I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?
In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.
Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?
Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.
Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one
1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)
2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]
From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.
What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.
Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”
Refuting the skeptic
So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.
Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:
(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;
(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10120, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10120: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10120, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10120.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10120 to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;
(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.
I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.
Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause
(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…
Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:
There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.
In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?
And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.
Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?
As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?
(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:
Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.
Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.
To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)
Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”
The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.
[Case study: the Resurrection]
The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 1044 times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.
(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10120. Since 1044 is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10120. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)
Conclusion
Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.
One can be forgiven for not knowing what the hell Erik is or isn’t, given his propensity to stay away from saying anything that isn’t vacuous.
You know what professionals do? They work. They don’t let beliefs get in the way. They do their job, professionally. Their value is in that they are good at what they do.
Textual material has its limits. It doesn’t show conclusively what happened and what didn’t. It only shows that somebody wrote it down. The rest is up to contextualization and interpretation. And to other sciences, such as archeology, which have their own limits. Professionals know these limits and they know how to interpret. Laymen don’t.
Historicity is far from the main concern in genres like mythology and folklore. Christian apologists only betray their own bias by trying to cast New Testament as mainly historical. On the surface NT leaves a more historical impression than Iliad, but historicity is still not the main concern there the way it is in, for example, Josephus or Suetonius. Which doesn’t prevent stone tablets with “Pontius Pilate” on them being dug up, so you cannot say NT is un-historical. The task of the historian in such a situation is to avoid being anti-historical and anachronistic.
A couple of other thoughts:
1. Vincent; under “phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces” you include (emboldened in green) “we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent”. The unavoidable problem with this is that it may be impossible to demonstrate that only an intelligent agent could have caused some specific DNA sequence. Barring a nearly-exhaustive and long-drawn-out evaluation and exclusion of other possibilities; these phenomena could never approach the status of “confirmed”.
2. “I have to disagree with [Feser’s] implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection.” Back In The Day when I was still a believer, there were members of our congregation who were quite adamant that Jesus did not die on the cross, that he fell unconscious, was taken down alive, but everyone thought he was dead. These are some of the same people (in my congregation) who believed that after the “resurrection” Jesus married Mary Magdalene and moved to India. Even in modern times there have been cases reported where “dead” people “woke up” at the start of their autopsy. I can’t cite one at this moment, but one need not invoke aliens to “explain away” a resurrection. The most obvious thing to think if a “dead person” rises from the dead is to wonder if they actually were dead.
3. Vincent, your position on the probability of the Resurrection of Jesus (including the work of the McGrews and Laplace’s Sunrise argument) is defective. No mass hallucination is needed; the story could well have been fabricated entirely. No amount of fabricated testimony can make a story true.
4. REW makes an interesting and valid point: most “evidence” of a deity or alien activity actually could point to either or both. If “we continued to gather evidence we could start to distinguish between the 2 possibilities of God vs Aliens.”
sean s.
Vincent in the OP
Vincent is correct in pointing out there are two separate issues.
First, establishing that some extraordinary event has occurred. What are the criteria for this? That some event is inconsistent with the properties of the universe? Violation of the laws of physics?
Second, attribution. (Much the more problematic, in my view.) How do you make the link between some extraordinary event and some particular religious dogma? I have no idea where you would even start.
Okay, so don’t let them get in the way, but tell me about them instead?
That’s the hubris element.
That’s the neediness part.
Schliemann dug up Troy. Frova dug up the Pilate stone. Therefore I am needy. And full of hubris. Me, not them.
Wonderful how it works for you.
Erik,
The NT was written in a particular historical context, and to the extent it reflects that context (first and second century Roman-ruled Judea) it is sufficiently reliable.
Which—if any—of the significant events reported there (about Jesus of Nazareth and the first Christians) are accurate is not established.
Given that every complete version of the NT which we have was written down many decades after the reported events, the NT is not inherently reliable beyond what can be corroborated or is reasonable.
Even devout Christians dispute the correct understanding of the NT, and the balance of their opinions has shifted over time. Those of us on the outside are reasonably inclined to hold the NT as an uncertain source of information about any hypothetical deity.
sean s.
Right. YOU, not them.
sean samis,
So you say that a mass conspiracy theory is a reasonable explanation?
Do you believe in the stories about Joseph Smith? Do you believe in Scientology? Those are two recent existence proofs that religions needn’t arise from historical events.
No.
