Doug Shaver

OK. Then what you're saying, hyperbolically, is that the resurrection would be difficult (but not impossible) to believe. In that case, there could in principle be evidence that would convince you if it were discovered. If such evidence were found, it would verify the resurrection, which is an event that allegedly happened in the past. The discovery and analysis of evidence of events in the past is what history is all about, and so it is not the case that history could not verify the resurrection.

DCHindley

Hmmm,

I would say that the issue at hand is really the very nature of historical accounts (aka epistemology: "the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity"). There are various schools.

One may say that we "know" facts of history because we have a historical source. Others argue that the narrative nature of written history adds elements of subjectivity to the facts presented in a historical account, both on the part of the writer (how s/he selectively choose from an array of facts available to him/her, the method of analysis applied - and there are scores of them, and then the manner by which he s/he presents his/her interpretation of the facts) and on the part of the reader (how the presentation interacts with the readers' background and expectations). The only reference point a reader has available to him/her to evaluate an account is their own experiences and world views.

One of the big arguments going on in the fundamentalist/conservative Christian circles is the fact that modern science, which works just fine when applied to industry and physics, but when applied to geology, astronomy and cosmology produce facts that are in direct opposition to statements made in Jewish & Christian sacred scriptures.

If you have ever studied psychological "defence mechanisms" (that's is the Freudian term) or the ways that people and groups can reduce psychological dissonance - that is, the uneasy feeling we get when we encounter new facts that are at offs with expectations (the term is actually "cognitive dissonance", from a theory by Leon Festinger), you will realize that any and all of these can be used to resist the unpleasantness of facts or dissonance.

Probably your best bet is to use a line of argumentation in which you can get your opponents to acknowledge that the presentations of facts in their scriptures is based on the general understandings and world views in operation at the time, often thousands of years ago. Once you can get that admission (not an easy thing to get, btw) you can argue that each age has to bring its belief systems into sync with modern science (which has yet to prove resurrection or miracles, as these are by nature anomoloies to what we can reasonably expect in everyday life). They will have to modernize their beliefs or at least treat these accounts as allegory.

Essentially, if they are intent on bringing their faith into modern times, they will have to go the way of the Christian moderates. Unfortunately, there are many psychological defense mechanisms or dissonance avoidance techniques they can, and almost certainly will, apply to resist this kind of "compromise" of their core beliefs. At best, you may plant seeds in some of them which might sprout if conditions are right within those individuals as well as without.

DCH

DCHindley

FWIW, here is how Sigmund Freud classified psychological defense mechanisms:

Level 1 (pathological - note similarity to Rush Limbaugh's methods)

Denial: Refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening; arguing against an anxiety-provoking stimulus by stating it doesn't exist; resolution of emotional conflict and reduction of anxiety by refusing to perceive or consciously acknowledge the more unpleasant aspects of external reality.

Distortion: A gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs.

Delusional Projection: Grossly frank delusions about external reality, usually of a persecutory nature.

Level 2 (usually exhibited in adolescents, but is often the psychological level that many adults seem to exist at today, especially the emotional ones)

Fantasy: Tendency to retreat into fantasy in order to resolve inner and outer conflicts.

Projection: Projection is a primitive form of paranoia. Projection also reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the undesirable impulses or desires without becoming consciously aware of them; attributing one's own unacknowledged unacceptable/unwanted thoughts and emotions to another; includes severe prejudice, severe jealousy, hypervigilance to external danger, and "injustice collecting". It is shifting one's unacceptable thoughts, feelings and impulses within oneself onto someone else, such that those same thoughts, feelings, beliefs and motivations are perceived as being possessed by the other.

Hypochondriasis: The transformation of negative feelings towards others into negative feelings toward self, pain, illness, and anxiety.

Passive aggression: Aggression towards others expressed indirectly or passively.

Acting out: Direct expression of an unconscious wish or impulse without conscious awareness of the emotion that drives that expressive behavior.

