Quentin Smith

I just learned that Quentin Smith passed away last month. He was an atheist philosopher that I respected greatly, despite his controversial claims about Kripke. Smith fully accepted Big Bang cosmology, but argued that the best explanation of it is that the universe just popped into existence without any kind of cause. In case this sounds like the theistic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), the difference is that theism maintains that the universe has a cause -- God, in case you were wondering -- but that there was not some pre-existent "stuff" that the universe was made out of. That is, God didn't create the universe out of something else that was already there, he created the stuff itself. So the difference is in saying the universe has an efficient cause but no material cause (theism) and saying that it has neither (Smith). I find this implausible in the extreme, but Smith gave as good a defense of this as can be done. It's impressive. Adolf Grünbaum, a more famous philosopher of science, argued the same thing, but much less convincingly. Smith and William Lane Craig debated a few times (and were apparently friends) and they published a book together highlighting their disagreements, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.

Some more recent acquisitions

Nonfiction:

William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth.

---,  The Reliability of Sense Perception.

Robert Audi, The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality.

Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning.

Michael Bergmann, Justification without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism.

Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief.

Roderick M. Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing.

Paul Copan, ed., Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan.

Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition.

George S. Pappas and Marshall Swain, eds., Essays on Knowledge and Justification.

Ernest Sosa, Epistemology.

Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim, eds., Epistemology: An Anthology (1st edition).

Barry Stroud, Hume.

Peter Unger, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1.

---, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2.

Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus' Essential Teachings on Discipleship.

Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

Fiction:

Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics.

Tony Daniel, The Robot's Twilight Companion.

Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Philip José Farmer, Night of Light.

Walter M. Miller, Jr., Conditionally Human.

---, The View from the Stars.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Martians.

---, Galileo's Dream.

---, The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man.

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin.

A problem with middle knowledge

I'm inclined to accept middle knowledge. This is the view that God doesn't merely know what we will (freely choose to) do, he knows what we would (freely choose to) do under circumstances that are never actualized or never come to pass. In fact, God knows what a person whom he never creates would do under any possible circumstances. So God has this store of knowledge about what every possible person would (freely choose to) do under any possible circumstances, and he uses this knowledge to actualize -- that is, create -- the world. I think this answers a lot of the issues people have with the problem of evil, with the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and creaturely freedom, etc.

There are numerous objections to middle knowledge of course so it's not all sunshine and roses. But here I want to raise another potential objection. Perhaps that's too strong a term, actually, it's more like a potential problem. It's this: middle knowledge could explain virtually any scenario. But then you can't falsify it. This means you can't give any evidence that would rebut it. I say this is just a problem and not really an objection because you have to define "evidence" pretty narrowly to make it work -- as mentioned, there are plenty of objections to middle knowledge that have to be dealt with, and these objections could potentially refute it.

Anyway, my objection -- sorry, my problem -- can perhaps be illustrated by looking at some essays defending middle knowledge by William Lane Craig that specifically use it to explain Christian doctrines. The two essays I'm thinking of are:

"Lest Anyone Should Fall": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Perseverance and Apostolic Warnings

and

"Men Moved By The Holy Spirit Spoke From God": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Biblical Inspiration

So in these two cases, Craig is showing how middle knowledge uniquely explains the doctrines of a) the perseverance of the saints and b) the inspiration of the Bible (which could easily be a gateway to another essay giving a middle knowledge perspective on biblical inerrancy). Well and good. But then, it seems to me, you could write similar essays on other topics. For example:

"Upon This Rock I Will Build My Church": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Papal Infallibility

which I presume Craig would not approve of as he is a Protestant (as am I). But such an essay could certainly be written. Of course Catholics could accept such a view, as long as they accept middle knowledge in the first place. But then what if I wrote an essay like this:

"The Governing Authorities that Exist Have Been Established by God": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Divine Right of Kings

Again, such an essay could be written, such a position could be defended by appealing to middle knowledge. My point is that it's difficult to see what restrictions we can put on this type of explanation. Presumably, someone could say the restriction would be biblical doctrines, but both of these positions have been defended by, I presume, honest and well-meaning Christians as biblical. Once you open the door, you're going to have people come in that you didn't invite.

Philosophers in the Chronicle

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on William Lane Craig, who remains an incredibly prolific spokesman for evangelical Christianity. He's published over 120 articles in academic journals, mostly of philosophy and theology. Here's his website. On the other hand, there's another article in the Chronicle on Colin McGinn who recently resigned over allegations of sexual harassment. That article, unfortunately, is only available to subscribers. Maverick Philosopher provides some links to McGinn's side of the story.

I was told there would be no math myth

In two earlier posts I argued that the stories of Jesus in the New Testament cannot be explained (or explained away) as either mythological or as urban legend. I should clarify some of the issues involved as well as the difference between the two, bearing in mind that I'm not an expert.

Mythology has many elements to it, but here I'll focus on two. First, it develops over a long period of time. It's sometimes compared to the game of telephone, where one person whispers something in someone else's ear, the second person whispers to a third, etc. After several people, the story has become mangled. This, however, is incomplete. A closer parallel would be the same game where every third or fourth person has to say what he heard aloud, and allow himself to be corrected by the first person. So with mythology: it takes a long time for it to replace the original story because the original is still available and has more credibility.

The telephone game analogy suggests that mythology evolves slowly over time. It should be noted, however, that the inaccurate ideas may arise quickly. What takes a long time is the replacement of the original with the myth. The collective memory of the actual events simply takes a long time to dissipate. A. N. Sherwin-White argued in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament that two or three generations was too short a time to have the original story replaced by a myth. Indeed, when it was first suggested in the 19th century that the accounts of Jesus in the Bible are mythological, it was assumed that none of them were written until the late 2nd century, since that's how long it would have taken for a myth of that magnitude to arise and be widely accepted. At least there aren't any known examples of it happening faster. Indeed, were this not the case, we would virtually have to abandon the field of ancient history, since almost no ancient historical writings were written close in time to the events they narrate. Since all but a few of the books of the New Testament are dated by scholars to within the first century, the time necessary for them to be mythological simply isn't there. In fact, there is no competing story other than the one found in the gospels until you get to the mid to late second century. As William Lane Craig writes:

The letters of Barnabus and Clement refer to Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. Polycarp mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus’ miracles. Ignatius speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a nonmiraculous story exists. That the original story should be lost and replaced by another goes beyond any known example of corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the experience of written transmissions. These facts show that the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that Christians had at the beginning. (emphasis mine)

A second element of mythology is that it functions as a literary genre. This is a very important point: as the story changes, so does the way it is told. To suggest that the ancients could have written mythology but not in the genre of mythological writings is simply incoherent; these were two aspects of one thing. It is only in the Modern era that we have classified these literary genres and how they function. So in order for someone in the ancient world to write a mythological story but not in the mythological genre is to suggest that he foresaw the development of Modern literary criticism and adjusted his style of writing in order to trick his future readers -- two millennia in the future -- into thinking that the stories he was telling were not mythological when they really were. This is about as conspiracy theory-ish as you can get without spontaneously combusting.

One aspect of the process of mythologization is that it tends to eliminate irrelevant details -- either by simply erasing them or by ascribing some meaning to them (thus eliminating their irrelevancy). In a myth, every element has a role to play, but historical writings record things that are "messy", that don't have some meaning to the overall story. The biblical accounts of Jesus are replete with such little details. Several times before Jesus would speak to people, Mark records him sighing deeply (7:34; 8:11-13) or gazing at them intently (3:5, 34; 10:23). When a crowd brings an adultress before Jesus, he stoops down and doodles in the dust with his finger (John 8:2-11). A few copies of the New Testament several centuries later tried to accommodate this by adding that Jesus wrote down the sins of the woman's accusers to show that they were not without sin. That's exactly how mythology works, by changing the details so that they have some relevance to the story.

