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DO THE GOSPELS PROVIDE EVIDENCE OF JESUS’S EXISTENCE?

6/14/2014

 
Tim Callahan believes that the Jesus of history has almost no connection with the character portrayed in the New Testament. While admitting he probably existed, he thinks we know next to nothing about him. As he put it in a recent article (“Did Jesus Exist?”, Skeptic Vol. 19, No. 1), Jesus was only “barely” historical.

One reason he believes this is because the gospels cannot be trusted. They contain so much that is obviously made up that even people like C.S. Lewis and William Lane Craig admit not everything in them is historically accurate. As a result, Callahan pretty much dismisses anything found in them.

But the untrustworthiness of the gospels doesn’t mean one cannot extract valuable information from them.  In fact, they contain clear evidence that Jesus existed – evidence that of course also adds to what we can know about him.

To begin with, there are clues within the gospels themselves that they had precursors – earlier writings on which they were at least partially based. But this means that some writings were already around not very long after Jesus's death. Moreover, there appear to have been several of them (Luke in fact refers to “many” such works), and yet they all seem to agree on certain basic points, such as that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate at the instigation of the Jewish authorities. This is therefore pretty strong evidence that at least these parts of the Jesus story are true.

In the second place, there are several things in the gospels that were problematic for Jesus’s early followers and thus are very unlikely to have been invented. The most obvious is the crucifixion itself (mentioned not only in the gospels but in Paul’s letters as well). Why would a Jewish cult have made up such an event given that it goes completely against what was expected of the Messiah? It just doesn’t fit. A far more plausible story is that there was an actual execution of someone regarded as the Messiah, and that his followers then had to adjust their messianic expectations.

Another clue found in the gospels is that Jesus was said to have come from Nazareth. Again, this goes against what was expected: the Messiah was supposed to be from David’s city of Bethlehem. It is for this reason that fictitious stories are told about his birth in Matthew and Luke, so as to explain the problem away. (We know they are fictitious because they are utterly implausible and because they are inconsistent with one another.) But if Jesus was an invention, why would he have been said to be from the wrong place to begin with?

Related to this is another clue that I find very interesting. It is claimed that in his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus was almost entirely unable to perform miracles. This is telling, because, first, it is unlikely his followers would have invented a story of failure about their leader; and second, because it fits in with what we know about human gullibility. The people in his hometown knew him, they had seen him grow up, and thus they were much less disposed to accept the idea that this individual they had known all their lives was suddenly a great miracle worker.  The only part of the story that is clearly invented is the explanation offered to justify the unexpected failure: that it was due to the lack of faith of the Nazarenes. By putting the blame on them – and making a theological point in the process – the one who came up with this explanation found a pretty good excuse. (And it might very well have been Jesus himself who first explained the failure in this way.)

The last problem I’ll mention is Jesus’s baptism. Again, this is unlikely to be an invention. The purpose of baptism is to cleanse away one’s sins, and as many critics have pointed out, it seems Jesus wouldn’t have needed to do that. Moreover, the story suggests that Jesus was originally a follower of John the Baptist – an idea that finds further backing in the fact that Jesus had essentially the same apocalyptic views as John, and also in the fact that the story of the baptism itself changed over the years so as to make Jesus less and less like a follower and John less and less like the leader.  The baptism is therefore something that in all probability occurred, and which Christians later had to somehow deal with so as to make it fit with their theology.

The gospels, then, do present pretty solid evidence that there was a historical Jesus. Furthermore, they present various facts about him that are entirely believable. The Jesus of history, it seems, was not as unrelated to the Jesus of scripture as Callahan suggests.

The Moral Landscape Challenge, Part 2

6/8/2014

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Harris informed his readers of three principal objections to his claim that moral questions have answers which can, at least in principle, be decided scientifically. The first two, in Harris’s own words, are:

“1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value well-being, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)

“2. Hence, if someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about his own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)”

Harris replies to these criticisms by means of analogies with the science of medicine and with science in general. Both analogies make essentially the same point. However, the second raises somewhat more complex issues which would take us too far off the main topic, so here I’ll consider only the first.

Harris reasons as follows: some of my critics complain that ethics must presuppose a fundamental value (well-being) and that therefore it isn’t a science. But medicine is clearly a science, and yet it too must presuppose a value (health). Therefore, there is no problem about ethics also being considered a science; it can be every bit as scientific as medicine.

To this, the winning essay of the Moral Landscape Challenge replied that the analogy isn’t a good one because, whereas medicine must presuppose health is good in order to even make sense, ethics doesn’t have to presuppose well-being is good – there are competing views of ethics.

Now, that’s certainly true, and it points to one important flaw in Harris’s argument – but in my opinion, there is a more fundamental problem with the analogy. The science of medicine does not depend on the claim – and in fact doesn’t even make the claim – that health is objectively good. People desire health, and medical scientists therefore try to figure out ways they can achieve it. But medical truths in no way depend on it being a fact that health is good. Whether or not it is a fact that avoiding scurvy is good has no bearing whatsoever on the medical finding that it can be avoided by taking vitamin C. The medical finding is true quite independently of what position anyone takes on the desirability of scurvy. Harris’s “science” of ethics, on the other hand, does depend on the supposed objective desirability of well-being. And that’s where the fundamental disanalogy lies.

