells us where the out-of-bounds lines are drawn. At some level, everyone knows some aspects of the law, hopefully, the important parts. In most cases, the law is so opaque that we require specialists to know the law and represent people when they are accused of running afoul of it.
Even so, those specialists don't know all of the law any more than a doctor knows all of medicine. We subdivide the law into more areas of speciality, each requiring a lifetime to master. You don’t want to choose a contract lawyer as your defense attorney. Things will likely not go very well for you.
The same goes for judges, who are just lawyers with a promotion. They hear cases rather than trying them. Different judges also have specialties. We have different kinds of courts to hear different kinds of cases. Oh, and let's not forget jurors. They are the untrained people who get to have a say in the matter of guilt and innocence.
The legal system is complicated and convoluted. I hesitate to call it a justice system because I question if justice is even a consideration these days. In the current state of the law, justice is an occasional byproduct. Even so, the idea of law is a good one. The absence of law is anarchy. And where anarchy reigns, everyone loses. Even the strong are better off when law exists. Law is the ultimate conclusion of practical morality for societies that want to live.
That said, I believe the US is failing its citizens with regard to ethical guidance. It is supposed to be of the people, for the people, by the people. To the extent that we all have a voice in how society is shaped, that voice has become more univocal and less representative of the whole. It could be that we were never good at it. But it seems more obvious than ever.
I cannot speak to your country of origin. But my country used to be based on certain values such as the inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Did that ever really exist? I have no idea. I am not even sure that such can exist outside of jingoistic propaganda. The best I can do is look at particular categories and see how we're doing. Saddle up:
Inalienable rights
There is no such thing as inalienable rights. Flame away. It is trivially easy to prove that no such thing exists. Your right to life can be alienated by a 4-year-old with a gun. It can also be revoked by the state. If you perform certain actions in this society, you will find your right to life brutally and inexorably curtailed. You live by the good graces of everyone who chooses not to kill you. The person on death row can find no defense on the grounds of an inalienable right to life.
Liberty is the right of the wealthy and powerful. Some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by people who are rich and powerful. That is because they are the only ones with the resources to commit certain crimes. I could possibly commit a crime that harms as many as five people at once. But those with resources can ruin the lives of millions at a time on the grandest of scales. And they do.
The powerless have the right to liberty as mediated by the powerful. Try getting caught littering in your neighborhood and see how big a fine you receive. If you want to litter in such a way that generations of people die of cancer, you need to be an industrial polluter. It took the Me Too movement to start holding powerful men accountable for sexual crimes. The reason they got away with it for so long is that their wealth and power allowed them the freedom to do it.
Were I to boast of randomly grabbing women by the crotch, I would go to jail whether or not there was any evidence that I actually did it. But if you admit to the same thing and everybody knows you actually did behave that way, you become the president. There is an old saying: Context is for kings. The more power you have, the more context you can apply to your actions. With more context comes more liberty. The less you have, the less liberty you have.
What about the pursuit of happiness? That sounds like something that a Christian would call hedonism sinful when an atheist says it. As some believers describe it, all happiness is sin that is not based on Jesus/god. Without him, all happiness is just a pursuit of satisfying a sinful heart. To openly declare your interest in pursuing what makes you happy sounds to many Christians like an open declaration against righteous suffering and sacrifice. Christians are big believers in those things. At least, they like to give lip-service to them.
Do we have the right to pursue our own happiness? Is it really possible? Who gave us that right? Who can take it away from us? I contend that all rights come from other people who are powerful enough to grant them, and can be taken away by those same people, or others even more powerful. If human rights come from god, then He is really bad at enforcing them. Or possibly, we humans are the stronger power and can override them.
Does god establish governments?
I'm not sure the Bible is clear on this one. On the one hand, there's this:
Let everyone submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which derives from God, and whatever authorities exist have been instituted by God. Consequently, anyone who resists authority is rebelling against what God has appointed, and those who so resist will bring judgment upon themselves. Ro. 13:1-2
That passage seems super clear. It repeats the theme using different words each time just to make sure no one is confused. Yet it seems unlikely that any Christian would argue that god is the one who instituted Nazi Germany. Then again, the way Christians argue even Auschwitz might have been god's intent.
So we are left with a century-old debate. Who establishes governments? Also, when is it ever okay to rebel against the government? When I read Romans, it is never okay to rebel against the powers that be because to do so would be to rebel against the god who put those powers in place. Unfortunately, there is a giant loophole that renders the question unanswerable:
Peter and the other apostles replied, “We must obeyGod rather than men. Acts 5:29
This is one of the most harmful texts in the Bible. It has emboldened believers to randomly disobey any law they don’t like. And since they have political power right now in the US, that stands almost without challenge. Holding jobs that require them to stamp marriage licenses, Christians are now able to decide which marriages they stamp based on their personal interpretation of what it means to obey god.
America has a long and storied history of bigotry. Same-sex couples have long been targets of this bigotry. Now, the bigotry is supported by law such that a Christian holding the position of a court clerk can use her bigotry as an excuse to disenfranchise same-sex couples. That couple no longer has a guarantee of marriage.
They are reduced to hoping there is someone there that day who would make the marriage official. This is despite the fact that such marriages are legal. This same disenfranchisement could happen to mixed-race couples, and even Christian couples where one has had a divorce the clerk deems unbiblical.
In this way, the Bible supports conflicting opinions:
Obey the government and its laws because god is the one who put them in place. To disobey the government is to disobey god.
Don’t obey the government if it offends your religious conscience. Rather, work to subvert the government and turn it into a government that follows the laws of god.
In a recent story I talked about on the podcast, a group of Christians have taken to checking out library books they don't like, with the intention of never returning them -- in effect, stealing them. In this case, obeying god means to take upon themselves the job of the library commission and steal in the name of Jesus. So twisted is this view that obeying god literally means to break one of the 10 commandments.
So I end this section where it began: Does god establish governments? If so, what does that mean from a practical standpoint?
The purpose of law
Laws are a way of expressing the will of the powerful. Law enforcement is a way of enforcing the will of the powerful. In the case of a democracy, power is given into the hands of the people. As long as the people hold power, it is their will that will be expressed. In a system where there are multiple parties, power can be distributed in ways that disenfranchise large portions of the population.
Another function of law is to express ethical conviction. It is not just a matter of power: it is the power to say what is right and wrong. Even a theocracy based on a sacred text has laws outside of that text. Those laws might be interpretations of what the powerful believe that text is requiring. But law is ultimately a human enterprise (as are sacred texts) that instantiates an underlying ethical view.
Nations that are mostly religious tend to hold a high view of their laws because they feel those laws are based on transcendental ideas. In that way, their laws are also transcendental. Consider the sacred language in US law:
We hold these truths to be self-evident...