Gregory Boyd gave several examples of this in John 20:1-8 in a letter he wrote to his non-Christian father, later published as Letters from a Skeptic (I should note that I disagree with Boyd on some of the points he makes here):

Early on the first day of the week (when? does it matter?), while it was still dark (who cares?), Mary Magdalene (an incriminating detail, see the next criteria) went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved (John's modest way of referring to himself -- another mark of genuineness) and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" (note her lack of faith here) So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. They were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first (John's modesty again, but who cares about this irrelevant detail?). He bent over (the tomb entrance was low -- a detail which is historically accurate for tombs of wealthy people of the time -- the kind we know Jesus was buried in) and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in (why not? irrelevant detail). Then Simon Peter, who was behind him (modest repetition again), arrived and went into the tomb (Peter's boldness stands out in all the Gospel accounts). He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head (irrelevant detail -- what was Jesus wearing?). The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen (could anything be more irrelevant, and more unusual, than this, Dad? Jesus folded one part of His wrapping before He left!). Finally the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went inside (who cares about what exact order they went in?).

The presence of little details like this should not be understood as absolute. Fully mythological stories can have irrelevant details, and historical writings can show how little details were actually relevant to what was going on. The point is that in general, the more such details there are, the less mythologized the story is. This gives us the ability to test how far along the mythologization process a story is.

Here's a non-biblical example: The Voyage of Saint Brendan is an early medieval text describing an Irish monk who built a small leather boat and, essentially, sailed it around the North Atlantic Ocean. Tim Severin, in The Brendan Voyage, relates how his wife, an expert in medieval literature, thought that The Voyage of Saint Brendan was a partially mythologized story of something that actually happened.

"There's something odd about the Saint Brendan text," remarked my wife Dorothy one evening. Her casual comment immediately caught my attention.

"What do you mean by 'odd'?" I asked her.

"The text doesn't match up with much of the other literature written at about the same time. The best way to explain it is that it doesn't have the same feel. It's a curiosity. ... The story has a remarkable amount of practical detail, far more than most early medieval texts. It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits. It carefully describes the progress of the voyage, the times and distances, and so forth. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend as a tale that is embroidering a first-hand experience."

Severin decided to build a leather boat out of the same material that would have been available in that particular part of Ireland at that particular time and sail it across the North Atlantic (à la Kon-Tiki). Not only did he successfully sail from Ireland to North America (via the Faroes and Iceland), he learned that a leather boat had great advantages over wooden ones: at one point, they struck an iceberg strong enough that it would have punched a hole in a wooden boat, big enough to sink it. A leather boat, however, can be sewn up en route.

Anyway, the point is that no scholar has ever suggested that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Those who have argued that they are mythological (primarily in the late 19th century) said they should be understood this way despite the genre in which they are written. In fact, this is so blatant, so screamingly obvious, that you can verify it yourself: simply read the gospels side-by-side with actual mythological writings -- not modern retellings of mythological stories, but the actual myths themselves. It's obvious that they're not in the same genre. Until fairly recently, it's been a contentious point what genre the gospels belong to, other than that they were roughly historical writings. But in the last few decades, scholars have accepted that they are written in the genre of ancient biography, similar to Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. As I pointed out here, that doesn't mean that they are historically accurate in every detail, but it certainly makes it very difficult to claim that they are inaccurate in their central claims.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time on mythology. Urban legend is simpler: it basically lacks many of these elements. An urban legend is not based on a long process of mythologization but on someone telling a false story. Thus, in contrast with actual mythology, urban legends do not replace the original story, they are, in a sense, competing with it. Having said that, urban legends are similar to mythology in that they will often lack the irrelevant details that we find in veridical accounts. Urban legends are trying to make a point, and so simply ignore the details that don't play a role in this. In my post on this, I argue that the people who originated an urban legend either a) simply made it up (i.e. they lied); b) hallucinated; c) experienced something they mistook for something else (such as nondescript lights in the sky which are mistaken for alien spacecraft); or d) were insane (didn't really experience anything, but now actually think they did). The biblical accounts of Jesus cannot fit into any of these categories. Rather than rehearse them here, I'll just commend you to my earlier post.

Incidentally, if you haven't read The Brendan Voyage, I strongly recommend it.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Minding God

Many cosmological arguments, though not all, argue that the universe began to exist; and since everything that began to exist was caused by something else, the universe was caused by something else. With Big Bang cosmology this point has received empirical confirmation: according to the Big Bang, the universe -- that is, matter, energy, space, and time -- began to exist. Thus, something that exists independently of matter, energy, space, and time brought them into existence.

One objection to such arguments is that, even if the Big Bang has a cause, there's no reason to think this cause is God, much less the God of the Bible. I have to admit, I've never felt the force of this objection. I mean, is there any other issue where if you don't prove everything about it with a single argument, you prove nothing about it? The Big Bang only proves that there is an immaterial, spaceless (hence omnipresent and transcendent), timeless, and unimaginably powerful cause of the universe, and the response is, "Yeah, so?" Really? Of course the Big Bang doesn't prove that the cause of the universe is the ground of morality, of course it doesn't prove that Jesus rose from the dead, etc. But has anyone ever claimed it does? Why can't it function as part of a cumulative case argument?

What this objection is really focusing on, I think, is whether the cause of the universe is a mind -- or at least, as C. S. Lewis puts it, "more like a mind than it is like anything else we know". A cause that was not a mind would be mechanistic, since a mechanistic cause is one which produces its effect automatically. That is, if the cause is present, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the effect to take place are met; and since the necessary and sufficient conditions for the effect to take place are met, the effect takes place.

But since the scientific evidence proves that we are dealing with the beginning of time itself, the cause of the universe must be timeless. So is it possible to have a timeless mechanistic cause that produces a temporal effect (in this case, the universe)? It is difficult to see how this would be possible. A timeless mechanistic cause would produce its effect timelessly, since the necessary and sufficient conditions for its effect's occurrence are timelessly present. But in the case under discussion, the effect (the universe) is not timelessly present, and yet must have a timeless cause, since time is part of the effect. Therefore, the cause of the universe cannot be mechanistic or automatic; it must be non-mechanistic. It must be an entity with the capacity of choosing to create the universe as a finite, temporal effect. And the ability to choose is an inherently mental act. Therefore, the entity responsible for creating the universe must be a mind, a personal agent with free will. As William Lane Craig puts it in The Kalām Cosmological Argument, "For while a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions would either produce the effect from eternity or not at all, a personal being may freely choose to create at any time wholly apart from any distinguishing conditions of one moment from another. For it is the very function of will to distinguish like from like."

So it seems that cosmological arguments based on Big Bang cosmology prove, among other things, that the cause of the universe is an incredibly powerful Mind. This obviously matches up with the Judeo-Christian concept of God. One could still object that the Judeo-Christian God has other traits that these cosmological arguments don't prove, but I'm afraid I'm too overawed by what they do prove to think this objection amounts to much.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Quote of the Day

We should, then, test world views by their logical consistency and by how well they fit the facts known by experience. In our day and age, however, certain people, under the influence of Eastern mysticism or its Western step-child, the New Age Movement, deny that consistency is a test for truth. They affirm that reality is ultimately illogical or that logical contradictions correspond to reality. They assert that in Eastern thought the Absolute or God or the Real transcends the logical categories of human thought. They are apt to interpret the demand for logical consistency as a piece of Western imperialism. Trying to reason with such people can be very frustrating, because they will cheerfully concede that their view is logically incoherent and yet insist that it is true.

What such people seem to be saying is that the classical law of thought known as the Law of Excluded Middle is not necessarily true; that is to say, they deny that of a proposition and its negation, necessarily, one is true and the other is false. Such a denial could take two different forms. It could be interpreted on the one hand to mean that a proposition and its negation both can be true (or both false). Thus, it is true both that God is love and, in the same sense, that God is not love. Since both are true, the Law of Contradiction, that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true (or both false) at the same time, is also denied. On the other hand, the original denial could be interpreted to mean that of a proposition and its negation neither may be true (or neither false). Thus, it is not true that God is good and it is not true that God is not good; there is just no truth value at all for such propositions. In this case, it is the classical Principle of Bivalence, that for any proposition, necessarily that proposition is either true or false, that is denied along with the Law of Excluded Middle.

Now I am inclined to say that such claims are frankly crazy and unintelligible. To say that God is both good and not good in the same sense or that God neither exists nor does not exist is just incomprehensible to me.