This point can be explained another way. Suppose Harris merely proposed that we develop a science of well-being – that is, a science that studies ways to measure and increase the overall amount of well-being. Now, I would have no fundamental problem with that. And it actually would be analogous to medicine. People desire well-being, just like they desire health (a subset of it, after all), and “doctors” of well-being could prescribe ways to increase it. But notice the difference between this proposal and Harris’s actual proposal: someone who disagrees that well-being ought to be increased wouldn’t be regarded as an unscientific, illogical person. He would just be someone with different preferences, someone who would never be a customer of the “well-being” profession.

To return to the value and persuasion problems, if we replace “health” for “well-being” in the above statements we get the following:

“1. There is no scientific basis to say that we should value health, our own or anyone else’s. (The Value Problem)

“2. Hence, if someone does not care about health, or cares only about his own and not about the health of others, there is no way to argue that he is wrong from the point of view of science. (The Persuasion Problem)”

Harris appears to think no one would say such a thing about health. After all, medicine is a science, so what it values must be “scientific” too (whatever that might mean). But actually, the only thing that is objectionable in these quotes is the claim that they are problems. It is in fact true (contrary to what Harris implies) that there is no scientific basis to say we should value health, and that, form the point of view of science, there is no way to argue that someone who doesn’t desire health is wrong. However, these aren’t problems for medical science. They would only be problematic if medical science depended on the claim that it is a fact that health is a good that everyone must value. And as I’ve already explained, that is simply not the case.

Harris claims that his critics are confused, but the real confusion in all of this is that he does not appear to understand the difference between ethics and a science of well-being. His conflation of these two concepts is the real problem.


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the moral landscape challenge, part 1

6/8/2014

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A few months back, Sam Harris challenged readers of his blog to disprove the central thesis of his book The Moral Landscape. In that book, Harris argues that when we talk about what is good we are really talking about the well-being of conscious creatures. This implies that Harris understands “good” to mean the same thing as “well-being.” Thus, he says things like “it makes no sense at all to ask whether maximizing well-being is ‘good’,” and “if you think we cannot say [a scenario in which everyone is in the worst possible misery] would be ‘bad’, then I don’t know what you could mean by the word ‘bad’ (and I don’t think you know what you mean by it either).”

The fundamental objection to such a view is that it commits the so-called naturalistic fallacy.

It might be easier to understand what this fallacy is by means of an analogy. Suppose someone claimed that “true” means “stated in the Bible.” Now, that can’t be right – and one way to see that it can’t be right is that it makes perfectly good sense to say things like “I know that x is stated in the Bible, but is it true?” If “true” were synonymous with “stated in the Bible,” however, then such a thing would not make sense: it would be like saying “I know that x is stated in the Bible, but is it stated in the Bible?” The word “true” doesn’t mean the same thing as “stated in the Bible”; that’s just not how it is used.

Similarly, if “good” meant the same thing as “well-being,” then (as Harris implies) it would never make sense to ask whether well-being is good: it would be like asking whether well-being is well-being. And yet the question “is well-being always good?” does make sense.

To convince you of this, consider the following thought experiment, which was first proposed by the philosopher Robert Nozick and which is discussed in the appendix of Harris’s book: Suppose that there are alien creatures who would experience an increase in their well-being by devouring us that surpasses any amount we would lose. That is, their gain in well-being would more than make up for our loss. It follows that if we became their dinner, the amount of well-being in the world would increase. Now this means that, if increasing well-being is always a good thing (which would follow if "well-being" is the same as "good"), it would be a good thing for us to be devoured. And that doesn’t seem right – not to Nozick, not to me, and probably not to you. (You may think Harris would deny such a conclusion, but in fact he admits that it is a consequence of his view, and accepts it.)

Even if you believe that in this case it would be a good thing for all of us to be devoured by aliens, it seems you must admit that the question “is it really a good thing?” makes sense. It at least is the case that someone can have reasonable doubts about this.

Another way to see the problem is this. Two people can disagree about the desirability of the aliens’ dinner plans, even if they agree that it would increase well-being. That is, they can agree with respect to the well-being involved, yet still disagree with respect to the goodness of the event. And that’s because “well-being” does not mean the same thing as “good.”

What Harris is actually doing in The Moral Landscape, then, is re-defining moral terms. His view that “questions about values… are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures” depends on meaning something different by “values” than what is normally meant by that term. He is not talking about the same thing that most people are talking about when they discuss values.



Part 2 addresses the analogy Harris makes between ethics and medicine, an analogy he introduces in order to handle what he calls the value and persuasion problems.

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First Blog Post

6/6/2014

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This blog will feature posts related in some way to my main writing projects. My first planned topic will be the recent Sam Harris challenge, in which that author asked readers to submit criticisms of his argument in The Moral Landscape. (Harris offered $2000 for the best entry and $20,000 if that winner actually convinces Harris to change his mind.)

The winning entry, by Ryan Born, takes issue with the analogies Harris makes between ethics on the one hand and both medicine and science as a whole on the other. What Born argues is essentially correct, but I don’t think it addresses the most fundamental problems with Harris’s view – and neither do any of the other entries I’ve read, even though most also stated things that I believe are correct. Over the next two posts, I’ll attempt to explain what I see as really wrong with Harris’s argument.

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