Six Degrees of Separation: Between Modern Christians and Jesus
The gospels stand in the way
The gospels stand in the way
Labels: Monday Mornings, Paul Moser
This book by my friend Gary Habermas just came out. It's volume 1 of an expected 4 volumes. They represent the culmination of decades of research that he spent on a lifelong quest to defend the resurrection of Jesus. Other notables who have done a great deal of research on the resurrection include William Lane Craig, Michael Licona, and NT Wright.
The reason why so much research has been devoted to the resurrection claim is because it is the linchpin upon which everything else hangs when it comes to a Bible believing faith. If Jesus was raised from the dead their faith is not in vain, Paul tells them. But it also provides the justification for believing in a miracle working god of the Bible, including the story of the garden of Eden, Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac, the Exodus, and all other miracles, including the virgin birthed son of a god. It also guarantees the return of Jesus, and his promise of everlasting reward in a heavenly existence.
Gary and I have met and have emailed each other for more than a dozen years. He invited me to Skype into a class of PhD students [in June 2020] who were majoring in Apologetics to discuss my book, The Case Against Miracles.
Having known about his upcoming set of books I suggested a blurb he could use based on his previous writings:
My friend Gary Habermas has produced the most exhaustive defense of the indefensible claim of faith in the resurrection of Jesus that has ever been attempted. No non-Christian who cares to argue otherwise can avoid it. [Sent on February 18, 2020]
A mighty stream of pompous theobabble
Insight into Christian origins is provided by three texts, written by a man who never met Jesus. (1) The apostle Paul states in Galatians 1:11-12: “For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” A revelation as he imagined it, unless you’re willing to credit visions claimed by hundreds of other religions. (2) He also imagined that Jesus was a dying-rising savior god; that is, those who believe in this hero are entitled to eternal life, as he states in Romans 10:9: “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (3) In I Thessalonians 4:17, Paul assured his followers that their dead Christian relatives and friends would be the first to rise to meet Jesus when he arrives on the clouds: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”
Labels: "Debates", Monday Mornings, Virgin birth, Virgin Birth Debate
Dr. Vincent Torley reviewed it and said:
It seemed to me that Loftus was questioning premise P5 of Akin’s argument (that the New Testament is inspired by God), but unfortunately, he did not explicitly say so, preferring to focus on his own argument against the Virgin Birth, which I have to say was very well-presented. Loftus made a powerfully convincing case that miracle claims should rest on solid evidence, and that belief in the Virgin Birth does not. Loftus highlighted the numerous historical problems Matthew’s and Luke’s historical narratives succinctly and cogently. The Skeptical Zone.
Here's an excellent debunking of what Jimmy Akins said. Thanks go out to Dr. Aaron Adair and the Godless Engineer for this! Adair and GE claim that I did very well!
Labels: Virgin birth
Labels: Virgin birth
The gospels could have been so much better
Here’s a story I’ve told before, but deeper research has revealed more details. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had submitted their gospels to the New Testament Approval Committee. They had been instructed to go to a nearby bar to await the decision on whose gospel would be chosen. So they sat there at the same table, sipping cheap booze, and there was a lot of tension: these guys didn’t like each other at all. Mark was furious that both Matthew and Luke had copied most of his gospel, without mentioning they’d done so, without giving him any credit. Mark was wondering how long it would take for plagiarism to be considered a sin. He was also annoyed they’d changed his wording whenever they saw fit.
Labels: Virgin birth
It’s not hard to find the goofs and gaffs
[First Published in December 2022] Churches all over the world will once again get away with the traditional Christmas story, for one simple reason: the folks in the pews can’t be bothered to carefully read the Jesus birth stories in Matthew and Luke. It’s just a fact these stories don’t make sense and cannot be reconciled: Fake News! A few of the more charming verses from these stories have been set to music and are recited during Christmas pageants; these deflect attention from the utter failure of these stories to quality as history.
"How the New Testament Writers Used Prophecy" by John W. Loftus.
One of the major things claimed by the New Testament in support of Jesus’ life and mission is that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy (Luke 24:26–27; Acts 3:17–24). If God cannot predict the future as time moves farther and farther into the distance, as I questioned earlier, then neither can any prophet who claims to speak for God. As we will see with regard to the virgin birth of Jesus, none of the Old Testament passages in the original Hebrew prophetically applied singularly and specifically to Jesus. [In chapter 18, "Was Jesus Born of a Virgin in Bethlehem?"]. Early Christian preachers simply went into the Old Testament looking for verses that would support their view of Jesus. They took these Old Testament verses out of context and applied them to Jesus in order to support their views of his life and mission.9
Labels: Excerpts, Monday Mornings
In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month. But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of “miracle” is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.Other important books by people who know say the same thing, such as: Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything, by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, who also wrote the book, Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities. Rosenthal is a professor of statistics at the University of Toronto, having received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard. Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence, by Joseph Mazur, who is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Marlboro College in Vermont. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow, who co-wrote with Stephen Hawking "The Grand Design", and had previously earned his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California at Berkeley. What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, by Gary Smith, who is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and It's Consequences, by John Allen Paulos who is a professor of mathematics at Temple University.