Idealization: Subconsciously choosing to perceive another individual as having more positive qualities than he or she may actually have.

Level 3 (neurotic, but also very common. Recognize anyone here?)

Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.

Dissociation: Temporary drastic modification of one's personal identity or character to avoid emotional distress; separation or postponement of a feeling that normally would accompany a situation or thought.

Isolation: Separation of feelings from ideas and events, for example, describing a murder with graphic details with no emotional response.

Intellectualization: A form of isolation; concentrating on the intellectual components of a situation so as to distance oneself from the associated anxiety-provoking emotions; separation of emotion from ideas; thinking about wishes in formal, affectively bland terms and not acting on them; avoiding unacceptable emotions by focusing on the intellectual aspects (e.g. Isolation, Rationalization, Ritual, Undoing, Compensation, Magical thinking).

Reaction Formation: Converting unconscious wishes or impulses that are perceived to be dangerous into their opposites; behavior that is completely the opposite of what one really wants or feels; taking the opposite belief because the true belief causes anxiety. This defence can work effectively for coping in the short term, but will eventually break down.

Repression: Process of pulling thoughts into the unconscious and preventing painful or dangerous thoughts from entering consciousness; seemingly unexplainable naivety, memory lapse or lack of awareness of one's own situation and condition; the emotion is conscious, but the idea behind it is absent.

Regression: Temporary reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses in a more adult way.

Rationalization: The sense in where the person convinces themselves that no wrong happened and that it is or was alright. The main show of this defence comes in the form of excuses.

Finally, level 4 (Freud's highest level for dealing with unpleasant facts, examples of which - here at FRDB at least - are rare and universally ignored)

Altruism: Constructive service to others that brings pleasure and personal satisfaction

Anticipation: Realistic planning for future discomfort

Humor: Overt expression of ideas and feelings (especially those that are unpleasant to focus on or too terrible to talk about) that gives pleasure to others. Humor, which explores the absurdity inherent in any event, enables someone to "call a spade a spade", while "wit" is a form of displacement (see above under Category 3). Wit refers to the serious or distressing in a humorous way, rather than disarming it; the thoughts remain distressing, but they are "skirted round" by the witticism.

Identification: The unconscious modeling of one's self upon another person's character and behavior

Introjection: Identifying with some idea or object so deeply that it becomes a part of that person

Sublimation: Transformation of negative emotions or instincts into positive actions, behavior, or emotion.

Suppression: The conscious process of pushing thoughts into the preconscious; the conscious decision to delay paying attention to an emotion or need in order to cope with the present reality; able to later access uncomfortable or distressing emotions and accept them.

Al these definitions were stolen, I mean, plaigerized, no I mean harvested, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_defenses

Freud may be "old fashioned" but I always felt his definitions of "defense mechanisms" were spot on.

DCH

DCHindley

Again, FWIW to any seriously interested lurkers (hah!), is my own synopsis of Leon Festinger's possible reactions to dissonance, taken directly from his book Cognitive Dissonance:

The major ways by which dissonance can be reduced (the basic rules):
1 By changing one or more of the elements involved in dissonant relations.
2 By adding new cognitive elements that are consonant with already existing cognition.
3 By decreasing the importance of the elements involved in the dissonant relations.

