The Lack of Reason for God, Chapter 13
Dec. 17th, 2014 04:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blimixThis is part of a series examining the the logic of Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: Chapter 12 tried to justify the crucifixion.
Chapter 13
In which Jesus has had enough of being dead.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
p. 201. "However, if you disbelieved the resurrection you then had the difficulty of explaining how the Christian church got started at all.
"People are gullible." That wasn't difficult.
p. 202. Keller responds to prospective Christians who do not accept the resurrection: "If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said?"
I see no reason for either of these assertions. First, vampires supposedly rise from the dead. Would you believe everything that a vampire tells you? Second, is Keller seriously suggesting that the teachings of Jesus cannot stand on their own merits, and are only worth considering if he died and rose again? If so, then why did anybody listen to him before he died? Was everyone in the gospels stupid for paying attention to him?
pp. 202-204. Keller asserts that nonbelievers have a burden of proof to explain the existence of Christianity in the absence of a resurrected Christ. He constructs an alternate narrative as an example of such an explanation, then uses "facts" that are merely Christian beliefs to disprove some weak aspects of this narrative.
Keller is not even arguing against any real nonbelievers, but just against one from his imagination. The fact that he cannot even do that without substituting religion for reason is sad, to say the least. In the process, he repeats his errors from pages 101 and 102 of chapter 7: He claims that Paul's account of the resurrection must be true because it was "a public document".
p. 204. Referring to 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 (see below for text), "Paul indicates that the risen Jesus not only appeared to individuals and small groups, but he also appeared to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing and could be consulted for corroboration." This is supposed to be evidence of the resurrection.
Writing, "It's true! Five hundred people saw it!" doesn't give the recipient enough information to find and consult those five hundred people. It is a trivially easy claim to make, and a hard one to verify or debunk. (Also, an impossible thing doesn't become possible just because many people claim it. See "Three men make a tiger".)
p. 204. Keller claims that Paul's account of the resurrection was accurate because "Historical accounts were not allowed to be changed."
I trust that my reader needs no comment from me here.
p. 204-205. "Each gospel states that the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection were women. Women's low social status meant that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court. There was no possible advantage to the church to recount that all the first witnesses were women. It could only have undermined the credibility of the testimony. The only possible explanation for why women were depicted as meeting Jesus first is if they really had."
This argument is weak in an astonishing number of ways. First, see my response to pp. 104-105 of chapter 7: If he can't think of a reason, that doesn't mean there's no reason. Second, preaching does not depend upon testimony in court, so the witnesses' legal ability to testify shouldn't matter. Third, nobody claims that women were the only witnesses, just the first ones: Thus, the story is not undermined by a failure to claim credible witnesses in any case. Fourth, even ignoring all of the previous considerations, there could indeed be a self-serving reason for a false story to claim witnesses who cannot testify in court: To prevent authorities from disproving the story by seeking the testimony of the supposed witnesses.
Also, Keller mentions "each gospel," but says nothing about the letters of Paul. If I may quote Keller himself in pp. 203-204:
"The first accounts of the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses are not found in the gospels, but in the letters of Paul, which every historian agrees were written just fifteen to twenty years after the death of Jesus. One of the most interesting texts is 1 Corinthians 15:3-6: 'For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have died.'"
Paul's letter contradicts the story that the first witnesses were women. So which story is false? The closest I can come to reconciling them is that Paul, in a fit of misogyny, may have elided the women from his telling.
p. 205. Keller cites N. T. Wright in arguing that Christians would only have concluded that Jesus was resurrected if both his tomb were empty and he had been sighted afterward by witnesses.
My book club friend points out that if resurrection is a valid conclusion from sightings and an empty tomb, then one need only hire a grave robber and claim to have seen the deceased, and a new resurrected messiah will be generated.
Even disregarding the poor logic supporting Wright's train of thought, the resurrection wasn't a conclusion: It was a premise of Christianity. Nobody has been called upon to figure out the resurrection for themselves, and so the fanciful story of their having done so cannot support it as reality.
pp. 206-207. To answer the idea that ancient people were credulous (and so might believe in the resurrection with insufficient evidence), Keller presents first-century Middle Easterners as skeptics of a sort who would find human bodily resurrection inconceivable. Presumably, their belief in spite of this is meant to challenge disbelievers, though Keller does not explicitly say this until the end of the chapter.
Keller's argument is based on the fact that their religions do not explicitly include stories of individual human resurrection. Yet it turns out that people believe all sorts of religious things that are not explicitly described in their religions (such as that Jesus was born in winter, that emperor Nero (or any current pope or American president) is the Antichrist, that god wants you to hate homosexuals, or that epileptic seizures are divine visions).
My book club friend notes that Keller's portrayal of modern people as rationally skeptical is far from true. (People still buy homeopathic remedies, healing crystals, and, of course, crosses. (My examples.))
p. 207. Keller argues that the only Jewish belief in resurrection regarded the end times, when everyone good would be resurrected, and therefore an individual resurrection would have been unthinkable. "If someone had said to any first-century Jew, 'So-and-so has been resurrected from the dead!' the response would be, 'Are you crazy? How could that be? Has disease and death ended? ...'"