Labels: "miracles", Christian Apologetics, miracles
About two centuries ago, there was a major transition in the way scholars were approaching the stories of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. There was a greater attempt to look at the historical context and formation of the holy book and its stories, and the tales of Jesus were a major issue for critical scholars and theologians. It was also at around this time that the acceptability of wondrous stories was not palatable, at least for the educated where a deistic god was more ideal, one that did not perform miracles and was consistent with the universe of Newtonian mechanics. A naturalistic understanding of the world, inspired by the success of the physical sciences, along with inspiration from Enlightenment thinkers, changed the way people looked at the world, and that caused for a significant reassessment of the spectacular stories of the ancient world. What was one to do with the miracle stories of Jesus if miracles don’t happen? The solution was a series of rationalizations, none seen as terribly plausible but preferable to claiming a miracle or a myth. For example, Jesus walking on water was a mistake on the part of the Disciples, seeing their master walk along the beach shore on a foggy morning and not actually atop the water. Even the resurrection of Jesus was so retrofitted into scenarios that are unlikely, to say the least, but at least they weren’t impossible.
Labels: Monday Mornings
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her secretly.
Labels: John Beversluis
Tis the season to carefully study the Jesus birth stories
A few years ago I attended the special Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. It ended with the famous tableau depicting the night Jesus was born: the baby resting on straw in a stable, shepherds and Wise Men adoring the infant, surrounded by farm animals—and a star hovering above the humble shelter. Radio City did it splendidly, of course, but the scene is reenacted at countless churches during the Christmas season. The devout are in awe—well, those who haven’t carefully read the birth stories in Matthew and Luke. This adored tableau is actually a daft attempt to reconcile the two gospel accounts—which cannot, in fact, be done.
Chapter 2: The Fact of Religious Diversity
This chapter supports my first contention—that people who are located in distinct geographical areas around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and justify a wide diversity of mutually exclusive religious faiths due to their particular upbringing and shared cultural heritage. This is the Religious Diversity Thesis (RDVT), and it is a well-established fact in today’s world. The problem of religious diversity cries out for reasonable explanation, something that faith has not provided so far. Attempts to mitigate it or explain it, as we’ll see, either fail to take it seriously or explain religion itself away.
Labels: Excerpts, Monday Mornings, Outsider Test
Below I've put together thirty of them that most Christians agree on and why they are all improbable:
1) There must be a God who is a simple being yet made up of three
inexplicable persons existing forever outside of time without a
beginning, who therefore never learned anything new, never took a risk,
never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had
a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.
2) There must be a personal non-embodied omnipresent God who created the
physical universe ex-nihilo in the first moment of time who will
subsequently forever experience a sequence of events in time.
Labels: Monday Mornings, Reality Check
Yet the church gets away with “God is love”
Those who have been assured since childhood that God is Love—and
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (Matthew 10:34-36)
Luke’s version of this text is prefaced with, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49)
In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul taught that “wrath and fury” awaited people who were disobedient to god. (Romans 2:8)
It can be asserted with little fear of contradiction that every literate
IS RELIGION COMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE? by Dr. David Eller (pp. 257-278). [This is a 4000 word excerpt out of 8600 words. Get the book!]
Labels: Monday Mornings
We often marvel at Paul's lack of interest in the life and times of Jesus. He says Jesus was born of a woman but says nothing about his mother. He tells us Jesus was killed for the sins of others but tells us nothing about where the event occurred. He tells us that Jesus was buried but he tells us nothing about the gravesite. Did Paul not think the information was available in his time?
We know Paul could read the Old Testament as allegory as we see in Galatians 4:22-31:
“Tonight is the night that Mary passes through your house…”
It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? Such might indeed be the right thing to do a time when the physicist believes he has at his disposal a rigid system of fundamental laws which are so well established that waves of doubt can't reach them; but it cannot be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become problematic as they are now. At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of theoretical foundations; for he himself knows best and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for an new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Einstein’s Philosophy of Science.Granted he was speaking about the philosophy of science, which is a legitimate philosophical inquiry. But think on this. Maybe not, I say. Science has solved a multitude of philosophical problems, and will continue doing so. Given that success rate scientists are good philosophers. By contrast, by the same standard, philosophers have been poor scientists.
Labels: philosophy
Labels: Monday Mornings