Practical applications (this is how propaganda and control of media affect the way we think about issues, and why you should care about it)
1 Postdecision dissonance may be reduced by increasing the attractiveness of the chosen alternative, decreasing the attractiveness of the unchosen alternatives, or both.
2 Postdecision dissonance may be reduced by perceiving some characteristics of the chosen and unchosen alternatives as identical.
3 Postdecision dissonance may be reduced by decreasing the importance of various aspects of the decision.
4 If forced compliance has been elicited, the dissonance may be reduced by changing private opinion to bring it into line with the overt behavior or by magnifying the amount of reward or punishment involved.
5 If forced compliance has been elicited, dissonance may be reduced by intensifying the original private opinion or by minimizing the (private opinion about the) reward of punishment involved.
6 The presence of dissonance leads to seeking new information which will provide cognition consonant with existing cognitive elements and to avoiding those sources of new information which would be likely to increase the existing dissonance.
7 When some of the cognitive elements involved in a dissonance are cognitions about one's own behavior, the dissonance can be reduced by changing the behavior, thus directly changing the cognitive elements.
8 Forced or accidental exposure to new information which tends to increase dissonance will frequently result in misinterpretation and misperception of the new information by the person thus exposed in an effort to avoid (the resulting) dissonance increase.
9 Dissonance introduced by disagreement expressed by other persons (with whom one associates) may be reduced by changing one's own opinion, by influencing the others (with whom one associates) to change their opinion, and rejecting (association with) those who disagree.
10 The existence of dissonance will lead to seeking out others who already agree with a cognition that one wants to establish or maintain, and will also lead to the initiation of communication and influence processes in an effort to obtain more social support.
11 Influence exerted on a person will be more effective in producing opinion change to the extent that the indicated change of opinion reduces dissonance for that person.
12 In situations where many persons in situations where many persons who associate with one another all suffer from identical dissonance, dissonance reduction by obtaining social support is very easy to accomplish.

Effectiveness of attempts at dissonance reduction (this is why people change their minds!):
1 The effectiveness of efforts to reduce dissonance will depend upon the resistance to change of the cognitive elements involved in the dissonance and on the availability of information which will provide, or of other persons who will supply, new cognitive elements which will be consonant with existing cognition.
2 The major sources of resistance to change for a cognitive element are the responsiveness of such cognitive elements to "reality" and the extent to which an element exists in consonant relations with many other elements.
3 The maximum dissonance which can exist between two elements is equal to the resistance to change of the less resistant of the two elements. If the dissonance exceeds this magnitude, the less resistant cognitive element will be changed in order to reduce the dissonance.

DCH

Donnmathan

I think your first problem is the contractory level of expectation you display here. If it can be proved historically, how can it be too incredible for history to deal with? History is full of improbabilities and fantastic feats, yet if enough evidence exists to prove them historically, we must accept them, at least provisionally. To do otherwise would be to commit the logical "sin" of argument from incredulity.

SCIENCE says that which is not a recognizable part of nature is beyond it's scope of inquiry. The statement isn't a "that one", it is a part of the standard definition of methodological naturalism. You are suffering from a side effect of taking the presuppositions of science too far - you assume all things that science hasn't explained yet as "natural", then reject the same phenomina because someone else uses the label "supernatural" for them.

Remember, at one point the public assumed that lightning came from the gods and was thus supernatural. At one point as well, science had no means to measure lightning, and no explaination for it. Scientists (such as they were) assumed the lightning has some natural cause, but it was beyond their understanding and ability to find. They did not, however, reject lightning as impossible just because they couldn't yet explain it and people were calling it 'supernatural'. That happens a lot today. Now, I'm not suggesting that every - or even any - phenominon described as supernatural is real and just awaits explaination. However, the edges of theoretical physics and quantum physics are full of bizarre possibilities, some of which seem to move classes of phenomina generally called "supernatural" and ridiculed by science toward the realm of the natural and explainable. There is a lot we aren't sure of yet, and closing your mind on things just because someone describes them as "supernatural" is a slap in the face of those who finally measured lightning.

Do you realize you just used the same arguement literalists use against evolution? "You didn't see it, thus it didn't happen"?

Absolutely unreasonable, and in exactly the same way as biblical literalists are. Open your mind and accept the fact that whatever is proven historically is what most likely happened, the same way as what is proven scientifically, no matter how fantastic, is how things work. I don't think the ressurrection will ever BE historically proven, but that's an entirely different can of worms.

Amaleq13

You don't know that it is incredible to claim a man was dead for three days and then magically recovered? :rolling:

Oh, that's right, you are the same fellow who was willing to concede that it was "certainly possible" that the story of a man who recovered after being embalmed was a fraud!!

