Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion
Page 36
probably going to happen. Big news: we can trace only factors that we can trace,
though for all we know, there may be others.
Likewise, with Troeltsch's "principle of analogy" (pp. 48-49). There is no
claim here (nor in poor, much-maligned Hume) that nothing out of the ordinary
happens or ever can happen. ("What? You mean a politician told the truth last
night?") There is no dogma, no certitude, that miracles do not and never can
occur. We don't have a time machine; we don't know what did or didn't happen.
Again, that's why we have to fashion these conceptual instruments, crude though
they may be, to try to surmise what probably happened, which is all we can ever
"know." And analogy forbids us to deem "probable" any event without reliable
corroboration from some analogy with present-day experience.
I am a good historian when I get home, plop down in front of the TV, switch it
on, see an image of a giant creature smashing Tokyo, and do not infer, "Oh! I
must be watching CNN!" Is it because I know darn well that monsters do not and
cannot exist? I know no such thing! Cryptozoology tells us we may yet discover
lingering dinosaurs hidden away here and there (though none is likely to be this
big). All I know is that I have seen the like of this big boy in a number of Toho
Studios flicks over the years, and that this is probably Gojira or Baragon, and
that I am probably watching the Sci-Fi channel, not CNN. Analogy impels me
toward the matching genre. Thus, if Buddhist devotional lore provides a close
analogy to the Matthean tale of Peter walking on the water and sinking as he
becomes distracted, but no experience of today provides any analogy-what am I
to conclude? Should I not, especially in view of the obvious homiletical motif of
both stories, conclude that Matthew's story is probably another legend? Why tar
me with the brush of unbelieving naturalism? (Please note by the way, that in my
book The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man,2 I never invoke the mere presence
of miracles in the narrative as a reason to reject a Gospel story as historically
improbable.)
Nothing in Hume or Troeltsch or Bultmann, that I can see, bids us reject
miracle claims without weighing the evidence. It is just that, given the
limitations imposed upon us (until we invent the time machine, that is), we
cannot detect "probable miracles" even if they happened! Historical inquiry
cannot touch them, even if time travel would show them to have been real! I
believe this was the position of Karl Barth. Barth knew that faith and
historiography entailed very different epistemologies.3 Faith claims to be able to
do an end-run around the data and to obtain certainty about an ostensible miracle
via some other way. But what way is that? It is, I think, nothing more than the
will to believe. Listen to the parting words of Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy:
Our historiographical conclusions, of course, do not yet come close to the
surrendered, trusting relationship to the living Christ that lies at the heart of
the Christian faith. But no amount of strictly historical reasoning or
evidence can take one to that point. At best, historical reasoning can point
in a more or less probable direction. To speak now as Christian theologians:
the Holy Spirit, personal commitment, and covenant trust must carry one
the rest of the way.4
But they have been speaking as Christian theologians-not historians-all along. In
all their determination to build into the historical-critical method a "recognition"
of miracles as probable, they have been trying to smuggle in a decision to
believe. They imagine themselves to have maintained a strict separation between
a supposedly "historical" acceptance of miracles as probable events of the past,
as distinct from religious belief about those events. They aver that the historian,
as historian, should accept that Jesus rose from the dead. But then they say it
would take a hat-switch to the theologian's role to decide that this miracle held
salvific significance. I would suggest instead that in arguing for a "resurrection"
to be accepted as a "supernatural" (not just an anomalous) event, Boyd and Eddy
have already smuggled in soteriology, much as in that scene in Animal House
when the Food King cashier catches hapless freshman Pinto trying to sneak past
her with his sweater and pants stuffed grotesquely with roasts, hams, and
packages of ground meat.