In our politically correct age, there is a tendency to vilify all that is Western and to exalt Eastern modes of thought. To assert that Eastern thought is seriously deficient in making such claims is to be a sort of epistemological bigot, blinkered by the constraints of the logic-chopping Western mind. But this attitude is far too simplistic. In the first place, there are thinkers within the tradition of Western thought alone who have held the mystical views under discussion (Plotinus would be a good example), so that there is no need to play off East against West in this matter. Secondly, the extent to which such thinking represents "the Eastern mind" has been greatly exaggerated. In the East the common man -- and the philosopher, too -- lives by the Laws of Contradiction and Excluded Middle in his everyday life; he affirms them every time he walks through a doorway rather than into the wall. It is only at an extremely theoretical level of philosophical speculation that such laws are denied. And even at that level, the situation is not monochromatic: Confucianism, Hinayana Buddhism, pluralistic Hinduism as exemplified in Sankhya-Yoga, Vaishesika-Nyaya, and Mimasa schools of thought, and even Jainism do not deny the application of the classical laws of thought to ultimate reality. Thus, a critique of Eastern thought from within Eastern thought can be -- and has been -- made. We in the West should not therefore be embarrassed or apologetic about our heritage; on the contrary, it is one of the glories of ancient Greece that her thinkers came to enunciate clearly the principles of logical reasoning, and the triumph of logical reasoning over competing modes of thought in the West has been one of the West's greatest strengths and proudest achievements.

Why think then that such self-evident truths as the principles of logic are in fact invalid for ultimate reality? Such a claim seems to be both self-refuting and arbitrary. For consider a claim like "God cannot be described by propositions governed by the Principle of Bivalence." If such a claim is true, then it is not true, since it itself is a proposition describing God and so has no truth value. Thus, such a claim refutes itself. Of course, if it is not true, then it is not true, as the Eastern mystic alleged, that God cannot be described by propositions governed by the Principle of Bivalence. Thus, if the claim is not true, it is not true and if it is true, it is not true, so that in either case the claim turns out to be not true. Or consider the claim that "God cannot be described by propositions governed by the Law of Contradiction." If this proposition is true, then, since it describes God, it is not itself governed by the Law of Contradiction. There, it is equally true that "God can be described by propositions governed by the Law of Contradiction." But then which propositions are these that are so governed? There must be some, for the Eastern mystic is committed to the truth of this claim. But if he produces any, then they immediately refute his original claim that there are no such proposition. His claim thus commits him to the existence of counter-examples which serve to refute that very claim.

William Lane Craig
Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 2nd edition

Causality and the Big Bang

Since Big Bang cosmology is the claim that matter, energy, space, and time all sprang into existence, it strikes many people as similar to the theistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo (and by "similar" I mean "identical"). So some philosophers and some cosmologists have tried to find ways of avoiding the theistic implications.

One of the most common is to claim that causality is a physical phenomenon; it describes what takes place within the universe. You can't apply it to the beginning of the physical universe. The idea here is that causality is a posteriori like the laws of physics or chemistry, not a priori like the laws of logic. As such, it only describes the conditions inside the universe and can't be applied to the beginning of the universe itself. This is the tack taken by some illustrious philosophers, such as Adolf Grünbaum and Quentin Smith

It's certainly true that causality is not a priori in the same way the laws of logic are. We simply can't imagine the law of non-contradiction failing to hold, but we can imagine causality failing to hold -- that is, we can imagine (form a mental picture of) something popping into existence without a cause. But it's incorrect to say that we discover causality the same way we discover the laws of physics, i.e. through observation. Causality is derived from our basic intuition that something does not come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing, nothing comes). To limit this intuition to physical processes would be a case of special pleading; there's no reason why it wouldn't apply to the beginning of the universe. Causality is not a physical principle, it's a metaphysical principle.

Perhaps one could suggest that once we have the principle of causality via intuition, we can then establish it via observation and continue to believe it based on the latter. But it's not clear to me how causality could be falsified, or what would count as observation of causality not holding. At best you could say that you didn't observe a cause of an effect, but everyone would infer that the effect does in fact have a cause and we just didn't observe it. It's not like you could set up a scientific experiment to observe the absence of causality, since if the conditions you set up are sufficient to bring about the effect, then obviously the former caused the latter. As such, I think William Lane Craig's argument that causality has never been falsified is an empty claim. There are plenty of times where we observe an effect without a cause, but no amount of such experiences will ever convince a sane person that the effects didn't have a cause, merely that the causes weren't observed.

Or, perhaps one could simply deny the intuition. There are problems with this though: for one thing, science presupposes causality. If causality goes out the window, science goes with it. This is not only absurd and unacceptable, it's a conclusion I doubt nontheists would be willing to accept, since they (mistakenly) think science is on their side. For another thing, while causality is not a priori in the same way that the laws of logic are, it is still a precondition of thought. If causality did not hold, then there would not be an appropriate connection between our beliefs and their objects, such that we could never know if any of them are true. So it's not merely scientific knowledge that would be endangered; if we deny causality, then the possibility of any knowledge becomes impossible. So it's not like this intuition is just some random assertion.

But doesn't quantum physics posit virtual particles coming into existence without causes? This is a misunderstanding. As Craig writes,

... virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously out of nothing. Rather the energy locked up in a vacuum fluctuates spontaneously in such a way as to convert into evanescent particles that return almost immediately to the vacuum. ... The microstructure of the quantum vacuum is a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence. A quantum vacuum is thus far from nothing, and vacuum fluctuations do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Another suggestion might be that Hume denied causality. But ignoring the fact that Hume was not inerrant, this is another misunderstanding. Hume argued that just because we've observed a particular cause producing a particular effect in the past, we cannot know that the cause will produce the same effect. In other words, he argued that we can't infer an effect from a cause. Those who deny causality applies to the creation of the universe are claiming that we can't infer a cause from an effect -- that just because we observe that an effect has taken place, we can't claim that it was caused. This is radically different from what Hume was claiming, and Hume explicitly repudiates such an idea as absurd.

A final claim might be to suggest that applying causality to the Big Bang is just as problematic for the traditional theistic doctrine of creation. The doctrine, after all, is called creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) and the intuition is that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing comes). But again, this is a misunderstanding. Creation ex nihilo is the claim that the universe didn't have a material cause -- that it wasn't constructed out of some pre-existent "stuff". This is certainly a radical claim and we should recognize it as such. But it doesn't deny that the universe has an efficient cause -- some entity or agent that brings about the effect -- since the claim is that God is the efficient cause of the universe. Those who deny that causality would apply to the beginning of the universe, however, are claiming that the universe had neither a material cause nor an efficient cause. So I simply put it to you, which of these two explanations is more plausible: that the universe's beginning has an efficient cause but no material cause, or that it has neither?

Now it's all well and good to say that applying causality to the beginning of the universe creates some philosophical issues, but the alternative is that it just popped into existence without any cause whatsoever. That people who portray themselves as skeptics would be willing to accept this shows that their skepticism is absurdly selective. If this is the the only way to avoid believing in God then there's just no contest.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

The Christ Myth Myth

I've gone over this before here and here, so let me just summarize. Some people think 1) Jesus Christ is mythological rather than historical, and their primary evidence of this is that 2) there are parallels of Jesus in world mythology. Some take this the further step of arguing that 3) Jesus is completely mythological and thus completely unhistorical; that is, no such person as Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. I'll deal with these in reverse order. In the following, by "scholars" I mean "scholars of the relevant disciplines", i.e. historical Jesus scholars: people with PhDs in ancient history or New Testament history or something similar. I'm sure there are experts in pharmacology or library science who have different views than the scholars I'm referring to, but this is irrelevant since their area of expertise has no bearing on the subject in question. To think otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of irrelevant authority.

3) No scholar thinks it even remotely possible that Jesus may not have existed. Those that do mention such claims explicitly put them on the same intellectual level as Holocaust denial, Moon landing hoax claims, and other conspiracy theories. Indeed, scholars maintain that certain events regarding Jesus are historically certain, and he would obviously have had to exist in order for these events to have taken place. So, for example, Jesus' crucifixion is considered by scholars to be one of the central events in human history; you can't deny it without having to deny most of ancient history in order to be consistent, and it would render subsequent historical development virtually inexplicable. N. T. Wright, the most prestigious contemporary scholar, wrote in The Resurrection of the Son of God that this is true of the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus as well: "I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category of historical probability so high as to be historically certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70". Similarly, William Lane Craig has called Jesus' post-mortem appearances "a fact that is almost universally acknowledged by New Testament scholars today".

