As has been mentioned many times in these pages, I am a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. FFRF's PR guy is a fellow named Dan Barker. Dan's a former evangelical minister turned atheist. He's written a fantastic book called LOSING FAITH IN FAITH: From Preacher to Atheist, which you can buy at FFRF's website. And he does a lot of speaking engagements, including debates.
Now, I'm not altogether fond of debates, really. Most of the time, they don't really do anything except show which of two people has better debating skills. They rarely illustrate the true merits of either side of the given argument.
Nevertheless, I've attended two of Dan's debates. The first was a few years ago, at the University of Delaware. The subject of the debate was, "Resolved: the Triune God of Scripture Lives." It was a joke. Dan's opponent, evangelical Douglas Wilson, had no idea how to make an argument that made sense. His arguments were nothing but presuppositions and circular reasoning. For example, he said that one cannot use logic to argue against the likelihood of God's existence, because God created logic. Thus, by using logic, one is tacitly admitting that God exists.
Riiiiight...
Anyway, this recent debate, against John Morehead, wasn't quite so bad as that. But it still wasn't good.
The subject was, "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?" Morehead was a slick debater, a rapid speaker who hammered home his points in a very convincing-sounding voice. Of course, that didn't make the things he said any more credible.
He began his opening by listing twelve "historical facts." He asserted that "scholarship" supported these. Unfortunately, I was unable to scribble notes as fast as he was speaking, and as he only focused on three of these "facts," I wasn't able to jot them all down. Let's just say I strongly doubt the veracity of some of them, and can virtually guarantee that at least two were anything but "facts."
At any rate, these were the three he focused upon:
The postmortem appearences of Jesus are entirely anecdotal, taken from sources we cannot verify as authentic, including some from people who had never met Jesus when alive. So how could they know who they were allegedly seeing?
The final of his three points is the most humorous, though. Something, he contends, caused the early Christians to have this major change in belief systems. The resurrection must have been it!
Please.
Morehead continued by asserting that belief in God is perfectly rational. He even cited the Creationists' "Argument by Design" as evidence! (He has a very skewed definition of "evidence," obviously.)
He concluded his opening by once again mentioning the three "facts" listed above, asserting that the inference of Jesus actually being physically restored to life is the best explanation of events, and that the God hypothesis has greater scope and power than any other hypothesis for the resurrection story.
Dan opened by asking why they were even having the debate. He said we debate things not because we're sure of them, but because it's a matter of faith. He pointed out, referring to Morehead's assertion that scholarship supported his assertions, that "cheerleading scholarship is not real scholarship." I liked that line.
The meat of his opening consisted of five points:
Many pagan religions, some of them before the time of Christ, contain figures that resemble Jesus quite a bit, up to and including death by crucifixion and a resurrection a few days later. He brought this up to show that such stories were commonplace in those days, and that the Jesus story is cut from the same cloth as the others.
The legendary hypothesis states that maybe there was a Jesus, but that the stories about him have grown more and more fantastic as time goes by. He illustrated this by showing the books of the Bible that talk about the Resurrection story, laid out in the order in which they were written. Paul's writings (about the year 50) contained virtually no supernatural events. With Mark, we had some. With Matthew, even more. Luke and Peter, more and still more. By the time of the writings attributed to John (around the year 90), we had a whole host of supernatural events in the story.
Dan devotes an entire chapter of his book to the internal contradictions in the versions of the resurrection story in the Bible. (Check the website of FFRF for excerpts of the book, which might include this chapter.) Basically, there is no way on earth to take the different stories and assemble them into a coherent whole. They contradict each other on many levels. Pretty suspicious for works that are supposed to be the divinely inspired word of God.
Finally, there are plausible natural explanations for the sightings of Jesus. Paul's writings were the earliest, and all the other writers basically built on his version of things. But what if Paul had hallucinated? We know this happens. Ask anyone who cares for someone with dementia or Alzheimer's. Hallucinations can seem incredibly real to the one having the hallucination. No amount of arguing will convince them that the visions were in their heads. But we don't have any evidence for resurrections. Logic dictates that the more plausible explanation is the one we should stick to, unless we have good reason not to. And we don't.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the early Christians believed in a bodily resurrection of Jesus. They believed in a spiritual resurrection. Only in later years did the idea of a real, physical resurrection come into vogue.
There were, of course, rebuttals and conclusions, but this pretty much sums up the whole debate. None of Morehead's rebuttals carried much weight. He passed off inconsistencies and contradictions with a wave, saying (in effect) that they were superficial and irrelevant. He even went so far as to say that the New Testament is a better source of accurate history than any other source. Yeah, like that is going to make me take the guy seriously.
All in all, though, I have to agree with my wife when she said, "What's the point in debating whether Jesus was raised from the dead or not, when we can't even say with certainty that he ever lived in the first place?"
Well, that's a debate for another time, I suppose...
