An Argument Against Rational Belief in The Resurrection of Jesus

“and if Christ hath not risen, vain is your faith, ye are yet in your sins;”

1 Corinthians 15:17

I want to grant the strongest possible case allowable for the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, I expect to afford much leeway- indeed, more than is rationally justified- to the claims of the historicity and reliability of the Christian texts. That is to say I will grant, though I do not think it is true, that the eyewitness reports in the gospels and the epistles are from individuals who were neither inappropriately credulous, uneducated, nor emotionally and psychologically unfit to provide generally reliable testimonies. I will further grant, though I do not think it is true, that the gospels and the epistles are independent, generally reliable and unbiased historical documents which track the events under consideration accurately- as accurately as any historical text could, that is. I will also grant, though I do not think it is true, that the testimony of the Church Fathers was generally reliable and has transmitted accurately the succeeding 1,800 years to the current day.

I shall further suppose, though I am not sure how they might accomplish this, that historians can exclude all possible naturalistic explanations, with the exception of so-called swoon hypotheses, to include even future explanations which further scientific investigation might disclose and more elaborate explanations such as extraterrestrial interventions not now seriously entertained. Even then, I shall contend, Christians are not justified in believing that Jesus’ reported postmortem sightings were the result of a Christian miracle. I will argue that even on these favorable grounds the Christian is not justified in believing the Christian god rose Jesus from the dead.

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Consistent Standards for the Rationality of Religious and Perceptual Beliefs

In a recent and very engaging presentation at UNF, Chris Tucker asked for an argument that shows perception is trustworthy that does not already assume that perception is trustworthy, where perception includes vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell, and proprioception.  It was intended to be a trick question as any argument for one type of perception will depend on another.  For example, when asked how I can trust my hearing – e.g. that who I heard speaking at the lecture was Chris Tucker and not a recording being played in the background- I can respond that I watched him speak with my very own eyes.  So it seems that we are left with basic faculties of perception to form rational beliefs that cannot themselves be verified as trustworthy by argument or experience independent of those faculties.  If this is so, argued Tucker, then a common argument against the use of religious experiences to make religious beliefs rational employs inconsistent standards – higher standards are set for religious beliefs than perceptual.  I would like to look more closely at Tucker’s objection and consider a way of responding by arguing that the standards for religious beliefs are not higher than those of perceptual beliefs and that perceptual experiences are supported for reasons independent of those experiences.

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Cross-Checking of Religious Experiences

There is a side-conversation in the comments section of another post  discussing religious experiences and their veracity in affirming the existence of a supernatural or religious ’cause’ of such experiences. This side-conversation reminded me of the discussion of cross-checking procedures beteen Alston and Fales, and so I would like to open up a seperate post for discussion on this topic. Below is an exposition of the largest problem I see with the cross-checking procedure theory.

What I propose is that any attempt to utilize intrapersonal religious experiences in order to justify or prove a specific religious position interpersonally must necessarily fail by virtue of a fundamental disconnect. What’s more, the poverty of cross-checking when applied to transcendent religious experiences is not surprising given the very content of such experiences. By attempting to use the personal to prove the general, the intrapersonal to prove the interpersonal, the profundity of the religious experience is lost and becomes fodder for philosophical skeptics. First I shall begin by discussing the type of transcendent religious experience to which I am referring and by citing specific examples. After that I shall introduce the current discussion surrounding the veracity of religious experiences that has carried on between authors such as Alston and Fales, paying specific attention to the concept of cross-checking. From there I shall argue how, based on the intrapersonal nature of these transcendent religious experiences, cross-checking must be re-evaluated as a verification tool.

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Agnostic Atheism and the Modal Argument for the Existence of God

Filotheya: Prudence, you are an agnostic, right?

Prudence: I am, yes.

Filotheya: By ‘agnostic’ do you mean there is equal evidence both for and against the existence of God or something else?

Prudence: No, nothing else. I hold that there are equally compelling reasons to believe in God’s existence and not to believe in God’s existence such that God’s existence is as equally likely as God’s non-existence.

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The Moral Trilemma of the Omnibenevolent Abrahamic God

Let me present the following trilemma to those theists who worship the omnibenevolent Abrahamic God:

Q: If God commanded you to kill your child, would you be morally justified if you were to obeyⁱ?

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Call for Papers: “Spirituality in Action: Bringing Transpersonal Psychology to a World in Crisis”

I though this might be relevant for those working on Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and/or Moral Psychology. Best of Luck!

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Old Testament Ethics Conference at Notre Dame

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at the  University  of  Notre  Dame presents a conference entitled

My Ways Are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible

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Muslim Girls reach out

Here is a good link for educators who want to help shape a global understanding of religion and cultural diversity and who are looking for new tools.

The magazine is clever, hot, fun, and contemporary. It is targeted for college age young female adults. You can get it free at:

http://www.muslimgirlworld.com/mgmag/2class.cfm

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Faith, Film, and Philosophy

On behalf of the Gonzaga University Faith and Reason Institute and Whitworth College’s Weyerhaeuser Center for Faith and Learning, I am pleased to announce a call for papers for the inaugural “Faith, Film, and Philosophy” one-day conference to be held at Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA) this coming September 29. The conference will be held in conjunction with a series of three public talks to be held on the evenings of September 27-29.

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Thanks to Our Friends

… at R-P-E for welcoming us to the blogosphere. We encourage our readers to participate in their discussions and check out their conference announcements, like this one on Islam.

- Rico Vitz

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On Silence…

While there are arguably not many things in philosophy that we can call ‘Absolutely True’ there is at least one thing in life that is certain. Those who have met me know that I tend to talk…at lot! After recently enjoying my birthday (which I celebrate, as I find birthdays a far better option than the alternative) I found myself pondering things such as adulthood, maturity, and knowledge. I wondered to myself, have I reached an age where I can be considered adult? And does that also mean that I am mature? And if I am mature, does that mean that I finally have ‘some knowledge’? And if I don’t have knowledge, then how do I get some? Socrates said that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing at all. This acknowledgement, according to the Oracle, if I understand correctly, made Socrates the wisest man in the world. I wonder, though, if perhaps something else made Socrates so clever. Famous for his dialectic questioning, he had to have been very skilled at one thing: Listening! Listening is not the forte of someone, such as myself, who tends to talk too much. Though we, as students, tend to spend most of our day engaged in listening, for many reason, it appears that we are not very good at it. Scientific evidence will tell us that this is caused (among other things) by the fact that thought speed by far outruns speaking speed. Often people may find themselves bored with a presentation, or already planning rebuttals to arguments before the other person has quite finished speaking. Hoping that age will bring some knowledge, I decided that this year, I will practice listening more and speaking less (…this is not going well at all, I might add!). Listening, I realized, would mean that I would have to be silent. In order to do that effectively, I had to consider what that really means. What is silence?

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When ethnocentricity tears the world apart.

Lately I have been pondering what life must be like for a Muslim female living in the Middle East, or a Middle Eastern Muslim female who have moved to the West. The obstacles they face, a double-edged sword, as they have to contend with a largely male-dominated society, while they are often seen as weak and submissive in the eyes of their Western sisters, intrigue me.

It seems to me that many Western women find is reprehensible that Muslim women continue to live in conditions that are thought to largely prevent them from having independence and identity. I tend to believe that this is not necessarily the case. Unquestionably, there are many women who suffer greatly in the Middle Eastern cultures. There are, however, also many Muslim women, who find comfort, peace, and solace in their religion and cultural traditions.

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