2) The claim that there are parallels to Jesus in world mythology was only ever held by a minority of scholars, and has been completely rejected by scholars for nearly a century. The parallels in question were conceived so broadly that virtually anything would fit. As such, they were completely contrived. There are, of course, some authors who argue for these parallels even today, but they are not scholars. Joseph Campbell comes to mind: he wrote extensively about mythology and how the Christian myths had many antecedents (except the antecedents were far superior to the Christian version). But Campbell didn't have a PhD, he had a Master's degree in French literature. That's certainly very valuable and a noteworthy accomplishment, but it doesn't qualify him to be considered a historical Jesus scholar. I have a couple of Master's degrees in Philosophy; that doesn't qualify me to be considered a scholar of solid state physics. At any rate, many universities have "The Bible as Literature" courses which are essentially stages to advocate the parallels between Jesus and mythology. But again, these courses are not taught by historical Jesus scholars, they are taught by people with degrees in unrelated disciplines. I find this unfortunate.

1) The idea that the gospels are mythological survived a few decades longer within scholarly circles than did the idea that there are mythological parallels to Jesus. Rudolf Bultmann advocated the view that when the gospels are "demythologized", very little of Jesus could be known beyond the fact that he existed and was killed by crucifixion. Bultmann lived to the 1970s, but his views were rejected by the 1950s with the initiation of the Second Quest for the historical Jesus (we are currently in the midst of the Third Quest). But there is a much more obvious problem with the claim that the gospels are mythological. Mythology is, at least partially, a literary genre, a style of writing. But I'm unaware of any scholar, ever, who argued that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Rather, those who claimed they were mythological argued that what the gospels record could not be historical, and so must be mythological, regardless of the genre in which they were written. This point is easily demonstrated: simply read some actual myths -- not modern accounts of myths, but the actual myths themselves -- side by side with the gospels. It's obvious that they don't belong to the same genre, the same type of writing. Thus, James D. G. Dunn argued in the entry for "Myth" in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels that the entry wasn't really necessary: "Myth is a term of at least doubtful relevance to the study of Jesus and the Gospels". The genre of the gospels has been a matter of dispute for the last couple of hundred years, although most scholars would have said that they are written as historical writings. But in the last 20-30 years there has been an incredible revolution within historical Jesus studies to the effect that most scholars today consider the gospels to have been written in the literary genre of ancient biography. Of course, this doesn't speak to their reliability in matters of detail, but it certainly makes it difficult to claim they don't have a solid historical core at all.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Craig vs. Spong

I recently listened to a debate between William Lane Craig and John Shelby Spong on the historical Jesus (this was an actual debate, unlike the presentation and response Craig had with Dennett). You can listen to it here. Craig argued that Spong is so insulated that he doesn't know what scholars outside of his small circle actually say. He points out that a survey of NT scholarship of the last few decades indicates that three-fourths of the scholars writing on the subject accept the historicity of Jesus' empty tomb, and almost universally accept his post-mortem appearances as historically demonstrable. Moreover, most scholars today recognize that the four gospels are written as historical writing, specifically in the genre of ancient biography -- not myth, not legend, not allegory, not midrash (as Spong claims). Spong seems genuinely puzzled by this. It reminds me of something N. T. Wright wrote of Spong in Who Was Jesus?

What is central is that Spong apparently does not know what 'midrash' actually is. The 'genre' of writing to which he makes such confident appeal is nothing at all like he says it is. There is such a thing as 'midrash'; scholars have been studying it, discussing it, and analysing it, for years. Spong seems to be unaware of the most basic results of this study. He has grabbed the word out of the air, much as Barbara Thiering grabbed the idea of 'pesher' exegesis, and to much the same effect. He misunderstands the method itself, and uses this bent tool to make the gospels mean what he wants instead of what they say.
...
We may briefly indicate the ways in which genuine 'midrash' differs drastically from anything that we find in the gospels.

First, midrash proper consists of a commentary on an actual biblical text. It is not simply a fanciful retelling, but a careful discussion in which the original text itself remains clearly in focus. It is obvious that the gospels do not read in any way like this.

Second, real midrash is 'tightly controlled and argued'. This is in direct opposition to Spong's idea of it, according to which (p. 184) 'once you enter the midrash tradition, the imagination is freed to roam and to speculate'. This statement tells us a good deal about Spong's own method of doing history, and nothing whatever about midrash. The use made of the Old Testament in the early chapters of Luke, to take an example, is certainly not midrash; neither is it roaming or speculative imagination.

Third, real midrash is a commentary precisely on Scripture. Goulder's theories, on which Spong professes to rely quite closely, suggest that Luke and Matthew were providing midrash on Mark. It is, however, fantastically unlikely that either of them would apply to Mark a technique developed for commenting on ancient Scripture.

Fourth, midrash never included the invention of stories which were clearly seen as non-literal in intent, and merely designed to evoke awe and wonder. It was no part of Jewish midrash, or any other Jewish writing-genre in the first century, to invent all kinds of new episodes about recent history in order to advance the claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled. It is one of the salient characteristics of Jewish literature throughout the New Testament period that, even though novelistic elements could creep in to books like Jubilees, the basic emphasis remains on that which happened within history.

A moment in the debate that particularly struck me was when Spong related how Carl Sagan had once approached him and said something to the effect of, if Jesus had ascended away from the surface of the earth at the speed of light, he'd still be in the Milky Way galaxy. This is essentially the claim that the Ascension was predicated on a local heaven just above the clouds and thus that the ancients and medievals didn't know the universe is incomprehensibly large, something I showed to be false here.

The fact that Spong thinks this is a good or original point further demonstrates how insulated he is. The South England Legendary, written in the 13th century, says something similar. C. S. Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, that the Legendary is "better evidence than any learned production could be for the Model as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are there told that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of ‘forty mile and yet som del mo’ a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum (‘the highest heven that ye alday seeth’) in 8000 years." Since this was common knowledge several hundred years before it occurred to Sagan or Spong, I can't get too excited about their "insight", much less their claim that it threatens traditional Christianity -- a point that the South England Legendary somehow misses.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Some Issues in NT Historiography, part 1

While many positive arguments can be (and are) made to support the general reliability of New Testament history, many of the arguments put forth by Christianity’s detractors are more concerned with a priori reasons why we should be suspicious of its historical claims. Probably the most obvious example of this is the question of whether miracles can be upheld as historical explanations, or even more basically, whether miracles can ever happen at all. A lot of modern historical scholarship is based on the assumption that they cannot.

However, this is not a historical claim about what has happened, it is a philosophical claim about what can happen and what can be allowed into our theories. Unfortunately, most scholars in this field have little to no philosophical training, so this assumption against miracles is more of a reflection of modern academic culture than the result of philosophical analysis. It is, essentially, a bias, dating back to Hume, that any naturalistic explanation is more likely than a supernatural one. A few points should be made about this.

First, why are miracles so improbable? As Kreeft and Tacelli (two philosophers) put it in Handbook of Christian Apologetics, "They are certainly unusual, but how do we know whether they are likely to happen or not? Only if we have already decided whether or not it is likely that God exists -- or that he would ever work a miracle. In that case, calling miracles ‘maximally improbable’ is not a neutral description: it stacks the deck against them." No one has ever produced a reason why, if God exists, he would be unwilling or unable to perform a miracle. So unless we can be absolutely certain that God does not exist, miracles are possible. And if miracles are possible it’s neither valid nor honest to blindly assume a priori that they’ve never occurred.

Moreover, a miracle can be perceived by the senses like any other event and thus can be supported by historical testimony. Because of this, testimony to a miracle is not nullified by the regular order of events. As William Lane Craig, another philosopher, writes in Reasonable Faith,

Of course, a historian could be so deeply prejudiced in favor of naturalism that he resolutely refuses to accept any miraculous hypothesis. But that is just a fact of psychology, which does not undermine the objectivity of history, any more than does the case of a Marxist historian who shuts his eyes to un-economic causes of historical development or a Confederate historian who refuses to acknowledge any responsibility of the South in bringing on the Civil War.