Why can they not see that to come to a point of feeling stumped and then
throwing up one's hands and exclaiming, "God did it!" has the exact same value
as saying, "God only knows!"? So why not just say they don't have the
explanation-rather than claiming that they do-that it defies explanation just as
much as that puzzle they are invoking it to explain! To jump the gun and say
"God did it!" rather than "God only knows" is to wave one's theological wand to
transform agnosticism into fideism. In the last analysis, Boyd and Eddy are
biblicists whose "historical" judgments are simply a matter of the will to believe.
They know that would never pass for historical method, so they engage in what
Freud called projection. While the fault is their own, vitiating the probabilistic
method of historians via "the obedience of faith," they project the fault onto the
genuine critic, urging that if he would only accept the bare possibility of the
miraculous, he could start being honest with the text. But, beneath their shameful
shell game, our authors are exalting faith and calling it historical judgment.
The phoniness of their enterprise is evident from the way they have to
misrepresent Hume (pp. 29, 40-42, 61-63) and Bultmann (pp. 44, 49, 51, 75,
etc.). Hume held the door open for precisely the "out" Boyd and Eddy ask us to
entertain: Hume already allows us to accept a miracle report, provided any
naturalistic explanation would sound even more farfetched than a supernatural
one.' In appealing to the universal facts of human experience, Hume is being
neither deductive nor circular. He is merely appealing to what everyone knows:
the frequent reports of the extraordinary we hear from UFO abductees, Loch
Ness Monster fans, people who see ghosts or who claim psychic powers, always
seem to turn out to be bunk upon examination. Ask Joe Nickell. Ask James
Randi. Ask the evangelical stage magician Andre Kole, who exposed Filipino
"psychic surgeons." So someone reports to you that he has seen his Uncle Mel
alive again after his cremation. Are you going to believe him? Even if you
believe Jesus rose from the dead, I think you will not be quick to conclude that
Uncle Mel did, too. What would you say are the chances your friend is
mistaken? Probably pretty high. If your friend introduced you to the living Uncle
Mel, I bet you would immediately doubt whether it was really he who was
cremated, as if it was all some kind of joke. Everybody would think you were
pretty silly if you took to the streets proclaiming that Uncle Mel had risen from
the dead.
This whole notion of granting that a miracle happened, or that the supernatural
intervened, when we can find no adequate naturalistic explanation is headed in
the wrong direction
. Pretty soon any miracles the Bible says happened will fall
into the same bag. Elijah called down fire from the sky to roast hundreds of
Samaritan soldiers? Well, no naturalistic explanations are going to be able to
account for that, so Boyd and Eddy will say they're entitled to believe it. Why?
Because there's a compelling reason to say that it happened. And what is that
reason? It's simply that the Bible says it happened! What other reason can there
be if the normal pointers to historical probability are absent? We see in the long
run that Boyd and Eddy just want us to believe what the Bible says, and when
we don't, they flog us with the wet noodle of "naturalistic presuppositions."
Here we see a twin to Michael Behe's fraudulent "irreducible complexity"
argument against evolution. He points to transitional features required as stations
on the way toward a creature evolving toward something with survival value.
But the transitional version does not yet possess the "envisioned" survival value.
Half an eye has no utility. The creature has to make it the next step, and the next,
until finally it reached greater eyesight with its survival value. What gets it
there? Evolution, you see, must have proceeded according to the plan of an
"intelligent designer." (Behe does not admit to being on chummy enough terms
to call him by his name: God.) In the same way, Eddy and Boyd will not, they
say, presume to read Christian theology into what they claim is a mere research
result: yes, the supernatural must have intervened to work this miracle, but that
hardly implies it is a marvelous work and a wonder wrought by Jehovah. Oh no:
that would be a further step, a step of faith.
