Re-formulating William Lane Craig's 4 Facts Resurrection Argument
I am going to demonstrate with completely sound reasoning why the most reasonable conclusion based on the evidence is that Chippy the squirrel rose from the dead.
There are four historical facts which must be explained:
1. Chippy's burial
2. The discovery of the empty tomb
3. His post-mortem appearances
4. The origin of a few people's belief in his resurrection
Link.
44 comments:
Long Live Chippy!
And Elvis!
We cannot ignore the witnesses, there were at least 500 squirrels, dogs, cats, insects, worms that witnessed Chippy's resurrection, not to mention that Chippy came back and his body was eaten just as Jesus commanded his disciples to eat his body, John 6:53
Sorry to Break the Spell a wee bit, but I've been struck by the shift of the apologist brigade from "proof" to "best explanation". Michael Behe of Intelligent Design fame, and major part player in the crash-and-burn for the DI that was Kitzmiller 2005, now no longer claims that "irreducible complexity" is a slam dunk for intelligent agency, as he used to. Now it is merely the "best explanation", and that's all he's waggling at. It is a bit pathetic.
They're weakening, folks. Weakening.
I don't know about Behe but Dembski has always argued for the "best explanation." You can read about it in his book "Intelligent Design"
He's quite up front that Intelligent Design doesn't prove that God exists. This is what the ID movement has always claimed.
Even the agnostic Michael Denton believes that the Laws of Biology reveal purpose in the universe. He believes in DIRECTED evolution not Darwin's theory that natural selection can explain all the changes in living organisms.
As far as the Resurrection goes Craig has always argued for the "Best Explanation" where as people like Hank "The Bible Answerman" and Norman Geisler still claim that it's an irrefutable fact of history that is beyond reasonable doubt. I don't see any weakening at all.
He's quite up front that Intelligent Design doesn't prove that God exists. This is what the ID movement has always claimed.
Yeah, they've "claimed" that, but the infamous wedge document revealed their true intentions long ago. Even if they weren't though, they seem to dodge the obvious question: what could we infer about the designer from its designs?
Even the agnostic Michael Denton believes that the Laws of Biology reveal purpose in the universe.
So?
He believes in DIRECTED evolution not Darwin's theory that natural selection can explain all the changes in living organisms.
Who said it does? You also need genetic drift. Evolution is not, contrary to Behe et al, an "unguided" process – it's guided by survival and reproduction. Geez, didn't you guys learn this in high school?
Oh, and, re: Craig's nonsense. The "four facts" are only valid facts IF you assume that the Bible is a fully reliable historical document. Bart Ehrman torn Craig apart on this point during their debate, and Craig's only response was a frail appeal to the authority of "New Testament scholars". The Bible, as a historical document, is about as reliable as the $4 toaster I got at Walmart.
I will not believe in Chippy's Resurrection until I can place my fingers in the mastication wounds in his side.
I have an anouncement to make. I, MATT The MAGNIFICENT, am the new GOD of this world. and I can prove it.
As a demonstration of my abilities, i will perform a miracle that no one can deny, and supply the proof that I exist to all.
For the next few months I will listen to the prayers of the children in america, and, based on how genuine I believe they are, I will answer an indisputably high percentage of these prayers. I will influence, by using my omnipotent power, the minds of the parents of these deserving children (this may include you) and FORCE them to bend to my will and assist me in accomplishing this miracle (which will also prove that if I choose, I have the ability to control as much of the population as i desire).
on christmas day, I will fullfll the prayers of these children, as proof of my power, benevolence and existence. and children accross the land will answer, if asked, that GOD (me) answered their prayers to their utmost satisfaction. Be prepared to be amazed, and worship at my feet, while enjoying the happiness I will bring to your children.
Matt bless you.
Why do you suppose you see so many dead squirrels on the highways and biways? Martyred, because they're Chiptians. Do you really think they would go to their deaths if the story of Chippy wasn't true?
Love the satire. This argument has always bothered me, mainly because I don't think that they have proven that any of those four things actually happened, much less developed a well formed logical argument from them leading to Christ's resurrection.
