Johnny Skeptic

James Holding’s admittedly flagship essay is titled ‘The Impossible Faith.’ Factor #17 is titled ‘Encouraging People to Check the Facts for Themselves.’ Following are some excerpts:

“A reader (who goes by ‘Jezz’ at TWeb) has suggested this new point. Encouraging people to verify claims and seek proof (and hence discouraging their gullibility) is a guaranteed way to get slammed if you are preaching lies. Let us suppose for a minute that you are trying to start a false religion. In order to support your false religion, you decide to make up a number of historical (i.e., testable) claims, and then hope that nobody would check up on them. In other words, despite the advice given in factors #7 (i.e., don't make up historical claims) and #13 (i.e., that people will check out your claims), you've decided to take a punt and hope that people will be gullible enough to join your religion. What is the most important thing to do, if you have made up claims that are provably false? Well, of course, you don't go around encouraging people to check up on your claims, knowing that if they do so you will be found out!�

Holding has embarrassed himself. In the 1st century, which is the time period that he discusses in TIF, there is no evidence that when people did check things out for themselves that more than a relative handful of them accepted the claims of miracles, including the Resurrection. Holding himself once admitted this with the following:

Clearly, it did affect his point quite a lot, since if there were only 7,530 Christians in 100 A.D., obviously the vast majority of people who did check things out for themselves chose “not� to become Christians. Holding had previously said that Stark picked his number out a hat, and that he massaged the numbers. He contested Stark’s estimate by tooth and claw in various threads for over a year, only to finally say that it didn’t matter after all. He said that the only reason that he spent that much time disputing Stark was to make a 100% argument into a 150% argument. He had previously estimated that there were from 100,000 – 250,000 Christians by 70 A.D., and that there had to be that many in order to get the Romans' attention. I asked him to what extent Christians did get the Roman’s attention by 70 A.D., but he became evasive, which is quite typical of him when he knows that he is in trouble. The Theology Web conveniently banned me before Holding was able to make a reply.

Acts 14:3 says “So Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there, speaking boldly for the Lord, who [tangibly] confirmed the message of his grace by enabling them to do miraculous [tangible] signs and wonders.� The verse is not to be trusted. Regarding the feeding of the 5,000, the feeding of the 4,000, Matthew 4:24, which says “And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them,� the 500 eyewitnesses, and the coming of the Holy Spirit mentioned in the book of Acts, if those claims actually happened, there would have been no need for additional tangible confirmation by the disciples.

It is a fact that we need tangible confirmation of
“the message of his grace� much more today than people did back then. There were supposedly eyewitnesses aplenty back then, but there aren’t any of them around today. Where is tangible evidence of God's power and compassion in tangible ways today? An unusual healing can happen to anyone, not just to Christians. In the world today, there is every indication that tangible good things and bad things are not distributed equitably, and that they are distributed according to the laws of physics, not by divine intervention. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that 1) God used to be compassionate in noticeably tangible ways but is no longer interested in being compassionate in noticeably tangible ways, or that 2) God is compassionate in tangible ways today, but has abandoned his previous approach and now chooses to make his compassion not noticeable in tangible ways, adding considerably to doubt regarding his compassion, or that 3) he never was compassionate in noticeably tangible ways, or that 4) he does not exist.

Peter Kirby

What number of people "checked things out for themselves"?

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Matthew_Green

This is a false dilemna here. Why is the only alternative to preaching something true is to preach lies? It seems to me that a number of apologists are trying their best to rule out delusion. You can be completely honest and yet be terribly deluded. But some Christians, for whatever reason, just won't have delusion as a possibility- it's either all true or all lies. Period.

Matthew

Diogenes the Cynic

I would disagree that any of the miraculous claims were testable by the time they were made and by the audience they were made to. How is say, a slave in Antioch (many early converts were slaves) in 100 CE supposed to verify claims made about (not by) alleged "witnesses" to miraculous events which had occurred in a now destroyed city a generation before? What claims should they have been able to put to any sort of test and how?


Even if we accept Holding's unsupported assumption that the apostles themselves personally claimed to have witnessed a physically risen Jesus, how is THAT supposed to be testable. You either believe them or you don't. Evidently, the vast majority of people closest both historically and geographically to these alleged events didn't buy a word of it. The movement was only successful with those who were the most remote from it and had no access to witnesses or evidence.