As a result of this bias, when certain scholars examine the historical evidence with regard to the resurrection of Jesus, some of them start by presupposing it couldn’t possibly have happened. As such, their conclusions that "therefore, it didn’t happen" are hopelessly circular. In Jesus Under Siege philosopher Gregory Boyd writes,

The obvious question that we must be asking ourselves through all of this is, why do these scholars assume that God could not have become a human being and that divinely inspired miracles cannot occur? On what basis can they be so confident about what can and cannot happen in history? By what means do they come to know so much about God and the nature of the world that they can confidently pronounce, prior to any investigation of the evidence, that God has never intervened into the world!? Wouldn’t you have to be God Himself to know this?

I think that part of the problem is that any miraculous explanation of an event is automatically considered to be ad hoc. The more a theory goes beyond what is known, the more ad hoc, or contrived, it is. But "miraculous" and "ad hoc" are not synonyms.

This was demonstrated to me in a debate between Craig and Robert Greg Cavin on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. Cavin acknowledges that the historical evidence proves that Jesus was killed and buried, that the tomb was found empty a few days later, and that many people experienced what they understood to be appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. However, Cavin doesn’t accept the resurrection of Jesus as the best explanation of these facts: rather, he believes it’s more plausible that Jesus had an evil twin (no joke). They were separated at birth when one of the identical twins was switched with the baby to which Mary had given birth. Immediately after Jesus was killed, the twin just happened to arrive in Jerusalem and, learning of the events, decided to steal Jesus’ body and impersonate his long lost brother. This theory is ridiculously ad hoc in that there is virtually no evidence in support of it, and Cavin has to suggest more and more outrageous tidbits in order to plug all of the holes in it. There is no reason to think that Jesus had an identical twin brother; there is no reason to think that Mary wasn’t Jesus’ biological mother; there is no reason to think that Jesus and his twin would have grown up and lived geographically separated from each other; there is no reason to think that Jesus’ twin would have arrived in Jerusalem at exactly the time when Jesus was crucified; etc. There’s also blatant inconsistencies in this scenario: the twin would have to be ethical enough to want to continue Jesus’ work and teaching, but unethical enough to want to hoax the resurrection. He would have to be brilliant enough to have the idea occur to him (Jesus’ resurrection contradicted fundamental Jewish categories of thought) and moronic enough to want to impersonate someone who had just been condemned by the Jews as a blasphemer, and executed by the Romans for treason. Obviously, Cavin’s theory is completely contrived and ad hoc. By way of contrast, the only extra supposition we have to make to accept the resurrection is that a God capable of doing it exists -- and since most people already believe in God, this wouldn’t be an additional supposition.

Some also get nervous that any miraculous event would demonstrate that we live in a capricious universe, since any miracle would supposedly be an entirely arbitrary act of God. But, of course, this is false. With regards to Jesus’ resurrection, for example, the Messianic expectation of the Jewish people, the uniqueness of Jesus’ life, and the relevance that it has for one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience (death) makes it about as far removed from caprice and arbitrariness as anything could be.

Update (15 Feb 2010): See also part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

The Meaning of Life

There has been much discussion in the last several years about the possibility of extending the human life span. As futuristic as it sounds, medical research is uncovering possible methods by which the maximum age could increase from about 120 years to 160, 180, 200, and just keep on going. Some argue against extending lives because they believe it to be unnatural. I have no sympathy for this view. I don't see how this objection wouldn't also apply to any and every kind of medical treatment.

That's a post for another day though. For now, I just want to emphasize what the possibility of extending life spans does not do. Avoiding death is a good goal to have, but the mere extension of our lives can never satisfy. Immortality is not enough: we need meaning. We need a meaningful life. The atheist existentialists tried to address this, but never really went beyond the suggestion that we should pretend our lives have meaning even though they really don't. Others may say that making other people happy or making a difference in society would do it. But that doesn't give any real meaning, only a relative meaning. That is, if the happiness of others or the betterment of society has no meaning, then working towards one of them is simply arbitrary. If changing the world for the better is pointless and meaningless, then why bother? Why not work towards making other people suicidal, or for the downfall of civilization instead? If our existence doesn't have any significance, any purpose, any meaning, then what motivation is there to do or say anything?

It seems to me that the only serious answer one could give would be pleasure. But this has several problems:

First, when we pursue pleasure, we tend to become sickened. If we seek pleasure with food and gorge ourselves, or with alcohol and drunkeness, it stops being fun. This doesn't just mean that if you eat or drink too much you'll get sick. It also means that if we regularly gorge ourselves, or regularly get drunk, it tends to become less and less pleasurable.

Second, if someone gets pleasure from something that is harmful to others, like child-abuse, what could motivate them to not pursue such pleasure? Well, the danger of being caught perhaps. But this only means that such a person would only abuse children when he's confident that he can get away with it. A sophisticated murderer would only kill people whose lives have less impact on society, and therefore their deaths would also have less impact; and so he would be able to get away with it. This is simply unacceptable.

Third, seeking pleasure is something everybody does. If it really led to the highest satisfaction one could achieve in life, why would anyone think otherwise? It's like that Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin taped paper wings to his arms so he could fly. Hobbes asks him "If paper wings is all it takes to fly, don't you think we'd have heard about it by now?" If pleasure is all there is to life, don't you think everyone would have realized it by now? But we don't: we realize that there is more to life, although we often can't put our finger on it. Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, two Catholic philosophers from Boston College, wrote that to live solely for pleasure "is the stupidest gamble in the world, for it is the only one that has consistently never paid off ... every batter who has ever approached that plate has struck out. ... After trillions of failures and a one hundred percent failure rate, this is one experiment no one should keep trying." An essay by William Lane Craig, published as chapter 2 of his book Reasonable Faith, discusses this and similar themes; it's called "The Absurdity of Life Without God". Read it at your own risk.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Infinite Amounts

Many cosmological arguments, in trying to show that the universe is contingent, argue that an actual infinite amount of something is metaphysically impossible, and so could not occur in reality. As such, there could not have been an infinite regress of events or an infinite chain of cause and effect. There must be a stopping point where a cause is not an effect of a cause itself, but is pure cause, not contingent on anything else. "And this all men call God."

The impossibility of an actual infinite has been defended in the last few decades by William Lane Craig, in his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument, his general apologetics book Reasonable Faith, and numerous philosophical articles, some of which were republished in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, a book he co-wrote with atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. Most of this post is just paraphrases of Craig’s writings. In Reasonable Faith, Craig points out that there is a distinction between an actual infinite and a potential infinite.

A potential infinite is a collection that is increasing toward infinity as a limit but never gets there. Such a collection is really indefinite, not infinite. For example, any finite distance can be subdivided into potentially infinitely many parts. You can just keep on dividing parts in half forever, but you will never arrive at an actual ‘infinitieth’ division or come up with an actually infinite number of parts. By contrast, an actual infinite is a collection in which the number of members really is infinite. The collection is not growing toward infinity; it is infinite, it is ‘complete.’

In other words, an infinite amount of defined units is an actual infinite. An “infinitieth” of something is not a defined unit, so this is a potential infinite. An actual infinite is usually signified by aleph-null, but I can’t figure out how to type that in blogger, so I’ll just use ∞ instead, even though it usually represents indefiniteness rather than infinitude.

While actual infinites are used in conceptual mathematics they do not have any corresponding reality.

1. The most famous illustration of this is Hilbert’s Hotel (named after mathematician David Hilbert). Imagine a hotel with two wings that stretch out infinitely in opposite directions and which therefore contain an infinite number of rooms, and imagine that they are all occupied, that is, the hotel is completely full. Somebody shows up and asks for a room. In a finite hotel the proprietor would have to turn him away, but in an infinite hotel the proprietor could just move the person in room 1 to room 2, the person in room 2 to room 3, the person in room 3 to room 4, etc. Now room 1 is open and the person can check in. But the hotel was already full. Each room was occupied. Moreover, the same number of people are in the hotel even though no one has left and there is one more person than before. This is true for any finite number: if a million new people checked in, you could just move the person in room 1 to room 1,000,001, etc.

A friend of mine once suggested that if the hotel is infinite, then there would be no outside for someone to come in from. This is incorrect. We can easily imagine that the hotel extends infinitely in two directions along a street or something. Someone on the other side of the street (perhaps in the infinite restaurant) could then cross the street and check in.