This is the idea that morality is somehow objective and not just a set of good ideas that we happen to like. Consider this in the context of the full quote from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
Twice, we have allusions to a creator. The statement that we are created equally implies a creator. That is a sacred, not a secular idea. In no uncertain terms, it says these rights are endowed by our creator. Again, this is a sacred document and not just a set of secular ideas. An unalienable right is something given from above that cannot be altered by humans and human ideas. We have at least one Bible that places this document alongside the KJV text as well as other documents such as the Constitution of the United States of America. That means that to the publishers of this Bible, all of the documents are sacred.
When something becomes sacred, it is difficult to amend. Court rulings become a part of the sacred canon. Some people will never accept amendments to the Constitution because they feel like the original document was sacred in a way that amendments are not. Gun people are opposed to any law that would infringe upon their ability to bear arms because they believe that right is unalienable and comes from god, handed down via one of His sacred decrees. This brings us to the problem with sacred decrees:
The problem with sacred laws
Law becomes a problem when it becomes sacred. Personally, nothing is sacred to me. There are things and people that are important to me, but none that I revere. Sacred things live in a transcendent space; they are above the mundane. But all life is mundane. Every breath is mundane. No sacred breath of life was given to us. We are meat, water, and energy. We are the stuff of stars and nothing more. And everything that we have any part of is the same.
For something to be sacred, it has to be right in a way that other things aren't. It has to be beyond human. If it is beyond mere humanity, it can't be changed by mere humanity. Things that can’t be changed are destined to be harmful. Even good ideas can become bad ideas when they exceed the limits of the time and space for which they were made.
We might have all come out of Africa. But no one seeks out ancient jurisprudence from that origin to sort out the best way to settle a moral issue. It is not at all sacred to us. For some reason, the same people who reject ancient Egyptian law will insist that the world be governed by ancient Jewish law. There were older laws held even more sacred by other people for longer.
There is also the issue of who gets to decide what is and isn't sacred. This can’t be done by the populace of a pluralistic society. This can only be done in a narrowly defined theocracy. One person's sacred text is another's anathema. In this fight, the atheist will almost always lose out because we tend not to have any such texts. In a battle of who gets to decide what is sacred, the most fanatical is often the winner.
In this way, sacred laws lead to holy wars. Humans have become convinced that their all-powerful god needs them to fight on the behalf of their gods. God has his holy decree but is lacking the ability to enforce it. Apparently, god needs armies and politicians and freedom fighters and activists to carry out his divine decrees. It is surprising how easy it is to go from holy laws to holy wars. Indeed, it could hardly be any other way.
Agents of god
In Rome, the church became the state and the state became the church. Pretty soon, it became nearly impossible to separate the political machinery from the will of god. So entwined is the state and church that the seat of religious power on Earth is also a sovereign state. Around the world, Catholicism can barely be touched by the state. It happens on occasion. But look at what it took to get some small part of the world to act.
It is not just the popes and bishops. The predominant view among believers is that all were given the Great Commission directly from Jesus - to enter all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Also, the commission in the epistles to be prepared to give an answer for the hope that lies within you is seen as a direct command. With that backdrop in place, the order to obey god rather than man is a perfect storm that transforms Christians who work in the public sector into direct agents of god.
This is how we get public officials who feel entitled to ignore the mandates of their job because those mandates violate their view of god's law. This is how we get Trump as President/King David. This is how we get theocratic laws instead of pluralistic secular laws. One of the most dangerous kinds of lawmaker a society can have is one that views themselves as an agent of whatever god they happen to believe in.
Pluralism and Objective Morality
There is no such thing as objective morality. But most holders of an Abrahamic faith tend to believe there is. This makes for increased societal tension. On the one hand, there are the people who believe that right and wrong is not a matter of opinion or democratic processes. They believe that a thing is either right or wrong intrinsically. When they have one opinion (certainty) about a moral issue that only makes sense in the context of their given religion, conflict occurs.
Pluralism has to accommodate the mores of everyone to the extent possible. This is not merely a challenge of religious vs. non-religions. It is a problem for people within the same faith group. It is also a problem for secularists. Eliminating god does not eliminate conflict. We always have to fall back to negotiation. In a pluralistic society, someone is always going to lose the negotiation. On minor issues, this does not pose an immediate threat. But on matters of moral conscience, losing is not an acceptable option, especially on key issues such as the following:
Life
I don't exactly know when abortion became a matter of life and death. Jews never saw it that way. Even the church was okay with it for the longest time. But now, abortion is infanticide. There can be no negotiation for infanticide. There can be no accommodation for murder. If you believed that murder and infanticide were being practiced, what would you do to stop it? Could you live in a society where they openly and plainly allowed murder as a legal practice? Neither can a certain type of Christian. If life is sacred, then so is your duty to preserve it.
Death
Euthanasia is another one of those life and death issues. The same people who crusade against abortion crusade against a person's ability to choose doctor-assisted suicide. To them, such assistance is the same as murder. We can see their point even if we do not agree with it. People who want to live are typically against another person's decision to die. If we know about an intended suicide, we do what we can to step in and stop it. This is not a simple matter of disagreement. It is life and death.
Slavery
What would we do if the Trump administration managed to reinstate slavery? That would most certainly be a bad thing for society. We would fight it with all our might. There is a good chance we would take up arms against the government. Many would say it is a violation of basic human rights. Others would say that we are to obey the governing authorities since they were placed there by god. I only mention this hypothetical as a reminder that we would be just as radical as many Christians are today.
These types of issues are not easily resolved. The abolition of slavery sparked a war. Women's suffrage did not happen overnight. Society has ripped itself apart over the course of its brief history. The American experiment has almost ended many times. We are living in one of those times right now. When social upheaval occurs over a matter of societal morality, we look to the law to decide the matter in our favor and on the side of the angels. When that doesn't happen, we often take the law into our own hands.
When law is not enough
I have no idea how a theocratic society works. Everything becomes a moral issue. It is hard to find two religious people who agree on all moral issues. It has to be madness. A secular, non-pluralistic society would just be some version of a democracy. It is not that there are no issues of grave importance. It is that those issues would be decided by research and negotiation.
A pluralistic society with a mix of all cultures, religions, and varying levels of fanaticism is a constant powder keg. At least one part of society won't give a tinker's damn about the research. They are already convinced that their holy book has the right of it. Another significant portion would care nothing about the pronouncements from a holy book.
Matters of basic morality can take wild swings every few years depending on who's in power. What I would like to do to conclude this series is to do an exercise in negotiation. If you were the leader of a pluralistic society with the power of a hegemon, what moral compromises would you allow in the name of plurality? I guess I should go first:
Conclusion: Compromise in the name of pluralism
It is easier to think about compromises I wouldn't allow. I would keep the government entirely secular. No part of it would be ruled by sectarianism. There would be no prayers during official government business. No signs of religion would be allowed, such as crosses, headwear, and the like. No one should be able to tell that a person in government is religious by their chosen iconography. You get the idea. All government business would be 100% secular with no exceptions. You know; secular.
Beyond that, I would be highly democratic with a touch of socialism. The ethical North Star would be human flourishing of all people. All debates and proposals would have to be couched in terms of how it will further human flourishing on human terms. I like limited capitalism and would keep it in check. I would use unilateral power to do the things that capitalism would not, such as mandate free healthcare for all, free education, and a minimum standard of living for those incapable of earning more.