Perhaps someone fabricated the story to explain why Christians continued to follow their dead teacher. Maybe the reported 500 witnesses never existed; (they are not named; how would one verify the story?)
Since we don’t exactly know when the Resurrection story was first written down, we can’t be sure of it and have no reason to take it at face value. One or two devoted followers, decades after the events, could have created the story and it stuck.
sean s.
It is at least as reasonable as the idea that an immortal, eternal and divine intelligence that can live and think without a physical brain, made itself be born from a human female that never had intercourse* (took a sexually mature male’s ejaculation in the birth canal close to ovulation), then later made itself be crucified into being fully bodily and physically dead, stayed fully dead for two days, then fully bodily and physically resurrected it’s human body back to life as if nothing had happened to it.
In fact I suspect that, as reasonableness goes, it is many many times more reasonable that a conspiracy of some sort could have happened.
But any way, why would it have to be a “mass” conspiracy theory? Or even a conspiracy theory? The whole thing could originate from a single person’s epileptic seizure-caused hallucination, he compellingly and to the best of his understanding, honestly told about it (without, of course, actually knowing the neurophysiological basis that caused the visions) to people around him who started believing it, it was transformative in their lives as religious beliefs usually are, and on and on it went.
My claim is not that this actually happened, merely that at no point does it have to actually involve mass hallucinations, or mass conspiracy, or trickery or anyone knowingly telling falsehoods or having any unethical or morally bad motivations for anything.
* By the way, in my experience, women who become pregnant usually had sex. But I guess we’ll just believe otherwise on some people’s say-so. Me and my silly skepticism.
Then there are those people who were abducted but will never admit it. They tend to make fun of people who admit they were abducted.
Since alien abductions are inherently uncertain; the subcategory of actual-but-unreported abductions is even less certain. One cannot establish the certainty of something by citing something even less certain.
sean s.
more like
quote:
For the king knows about these things, and to him I speak boldly. For I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner.
(Act 26:26)
end quote:
——–And if you don’t know what I’m taking about just ask the folks yourself they are still around and not hiding 😉
peace
Perhaps someone more theologically inclined than I am could enlighten me, but Mary was described as a virgin before conceiving.
“The Holy Spirit will come to you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”
A euphemism for the Leda/swan thing.
petrushka,
Forgive me but every woman was a virgin BEFORE conceiving! The claim is that Mary was still a virgin AFTER conceiving.
sean s.
Seems to work for critics of Christianity.
Mung,
You’d have to give us an example; it should not be acceptable to do this.
sean s.
Not really.
It’s not conception that ends virginity.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
True. But since I never said it was…
sean s.
Is there a biblical statement to that effect?
Let’s not get sidetracked over the difference between having intercourse and conceiving. My thought is that overshadowing is a euphemism for intercourse. There are lots of similar euphemisms in the bible.
chuckle
I don’t think we need the bible to tell us how the world works. Every woman who conceives a child was a virgin once, but no more.
This is true. It was never in doubt.
sean s.
FYI words have meanings
Original: ἐπέρχομαι
– Transliteration: Eperchomai
– Phonetic: ep-er’-khom-ahee
– Definition:
1. to come to arrive
a. of time, come on, be at hand, be future
2. to come upon, overtake, one
a. of sleep
b. of disease
c. of calamities
d. of the holy spirit, descending and operating in one
e. of an enemy attacking one
– Origin: from G1909 and G2064
– TDNT entry: 13:20,3
– Part(s) of speech: Verb
– Strong’s: From G1909 and G2064; to supervene that is arrive occur impend attack (figuratively) influence: – come (in upon).
Total KJV Occurrences: 6
• come, 4
Luk_1:35; Act_8:24; Act_13:40; Eph_2:7
• thither, 1
Act_14:19
• upon, 1
Jam_5:1
and
– Original: ἐπισκιάζω
– Transliteration: Episkiazo
– Phonetic: ep-ee-skee-ad’-zo
– Definition:
1. to throw a shadow upon, to envelop in a shadow, to overshadow
– Origin: from G1909 and a derivative of G4639
– TDNT entry: 13:39,1
– Part(s) of speech: Verb
– Strong’s: From G1909 and a derivative of G4639; to cast a shade upon that is (by analogy) to envelop in a haze of brilliancy; figuratively to invest with preternatural influence: – overshadow.