Johnny Skeptic

Message to Peter Kirby:

In answer to your question, James Holding has claimed that in the 1st century, the majority of people carefully checked out claims of miralces and were not gullible. He referred to an article by Glenn Miller at http://www.christian-thinktank.com/mqfx.html. Following are some excerpts:

“Even if we grant that these miracle stories are meant to be understood literally, and that these accounts derive ultimately from eyewitness accounts, doesn't the pervasive gullibility of the ancient world reduce the credibility of these accounts to virtually nil? The countless 'eyewitness testimonies' to things like centaurs, live births from males, miraculous healings at temples, teleportation and metamorphoses should render the evidential value of the gospel 'eyewitness accounts' similarly zero.

“A published version of this can be seen from Evan Fales [Philsophia Christi, Series 2, Volume 2, Number 1, 2001, p. 22):

"Perhaps most surprisingly, he [David Clark] fails to see the evidential force of the concessions he makes in considering alternative explanations for miracle stories. It is a truism that the fact that some miracle stories are fabricated is logically consistent with the possibility that some are true. The issue is evidential: given that so many are fabricated, what reason do we have to believe those of the home religion?"

"Fales referred in the preceding paragraph to Richard Carrier's piece on Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire (http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...ier/kooks.html).

"Carrier will say there:

"If the people of that time were so gullible or credulous or superstitious, then we have to be very cautious when assessing the reliability of witnesses of Jesus. As Thomas Jefferson believed when we composed his own version of the gospels, Jesus may have been an entirely different person than the gospels tell us, since the supernatural and other facts about him, even some of his parables or moral sayings, could easily have been added or exaggerated by unreliable witnesses. Thus, this essay is not about whether Jesus was real or how much of what we are told about him is true. It is not even about Jesus. Rather, this essay is a warning and a standard, by which we can assess how likely or easily what we are told about Jesus may be false or exaggerated, and how little we can trust anyone who claims to be a witness of what he said and did. For if all of these stories below could be told and believed, even by Christians themselves, it follows that the gospels, being of entirely the same kind, can all too easily be inaccurate, tainted by the gullibility, credulity, or fondness for the spectacular which characterized virtually everyone of the time.

"Now, much of modern scholarship would 'already' disagree with this position, as can be seen from a couple of authors:

"In antiquity miracles were not accepted without question. Graeco-Roman writers were often reluctant to ascribe miraculous events to the gods, and offered alternative explanations. Some writers were openly skeptical about miracles (e.g. Epicurus; Lucretius; Lucian). So it is a mistake to write off the miracles of Jesus as the result of the naivety and gullibility of people in the ancient world." [GAJ, rev 2, p.235, Stanton]

"This period [Hellenistic] may well have been the least superstitious period of antiquity, even if we have to allow for the continued existence in concealment of an undercurrent of the usual superstitions and belief in miracles. However that may be a change sets in with the beginning of late antiquity. Popular belief in miracles and superstition revived." [MSECT:269, Theissen]

"On the other hand it must be admitted that in the relatively peaceful and stable period of the first two centuries the irrationalism which first appeared at the beginning of the first century was unable to strike roots. There continued to be rationalist movements alongside it. In his dialogues Lucian mocked his contemporaries' belief in the miraculous. Oenomaus of Gadara mocked the oracles, and Sextus Empiricus once more brought together all the arguments of scepticism. Even where increased irrationalism was notable--for example in Plutarch's development--it remained within bounds, without eccentricity or fanaticism. There was no decisive change before the great social and political crisis of the 3rd century. AD. [MSECT:275, Theissen]

"Primitive Christian belief in the miraculous thus has a crucial role in the religious development of late antiquity. It stands at the beginning of the 'new' irrationalism of that age. Our brief outline of this development may have done something to correct the widespread picture of an ancient belief in the miraculous which has no history. What we have found here is not a rampant jungle of ancient credulity with regard to miracles, but a process of historical transformation in which forms and patterns of belief in the miraculous succeed one another. If we accept this picture, we must firmly reject assertions that primitive Christian belief in the miraculous represented nothing unusual in the context of its period." [MSECT:276, Theissen]

"Particularly in the Augustan age, when intellectual life was inspired by the example of Alexandrian scholarship, there was a general desire for increasingly exact knowledge, and historians, like poets, were always on the alert to correct their predecessors." [X02:RCH4S:93, Woodman]