My book club friend points out that the response might also have been, "Lazarus?"
pp. 207-208. "Others have put forth the conspiracy theory, that the disciples stole the body and claimed he was alive to others. This assumes that the disciples would expect other Jews to be open to the belief that an individual could be raised from the dead. But none of this is possible. The people of that time would have considered a bodily resurrection to be as impossible as the people of our own time, though for different reasons."
It's good to know that both ancient and modern people believe that bodily resurrection is impossible. I was concerned that millions of Christians might have believed that Jesus rose from the dead, but clearly I was wrong: Keller has reassured me that nobody believes the central tenet of his religion. Clearly, my job here is done.
p. 208. "In the first century there were many other messianic movements whose would-be messiahs were executed. However, 'In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead...'"
My book club friend notes that Keller cannot reasonably contrast Jesus with other early messiahs, about whom we know almost nothing. For all we know, their followers might have believed and behaved exactly as Jesus' followers did; there is no basis for contrast. I will add that Keller seems to know this, as he is careful to note only that we don't know that the cases were similar, rather than explicitly claim that they were not. But he goes on to draw conclusions as though he had just asserted the latter.
pp. 208-209. Keller argues that Christianity represents a bunch of Jews all coming to the same conclusion at the same time about the resurrection, rather than hashing it out through decades of debate. He says that this unprecedented shift in belief can only have been caused by many people all meeting the resurrected Jesus.
This almost reads like a joke about getting Jews to agree on anything. I'll bet someone could make it funny. However, I am not convinced that such widespread agreement about the resurrection is either factual* or strikingly atypical. Even were I to grant those, this agreement could still be explained by the deliberate creation and imposition of Christianity (either by Paul or by Roman aristocrats), rather than its evolution among the masses.
* My book club friend tells me that some modern Biblical scholarship indicates that Christianity evolved gradually from a diverse set of preexisting concepts, exactly contrary to Keller's claim.
p. 209. "Jews, however, believed in a single, transcendent, personal God. It was absolute blasphemy to propose that any human being should be worshipped."
It still is. I'm pretty sure that Christians worship Jesus the god, not Jesus the regular human. (Also, there is no reason to call the Jewish god "personal". That's a Christian thing.)
p. 210. "Virtually all the apostles and early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it is hard to believe that this kind of powerful self-sacrifice would be done to support a hoax.
Fictional self-sacrifice is not very convincing. Nor is real self-sacrifice by religiously deluded people.
The rest of the chapter is a summary, repeating previous errors and wishfully describing what the resurrection contributes to Christianity.
Next week: In chapter 14, Keller sermonizes about the trinity.
The whole series.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: Chapter 12 tried to justify the crucifixion.
In which Jesus has had enough of being dead.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
p. 201. "However, if you disbelieved the resurrection you then had the difficulty of explaining how the Christian church got started at all.
"People are gullible." That wasn't difficult.
p. 202. Keller responds to prospective Christians who do not accept the resurrection: "If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said?"
I see no reason for either of these assertions. First, vampires supposedly rise from the dead. Would you believe everything that a vampire tells you? Second, is Keller seriously suggesting that the teachings of Jesus cannot stand on their own merits, and are only worth considering if he died and rose again? If so, then why did anybody listen to him before he died? Was everyone in the gospels stupid for paying attention to him?
pp. 202-204. Keller asserts that nonbelievers have a burden of proof to explain the existence of Christianity in the absence of a resurrected Christ. He constructs an alternate narrative as an example of such an explanation, then uses "facts" that are merely Christian beliefs to disprove some weak aspects of this narrative.
Keller is not even arguing against any real nonbelievers, but just against one from his imagination. The fact that he cannot even do that without substituting religion for reason is sad, to say the least. In the process, he repeats his errors from pages 101 and 102 of chapter 7: He claims that Paul's account of the resurrection must be true because it was "a public document".
p. 204. Referring to 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 (see below for text), "Paul indicates that the risen Jesus not only appeared to individuals and small groups, but he also appeared to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing and could be consulted for corroboration." This is supposed to be evidence of the resurrection.
Writing, "It's true! Five hundred people saw it!" doesn't give the recipient enough information to find and consult those five hundred people. It is a trivially easy claim to make, and a hard one to verify or debunk. (Also, an impossible thing doesn't become possible just because many people claim it. See "Three men make a tiger".)
p. 204. Keller claims that Paul's account of the resurrection was accurate because "Historical accounts were not allowed to be changed."
I trust that my reader needs no comment from me here.
p. 204-205. "Each gospel states that the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection were women. Women's low social status meant that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court. There was no possible advantage to the church to recount that all the first witnesses were women. It could only have undermined the credibility of the testimony. The only possible explanation for why women were depicted as meeting Jesus first is if they really had."
This argument is weak in an astonishing number of ways. First, see my response to pp. 104-105 of chapter 7: If he can't think of a reason, that doesn't mean there's no reason. Second, preaching does not depend upon testimony in court, so the witnesses' legal ability to testify shouldn't matter. Third, nobody claims that women were the only witnesses, just the first ones: Thus, the story is not undermined by a failure to claim credible witnesses in any case. Fourth, even ignoring all of the previous considerations, there could indeed be a self-serving reason for a false story to claim witnesses who cannot testify in court: To prevent authorities from disproving the story by seeking the testimony of the supposed witnesses.