None of that speaks of compromise, and I can think of more things where compromise would not be allowed. My society would be entirely egalitarian. Humans could not become slaves or serfs or any such thing, even if that is what they wanted. There would be no deprivation of equality based on race, religion, sexuality, and all the rest. Acts of dehumanizing bigotry would not be tolerated regardless of religion or conscience.
I would compromise with regard to implementing significant changes in law where significant moral debate exists. I would insist on the best scientific research currently available. But I would not change the law until a sever-years grace period where even more research could be done and for people to get used to the idea of the coming change.
After the research is done, I would implement another period of public debate and hearings on how the changes can take effect without mass disenfranchisement. It is not my intention to leave anyone in this society behind, even the bigots and religious zealots. People are multifaceted and are more than the sum of their worst ideas. Everyone gets a voice. But in the end, human flourishing wins.
Compromise is hard.
See you in the comments...
David Johnson
4s: The summer of morality
Week 1: Morality defined
Note, these are my definitions unless I specifically mention a source. Defining terms is not the job of the dictionary. A dictionary is just a compendium of common usage as determined by those who write dictionaries. A dictionary is not an objective source of meaning. It is a reference of common usage.
It is the job of every individual to define their own terms. If there is a disagreement on a definition, the true definition is the one you carry in your head because that is the representation of what you mean by the term. Your meaning could be wrong in an academic sense, but never in a conversational sense because it represents what is in your mind when you use the word. I am offering you an expansive set of meanings for the term as I see it and use it.
We need to learn to negotiate definitions. I tell you what I mean by certain words so that you can unpack them properly when we communicate. But you also need to tell me what you mean so that we can spot the differences and negotiate a common usage between the two of us. Only then can we have a productive dialog. Here is my attempt to provide clarity with regard to what I mean by morality, and other important ideas:
No such thing as morality
There is no such thing as morality as I understand and define the word. Morality is not a thing anymore than numbers are things. Numbers are useful fictions. They are ideas we hold in our minds as a way of describing particular aspects of reality. Numbers are the most objective and accepted ideas held by humans. Numbers can be taught and learned. Numbers gives us a sense of grounding because, when used the same way to describe certain aspects of reality, numbers are universal and objective. When you understand what I mean by 1, it becomes a universal and objective fact that 2 is the sum of adding another 1 to the existing 1.
Note that we begin with a definition and teach it the same way to everyone. Only then can you get universal agreement about numbers. Also note that you might get a different result if you use base 8 as opposed to base 10. (I’m not a mathmagician.)
The important takeaway is that numbers are not things. They are descriptions of things. Further, they are abstractions that describe the relation of things in a single aspect of reality. The correct use of numbers provides objective facts about reality. There are no exceptions. That is why we love numbers, and why there is nothing quite like numbers in the entire universe. We wish there were other descriptions of reality that are as useful. But there simply aren’t any.
Morality is the same kind of thing as a number, but it never produces an objective fact about the universe. It can only be a marker for how you feel about social events. A social event is anything one person does that affects another person or persons. Morality cannot tell you whether or not a social event was a good thing or a bad thing. It can only be a marker for how you feel about that social event. Again, morality does not describe social events. It only describes your feelings about social events. Because of that, morality can never be a definitive description of the event itself. It can never be objective. It can never be as useful as numbers. That is why we accept numbers but debate morality. By their very nature, numbers describe reality. Morality does not and cannot describe reality, only how we feel about social events.
Objective, subjective, and universality
Numbers are descriptions of certain kinds of relationships between two or more entities. If one inputs the right kind of query, the product of correctly manipulated numbers is the objective truth. To the extent that descriptions of things can be reduced to numbers, they can be objective. All of the properties of colors and brightness can be reduced to numbers. Knowing whether or not the light and color in one place is exactly the same as another, is a contention that can be expressed entirely in numbers. We can be mathematically certain about things like color and brightness. We don’t rely on our senses for that information because at their best, our senses are not calibrated for the problem.
Sound is another aspect of reality that can be objectively known and described. Sound that we can hear is a matter of Newtonian physics. I can precisely reproduce a certain set of sounds given the right instruments of measurement and sound production. What I reproduce would not be similar or close to the original. It would be precise. We can know that I did an exact reproduction, not because of your senses, but because of numbers. Sound is reproducible to a degree of mathematical certainty. It is a fact that resides in the world of the objective.
Feelings are always subjective. Morality is feelings. Therefore, morality is always subjective. Social events are objective Morality is not the language of social events. It is the language of how we feel about social events. Descriptions of social events are always incomplete. How we feel about any given social event is largely mediated by how thorough the description is of that event.
That man shot and killed that other man is a set of facts without context. By themselves, those facts are insufficient to trigger a grounded opinion about how we feel about that event. Context is the details that allow us to personally adjudicate the moral content of our feelings about that event.
No event is moral or immoral. To believe so is to make a category error. Let’s add some context: *That man killed a baby just for the personal entertainment value of the action.” Now, is it immoral? That’s a trick question. The answer is always no. There is no moral content in the action. The action is just a thing that happened in reality. It cannot be moral or immoral. That said, we can feel a certain way about it. We can even universally agree that the action was harmful, and therefore, immoral. We are agreeing about our feelings of the actions. We use the same word to describe our feelings about the action. In that way, it is immoral since morality describes how we feel about a social event.
It feels like an objective fact that it is wrong to torture and kill babies for fun. But that feeling is always subjective and never an objective fact about the social event. If everyone we encounter feels the same way about that event, then the feeling is mutual and even universal. But universality does not equal, or ever point to objectivity. The fact that we all agree that the sky is blue has nothing to do with whether or not the sky is actually blue. We might all be correct. But the fact that we are all correct still doesn’t make it objective. What makes it an objective fact is that it is true regardless of what we think about it. The color of the sky is exactly what it is even when there is no one to describe or observe it.
A social event is exactly what it is even when there is no one to describe or observe it. It has no inherent moral context. We add the moral context as a way to explain our feelings about that event. The moral content is not in the event, but in the eye of the observer.
A thing is not beautiful because of mathematical parsimony. Things have no aesthetic context. Beauty is a description of how we feel about that thing. A person can never be wrong about their emotional description of a thing. That is why there will always be disagreement about whether or not something is beautiful. Nothing can be beautiful or ugly because things don’t possess those traits. We assign those values based on our subjective aesthetic values.
Morality is the same as beauty. We all agree that killing babies for fun is horrible. That doesn’t make the event horrible. The event is just the event. And for the record, I believe that a social creature is fundamentally broken if they don’t find such an event repulsive every time.
Universality can be gained via negotiation if we do not already have it by some other means. Negotiation is the attempt to agree on a mutually good outcome. I might have one idea about how to achieve a goal. Another person sharing the same goal might prefer a different course of action. Where only one action can be done, negotiation is required.