Total KJV Occurrences: 5
• overshadow, 2
Luk_1:35; Act_5:15
• overshadowed, 3
Mat_17:5; Mar_9:7; Luk_9:34
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
never “intercourse”
you are welcome
peace
To save you some trouble here is every time ἐπισκιάζω is found in the Bible
quote:
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.
(Luk 1:35)
and
so that they even carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them.
(Act 5:15)
and
He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
(Mat 17:5)
and
And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”
(Mar 9:7)
and
As he was saying these things, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud.
(Luk 9:34)
end quote:
you are welcome again
peace
You’re welcome to do that, but I for one would prefer active discussion over Monolithic KirosFocuseque blurts. There is no flock here to bully from the pulpit.
If being overshadowed can get you pregnant, I can see why one might be afraid.
But if it doesn’t end your virginity, the lord must have very small hands.
Seconded. We need to get the flock out of here.
We follow the crumbs. Stop dropping them in your lap.
Mung,
You’re on Patrick’s lap? 😘
I’m just one member of the flock. 🙂
I still can’t get over how shitty the math is.
There’s a relevant article over at Nautilus: “Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?”.
My personal take on this is that there’s no way to prove whether something is due to physics, God, aliens, Descartes’ “evil demon”, personal delusion, etc. But that does not mean we cannot gather evidence for and against these possibilities, and I’m perfectly comfortable evaluating the possibilities based on evidence, without descending into strong skepticism and demanding absolute proof.
At the risk of dragging politics into it, I also want to give an analogy to the 500 witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection: Donald Trump claimed that thousands of people in Jersey City cheered as the twin towers came down on 9/11, and that this was well covered in the media at the time. Like the 500 witnesses, this could be verified, but attempts to do so have failed. The event seems to exist only as rumors, and confused memories. Does that stop the claim from being made? No, of course not; people can make any claims they want to, with or without verification.
Unlike the 500 witnesses, this claim involves people who are still alive, from a recent period where extensive records exist, and so fact-checking claims like this is relatively trivial. Is there any reason I should take the claims that the 500 witnesses existed any more seriously than I take Trump’s claims about celebrations in Jersey City?
I would say yes. If the witnesses did not exist then we would expect the letter would have quickly fell out favor in Corinth and never made it into the cannon.
Tales of celebrations in Jersey City are already entering the “apocrypha” phase after only a couple decades. This is the opposite of what happened with the resurrection
Imagine If Trump claimed that thousands celebrated in Jersey City on 911 in a letter to a large group of people in London that doubted truth of the events with an open invitation to ask the witnesses yourself.
Do you honestly think no one would bother to verify the claim.
peace
Instead of a letter, he invited the media to investigate. Reporters can be pretty impressively diligent, their jobs involve doing an exhaustive amount of interviewing of thousands of people who were there and would have noticed – or provided directions to people who would have noticed. What the investigators found was no evidence — no witnesses, no record in print or video or tweet or other social media, nothing at all.
Relevantly to this topic, we notice that (1) Trump has nonetheless repeated this claim and never backed off of it; and (2) a great many people accept that Trump’s tale is factually accurate — either despite or even because of the intensive media effort to find even a hint of corroborating evidence.
As a few people here illustrate with impressive consistency, the Will To Believe is impervious to all facts.
Don’t know about thousands, but my son saw people celebrating in Manhattan. He is far from a Trump fan.
The circumstances are markedly different.
Trump’s claims were made publicly and were widely reported; the biblical account was reportedly made in a letter circulated within a disliked minority.
There is a large industry of skilled and motivated professionals who were able to thoroughly investigate Trump’s claims; few–if ANY–such professional investigators existed in biblical times.
There are many people who had strong interests in debunking Trump’s claims and the means to do so; it is quite likely that few among the early Christians had any interest in debunking the biblical claims, to the contrary nearly all had strong incentives to believe and few would have the means to competently investigate any way.
Trump’s claims were made at a time when the events were still recent memory; we simply don’t know when the biblical claim was first made nor how much time had elapsed since the event supposedly happened.
It is quite likely that no one tried to verify the biblical claim because they had no motivation to do so, or that some might have tried but they lacked a means to widely circulate their results, or these hypothetical investigators were thwarted by the passage of too much time.
sean s.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 🙂
I saw people celebrating in my little hick home town. They were not Muslims but Jehovah’s Witnesses who thought (I assume)that Armageddon was upon us.
