Phil Bair On Extraordinary Evidence For Miracles

Phil Bair was suggested by James K. Walker to debate me. Walker is a Christian apologist and former Mormon who is President at Watchman Fellowship. I hadn't heard of Phil before. But he seems smart enough. Anyone who has read my anthology on miracles and still disagrees gets my attention. 

Phil offered two objections to my defense of the aphorism, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." 

ONE) Phil Bair: “You have no criteria for identifying what qualifies as extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim.” My response:

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Phil Bair On Atheism, Miracles, and Extraordinary Evidence

No intellectual should expect that a good argument is one that convinces reasonable people. What we should expect is that an argument is a good one, or a strong one, or very strong one, irrespective of whether it is a convincing one. Even though I know this, I still try to come up with arguments that are convincing to most reasonable people. I expect kickback from Christian believers. What can annoy me is kickback from other atheists and agnostics, especially if they don't let it go after a while, until they say nothing new I haven't considered before. More on that in another post.

This post will concern Phil Bair, a good guy who engages me on Facebook from time to time. He's spent 40 years by his count, studying these issues. He even wrote a book. His target is atheism.

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Answering Two Objections Against Miracles

As I'm the editor of a highly acclaimed anthology on miracles, Phil Bair wants to debate me. He has some impressive credentials. So I asked him what his objections were. He offered two of them.

You already know one of my objections: you have no criteria for identifying what qualifies as "extraordinary evidence" for an extraordinary claim. If there is no criteria, that presents three problems. 1. your principle is subjective, 2. you have no basis for telling us our evidence is not extraordinary enough, and 3. we have no way of knowing whether our evidence would satisfy anyone who holds to this principle because they are unwilling to give us any guide for determining this. If you expect us to satisfy the requirement, you have to give us a way of measuring that aspect of the evidence.

In answer this is what I call obfuscationist apologetics. The attempt is to get sidetracked into interesting issues that are beside the point. Rather than clarifying the issue to be addressed the goal is to distract us away from it, or to muddy the waters for the unwary.

First, this is not my problem. This is a problem for Bair's god. His god should know what would be convincing for rational people who cannot believe. The question then becomes why such a god who wants us to believe or be damned, is not providing it. Second, if I were to go further I would say it must be sufficient objective evidence. The reason why this is the case is because there's no objective evidence at all for any of the miracles that form the basis for Bair's Christian faith. Third, as to offering criteria goes I would offer clear-cut obvious concrete examples instead, like the unevidenced belief that a virgin gave birth to the second person of a Trinitarian god in an ancient pre-scientific superstitious age, best described as one of Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire. Then I would ask Bair to state his criteria for believing such an extraordinary claim, to see if included, was any objective evidence at all, which isn't. Hence I could simply dismiss his claim, which should be the end of it, per Hitchens' Razor.

The other objection I have is that your rejection for miracles does not rest on the principles endemic in the discipline of historiography. They rely on philosophical presuppositions rather than historiographical principles. That philosophical bias does not establish a basis for rejecting historical claims that don't conform to it. This forces the investigator to accept explanations for historical events even if they are false, and forces him to reject explanations even if they are true. Based on this, my contention is that you are simply defining historical methodologies out of existence in order to defeat them in a way you find convenient but not in a way that honestly addresses the merits of the evidence.

Will someone please tell me why Bair accuses me of that which Bair is guilty of doing? Methinks he doth protest too much. This link of arguments should refute such an unfounded hypocrtical claim. Let me just quote one passage from that previous link, something Dr. Bart Ehrman said in his book, Jesus Interrupted, about the historian and miracles here:

Why was the tomb supposedly empty? I say supposedly because, frankly, I don't know that it was. Our very first reference to Jesus' tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in a different country who had heard it was empty. How would he know?...Suppose...that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea...and then a couple of Jesus' followers, not among the twelve, decided that night to move the body somewhere more appropriate...But a couple of Roman legionnaires are passing by, and catch these followers carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets. They suspect foul play and confront the followers, who pull their swords as the disciples did in Gethsemane. The soldiers, expert in swordplay, kill them on the spot. They now have three bodies, and no idea where the first one came from. Not knowing what to do with them, they commandeer a cart and take the corpses out to Gehenna, outside town, and dump them. Within three or four days the bodies have deteriorated beyond recognition. Jesus' original tomb is empty, and no one seems to know why. Is this scenario likely? Not at all. Am I proposing this is what really happened? Absolutely not. Is it more probable that something like this happened than that a miracle happened and Jesus left the tomb to ascend to heaven? Absolutely! From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one..." [See pages 171-179]