"It is in this light that we must judge the accounts we possess of other miracle-workers in Jesus' period and culture. We have already observed that the list of such occurrences is very much shorter than is often supposed. If we take the period of four hundred years stretching from two hundred years before to two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the number of miracles recorded which are remotely comparable with those of Jesus is astonishingly small. On the pagan side, there is little to report apart from the records of cures at healing shrines, which were certainly quite frequent, but are a rather different phenomenon from cures performed by an individual healer. Indeed it is significant that later Christian fathers, when seeking miracle workers with whom to compare or contrast Jesus, had to have recourse to remote and by now almost legendary figures of the past such as Pythagoras or Empedocles." [X:JATCH:103]

"In the second century C.E. there is a fair amount of evidence to support the thesis that philosophers were generally inclined to be less critical in assessing extraordinary phenomena than in the centuries immediately preceding and more cordial toward religion generally and mainstream piety and its wonders specifically." [X04:PCCM:104]

Of course, Miller's article is patently absurd. Let's take another look at the following that Miller said:

"In antiquity miracles were not accepted without question. Graeco-Roman writers were often reluctant to ascribe miraculous events to the gods, and offered alternative explanations. Some writers were openly skeptical about miracles (e.g. Epicurus; Lucretius; Lucian). So it is a mistake to write off the miracles of Jesus as the result of the naivety and gullibility of people in the ancient world." [GAJ, rev 2, p.235, Stanton]"

Now really, who does Miller think that he is kidding? Epicurus lived from 341-270 B.C. Miller claims that people were not gullible in the "first" century, so his reference to Epicurus is utter nonsense. Lucretius lived from about 94 - 55 B.C. Again, that is not the century in question. Lucian wasn't even born until circa 120. Epicurus, Lucretius and Lucian were most certainly not typical of most people. Only a very few people were atheists and agnostics in ancient times. Miller might as well have said that today, since members of the Flat Earth Society maintain that the earth is flat, people living today are skeptical of the claim that the earth is round.

"This period [Hellenistic] may well have been the least superstitious period of antiquity, even if we have to allow for the continued existence in concealment of an undercurrent of the usual superstitions and belief in miracles. However that may be a change sets in with the beginning of late antiquity. Popular belief in miracles and superstition revived." [MSECT:269, Theissen]

Miller's argument only works if the resurrection of Jesus "was not" a superstition, and he hasn't come anywhere close to proving that it wasn't.

Peter Kirby

I don't think you've quite got the intent of the question asked. My question was, "What number of people 'checked things out for themselves'?" Not, "What percentage of people checked out claims of miracles that they are confronted with and consider believing?" which is the question your answer responds to.

You wrote, "if there were only 7,530 Christians in 100 A.D., obviously the vast majority of people who did check things out for themselves chose “not� to become Christians." Theoretically, as a matter of maths, if 10040 people "checked things out" and 7530 people chose to become Christians, then 75% of the people who did check things out chose to become Christians. What I am getting at is that you can't assume that the entire Empire was interested or aware or checked things out; rather, you must estimate both the number of PeopleWhoCheckedThingsOut as well as the number of PeopleWhoCheckedThingsOutAndConverted.

Neither of which, I think, anyone can do from this remove.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Johnny Skeptic

As I said in my previous post, Glenn Miller, who James Holding referred to, quotes A. E. Harvey as saying that the number of miracles mentioned in the the New Testament far exceeds the numbers of claims of miracles made from all other souces combined from 200 B.C. - 200 A.D. If Holding's and Miller's own source is correct, then a dramatic increase in the numbers of claims of miracles would surely have caused a dramatic increase in peoples' desire to check things out. Even today, if claims of people being abducted by aliens dramatically increased, most people would become a lot more interested in checking out such claims than they are now.

Peter Kirby

You still haven't answered the question. What number of people 'checked things out'? What's the figure, and how do you derive it?

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Johnny Skeptic

I said "If Holding's and Miller's soruce is correct, then a dramatic increase in the numbers of claims of miracles would surely have caused a dramatic increase in peoples' desire to check things out. [I am assuming for sake of argument that A. E. Harvey is correct.] Even today, if claims of people being abducted by aliens dramatically increased, most people would become a lot more interested in checking out such claims than they are now." Do you disagree with this? If so, please tell me why. If not, then an accurate estimate is not necessary in order to reasonably conclude that a dramatic increase in the numbers of claims of miracles would have caused a dramatic increase in the numbers of people who would have checked out the claims.

Peter Kirby

You need an estimate of checker-outers to compare to the estimate of 7530 believers in order to make a statement about the "vast majority" of the population of checker-outers not being/becoming believers.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby