Toto

Wait a minute, I haven't "dismissed" Wright completely. You are the one asserting or hinting that somewhere in a 3 tome opus there is the answer to my questions. But it appears that you haven't read him either.

If I read an excerpt from Wright and see a problem, do I have to read everything else he has written to see if he has hidden a solution to that problem somewhere, before I can react to the words before me? That must be why he has written so much. His would-be critics would have to spend too much time plowing through all of his works before they could criticize any part of his argument.

luvluv

Toto:

Yes. I'm sure that's the reason.

Family Man

luvluv --

I don't disagree with you that, if we had good evidence of the supernatural -- and I think it is at least theoretically possible -- then it should be considered. The problem is that we don't have good evidence of the supernatural either today or especially in the past. Historians don't think that past miracles "can be evidentially supported" or that "they can play a substantial part in human affairs" except to the extent that people came to believe in them.

And it is factually true that historians routinely dismiss miracles as being non-historical. I've proposed this challenge in the past, and you're free to try it yourself: name one supernatural event outside of the Christian religious tradition widely held by scholars to be a true, historical event. I guarantee you you won't find any.

The reason why they do that should be obvious: the ancients made miracle claims at the drop of a hat. For example, after Caesar defeated Pompeii in Greece, it was reported that a large statue in a Greek temple turned around (supernaturally, of course) and a large fern miraculously popped up in front of it. Caesar was later proclaimed a god. Should we take the credulous stance that this is evidence that Caesar really was a god, or should we come to the obvious conclusion that the ancients were indulging in some hyperbole here? And, if it is the latter, how can we rule out that the gospel writers weren't engaging in exaggeration also? Especially since there is considerable evidence that this is exactly what they did. Remember the star in the birth narratives or the earthquakes and zombies walking around after the crucifixion? Classic examples of pious rhetoric that almost certainly didn't happen.

Or consider this example. Both Jesus and Vespasian were reputed to have cured blindness by spitting in the eye. Now, if they both did it, then what's so special about Jesus. If neither did it, then we suspect that someone was indulging in some rhetorical effort. And if one did it but not the other, we have some special pleading going on. None of these options reflect well on this evidence of the miraculous, and the particular claim that Jesus was a god.

In other words, historians don't dismiss the miraculous because of some philosophical bias against the possibility of the miraculous, but because there are some very real evidential difficulties in coming to the conclusion that the miraculous ever occurred. Since we do now that they were making at least some of it up, how do we come up with a principled way of saying which miracle stories are valid and which are not? (There are ways to do that with non-miraculous stories).

In short, there are far more problems than you're letting on and historians don't consider the miraculous to be historical for some very, very good reasons. If you want to argue otherwise, you're going to have to come up with a methodology for separating out the true miracles from the hyberbole that no other historian has been able to figure out. If you come up with something, I suggest you get a Ph.D. in history and start publishing. You'd be famous.

luvluv

Family Man:

So it seems you are now saying that miracles can be historical, provided sufficient evidence? Is this the claim of all historians?

So the Ressurection is not thought to be ahistorical a priori, but only after investigation into the evidence? Or is there even an investigation into the evidence? Is a literal, bodily Ressurection a live option in the pool of alternatives prior to the evidence being assessed, and only removed after investigation?

What's so special about Jesus? You know, the guy did a little bit more than spit in one person's eye. But in my opinion the relavent question would be which one was recorded first? The other story may be a copy. I'm not really arguing for the veracity of any particular miracle story, I'm just asking why ordinary investigative tactics can't be applied to them.

I don't understand. What are the relavent differences between natural and supernatural claims that makes supernatural claims so much harder to assess evidentially? Why can we approach evidentially the truth of whether or not Jesus was baptized, but not the truth of whether or not Jesus actually fed a crowd with a single loaf of bread and a single piece of fish? What is the method by which you assess the baptism story, and precisely why could this method not apply equally well to the miracle story?

Steven Carr

Miracle storys do get examined. Christians examine the miracle stories in the Koran, and these are well-known methods which can be used to examine the NT miracle storys.