Eddy and Boyd would no doubt protest that they are not calling for belief in
God, as if "the supernatural" were not merely a transparent mask like Michael
Behe's "intelligent designer." But it is clear they are. Here's why. Witness their
endless lambasting of Bultmann and his ilk for refusing to accept Gospel events
that are parallel to the experiences of third world peoples. This is very puzzling,
since Bultmann freely admits that Jesus did what he and his contemporaries
regarded as miracles-both healing and exorcism.6 Whatever you may want to
make of them, Bultmann said, you have to admit they might have happened
because such things, such scenes, occur today. Isn't this what Boyd and Eddy
demand? You see, here is the nub of the matter: it is apparently not good enough
to admit that anomalous events occurred. No, Bultmann's unforgivable sin is that
he will not jump from this diving board and confess, as a historian, that Jesus did
miracles by the power of Jehovah God.
I call Behe's "irreducible complexity" argument fraudulent because it was
refitted long before he made it. George Gaylord Simpson addressed the same
claim in his The Meaning of Evolution (1949), supplying a page frill of
examples of extant living creatures with every conceivable degree of light
sensitivity, together with an explanation of how each tiny increment of light
sensitivity has increased survival value. No mystery there. Nor is there any case
of New Testament miracle stories that cannot most readily be explained, a la
Occam's Razor, naturalistically (as an overblown retelling or an outright fiction).
And this is most especially true of the resurrection stories. (Boyd and Eddy
certainly do nothing to make a historical resurrection seem impossible to deny-
just see Richard Carrier's "Why the Resurrection is Unbelievable" in the present
volume). Now Barth may have been right: maybe God did raise Jesus from the
dead in space-time-history, but the fact is irrecoverable by the historical method.
Fine, whatever. But don't dress up the will to believe as some fancy
epistemology, much less the "open historical-critical method." Nor is this gambit
anything new: over thirty years ago in The End of the Historical-Critical
Method? Gerhard Maier called the same shell game the "historical-biblical
method." 7
Boyd and Eddy pull another fast one when they attack and deride the
postmodern doctrine of "incommensurability" (pp. 56-57) in order, as they
imagine, to pull it out from under Van A. Harvey, who had the goods on them
and their approach forty years ago in The Historian and the Believer.8 Harvey
says the historian cannot simply jump out of his historical skin to allow himself
to embrace the beliefs possible to the ancients with their very different raft of
assumptions. Here and elsewhere, Boyd and Eddy speak of biblical critics as an
insular group of snobs who abdicate all responsibility for their beliefs, merely
acquiescing to the suppositions of the momentary Zeitgeist(pp. 74-7 5). No one
can give Harvey a fair reading and come out thinking he means this. His book, in
fact, is filled with reasons he and his critical colleagues in the modern age have
abandoned ancient credulity in favor of fine-tuned historical method. But if
Harvey can be caricatured as a poster boy for passive subjectivity (as if to say,
"we can't help being the mouthpieces of our age"), then Boyd and Eddy have
exempted themselves from having to take his actual arguments seriously.
In doing this, our apologists pivot to wrap themselves in the postcolonial
outrage against the Dead White Males of Western academia. How dare the
Higher Critics exclude the beliefs and experiences of the third world and the
miracle-mongering ancients! We must instead construct an affirmative action
epistemology that will include their beliefs, too. What hypocrisy all this is! For
Boyd and Eddy will go on to argue in a later chapter that the ancients were not
particularly credulous, were indeed just as skeptical of claimed miracles as the
moderns are! They need to argue this way just long enough to promote the idea
that the early Christians must have had good reasons to believe in the
resurrection, and so on, rather than just believing any old rumor someone told
them (pp. 64-66). It is a way of pretending that the ancients were critical
historians who would never have believed in Jesus' miracles unless they were
forced to do so by the Humean caveat that when naturalistic rationalizations
become too farfetched, all that remains is belief in a miracle. So what were they?
Were they critical moderns before their time, so we can accept their conclusions
about miracles that we ourselves cannot witness? Or were they easy believers in
demons and spirits and wonders, which Boyd and Eddy would forbid us from
being skeptical about since we must embrace "democratized epistemology"? In
either case they want their cake and eat it too, and as such they are not being
responsible historians.