2. But what if an infinite amount of people come to check in? Does the proprietor tell them that the hotel is full and turn them away? No, he just moves the person in room 1 to room 2, the person in room 2 to room 4, the person in room 3 to room 6, etc., moving each person to the room number double their previous number. He thus empties all the odd numbered rooms and the infinite number of new guests can check in. But before they came, each room was occupied. And again, there are the same number of guests as before, even though the proprietor just increased his occupancy by an infinite amount. And he can do this again and again, in fact infinitely many times, and there would never be one more person in the hotel.

3. Another illustration would be a bookcase with an infinite number of books. If you took seven books off the shelf there would be an empty space where they had been. But there’s still an infinite amount of books left, so therefore the bookshelf is still completely full with no empty spaces.

4. Conversely, if you took out all of the books but seven, you would have taken an infinite amount of books off the shelf. However, if you took an infinite amount of books off the shelf, it would be completely empty; but it’s not, there are seven left.

5. Now what if you took out every other book? That would leave a space between each remaining book. Although you took away an infinite number of books, there’s still an infinite number of books remaining, since there’s an infinite amount of odd numbers and an infinite amount of even numbers. The absurdity of this last example can be realized by imagining that you take the first book and push it up against the third book, so there isn’t a space between them any more. Then push these two books up against the fifth, and all of these against the next one, etc. Then there will be an infinite amount of empty space on the bookshelf (from the infinite number of books taken off it), so it’s necessarily empty. But there are still an infinite number of books left on the shelf. As such, it’s necessarily full. But if the bookshelf is full, the first book would be where it’s always been, even though you just moved it. The bookcase is simultaneously completely empty and completely full. When you look at this bookcase, what would you see?

Obviously, Hilbert’s Hotel and a bookcase like this could not exist in reality. Yet, if an actual infinite amount could exist, they could exist as well. Arguments 1-5 can be reduced to the following mathematical equations (where X and Y are actual amounts, that is, any number greater than zero):

1. X + Y ≠ X but ∞ + Y = ∞
2. X + X ≠ X but ∞ + ∞ = ∞
3. X - Y ≠ X but ∞ - Y = ∞
4. X - X = 0 but ∞ - ∞ = Y
5. X - X ≠ X but ∞ - ∞ = ∞

Note also that 4 and 5 contradict each other: infinity minus itself equals both infinity and an actual amount.

A friend of mine once complained about these arguments by saying that when I add to or subtract from infinity I was treating it like an amount, and this is invalid. That is precisely the point: an amount, by definition, can be added to or subtracted from. Since we cannot do this with infinity, there cannot be an actual infinite amount of defined units. These arguments simply demonstrate this. As Craig writes,

There is simply no way to avoid these absurdities once we admit the possibility of the existence of an actual infinite. Students sometimes react to such absurdities as Hilbert’s Hotel by saying that we really don’t understand the nature of infinity and, hence, these absurdities result. But this attitude is simply mistaken. Infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of mathematics, so that these absurdities result precisely because we do understand the notion of a collection with an actually infinite number of members.

Some might object that God is often referred to as infinite. Doesn’t this disprove God’s existence since an actual infinite can’t exist? It does not for the following reason: what makes an actual infinite impossible is that it consists of an infinite amount of units or members (like books or hotel rooms). God is not “made up” of any amount of units. In saying that God is infinite, we are saying he is unlimited by anything. Since God does not consist of a bunch of units, the argument against an actual infinite amount of units existing does not apply to him.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8

(This is an essay I wrote for my MA in theology. It should be noted that there is not an original thought in it, and it is significantly dependent on the works of William Lane Craig; many of my references are his, and I just looked them up to make sure he got the quote right.)

In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul exhorts the fledgling Corinthian church to hold fast "to the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved." He then identifies this gospel with a creed which the vast majority of scholars date to the AD 30s, within about five years of Jesus’ crucifixion. This creed cites that Jesus was killed to atone for our sins, that his corpse was buried, and that he then rose from the dead. He then appeared to various individuals and groups of people. In this essay, I intend to examine this creed by defending its identification as such, the evidence which has convinced most scholars to date it so early, and its content, and the resulting significance for accepting the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

Exegetical evidence for recognizing 1 Cor. 15:3-8 as a creed
"That this confession is an early Christian, pre-Pauline creed is recognized by virtually all critical scholars across a very wide theological spectrum."[1] Some of the reasons given for holding this view are that, first, Paul introduces it as information with which his original audience was already familiar. Second, Paul describes this creed as that which he himself had received (paralambanein) and delivered (paradidonai). These are technical rabbinical terms employed in reference to the passing on of oral tradition.[2] Third, the language is organized stylistically, which is a mnemonic device used in order to facilitate memorization. This is demonstrated by the repetition of phrases such as, "and that" and "according to the Scriptures."[3] Fourth, the language is decidedly non-Pauline, which demonstrates that it probably did not originate with Paul. Non-Pauline phrases include "according to the Scriptures" (kata tas grafas, whereas Paul’s statement to this effect is always kathos gegraptai), as well as "for our sins," "he has been raised," "the third day," "he was seen," etc.[4] Fourth, this passage appears to have been translated into Greek from an Aramaic original, as evidenced by the fact that many of the non-Pauline phrases mentioned above are Semitic in character, as is the parallelism, and the use of Peter’s Aramaic name, Cephas.[5] "These [and other] considerations have persuaded virtually all New Testament scholars that vs. 3-7 do contain a pre-Pauline formula."[6]

The exact content of this creed is a more disputed issue among scholarship. Most would maintain that the creed ends in the middle of verse 6 after the statement that Jesus appeared to the 500 brethren, since the latter half of this verse is typically Pauline, and seems to be a break in the sentence structure. However, there are good exegetical grounds for seeing this, not as the cessation of Paul’s use of the creed, but merely as a parenthetical addition made by Paul, and that the creed continues in verse 7. This is evidenced by the fact that this latter verse contains the statement that Jesus appeared to all of the apostles; but one of Paul’s purposes in 1 Corinthians is to defend his own apostleship (1 Cor. 1:1; 9:1-6). Since verse 8 clearly indicates that he was not present at this appearance, it would serve no purpose for Paul to describe it as having been witnessed by "all the apostles" unless this phrase does not originate with Paul.[7]

Thus the creed would appear to consist of the following statement, minus the parenthetical comments in red font:

(For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:)
That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
And that he was buried,
And that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
And that he appeared to Cephas,
And then to the Twelve,
Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time,
(most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep)
Then he appeared to James
And then to all the apostles.
(Then, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.)[8]

The origin and date of the creed
Unfortunately, it would extend this essay beyond reason to discuss why scholars date 1 Corinthians in the mid-AD 50s, as well as why the timeline of Paul’s life detailed in Acts and corroborated in his letters is considered to be fundamentally historically reliable. We must accede to the judgment of the scholarly consensus on these issues in order to set our sights on a more particular target: when did Paul receive this creed? This then lends itself to two more questions: with whom does this creed originate? And when?

Paul’s conversion to Christianity in Damascus is dated at between three to five years after Jesus’ crucifixion, and he visited Jerusalem to confer with the apostle Peter and Jesus’ brother James three years after that (Gal. 1:18-19). The Aramaic character of the creed indicates that it originated when the church was still primarily made up of Jews rather than Gentiles who would have needed it to be in the "trade language" of Greek. Thus, most scholars date Paul’s reception of this creed to within this early period, i.e., three to eight years after the crucifixion.[9]

The particular event which most scholars lean towards is Paul’s visit to Jerusalem three years after his conversion. One of the reasons for dating his reception of the creed to this event is that it would accord well with the prominent place given to Peter and James in the creed, since Paul’s trip to Jerusalem was specifically in order to meet with these two. I don’t find this convincing because it would appear to belie the whole nature of the creed predating Paul; in other words, if Peter and James are mentioned in the creed because Paul met with them at this point, then it would imply that Paul was the one constructing the creed. But we’ve already seen that it’s very unlikely that Paul is the author.

More convincing is the argument of Paul’s description of this trip as historesai. This is another technical rabbinical term used to "designate fact-finding missions to well-known cities and other points of interest with a view toward acquiring first-hand information about them. Accordingly, it implies that Paul’s visit to Cephas and Jerusalem was for the purpose of gaining information about the faith from first-hand witnesses."[10] In fact, we could reasonably conclude this even without any direct exegetical evidence; if Paul traveled to Jerusalem and met with Peter and James there, "we may presume that they did not spend all their time talking about the weather."[11]

Another suggestion is that Paul received this creed immediately after his conversion in Damascus. However, the Aramaisms would suggest that this creed originated in the Jerusalem church, and there may not have been sufficient time for it to have been transferred to the Damascus church during the then-ongoing persecution. Thus, if we must date Paul’s reception of the creed to this early period, Paul’s historesai to Jerusalem, about five to eight years after Jesus’ crucifixion, would appear to be the best candidate, and this is the view that most scholars hold.

