Questioning the Bible--continued

Yes, I'm continuing a series of blogs dealing with Questioning the Bible. The author, Jonathan Morrow, moves on to a new topic which is interesting – what can we really know about Jesus? Did he exist? Can we be confident about what he said and did?

One key element the author looks at is something called "criteria of authenticity." This is used by New Testament scholars who are looking at the stories about Jesus. One such criterion is multiple attestation, which says a saying, teaching, or event concerning Jesus is probably authentic if it shows up in multiple sources.

So what is the finding when scholars put this and other criteria to work regarding the New Testament stories of Jesus? An international group of Jesus scholars met from 1998 to 2008 see what they could agree on as being authentic about Jesus. Their conclusion was that there were at least 12 significant events in his life that could be positively established by these criteria.

Here they are – Jesus affirmed the ministry of John the Baptist, Jesus collected 12 key followers, Jesus publicly associated with sinners, Jesus claim to be Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus cast out demons, Jesus accepted Peter's declaration that he was the Christ (Messiah), Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, Jesus claim to have authority over the sacred space of the Temple, Jesus connected the Passover meal with his disciples to his claim to be the deliverer of God's people, Jesus claimed unique divine authority when examined by Jewish leadership, the Roman ruler Pontius Pilate publicly executed Jesus for sedition, following Jesus's crucifixion and burial his tomb was found empty by a group of women followers.

So even skeptical scholars can agree that a large part of the New Testament Gospels' stories of Jesus are authentic. But what if we did not have the Bible? Morrow notes that these main points about his life are found in secular historians as well (Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, just to name a few). He quotes Ben Witherington: "There is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for the historical existence of Julius Caesar… The only persons who doubt the existence of Jesus of Nazareth are those who either hate Christianity and so want it to disappear, or those who have not bothered to do the proper historical homework."

Okay, that's enough to digest for now.

More on Challenges to the Bible

Here we go again. I'm continuing a long series of blogs dealing with Jonathan Morrow's book Questioning the Bible. Let's look at more about David Hume (see the last blog).

Morrow spends time to refute Hume's arguments since so many skeptics today use these arguments to ridicule the idea of miracles. One argument that Hume brought up was this – no historical miracle has been sufficiently attested by honest and reliable men than. But Morrow says that the New Testament writers were both interested in and capable of recording accurate history. In addition, both Christian and non-Christian sources agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a miracle worker.

I want to continue Morrow's chapter arguing that the Bible is actually not unscientific. He was challenging David Hume's arguments against the possibility of miracles.

Hume presented four arguments against miracles. I covered the first one in the last blog. For the second point, Hume believed that people crave miraculous stories and are gullible to believe absurd stories. Morrow agrees there are certainly gullible people, but is that true of everyone? Decidedly not. Hume also stated that miracles only occur among ignorant and uncivilized people. That smacks of racism. The miracles of Jesus did not occur among ignorant uncivilized people, but among the Jews, who were highly educated and sophisticated. Finally, Hume argues that miracles occur in all religions and thus cancel each other out since they teach mutually contradictory doctrines. But Morrow says none of these other miracles is as powerfully attested as the miracles of Jesus Christ. He focuses on the resurrection, claiming that historical evidence for it is quite strong. A more rational approach, he believes, would be to examine the strongest claims one by one rather than just dismissing all of them.

In the rest of the chapter Morrow looks at scientific reasons that point to the existence of God. First is the cosmological argument (why is there something rather than nothing?). Science tells us now that the universe had a beginning and since something can't begin to exist without a cause, it seems reasonable to believe that a cause outside of the universe is responsible for its existence. The Big Bang, in other words, is not a threat to belief in God but a supporting point. Secondly, the author points out a design argument from physics. He notes that the laws of physics that govern the universe are fine-tuned for the emergence and sustenance of human life. It is as if the universe was crafted with us in mind. If there were the slightest changes in any number of physical constants, our universe would be unable to have human life. Finally, Morrow discusses the design argument from DNA. Scientists in the last half-century have learned that cellular organization and the development of living creatures are orchestrated by genetic information. Natural forces such as chance and necessity have failed to explain the origin of biological information.

So Morrow comes to the conclusion that the Bible is not unscientific since arguments against the existence of miracles fail and there is so much scientific evidence suggesting the existence of a creator.

The Bible and Hume

I am going slowly through an important book called Questioning the Bible by Jonathan Morrow. In the last blog I've finished his first chapter taking on the challenge that the Bible is anti-intellectual. I'd like to jump around a bit and go to his eighth chapter because I think it ties in very well with the previous one. This one is titled "Is the Bible Unscientific?" I see this as an extension of the previous chapter dealing with the Bible and rationality.

The author starts by noting that for many people the Bible seems unscientific since it deals with miracles in particular. After all, Christianity and Judaism are supernatural religions. Their worldview clashes with a prominent Scottish philosopher David Hume, who thought such miracle claims were rubbish.

Hume claimed that belief ought to be justified by probability and that probability is based upon the uniformity or consistency of nature. Nature  behaves in a certain way over and over again. Therefore, it's likely that it will always behave that way. So, according to Hume, exceptions to nature's laws are so infinitely improbable they can be considered impossible. He says a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and since our experiences have established these laws, the proof against a miracle is complete. 

Here's how his argument looks in a short form:

1. Natural law describes regular occurrences.

2. Miracles are rare occurrences.

3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare.

4. We should always base our belief on the greater evidence.

5. Therefore, we shouldn't believe in miracles.

But there seems to be an obvious problem with this line of reasoning. It is circular. C. S. Lewis takes this on:

            Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely" uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

Hume's big problem is number 3 in the above statements. There are all sorts of rare occurrences that we believe in--the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the entire history of the world, each of our births, a hole in one in golf, etc. 

The key is not how regular or rare something is--the key is the evidence for the event.