Also, Keller mentions "each gospel," but says nothing about the letters of Paul. If I may quote Keller himself in pp. 203-204:
"The first accounts of the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses are not found in the gospels, but in the letters of Paul, which every historian agrees were written just fifteen to twenty years after the death of Jesus. One of the most interesting texts is 1 Corinthians 15:3-6: 'For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have died.'"
Paul's letter contradicts the story that the first witnesses were women. So which story is false? The closest I can come to reconciling them is that Paul, in a fit of misogyny, may have elided the women from his telling.
p. 205. Keller cites N. T. Wright in arguing that Christians would only have concluded that Jesus was resurrected if both his tomb were empty and he had been sighted afterward by witnesses.
My book club friend points out that if resurrection is a valid conclusion from sightings and an empty tomb, then one need only hire a grave robber and claim to have seen the deceased, and a new resurrected messiah will be generated.
Even disregarding the poor logic supporting Wright's train of thought, the resurrection wasn't a conclusion: It was a premise of Christianity. Nobody has been called upon to figure out the resurrection for themselves, and so the fanciful story of their having done so cannot support it as reality.
pp. 206-207. To answer the idea that ancient people were credulous (and so might believe in the resurrection with insufficient evidence), Keller presents first-century Middle Easterners as skeptics of a sort who would find human bodily resurrection inconceivable. Presumably, their belief in spite of this is meant to challenge disbelievers, though Keller does not explicitly say this until the end of the chapter.
Keller's argument is based on the fact that their religions do not explicitly include stories of individual human resurrection. Yet it turns out that people believe all sorts of religious things that are not explicitly described in their religions (such as that Jesus was born in winter, that emperor Nero (or any current pope or American president) is the Antichrist, that god wants you to hate homosexuals, or that epileptic seizures are divine visions).
My book club friend notes that Keller's portrayal of modern people as rationally skeptical is far from true. (People still buy homeopathic remedies, healing crystals, and, of course, crosses. (My examples.))
p. 207. Keller argues that the only Jewish belief in resurrection regarded the end times, when everyone good would be resurrected, and therefore an individual resurrection would have been unthinkable. "If someone had said to any first-century Jew, 'So-and-so has been resurrected from the dead!' the response would be, 'Are you crazy? How could that be? Has disease and death ended? ...'"
My book club friend points out that the response might also have been, "Lazarus?"
pp. 207-208. "Others have put forth the conspiracy theory, that the disciples stole the body and claimed he was alive to others. This assumes that the disciples would expect other Jews to be open to the belief that an individual could be raised from the dead. But none of this is possible. The people of that time would have considered a bodily resurrection to be as impossible as the people of our own time, though for different reasons."
It's good to know that both ancient and modern people believe that bodily resurrection is impossible. I was concerned that millions of Christians might have believed that Jesus rose from the dead, but clearly I was wrong: Keller has reassured me that nobody believes the central tenet of his religion. Clearly, my job here is done.
p. 208. "In the first century there were many other messianic movements whose would-be messiahs were executed. However, 'In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead...'"
My book club friend notes that Keller cannot reasonably contrast Jesus with other early messiahs, about whom we know almost nothing. For all we know, their followers might have believed and behaved exactly as Jesus' followers did; there is no basis for contrast. I will add that Keller seems to know this, as he is careful to note only that we don't know that the cases were similar, rather than explicitly claim that they were not. But he goes on to draw conclusions as though he had just asserted the latter.
pp. 208-209. Keller argues that Christianity represents a bunch of Jews all coming to the same conclusion at the same time about the resurrection, rather than hashing it out through decades of debate. He says that this unprecedented shift in belief can only have been caused by many people all meeting the resurrected Jesus.
This almost reads like a joke about getting Jews to agree on anything. I'll bet someone could make it funny. However, I am not convinced that such widespread agreement about the resurrection is either factual* or strikingly atypical. Even were I to grant those, this agreement could still be explained by the deliberate creation and imposition of Christianity (either by Paul or by Roman aristocrats), rather than its evolution among the masses.
* My book club friend tells me that some modern Biblical scholarship indicates that Christianity evolved gradually from a diverse set of preexisting concepts, exactly contrary to Keller's claim.
p. 209. "Jews, however, believed in a single, transcendent, personal God. It was absolute blasphemy to propose that any human being should be worshipped."
It still is. I'm pretty sure that Christians worship Jesus the god, not Jesus the regular human. (Also, there is no reason to call the Jewish god "personal". That's a Christian thing.)
p. 210. "Virtually all the apostles and early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it is hard to believe that this kind of powerful self-sacrifice would be done to support a hoax.
Fictional self-sacrifice is not very convincing. Nor is real self-sacrifice by religiously deluded people.
The rest of the chapter is a summary, repeating previous errors and wishfully describing what the resurrection contributes to Christianity.
Next week: In chapter 14, Keller sermonizes about the trinity.
The whole series.