This raises the question of who the creed actually comes from. Insofar as Paul received the creed from Peter and James, who are listed therein as having experienced individual appearances of Jesus after his death (not to mention the fact that Peter would have been included in the appearances to the Twelve and to all the apostles), this would constitute eyewitness approval of these statements, if not direct eyewitness statements. Gary Habermas noted this very point in a debate with Antony Flew, that "we have two separate appearances, to the twelve and to the apostles. So that’s in the creed, it’s eyewitness testimony, and it dates back to the time of the Crucifixion."

Most critical theologians who address the issue hold that Paul was given this material by Peter and James in Jerusalem. They were eyewitnesses and both are listed in the creed in 1 Corinthians 15. Now if they gave the creed to Paul, then that is a step earlier than the date of AD 33 to AD 38, which is when Paul received it. If they gave it to him, they knew it even earlier. And then the facts that make up the creed before it is stylized have to be even earlier. So we have three stages, the facts themselves, the disciples’ formulation of it, and Paul’s receiving of it. We do have the eyewitness material here because it was the eyewitnesses, in all likelihood, who gave it to Paul, number one. Second, in 1 Corinthians 15:11, 14, and 15, right after the creed, Paul states that these same eyewitnesses were also proclaiming this message that Jesus was raised. So we do have the eyewitness reports.[12]

It seems to me that we cannot make the claim that the creed was authored or formalized by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances; however, we can say that it was at least approved of by eyewitnesses. This fact has been recognized by the consensus of scholarship. We are told of this creed that, "This account meets all the demands of historical reliability that could possibly be made of such a text,"[13] and, "The passage therefore preserves uniquely early and verifiable testimony. It meets every reasonable demand of historical reliability."[14] The time needed from the beliefs of the early church to be formulated as a creed and then to Paul’s reception of it brings us back directly to the time of the crucifixion, and thus the beliefs must correspond to the actual events. "No longer can it by charged that there is no demonstrable early, eyewitness testimony for the resurrection ... for this creed provides just such evidential data concerning the facts of the gospel, which are the very center of the Christian faith. It links the events themselves with those who actually participated in time and space."[15]

Content of the creed
In what follows, I will go over the creed line by line, to determine exactly what is being said.

That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures -- Here we not only have a statement corroborating Jesus’ death, but also an interpretation of it, in which it is seen as an atonement for our sins. This is significant because the early date of the creed doesn’t allow sufficient time for this interpretation to develop from the brute fact of Jesus’ death itself. It might be suggested that this interpretation can be accounted for in the further statement that this is "according to the Scriptures," i.e., that the followers of Jesus found this interpretation in the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. However, this actually further emphasizes the difficulty: the Jews were not expecting a Messiah who would die, much less one who would do so in order to atone for their sins, but rather a political Messiah who would free them from the yoke of their oppressors (in this case, the Romans); and this expectation is largely based on the Old Testament prophecies about the conquering Messiah. While there are prophecies about an "atoning" Messiah, even John Crossan, one of the more radical scholars, admits that it would take at least five to ten years for the early Christians to interpret Old Testament texts in such a way after Jesus’ death.[16] This is dangerously close to too little time, not to mention the fact that most scholars see Crossan’s view as hopelessly optimistic.[17]

While there are plenty of OT passages which predict that the Messiah would suffer, there aren’t any which state unequivocally that he would die. The fact that the early Christians interpreted these passages as referring to Jesus’ death, then, is extremely significant, especially since the OT passage that the Messiah would not be abandoned to the grave or experience decay (Ps. 16:10) was universally understood as meaning that the Messiah would never die.

And that he was buried -- This importance of this statement lies primarily in what it implies for the one following. In itself, it provides us with a very early belief that Jesus’ corpse was interred.

And that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures -- Here we have what is, quite simply, one of the most significant statements in ancient history. The length of time between the events and the beliefs completely repudiates any attempt to assign belief in Jesus’ resurrection to legendary or mythological development. Moreover, as has already been stated, the ancient Jews simply did not believe in a dying Messiah, much less a rising one. While the resurrection of the dead is a Jewish category of thought, the resurrection of Jesus contradicts it in two central respects: the Jewish belief was in a universal resurrection which took place at the end of time, whereas Jesus’ resurrection was an isolated event which took place within history. This has led most scholars, even Crossan, to admit that there is insufficient material in the Old Testament to interpret in terms of a messianic resurrection.[18] Thus, we are faced with what C. F. D. Moule, a scholar from Oxford University, has called, a belief which nothing, in terms of prior historical influences, can account for -- apart from the resurrection itself.[19]

This statement also affirms that Jesus’ resurrection was "according to the Scriptures." This is probably in reference to the prophecy in Psalm 16:10 that the Messiah would not be abandoned to the grave nor would he see decay. However, as has already been stated, this prophecy in itself is insufficient to account for belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since it was universally believed to mean that the Messiah would never die in the first place.

When tied to the preceding statement, that Jesus’ corpse was buried, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead has great import in that it strongly implies what the gospels state explicitly: his tomb was left empty. In ancient Judaism there was a continuity between the body interred and the body raised. To speak of a resurrection while the body still lay in the tomb was an incoherent concept, and required the passage of nearly two millennia before it would occur to anyone.[20]

Nevertheless, it is frequently held among scholars that, whatever the resurrection was, it had nothing to do with Jesus’ physical body. One of the arguments given for this is that, since Paul clearly views Jesus’ resurrection as the "first fruits" of the general resurrection at the end of the world (1 Cor. 15:20), whatever conclusions he draws about the latter must apply to the former. Thus, when Paul says later in chapter 15 that "it is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body," (v. 42-44), we are to take this to mean that the resurrection body is being contrasted with our present physical bodies in the sense that the former is not physical in nature. Therefore, it’s not the same body that is interred, and this would then apply to Jesus’ body as well.

I have two responses to this: first, if it is sown a natural body and raised a spiritual body, there is clearly a continuity between the body interred and the body raised. If this means that the physical body is transformed into a non-physical body, so be it; but this can’t be used to maintain that the resurrection body has nothing in common with our earthly, physical bodies. Second, in this very same letter, Paul uses exactly the same vocabulary to contrast the natural man with the spiritual man (1 Cor. 2:14-15); but here the contrast is clearly between a man under the domination of sinful human nature and the man who has submitted himself to God’s Holy Spirit. In other words, it’s a contrast in orientation, not of substance or materiality.[21] One of the central tenets of exegesis is to interpret the unclear in light of the clear. Thus, we should interpret Paul’s statements in chapter 15 in light of his statements in chapter 2: the resurrection body is a real, tangible, physical body that is no longer under the control of sin and corruption and mortality. Similarly, when Paul states that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable," (1 Cor. 15:50), we need to recognize that the phrase "flesh and blood" is an idiom which Paul uses in reference to sinful human nature (Gal. 1:16; Eph. 6:12), and should not be understood as stating that the resurrection body will be a non-physical entity. Likewise, by saying that the perishable won’t inherit the imperishable, he’s simply saying that our resurrection bodies won’t be prone to death and corruption like our earthly bodies are.

And that he appeared to Cephas -- "Cephas" is the Aramaic name for Peter. The only other account we have of this appearance is in Luke 24:34, but no details are given.

And then to the Twelve -- This is a name given to the original twelve apostles which Jesus chose. At first, there would seem to be a problem, since Judas Iscariot had already committed suicide by the time of this appearance, and Matthias had not replaced him yet. However, when choosing a replacement, it was specifically required that he be someone who had "been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us" (Acts 1:21). So the Twelve were not alone when Jesus appeared to them; there were others present as well, who had been with the apostles "the whole time." An apostle was anyone who had witnessed the entirety of Jesus’ ministry. It was from this pool of people that Judas’ successor was chosen.