We also negotiate feelings. There was a time when not everyone believed in the humane treatment of noncombatants in war. At some point, we realized that good outcomes were not being achieved by letting everyone do whatever they felt like at the time. As a group, we decided to codify feelings of disgust over the inhumane treatment of noncombatants. Not everyone agreed at first. Such things take time and negotiation. But now, most civilized people around the world believe we should codify war crimes as a category. Enough negotiation has been achieved such that in large enough numbers, we can agree.
Inhumane treatment of noncombatants is not immoral or moral. It is merely a social event that happens in reality. We don’t tend to like the outcome of such treatment. Enough of us now feel the same way about it such that we agree on the label of immoral, and now, illegal. That is the product of subjectivity and negotiation. It is not a fact about any event. It is a fact about what we think of such events.
Good, bad, righteousness, and sin/evil
Secularly, we can describe events as good or bad. These words describe how we feel about the events and their outcomes. In subjectivity, outcomes are always a consideration. Was giving out $600 stimulus checks good or bad? Without context, we can only speak philosophically. Even with a lot of context, the event can never be good or bad. It is only a matter of how we feel about it.
On a personal and selfish level, it was very good. However, I am not an economist. It could be that the event will prove to be the downfall of western civilization. In that case, it would be bad, very bad. Right now, none of us can say for sure. We need the perspective of history.
Definitionally, good and bad are descriptions of how we feel about social events. We are either describing the outcome of an event or predicting the outcome of an event. Should we do another round of stimulus checks? We can describe the outcome of the last one and try to predict the outcome of the next one. Even if we predict that it would bring about the downfall of western civilization, some might believe that to be a good thing. Therefore, it would be a good thing from their perspective. If the feelings on the subject are sufficiently unclear, we come together to make our case and negotiate. That is how society works. Social creatures cannot remain social creatures without negotiation.
Righteousness and evil are not the same as good and bad. They have a metaphysical connotation. It is the language of someone who believes that events have some inherent moral content the way electro-magnetism contain the nature of color. There is no “moralion" that infuses a thing with morality. But if you think that there is in some metaphysical way, you are likely a religionist or spiritualist who believes that events, in and of themselves, are morally one way or the other.
I don’t believe in good/righteousness and evil. I believe that things can have good and bad outcomes. When Christians and atheists talk about such things, this is one place where imprecision in language creates confusion. Atheists generally mean only one thing when assessing an outcome as good or bad. Christians have a dual meaning. They are sometimes using righteousness and evil the same way we mean good and bad. And other times, they have a second meaning of metaphysical, inherent goodness and badness.
They and I might describe a social event as good or evil. But when I say it, I am speaking of my feelings about the event with a full view of outcomes. I never mean that it is some inherent nature of goodness or badness. Almost always, the Christian means that a thing is inherently good or bad. We both might decide that a thing is bad/evil. We both might use those words. But there is always a difference in meaning because the Christian has metaphysical baggage attached to the words that can never be ignored.
Moral goals
My moral goal is the outcome I wish to achieve by social events. It is aspirational more than predictive. It is a statement of what we want to happen rather than what we think will happen. Sometimes, there is no way to know for sure what will happen. In the case of stimulus checks, some of the goals might have been short-term predictions. But since we need the perspective of history to really know the outcome, the goals were mostly aspirational. Morality generally lives in the aspirational zone.
Based on our goals and the nature of humans, some moral decisions are trivially easy. We want all people in a society to be as free as possible to pursue their own happiness when that happiness does not conflict with the common good. That is always aspirational because we can never be too sure of an outcome. Slavery around the world lasted for a very long time because enough people benefited from it that we could not clearly see the advantage of abolishing it. From the slaves perspective, it is better to be regarded as a good mule than to be regarded as nothing at all.
However, as a society, we eventually determined that the usefulness of slavery was outweighed by the benefit of a society where everyone is free. The maximum possible freedom produces better outcomes. Also, if some could be slaves, then anyone (including you) could be a slave. Since powerful people don’t want to be slaves, it is better to kill the system than to risk ending up on the wrong side of it. Even if your nation is overthrown, your risk of becoming a slave is much lower since everyone has abolished it.
Distress signals at sea are interesting to me because there is no direct benefit of one crew risking their lives to save another crew who fell upon bad circumstances. But mirror neurons are a bitch. The sea is a rough place that can overturn any set of fortunes. We would cry out for help, even to the enemy, because on the high seas, there is no one to see you pee your pants with terror. So when we encounter a distress signal, we stop what we are doing and help the helpless.
This all has to do with moral goals. What are we aspirationally trying to achieve? Social creatures are also practical creatures. The greater good might be expressed in metaphysical terms, but is usually practical. We want a system of safety nets sufficient to get us out of a jam if we find ourselves on the wrong side of a distress call. We have to be a part of that safety system if we want it to be in place when we need it. See how this is not so much noble as it is a practical goal that we can dress up as metaphysical? We don’t save sailers because of the universal dignity of mankind. We save them because all sailors are equally vulnerable, including us. Wrap whatever metaphysical BS around that fact as you like. You are not being moral as much as you are achieving a practical goal.
I suspect war crimes are the same way. Get rid of the spiritual bullshit and recognize that you, who are safe right now, could fall to a savvy enemy before this paragraph is completed. You don’t want your family to be treated the way your soldiers sometimes treat other families. We have all lost enough war to recognize the universal appeal of better treatment of people in war. It is not righteous. It is the meeting of a practical goal.
We hire referees to adjudicate the moment by moment happenings of a game. This is not for the morality of fairness. It is to make sure that the other team can’t get away with stuff that our team can’t get away with. The reason playgrounds are full of team play without referees is that both sides want to play the game with a sense of fairness. They self-regulate and call their own fouls. They are not being moral; they are meeting a goal to ensure gameplay is fun and repeatable. People who routinely violate the rules are not invited back to play. Even assholes will follow some rules because they are also social creatures who want to play the game.
There can be no morality without an underlying set of goals as a way of adjudicating whether or not the aspirational outcomes are being met. Any morality not based on a set of clearly-defined, human-centric goals will be a liability rather than a benefit. When morality comes up, always determine the goals. When moral goals are aligned, it is possible for people to agree on the means to reach those goals, and a way to self-regulate and recalibrate the methods.
Moral values
A value is the description of a moral aspiration. We want to be good employees. There are many things necessary for being a good employee. Being on time is one of those necessary things. We notice that few people who are routinely late for work get to remain as an employee. So we decide that punctuality is a value worth having. We value punctuality.
Note that there is nothing inherently good about punctuality because nothing contains inherent goodness or badness. There are practical reasons why we deem some things values and others not. When arriving at a certain kind of party, there is an even greater value of being unpunctual. Concerts never start on time on purpose. Punctuality is not inherently good. We can value somethings in some situations and discard those values in other situations. That is how it should work.
Religion tries to shortcut the work of moral calculus by simply declaring that some things are good and other things are bad — that some values are good and others are bad. But trying to apply values in this universal manner creates more problems than it could ever solve.