Another egregious case of Janus apologetics, facing both ways at once, is
Boyd's and Eddy's argument that the resurrection of Jesus cannot have been
borrowed from polytheistic mythemes (pp. 91-132). Their first step is to
circumscribe a magic zone from about 165 BCE to 70 CE when there was no
Jewish inclination to accept Hellenistic influence. They figure that the
Hasmonean victory over the Seleucid Hellenizers put an end once and for all to
the temptation to Hellenize. Hellenization began to rear its ugly head again onl
y
after the Roman victory over Jews. This strikes me as a gratuitous assumption.
Indeed, the fact that there is during their magic period much evidence of Jewish
anti-Hellenistic zealotry surely means the "danger" of influence continued. You
don't strengthen the fortifications when there is no enemy at the door. And no
evidence of Hellenization? What about the astrology of the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Ah, er, it's not what it looks like! The presence of horoscopes at Qumran doesn't
mean the sectarians actually used or believed in them, say the apologists. Perish
the thought! It was probably because they needed them to write scholarly refiu-
tations of them! And second-to third-century synagogues with mosaics of
Hercules, Dionysus, and the Zodiac? Purely decorative, that's all. Come on!
Obviously you don't decorate your house of worship with images of gods you
find abhorrent! And this was just at the time Yahweh Judaism was getting
stronger and stronger, they claim! Judaism just was not a solid monolith even at
this time, much less in Jesus' time.
Our authors find it necessary to misrepresent Margaret Barker, too (p. 100).
She argues very powerfully (in The Older Testament and The Great Angel-A
Study of Israel's Second God) that popular Judaism had not embraced the
monotheism of the Exilic prophets yet, even in spite of priestly indoctrination
and interdiction.9 She ventures that Jesus as the resurrected Son of God was a
direct survival of Israelite polytheism. Boyd and Eddy cannot seem to get
through their learned heads that Barker is not talking about a Jewish embrace of
pagan mythemes. Her point is that mythemes, which the rabbis later
reinterpreted (explained away) as pagan, were always indigenously Israelite,
shared with Canaanite neighbors, not borrowed from them. Thus there is no need
to posit some repulsive borrowing from hated paganism to account for easy
Jewish familiarity with dying and rising gods. Ezekiel knew the daughters of
Jerusalem were engaged in ritual mourning of the slain god Tammuz even in the
days of the Exile (8:14). Baal and Osiris were well known in Israel, too.
Boyd and Eddy indulge in overkill when it comes to the dying and rising
gods, summarizing Jonathan Z. Smith's failed case for dismantling this ideal type
(pp. 143-45) with not even a footnote referring to, much less rebutting, my
detailed refutation of Smith in Deconstructing Jesus (Prometheus Books, 2000).
They follow Bruce Metzger (p. 136, 140), Edwin Yamauchi (p. 144) and other
apologists in arguing, absurdly, that the Mystery Religions borrowed the dying
and rising god mytheme from Christianity -even though early Christian
apologists like Tertullian, Firmicus Maternus, and Justin Martyr admit the pagan
versions were earlier (even insisting the devil fabricated the Gospel events long
before they happened with Jesus)! Some dying and rising god cults we know for
a fact were earlier, so this borrowing can't have gone the other way around as
they pretend anyway10
So there was no need to go to paganism for the resurrection doctrine/ myth. It
was homegrown in earlier Israelite polytheism. One need not throw up one's
hands in mock bafflement that the Christian resurrection faith could not have
come from paganism, so it must have been ignited by a real resurrection! This is
like saying space aliens must have built the pyramids. It's a ridiculous argument,
but the apologists see how ridiculous it is only once they have to refute someone
else's use of it against them! What about the worship of Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, believed by most of his followers during his
lifetime to be the Messiah, though he never said so? He died, and immediately
his fans predicted his soon return in glory and began hailing him as God