It would not surprise me if some folks in Manhattan did the same. It’s a big place after all.
peace
Acts 26:26
Luke 1:1-4
quote:
There is consensus among historians and Christian theologians that Paul is the author of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (ca. AD 53–54)
end quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epistle_to_the_Corinthians
and this
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/1corinthians.html
1st cor 15-17-19
you are welcome
peace
Acts 26:26 does not show that the biblical claims about the 500 witnesses were widely known, only that Paul reportedly thought the king knew of PAUL’S personal story. Nothing verifies Paul’s opinion nor the king’s knowledge of PAUL’S personal story, much less the story of the 500 witnesses.
The story of the 500 witnesses is not mentioned AT ALL in Acts., which is unsurprising because the story found only in a letter to the Corinthians, not a letter to any king.
Luke 1:1-4 does not show that any professional investigators existed in biblical times.
It may be true that, “There is consensus among historians and Christian theologians that Paul is the author of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (ca. AD 53–54),” but it is also true that we have no original copy of that letter; the consensus is that our oldest existing copy of the letter was produced around 200 CE. Given the significant changes we know about in other, later biblical texts, we cannot simply assume this letter survived unaltered for 150 years.
Given the remarkable nature of this claim (500 people seeing a man raised from the dead) the fact that only ONE account of this exists indicates that the truth of this story is reasonably doubted. It’s not disproved, but it’s not reliable either.
In response to my statement that “It is quite likely that no one tried to verify the biblical claim because they had no motivation to do so.” You reply by citing “1st cor 15-17-19”. Since there is no 1 Corinthians 17 or 19, I assume you meant 1 Corinthians 15: 17-19: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” This supports my view that Christians were strongly motivated to not doubt accounts of the resurrection.
Happy Thanksgiving!
sean s.
We don’t have an original copy of anything in antiquity, except stone or metal, so this point is irrelevant. This point is also counterproductive to you, because the Bible manuscripts get temporally closest to the original of any documents in antiquity. The second best is Homer, 11th century CE (sic!).
Which changes are we talking about, specifically?
The fact is that the Bible is the best-preserved document from antiquity, both in terms of temporal proximity to the originals and in terms of textual integrity. If the Bible’s standard is not good enough for you, then nothing is. You are simply in denial of all history wholesale.
It’s a tough thing for historians of antiquity that there are are no original documents, but they are still doing their work, successfully. Learn to appreciate it.
This does not justify taking the Bible at face value. The fact remains that we don’t know in what ways biblical passages may have been altered from lost originals, and we do know that there are differences among and between known ancient copies, and “modern” copies.
The topic of minor and major differences between ancient copies of biblical texts is a large one. You could begin with Bart Erhman’s “Misquoting Jesus” (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEGJF8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1). Please be aware this would only be a beginning.
Even being the “best preserved” does not mean its preservation is good enough for your purpose. If the Bible is supposed to serve as the basis of belief in some deity, then what you claim is not good enough for me. This is not a denial of anything, it is an acknowledgement that the rules of proper reasoning apply to the study of biblical history as much as anything. Claims about any resurrection based solely on biblical writings are not logically sufficient to make the story credible.
I appreciate their work, and after you read Ehrman et al. you might have even greater appreciation for their efforts. Historians cannot tell us what happened just from written sources; they can only tell us what the sources say and to what extent (if any) their accounts have been corroborated. I do appreciate how tough their work can be, but that does not give them a pass from the rules of reason.
sean s.
🙂
Bart Ehrman is not the beginning, but the end of biblical scholarship. He offers nothing new. And he would agree with me in this: The fact is that the Bible is the best-preserved document from antiquity, both in terms of temporal proximity to the originals and in terms of textual integrity.
If you think you know what Plato said or Homer said, then you all the more know what the Bible says, because the Bible has been better preserved in several orders of magnitude. The rest is meaningless quibble about the fact that the Bible does not appear to be a straightforward history book and not good enough as a religious book for atheists. Well, neither is Plato or Homer. For atheists and denialists, nothing is good enough.
From here: http://www.god-did-it.com/caesar-vs-jesus-historical-evidence/
Hmmmmm contemporaneous!
R O F L
Wow. Just… wow.
Lol. So if you don’t believe the garbage in the bible then you deny all history wholesale.
I guess it’s really true what they say about religion and what it does to your brain.
Erik’s infatuation with the Bible suggests that, if he’s not a christian, he has a very soft spot for christianity.