Lying is bad and honesty is good, except when it isn’t. It is good to lie to save a life if your goal, at any given moment, is to save lives. Honest game play is good so that the game can be enjoyed by all, unless you are playing poker or liar’s dice where dishonesty, deception, and deceit is the order of the day. In many cases, telling the truth leads to horrible outcomes. It can never be universally good. It is merely an option that can result in positive or negative results. Things do not have inherent moral values. A moral value is just the way we describe our moral aspirations and nothing more.
Moral oughts
If a value is an expression of aspiration, then an ought is the necessary procedure for achieving that aspiration. If we want to be a punctual employee, then getting out of bed on time becomes a moral ought. If we want a system of rescue by strangers on the high seas, then answering a distress call is a moral ought. All moral oughts are tied to moral goals and moral values. A moral value is simply the codification of a moral goal.
There is no ought without a goal. We cannot be good for goodness sake. We are good for the sake of achieving a moral goal. The goal might be to make sure we are seen as being a good person by others. To achieve that, we must do good things in the most visible way possible. If the goal is to be seen as good by ourselves, then it is not necessary to do good that others can see. But it is still necessary to do acts we deem as good.
No one has a moral ought to save a drowning kid in a pool apart from a moral goal. We might have a legal ought. But there is nothing metaphysical about it. Most of us will save a drowning kid, especially if we have kids. We want the distress calls of our kids to be answered, even by opposing tribes. So we all engage in rescuing drowning kids. That is why we pay for lifeguards at public pools. Even without kids, rescuing a drowning kid makes us a hero in the public eye and also in our own eye. No one ought to save a drowning kid. But there are plenty of moral goals aligned with doing so.
Conclusion: Because of the kind of creature we are
At bottom, our expressions of morality, values, and oughts come down to the kind of creature we are. A lion does not hold all values common with humans because of the kind of creature it is. Our values differ due to the kinds of creatures we are. Monkeys are social creatures that were here before us. We are closely related to them. We share many moral instincts. But where different, it is due to the kind of creatures we are. There is nothing metaphysical about it.
If kissing was necessary for a particular lifeform, you can be assured that there would be many moral values and oughts about kissing. They would do it all the time. Kissing a stranger would not be illegal. You might even be rewarded for kissing people against their will because you were helping them live. Those rules would not be wrong. They would be right because of the kind of creature such people would be.
What if humans had developed differently? Then we would most certainly have different moral insights. We know that because as we have matured via social evolution, we have become different kinds of people, so much so that our ancestors would probably not recognize us as being the same as them. Our morals change even as individuals. Moral values as a child are different than the ones we have as young adults, middle-aged, established adults, and mature adults nearer to the end of our lives. Our morals shift as a result of the kind of creatures we are at any given stage of our development.
Constitutions are largely based on negotiated moral instincts. Constitutions change. They must change to reflect the kind of creature we are right now, and aspirationally, what kind of creature we wish to become. Are there creatures who view rape as okay? Absolutely! That could have been us. So what? Those creatures are acting out what they are. We have what seems like the unique ability to desire to be different from what we are. That is a powerful evolutionary achievement that is not always an advantage.
We can imagine being better than we are — a different kind of creature. Religionists live in this space. They want to be other than what they perceive themselves to be. In some ways, that cannot be achieved without reshaping everyone into that better kind of person. They are always correcting for what they want to be and failing to recognize what they really are. Their mores are largely based on their aspirational fantasies.
It is hard for two people to agree on anything concerning morals when one acts on the basis of the kind of creature we are while the other acts on the basis of the kind of creature they fantasize we can be. In one reality, homosexuality is just human nature with no particular harm to what we are as human societies. The other sees it as a manifestation of what is wrong and an impediment to achieving the aspirational goal of what we want to be. This bifurcation is how we get wars.
There is much more to be defined. This will have to do for now. Coming up in week 2, the moral argument unpacked. See you then.
David Johnson
4S and friends: Evidential
Dale and I kick it old-school and do a marathon show. the usual suspects were in the peanut gallery causing their usual chaos in the comments. It was a great show. Expect more like this in the future. What follows is Dale’s writeup and then mine. Enjoy:
Dale's case: Christianity & Evidentialism and the Making of Apparent Strange Bedfellows
Dale’s Claims (I have the Burden of Proof): (1) Evidentialism is the proper Epistemological standard for belief & (2) Christianity (as per Jesus and the “12”) endorsed Evidentialism (esp. specifically with respect to Jesus’ Resurrection).
The Atheist host of the Skeptics and Seekers Podcast, David Johnson, has recently responded to my show on the Ultimate Resurrection Panel, celebrating the legacy and research of my friend Dr. Gary Habermas (see his comment here = http://disq.us/p/32xctfs).
Gary Habermas is famous for arguing his “Minimal Facts” case for Jesus’ Resurrection as a provable fact of history using secular history’s own standards. In his online book, The Uniqueness of Jesus Christ among the Major World Religions (free here = https://garyhabermas.com/Evidence2/Habermas-Uniqueness-of-Jesus-Christ-2016.pdf ), Gary goes into exquisite detail showing that of all of the other major world religions, only Christianity provides the Evidentialist with what they want most, evidence proving that the essential claims of the religion are in fact true!
But David Johnson sees this whole enterprise as a fools errand, he says, “Evidentialists like Gary have walked away from the [Biblically prescribed] path [to faith] and chosen a more secular approach”. Worse yet, David accuses Christian Evidentialists of degrading the Gospel message itself, he says; “They [Christian Evidentialists] want to seal the deal with evidence. And in trying to do so, they unknowingly mock the simple presentation of the word of god to the receptive heart”.
Is this true? I, myself, am a Christian Evidentialist and I came to faith in Christ solely on the basis of the evidence. If Christianity and Evidentialism are truly the strange bedfellows that David makes them out to be, then I want to know about it! Seems to me the first step toward figuring this out is to understand what exactly an “Evidentialist” is before then querying what Scripture has to say about it.
What is Evidentialism?
In the words of famous Evidentialist philosopher, Dr. Kevin McCain;
“Evidentialism is the view that facts about what a person is justified (or rational, or reasonable) in believing supervene upon facts about the evidence he/she has. More specifically, Evidentialism says that the evidence that a person possesses at a given time determines the doxastic attitude(s) that are justit person has. More specifically, Evidentialism says that the evidence that a person possesses at a given time determines the doxastic attitude(s) that are justified for her to adopt toward any proposition at that time” (p.1-2 of his paper on my Blog).
A simpler way to put it, is how I teach my own first year University students in their Logic and Critical Thinking class, namely that one’s individual credence level is in accordance with the principle of proportional belief. This principle states, as David Hume once put it, that one ought to apportion their level of belief/credence to fit the degree of evidence one is privy to at the time for the truth of that belief (Play Klaas Kraay clip in show).
But what qualifies as evidence? World-renown philosopher and logician, Dr. Robert Audi, defines evidence as “a sign or indication of something that helps us determine what is true” (See his The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality paper on my Blog). He goes on to list the 4 main sources of evidence: i) Perceptions, ii) Memory, iii) Introspection and iv) Reason and although there is some debate among philosophers, I would also include testimony itself as a 5th main source of evidence which actually generates rather merely transmits knowledge (see the debate between Testimonial Reductionism and Testimonial Anti-Reductionism positions in the Epistemology of Testimony papers on my Blog and/or later in this write up).