Surely you have a better grasp of the fundamentals of biology and physics than that!

That neither of these outlandish claims could be established through historical investigation should be patently obvious.

Roger Pearse

It is certainly best to work out one's methodology on uncontroversial things.

Bear in mind that I am no authority; just an interested amateur like yourself. But I've never seen a good piece of work that started with a theory and bent the data to fit it, and I'm sure we can see why.

I think that is an excellent summary of how to approach any ancient event and try to find out what happened.

I'm not qualified to say whether historians do it like this. But clearly they SHOULD do so. This is the humanities, remember. One of the problems is that if they don't do it right, it isn't always immediately obvious.

Probably. But a good historian will start with his evidence, rather than go looking for corroboration afterwards.

The difficulty with "less plausible" is... it all happened 20 centuries ago, in a culture which we can only know through the 1% of literature that chanced to survive and which would undoubtedly shock us if we could spend 5 minutes there by what was not as we imagined it. What seems plausible to us is likely to reflect our experiences and culture; not, necessarily, THEIR experiences and culture.

Thus it's not desperately plausible to us that anyone could imagine that burglars would be deterred by a wooden post in the garden with a big wooden willy sticking out of it, but there is impeccable evidence in Martial that this thinking was going on. Once you realise they could think like this, our confidence in "of course they must have thought..." is somewhat diminished. Who knows what they thought?

So the great thing is to avoid imposing a modern guess onto the facts. Obviously big crude facts can usually resist such foolishness (although there are people out there who can assert calmly that the Roman empire never collapsed and that there was never a Dark Age; a conclusion that escaped those there at the time, and everyone since then up to twenty years ago). But on small stuff, we may only have a piece of data or two; and the great thing is NOT to brush it aside because it doesn't fit our preconceptions. The bits that don't fit are the tip of an iceberg of information that mostly didn't reach us. They're where we need to do more work.

You know that there are people who get injured in car crashes and their memory gets damaged? They're largely helpless as our world relies on knowing things longer ago than 2 minutes.

But we all have a bit of a problem; we can't really remember much from before we were of the age of discretion. That's why politicians love the youth vote -- those too young to remember what happened before, the broken promises, etc. Yet these people are making decisions that affect us all.

The older you are, the more fake much of what we are told, what "everyone knows" looks. The certainties of 2009 don't look very solid, if you remember the certainties of 1979, or 1949. How do we get past this problem, of not knowing all the facts?

Also a lot of stuff doesn't make sense unless you know how it came to happen in the first place. Few of us can arrange to be there, for all those events.

History is a way to extend your memory back before you were born. That way you can find out who did it, who did it to whom, and who shouldn't be allowed to do it this time (or whatever).

How much certainty do we place on what we learn? Well, how much certainty do we place on anything we think we know? It's the same question. There are no certainties. There are only probabilities.

But one certainty... the certainties of one period of history, the one period in which we happen to live, these are WRONG. At least, we believe the same about every other period of history, and there seems no pressing reason to suppose that our children will not do likewise. We need to look beyond our own age.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I don't know that it is incredible that God died and came back to life, no; not until I have investigated the matter. Neither do you.

So I don't believe for a moment that Mohammed could work miracles. But if I was investigating whether his claims were true, I wouldn't start by presuming that he could not. I'd find out, by rational investigation.

Only fools are certain of what they have never investigated, know in advance what to think before they know the facts. Is that really the position anyone would want to adopt?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

thedistillers

Miracles by definition are incredible. We call the resurrection a miracle, because all of our empirical evidence point to the fact that people don't come back from the dead.

Obviously we can attribute a prior probability before the investigation, based on what we empirically know about the world.

Roger Pearse

If we merely wish to find evidence for whatever we already suppose, yes.

Otherwise, if we want to find out about something, we have to look with open eyes. Games with words will not find out the facts.

It is a little amusing to a cynic like myself, watching atheists trying desperately to avoid an unbiased investigation, tho. Dear me.