See http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm for examples of analysis of miracle storys.

Mageth

Well, that should be obvious, but I'll take a stab at it anyway. To establish a claim of a natural event as probably historical or historical, all you have to do is to estabish that the event probably or did happen.

To establish a claim of a supernatural event as probably historical or historical, you have to first establish that the event happened, and then also establish that it requires a supernatural explanation, that there is no viable natural explanation for the event - that it was indeed a supernatural event.

And "supernatural" is not assumed to exist; you have to establish that there is such a thing in the first place, which has not been done. That makes establishing a supernatural explanation rather difficult, no?

Obviously, establishing that some event in history requires a supernatural explanation is no easy task, much more difficult than demonstrating a natural event occurred in history. That's why natural explanations for events that are claimed to be of supernatural origin are generally preferred.

Toto

Robert Price in The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man uses a simple test that seems so obvious you wonder why no one talked about it before. You look around and see what happens today. You don't see any miracles, you don't see anyone rising from the dead. But you do see a lot of supernatural claims that are always debunked when a skeptic examines them. You see a lot of new religions that start with claims that seem ridiculous to those outside the religion.

So start with the evidence for a resurrection or other miracles. The "evidence" to support it is confined to stories written well after the time. Even if the writing were contemporaneous, you have to ask, what is more likely, that the miracle happened, or that someone made up the story? You have to ask why the resurrection did not make a bigger impression on contemporaries if it happened.

Extraordinary events demand extraordinary proof. Ancient documents just do not constitute the extraordinary proof of those events. They do not even rise to the level of ordinary proof.

Mageth

Also, please define what this "evidence of the supernatural" we would look for is supposed to be, exactly. I'm not talking about claims of the incredible, I'm talking about some real, bonafide empirical evidence of the supernatural.

luvluv

Mageth:

Thank you for coming down off of your lofty perch of intellectualism to enlighten the unwashed masses...

I don't understand. If the historian admits beforehand that the miraculous is possible, then why should he have to eliminate all possible natural explanations before accepting the supernatural one? You have a pool of live explanatory options, several of which are supernatural. If you admit the supernatural is possible, and the supernatural explanation explains more than all the other explanations in the pool, why is it necessary to exhaust all possible naturalistic explanations (even ones which weren't in the original pool and which are completely ad hoc)? It seems to me that all these explanations are just attempts to hide a philosophical bias behind a thin veneer of empiricism.

Well, how about my example of the person parting and crossing the Atlantic, with millions of eye-witnesses, video tape evidence, and the stumping of all the world's scientists. Would that do for ya?( If not, then again I'd say the problem is philosophical, because for you naturalism is apparently unfalsifiable and so supernatural explanations are excluded by you prior to the evidence.)


Toto:

This is sort of my point. If the historian is philosophically open to the possibility of miracles, then why is the claim extraordinary? At any rate, history is nothing but the record of extraordinary events, so if there's no philosophical bias going on, what exactly is so super-extraordinary about a supernatural claim?

Gregg

Why do you have to have a "philosophical bias" to be skeptical of supernatural claims? Would you cry "philosophical bias" if someone professed to be skeptical of the supernatural claims of non-Abrahamic religions? Wouldn't you scoff at a claim that invisible gremlins keep your car from starting? If so, why? After all, there's no way you can disprove it. Aren't you showing your philophical bias by denying that invisible gremlins live under the hood of your car?

Miracles today all seem to consist of funny coincidences, third-hand anecdotes, semi-hallucinatory experiences occurring to people under considerable stress, and spontaneous healings from seemingly terminal diseases. (Assuming that the original diagnosis was correct, there's still a lot we don't understand about the body, so there's no reason think spontaneous healings don't have any natural explanation.) This is piddling, unconvincing stuff. Where are the BIG miracles--three-days-dead people returning to life, water changing into wine, storms being calmed, seas being parted, demons going into herds of swine and driving them wacko, giant pillars of fire and smoke that move about in the absence of volcanic vents or combustible material?

There's no "philosophical bias" inherent in preferring a natural explanation over a supernatural one. It's just common sense.