In general, Atheists and religious skeptics, love to pay lip service to Evidentialism but they want to deny the Christian/religious adherent of the right to appeal to such. I remember many comments from skeptics online (including from David J. himself) when Dr. William Lane Craig seemingly stuck his foot in his mouth by he seemingly put the evidence aside and claimed;
“When I first heard the message of the gospel as a non-Christian high school student that my sins could be forgiven by God and that God loved me and that I could come to know him and experience eternal life with God, I thought to myself and I'm not kidding, I thought if there is just one chance in a million that this is true, then it's worth believing and so my attitude toward this is… far from raising the bar or the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed I lower it”. See YouTube video = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4wb3KoBc8A
Fundy lay skeptical sneering aside, Dr. Craig is hardly the silly roob that online Atheists and skeptics made him out to be when he said this, no Dr. Craig, like many brilliant philosophers and experts, simply holds to a Pragmatic Encroachment rather than Evidentialist theory in Epistemology. In his own words, he explains;
“In order to understand my answer one needs to distinguish between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. Epistemic justification seeks truth-directed reasons for some belief. That is to say, it seeks reasons to think that the belief is true. By contrast pragmatic justification seeks for non-truth-directed reasons for some belief. This is usually done in terms of a pragmatic/practical cost/benefit analysis… Sometimes one can be pragmatically justified in holding a belief even though one is not epistemically justified in holding that belief.” = https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/raising-and-lowering-the-epistemic-bar
This is the same epistemic theory that stands behind the notion of Pascal’s Wager for Christianity. And there are other theories that claim that evidence is an insufficient factor when considering what one ought to believe vs. not (for example, see Moral Encroachment theory in the papers on my Blog). Funnily enough, it is more often than not, fundy lay Atheists and skeptics, who like to dabble in Pragmatic and/or Moral Encroachment theories much more so than Christians when confronted with the evidence for Christianity! David Johnson, in particular, has advocated for raising the epistemic bar at times based on the moral implications of God’s Judgement and Hell and/or based on various pragmatic considerations as a way to argue that almost no amount of evidence would be sufficient prove to him that the Christian God is real, it would have be proven beyond all reasonable doubt before he’d even consider considering whether it might be true or not based on the evidence!
So, ought we employ Evidentialism or is another epistemic theory, like Pragmatic and/or Moral Encroachment theory, to be preferred?
Just the Evidence Ma’am
Evidentialism, everyone admits, is the common sense position that has been held to since the dawn of civilization, by Christians and non-Christians, even the goddless David Hume advocated for it! Evidence is inherently truth-indicative and since belief entails that one thinks a given proposition is in fact true, one will want to base their belief only on things which indicate such are true instead of other factors which are aimed at truth or producing true beliefs.
Neither pragmatic nor moral considerations are inherently truth-indicators and in many cases there are counter-examples to such considerations which contradict the truth such as telling your wife she looks beautiful instead of horrid in their new dress for survival purposes or hiring an underqualified person as the “best candidate” for the job because of their race to morally virtue signal (affirmative action).
Great, now that that is cleared up, what is the Bible’s take on Evidentialism, does it support such a view? You bet ya it does!
Christian Evidentialism & the Biblical Resurrection of Jesus
Having read David Johnson’s comments, I think he would actually agree with me that the Bible does indeed support an Evidentialist perspective as there are countless verses in the NT saying that Jesus’ Resurrection served as evidential proof of Jesus and the Gospel Message. Paul himself, says that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then the Christian faith as a whole is worth nothing more than the manure that Biff Tannen drove into (actually that manure had some worth, it was worth about $300 damage to Biff’s car, so Christian faith would be worth less than that as it would be literally worthless in such circumstances). Thus, according to Paul, the Resurrection of Jesus served as evidence that their beliefs were true and if the Resurrection didn’t happen, then that would falsify their beliefs as being untrue.
But David, knows this full well and so he quickly dismisses most of the NT as being relevant by saying, “Paul is the one who repurposed the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But the Jewish followers of Jesus remained Jews”. OK, for the skeptic’s sake, let’s just focus in on Jesus and “the 12” specifically, can we demonstrate that they were Evidentialists with respect to Jesus’ Resurrection? Did they think that treating the Resurrection of Jesus as evidence for the Gospel was wrong in some way?
No, in fact, looking at the Bible, we can see there is an explicit concern for belief in the one true God and for Jews LIKE Jesus and His “12 disciples” to follow truth and to be truthful, so they care that what they believe is true; they are truth-oriented in principle so to speak. On what basis do Jesus and the 12 disciples believe the truth, well in terms of the 5 sources of evidence, it appears that they utilize all of them in one way or another to help them adjudicate what is true vs. what is false.
i) Perceptions- Jesus appeared to various people after His death and Resurrection in multi-modal sensory ways- visual, audible, tactile, to prove His claims were true. John 20:30-31 says; And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
ii) Memory- There are ample proof of memorization of oral Jesus’ teachings and events surrounding His death and Resurrection preserved in the New Testament. All scholars agree that memory was used by the earliest followers of Jesus and used as evidence for the truth about Jesus and His Resurrection. The 1 Corinthians 15 creed is proof enough of this much!
iii) Introspection- The earliest Christians knew that the God of Israel, Yahweh, existed and that Jesus’ Gospel message was true through direct introspection of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit which dwelt in every single one of them and testified to the truth and guided them into all essential Spiritual truths about Jesus. See John 15:26 saying “But when the Helper/Holy Spirit comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.”
iv) Reason- The Bereans reasoned from the Scriptures logically to assess if what Paul taught about Jesus’ Gospel was true or not. Acts 17:11 says “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Jesus likewise reasoned from the OT Scriptures to make points during His ministry and teach people the truth about Him and the good news of the Kingdom of God.
v) Testimony- Once again, the Holy Spirit testified to early Christian’s Spirits, but also ordinary testimony was also used by the early followers of Christ. John 21:24 saying “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.”.
Looks to me to be conclusive, both Jesus and the “12 disciples” utilized various sources of evidence to establish and then demonstrate publicly that their beliefs were true. Sounds to me like Jesus and His disciples were definitely Evidentialists!!!
BUT, David Johnson objects to this line of reasoning and cites the Doubting Thomas incident to prove his point;
“Wearing my theology hat, I still believe that is correct and that the evidential enterprise is fundamentally flawed. I believe that the search for hard evidence stands in defiance of the kind of faith Jesus wanted, if John is to be believed. He rebuked Thomas for wanting that kind of faith and then turned to the camera with a wink, saying blessed are those who believe without seeing (evidence) as opposed to you who required it… Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God”?