Historically, the appearance to the Twelve is one of the best attested appearances of Jesus. "We have independent narratives of this event in Luke and in John. Both of them locate it in the upper room in Jerusalem. Then you have it attested by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. So the appearance to the Twelve, it seems to me, is very well attested -- even the location of it, which I regard as a secondary detail and not so important."[22] Among critical NT scholars, multiple, independent attestation of a historical event is one of the key criterion for establishing authenticity. That is precisely what we have here. Very few events in ancient history have as much evidence in their favor as Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the Twelve.

Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time -- This statement hits us like a ton of bricks. Jesus appeared to over 500 people at one time. Just in case there was any doubt that an appearance to over twelve people rules out the possibility of hallucination, we are given an example that outdoes this fifty-fold. This appearance completely repudiates any attempt to deny Jesus’ resurrection.

Because of this, the only option open to detractors of Christianity is to deny the historicity of this appearance. It has been suggested, for example, that since there aren’t any explicit references to this appearance in the gospels (although Jesus’ appearance on the Galilean hillside in Matt. 28:16-20 has been suggested), this event didn’t happen.[23] The reasoning behind this objection seems bizarre, though: since an event isn’t corroborated in our later sources, but is only mentioned in our earliest and most reliable source, we should presume it didn’t happen? Are we really supposed to take this seriously?

(most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep) -- This is an interpolation by the apostle Paul. While it’s not a part of the creed itself, and thus can only be dated to the time when 1 Corinthians was written in the mid-AD 50s, this statement further compounds our amazement at the claim that Jesus appeared to 500 people at one time -- Paul tells his original audience that most of these people are still alive to be questioned! Most scholars recognize that Paul is essentially challenging his readers to verify that this event occurred by checking with the people who experienced it.

Then he appeared to James -- While there are several people named James in the NT, even radical scholars concede that this refers to Jesus’ brother James.[24] During Jesus’ life, his family did not support him or his actions (Mark 3:30-5; John 7:1-5), but not long after his crucifixion we suddenly find his mother and brothers worshipping him along with the apostles (Acts 1:14). Flavius Josephus reports in about AD 93 that he was eventually stoned to death for his belief that his brother was Israel’s Messiah and had risen from the dead.[25] The inexplicability of James’ conversion has eluded all attempts of explanation -- unless his brother really did rise from the dead, and James saw him.

And then to all the apostles -- This is probably not referring to the Twelve, since they’ve already been mentioned in the creed by a different name, but to the larger group of those who had witnessed Jesus’ entire ministry. It’s unknown how many people this referred to. Perhaps this is the group of seventy that Jesus appointed and sent out to the Galilean countryside (Luke 10:1), but this is just speculation.

(Then, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.) -- This is an addendum to the creed made by Paul which relates that he experienced an appearance of Jesus as well. It has been argued by some that, since Paul’s experience as related in the book of Acts was not a physical apparition, and since he is here putting it on the same level as the other resurrection appearances of Jesus, that all of these appearances should be regarded as non-physical in nature (this is obviously another argument that Jesus’ resurrection didn’t have anything to do with his corpse).[26] My response to this is, first, even a scholar as radical as Crossan admits that, "Paul needs in 1 Cor. 15 to equate his own experience with that of the preceding apostles. To equate, that is, its validity and legitimacy, but not necessarily its mode or manner. ... Paul’s own entranced revelation should not be ... the model for all the others."[27] As has already been mentioned, one of Paul’s main goals in writing 1 Corinthians is to defend his own apostleship. Thus, he includes his experience with the others, not to relate theirs to his but to relate his to theirs.

Second, it is simply false to say that the several accounts of Paul’s experience in Acts relate it as non-physical. While it certainly differs from the other resurrection appearances in that it’s description seems to be more of a "heavenly vision," the people with Paul saw a light and heard a voice, but they were not able to understand what was being said (Acts 9:3-8; 22:6-11; 26:12-18). So Paul’s experience was not something that happened "only to him," but was witnessed by several other people as well.

The significance of this statement by itself is that Paul is describing to us an appearance he personally experienced of the risen Jesus, one that was witnessed (but not comprehended) by others. This experience convinced him to join the fledgling church he had hitherto persecuted.

He was a rabbi, a Pharisee, a respected Jewish leader. He hated the Christian heresy and did everything in his power to stamp it out. He was even responsible for the execution of Christian believers. Then suddenly he gave up everything. He left his position as a respected Jewish leader and became a Christian missionary: he entered a life of poverty, labor, and suffering. He was whipped, beaten, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked three times, in constant danger, deprivation, and anxiety. Finally, he made the ultimate sacrifice and was martyred for his faith at Rome. And it was all because on that day outside Damascus, he saw "Jesus our Lord."[28]

Conclusion
R. T. France, a NT scholar from Oxford, states that

Ancient historians have sometimes commented that the degree of scepticism with which New Testament scholars approach their sources is far greater than would be thought justified in any other branch of ancient history. Indeed many ancient historians would count themselves fortunate to have four such responsible accounts, written within a generation or two of the events, and preserved in such a wealth of early manuscript evidence as to be, from the point of view of textual criticism, virtually uncontested in all but detail. Beyond that point, the decision as to how far a scholar is willing to accept the record they offer is likely to be influenced more by his openness to a ‘supernaturalist’ world-view than by strictly historical considerations.[29]

I have appealed throughout this essay to the consensus of scholarship. It needs to be pointed out here that very few of these scholars believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead. Most of them come to the table with the presupposition that miracles can’t happen, not to mention their overly skeptical stance of their sources. And yet, with all of this, they have found themselves compelled by the nature of the evidence to acknowledge that 1 Corinthians 15:3ff relates an ancient creed that dates back to immediately after the events it purports to relate. Moreover, they freely admit that they are completely impotent to explain the historical evidence without recourse to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.[30] Their unwillingness to accept this, therefore, is not based on any lack of historical evidence, but rather on their belief that such things couldn’t really happen. This strikes me as an intellectually irresponsible concession to the spirit of the age; in fact, it seems to be a view held by blind faith. They should be reminded that, "Any interpretation of reality not in accord with the facts about reality is just a fairy tale which no rational person should believe."[31]

Notes:

[1] Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996), 153.
[2] Joachim Jeremias, Die Abendmahlsworte Jesu, 4th ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 95-8; cited in William Lane Craig, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mullen, 1989), 2-3. Specifically, Jeremias claims that paralambanein and paradidonai correspond to the Hebrew phrases qaval min and masar qa respectively. The significance of this is that oral tradition was memorized and passed on in a word-for-word fashion.
[3] Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1966), 102-3.
[4] Ibid., 101.
[5] Ibid., 102-3.
[6] Craig, Assessing the NT Evidence, 3.
[7] Peter Stuhlmacher, Das paulinische Evangelilum, FRLANT 95 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 268-9; cited in Craig, Assessing the NT Evidence, 5-6.
[8] Personal translation.
[9] Habermas, Historical Jesus, 154.
[10] Craig, Assessing the NT Evidence, 17.
[11] C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, 3rd ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967), 26.
[12] Gary R. Habermas and Antony G. N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate, Terry L. Miethe, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 54, 83.
[13] Hans von Campenhausen, "The Events of Easter and the Empty Tomb," in Tradition and Life in the Church (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), 44.
[14] Archibald M. Hunter, Jesus, 100. Quoted in Habermas, Historical Jesus, 156.
[15] Habermas, Historical Jesus, 157.
[16] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), 145.
[17] See several quotes given in William Lane Craig, "Opening Address," in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, Paul Copan, ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 31.
[18] John Dominic Crossan, Four Other Gospels (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985), 174.
[19] C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2nd series, no. 1 (Naperville, Ill.: Alec R. Allenson, 1967), 3, 13.
[20] Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist, 1973), 70, n. 121.
[21] See Craig’s excellent discussion of this in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?, 51-2.
[22] Craig, in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?, 55.
[23] Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 90. Martin is not a NT scholar.
[24] Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 73.
[25] Josephus, Antiquities 20:200.
[26] Gerd Lüdemann, "Second Rebuttal" in Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, eds. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 60-1.
[27] Crossan, Jesus, 169.
[28] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1994), 283.
[29] R. T. France, "The Gospels as Historical Sources for Jesus, the Founder of Christianity," in Truth 1 (1985): 86.
[30] Craig, Reasonable Faith, 280.
[31] Craig, Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?, 32.