It’s true, Jesus did indeed say “blessed are those who don't see and yet believe" following the Doubting Thomas episode in the Gospel of John 20:29, but where is the rebuke? I don’t see Jesus’ shaming or scolding Thomas and telling him that he and his eyeballs are of the devil in the same way He did to Peter during His ministry that one time! There is no condemnation or admonishment given to Thomas saying that employing empirical visual evidence itself is somehow contrary to the Gospel message and/or against proper faith in anyway. After all, Jesus fulfilled Thomas’ evidential demands and appeared before him, I don’t think a sinless Jesus would have done that if providing such evidence was a sin or hindered Thomas being born again or left him spiritually deficient in someway.
But what is Jesus saying here, in what way are those who haven’t seen and yet believe “blessed”? What does Paul mean that faith comes from hearing the Word of God?
Well, firstly, we know that Jesus and the Apostles constantly provided empirical proofs via miracles for during Jesus’ ministry and then again after Jesus’ Resurrection. Jesus appeared to all the other Apostles, to the women, to the 500, to Paul- he gave empirical evidence to all these people so that they would believe in the Gospel message. Do you honestly think that Jesus means to say that I am spiritually superior to Peter, Paul and John or the others simply because I didn’t see Jesus’ risen body physically, does that lack of visual confirmation with my own eyeballs really have any bearing on my spiritual status? Is this meant to imply that any and all demands for sufficient evidence of any kind is antithetical to proper faith via hearing the Word of God?
No, of course not. The point Jesus is making is perfectly clear here. The early disciples had already received and heard the Word of God, literally in the flesh for 3 years and they were privy to the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost which testified to their spirits about the truth of the Gospel message. It is the Holy Spirit’s testimonial evidence authenticating the Word of God/Gospel message when heard (or today read), known to all true Christians via direct introspection (both sources of evidence), which serves as the required sufficient evidence for the proper faith in Jesus. Sometimes, we are so sinful and hard of heart, that our lack of receptiveness to the Spirit’s testimony means we need some more objective forms of evidence to help open our spirits to the Holy Spirit and push us over the edge toward faith.
So, Jesus is merely saying blessed are those who don’t need that extra objective help, blessed are those whose hearts are already sufficiently soft and receptive to the Holy Spirit that upon hearing the Word of God and the Gospel, they believe in the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s testimony alone and get to work to serve the Kingdom right away.
David's case: Evidential
Positive claim:
Evidentialism is not a biblical prescription for making converts.
Evidentialism denies the power of the simple presentation of the gospel to save.
Evidentialism is ultimately self-defeating and is most effective for bolstering the faith of believers who need something more than faith.
Gary Habermas has completed his life’s work in book form. Despite his long and influential career as a Christian apologist, he will be known for his four-volume work on the resurrection. I am proud of him for his hard labor of love and also a little sad because I truly feel it is completely misguided.
You see, Gary is an evidential apologist. He specializes in providing hard evidence for the truth claims of Christianity: the resurrection in particular. That is all the more unfortunate since there simply is no such hard evidence, nor can there be. If the gospels are to be believed, the evidential door was bolted shut the moment Jesus left the scene.
Jesus rebuked Thomas for needing to see hard evidence. But because it was needed, he gave Thomas the hard evidence he required. John has him say that blessed are those who believe without seeing. That is because he knew there would be no more seeing. In this context, to see is to view hard evidence of his resurrection. John knew that faith would be the only looking glass available to future believers.
But along comes the evidentialist who insists that John spoke too soon and we do have evidence. One wonders what could spark this sudden interest in apologists to pedal evidence over faith? Also, is that really what is going on? I will leave it to the reader to decide. I will try to lay out my case for why evidentialism is misguided, but also explain what I think is at the heart of the movement. Here we go:
When faith is not enough
The biggest problem with the evidential movement (besides the fact that there is no evidence) is that faith is not enough. They have been lured away from their profession of faith by the siren song of evidence. It is not just their atheist interlocutors demanding evidence. It is other Christians.
I believe the problem runs much deeper than that and Gary is a prime example. By his own testimony, he had reached a crisis of faith that left him cold. He focused on the problem of resurrection and determined, like Paul, that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then the faith was untrue and Christians were to be most pitied.
Understand that at this point, Habermas was not only a Christian, but a graduate student. At that point, he already knew more about Christianity than the vast majority of people who would ever live. It simply wasn’t enough. His ability to take it on faith was insufficient to propel him further in his religious vocation. Without convincing evidence that the resurrection was true, he was done as a Christian.
I think a lot of believers reach the end of their race prematurely because their are thirsty after running for so long and so hard. They don’t need platitudes and well-meaning encouragement. They need water. In this metaphor, water is evidence. And they are bone dry. I believe that Gary was at that point. And just before expiring from dehydration, he saw a mirage in the distance and went for it with all he had.
Unfortunately, Jesus wasn’t a big fan of evidence, at least not when it mattered the most. When one group demanded evidence, he called them a wicked and adulterous generation for their troubles. On another occasion, he wasn’t able to do many miracles due to their lack of faith. This is one of the most damning passages in the gospels. Since when does god need you to believe he can do miracles before he can actually do miracles? It suggests that the magic of Jesus was mostly based on the power of persuasion rather than actual demonstrations of power.
Gary, like a lot of Christians, came to the end of what faith could do for them. So before completely jumping ship, they decided to try and find something that could pass for evidence, exactly the thing Jesus warned against.
Demand and supply
Apologists were also facing another front in the war against faith. They had to deal with a new kind of atheist who wasn’t afraid to call out the naked emperor in the room. The internet served to amplify those calls and also amplify the fact that there were not any answers for those calls.
Christian apologists had gotten away with bad arguments featuring question-begging, philosophy gamesmanship, sophistry, and presuppositionalism for ages. Atheists were more polite and fewer in number. The naked emperor could prance around freely and seldom be called out. Today, none of those rhetorical tricks are allowed to stand and the call to prove it has never been louder. Apologetics had to adopt or die.
Apologists started fighting back with something they called evidence, not just faith. The problem is that the new evidence was just a redress of the same old tricks with extra glitter. The “evidence” was as easily dismissed as everything that came before it. Here is a look at some of what people like Gary have presented as evidence to meet the growing demand:
Empty tomb
There is no empty tomb. Just ask any believer where this tomb is located and they will give you a blank stare. It is a thing taken on faith and not based on anything concrete. There is not, nor has there ever been an empty tomb to examine except in bible stories. But the situation is more damning than that.
No biblical narrative ever provides an account of anyone using an empty tomb as a way of proving that Jesus rose. Remember, the gospels were much later than the writings of Paul. Not once does Paul try to convince anyone that Jesus rose because of the empty tomb. He used made up eyewitnesses as evidence, but never an empty tomb.
Jesus never took his followers on a tour of the empty tomb. That might have been a powerful tool. But Jesus never mentions the tomb (or a shroud). When Peter preached the first sermon of the Christian age, he never tried to persuade on the basis of an empty tomb. It just wasn’t a thing.
Perhaps they knew that just pointing out an empty tomb would have proved nothing. There are plenty of empty tombs. What one has to prove is that there was a dead person in the tomb who became not so dead and left it empty after being occupied. This simply cannot be proven.
The first person who supposedly saw the empty tomb was a woman (not mentioned by Paul) who demanded to know where they had moved the body. Even seeing the empty tomb did not convince her that Jesus had risen. I can’t imagine why it should convince anyone today.
Witnesses
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives a list of witnesses of the resurrected Jesus. However, the writers of the gospels sharply disagreed with the list. It is important to note that Paul gave the list as an ordered and exhaustive list. He starts with the first, then the next, and the next, etc. Then, he gets to a “finally”.
There are many places to question the list. But we could stop at the first witness. It is wrong if the gospels are to be believed. The women were all over the gospels and nowhere to be found on Paul’s list. One cannot excuse this major oversight.
But the most fantastical of the witnesses were a mysterious group of 500 who saw Jesus at once. This development was completely missed by the gospel writers. No such appearance is even hinted at. I stand firmly on the ground that Paul made it up just as preachers do today. There was no 500. We simply have no reason to trust any account of witnesses.
We don’t have any account from Peter. We have a writing from Luke the fabulist. Paul and the gospel writers disagree. The witnesses are nothing more than plot devices and con artist rhetoric. Inventing witnesses is easy. I did many miraculous deeds and saved many during the event of 9/11. 5,000 people witnessed it. Many of them are alive today. Now, do you believe? You would immediately start asking questions like, who were these people? What were the names? Name even one of them? Did anyone write about it? You know, all the questions that no Christian asks of Paul’s 500. We have no witnesses, only stories of witnesses.
Martyrdom
You have heard it said that no one dies for something they know to be a lie. But this is not evidence of anything. We have no real evidence that any of the disciples were killed for what they claimed to be true, and only church tradition for a couple of them. There is no tradition that any had a chance to recant. There is reasonable criteria for what counts as martyrdom that Christians don’t tend to demand.
The bigger issue with the martyrdom argument (besides the lack of evidence for it) is the argument depends on an accurate reading of human nature and what people wouldn’t do. What we know about people is that they can convince themselves of the truth of anything if properly motivated. So it could be that some were convinced of their own story.
In sales, you must first sell yourself on the product. If you tell the story enough times, you start to actually believe your own BS. Once you have sold yourself on it, you can make bank selling it to others. At that point, the pitch is truly authentic. And authenticity sells. When you believe it, you can make others believe it. That doesn’t make any of it true.
Moreover, the argument from human nature works against the Christian. The apostles had not only watched Jesus do the impossible, they were also routinely doing the impossible. So human nature suggests that they wouldn’t abandon Jesus like they did. Not one of them remembered they could raise the dead. Not one of them tried. Not one of them decided to hang around the burial site just to see if anything would happen. That defies human nature. For the Christian, the argument from human nature is a total bust.
Minimal and maximal facts
It doesn’t matter if you are a fan of the minimal facts approach or the maximal facts approach. Neither proves the resurrection actually took place. Gary tries to collate and used agreed upon facts as taken from scholars in relevant fields. This is problematic for too many reasons to go into in this writeup.
The biggest problem is the cherry-picking. What Gary forgets to mention is that these facts do not convince these scholars to convert to Christianity. The minimal facts are too minimal to have any persuasive effect. Gary picks the facts that agree with his thesis. But then throws the same scholars under the bus when they do not validate his conclusions. No agnostic or atheist scholar believes that Jesus rose from the dead. And dead is where the minimal facts approach remains.
The wrong proof for the wrong thing
If a Christian could obtain real evidence for just one biblical claim, what should it be? I argue that your one wish for proof is wasted on resurrection. That is because resurrection was a lot less important than you might think. Bible times were dark times of superstition and misinformation about how the world really works. That might explain why the Bible is lousy with stories of resurrections.
Doing a bit of Googling, the blind were healed three times in the Bible. Leprosy was healed but I found no count. It wasn’t many. Though there was one time when ten were healed all at once. But there were 9 or 10 (depending on how you count them) resurrections in the Bible. It was the most common of the miracles and it was done by far more people than any other miracle. On one occasion, resurrection happened quite by accident. It was never played up as the big miracle that proved anything, let alone, everything.
Yet today, Christians like Gary believe that resurrection is the one thing that has to be proven. They don’t even care about all resurrections. All other biblical resurrections can be myth and fantasy. They only care about the one resurrection that proves Christianity, as if Christianity comes down to the good fortune of one man rather than the teachings that came directly from that man. They believe that if they can prove the resurrection of Jesus, they can validate the teachings of Paul. It simply doesn’t work that way.
Jesus never presented the message that his resurrection would prove that he was the son of god. Supposedly, that was known even before Peter’s confession. All of that was before the resurrection. Jesus didn’t need the resurrection to prove that he had authority. He was already considered an authoritative teacher.
Consider the fact that even in the stories, he died before a multitude but post-resurrection, showed himself to a relative few. And most of those few were already believers. He didn’t use his resurrection to prove to the world that he was legit. Were that his goal, he would have shown up at the Sanhedrin. He would have been the one to give the sermon on Pentecost instead of just the sermon on the mount. Jesus wasn’t trying to prove anything with his resurrection. And indeed, nothing was proven by it.
Conclusion: The failure of evidence
I contend that the more Christians attempt to present evidence that isn’t there, the worse things get for them. When the emperor tries to prove the magnificence of his non-existent attire, the more blinding is his full, frontal insanity.
But let’s imagine that all this evidence was present in the first century. What was the result of it in the lives of the people with the most access to it? The disciples lived the dream. Yet they didn’t believe. Jesus returned to them and they still didn’t believe, until they did. Paul was a murderous prosecutor who specialized in Christianity. He would have had access to all the evidence. Not a single bit of it was convincing to him. This all happened in the land of the Jews. The vast majority of them were unconvinced. The historians of the day such as Josephus were not convinced. They did not become Christians after their exhaustive research.
If the freshest evidence that could ever exist failed to convince the people of the day who had the greatest access to it, why on earth should it convince anyone today?
If Jesus wanted his resurrection to convince people to follow him, there are endless possibilities with regard to actual evidence he could have left, including the evidence of him sticking around to this day. But that is the point when these same Christians say that Jesus didn’t want to leave evidence lest we somehow lose our free will to choose. They can hang on to one of those arguments, but not both. Either he left convincing evidence or he refused to leave convincing evidence. Choose one.
I, for one, remain in the category of the unconvinced after carefully researching and reviewing the “evidence”. It has been weighed in the balance of my rational mind and found wanting. If I could have evidence for only one thing, it would not be evidence for the one resurrection. It would be evidence that god exists and that sins can and have been forgiven. Alas, for such things, we are left with the same inadequate faith that led Gary and the rest on an even more futile search for evidence in the first place.
And that’s the view from the skeptic.
David Johnson
4S: In transition
We speak to Lauren Blighton about the realities of being trans, trans activism, sports, and more.
In part 2, we talk about life, reduction to a one-dimensional existence, politics, and more. Enjoy.