~Rhaco
"Why do you suppose you see so many dead squirrels on the highways and biways? Martyred, because they're Chiptians."
There's another explanation:
Squirrels play a game in which they are dared by their fellows to run beneath passing cars.
The one who performs the most death-defying stunts is awarded a 1,000 acorn prize.
Sadly, many don't survive their attempts, and the prize has yet to be awarded.
I'm crossing my fingers that Reasonable Faith will take notice.
Mike D,
The Biologist Michael Denton says it does. He believes that evolution happens by natural law but he's an anti-Darwinian evolutionist:
"Before the Darwinian revolution many biologists considered organic forms to be determined by natural law like atoms or crystals and therefore necessary, intrinsic and immutable features of the world order, which will occur throughout the cosmos wherever there is life. The search for the natural determinants of organic form, the celebrated ‘‘Laws of Form’’. was seen as one of the major tasks of biology. After Darwin, this Platonic conception of form was abandoned and natural selection, not natural law, was increasingly seen to be the main, if not the exclusive, determinant of organic form. However, in the case of one class of very important organic forms, the basic protein folds, advances in protein chemistry since the early 1970s have revealed that they represent a finite set of natural forms, determined by a number of generative constructional rules, like those which govern the formation of atoms or crystals, in which functional adaptations are clearly secondary modifications of primary ‘‘givens of physics.’’ The folds are evidently determined by natural law, not natural selection, and are ‘‘lawful forms’’ in the Platonic and pre-Darwinian sense of the word, which are bound to occur everywhere in the universe where the same 20 amino acids are used for their construction. We argue that this is a major discovery which has many important implications regarding the origin of proteins, the origin of life and the fundamental nature of organic form . We speculate that it is unlikely that the folds will prove to be the only case in nature where a set of complex organic forms is determined by natural law, and suggest that natural law may have played a far greater role in the origin and evolution of life than is currently assumed."
1. Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall andMichael Legge. The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the Pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law. J. Theor. Biol. (2002) 219, 325–342
Oh, precious. Course some people might actually think that there's a real criticism here in this satyr of Craig's approach.
Geocentrist Gerardus Bouw's 1984
"With Every Wind of Doctrine" said:
"If God cannot be taken literally
when He writes of the "rising of the sun," how can anyone insist that He be taken literally when writing of the "rising of the son"?
How can any of us ever be taken literally when we all use metaphorical language.
We use both and we can figure out which is which. Why shouldn't the author's of scripture.
how can anyone insist that He be taken literally when writing of the "rising of the son"?
And come to think of it, we don't take that literally at all. Death is not literally a place down from where one rises. We associate death with lowness because people tend to fall when they die. So no, this is not literal language, but we still manage just fine to understand that what is meant is that Jesus literally was dead and then he became alive.
The normal distinction between metaphorical and literal language is quite shallow. In reality, metaphors are deeply seated in our mind and structure our very thought patterns that are expressed through language (even "literal" language).
"How can any of us ever be taken literally when we all use metaphorical language."
This is due to the presence of the background which is the set of nonrepresentational capacities that enable all representing to take place. The Background includes biological and cultural capacities, skills, stances, assumptions and presuppositions.
To insist on interpreting a text or what a person says literally then is to distort or pervert the intended meaning. Atheists and fundamentalists who demand a strictly literal understanding of language then would be seen as social deviants incapable of following the tacit rules of language and society.
If you look at the Westboro church of Fred Phelps and all you see are the only honest Christians around then you are as much a social deviant as they are.
Cole,
Ugh. Really? So, I'm not an evolutionary biologist. And neither are you. So your tactic here is to yank out some obscure argument by a guy whose best credential is that he's not a Christian but some sort of deist, and still thinks there has to be a "designer". Uh-uh. So, do I need to hyperlink the lengthy rebuttals to his ideas by Talk Origins and Pandas Thumb or can you find those yourself?
Here's why, without heading back to school for another degree, I am not convinced of ID: Firstly, it's an argument from ignorance. It presumes that when something is complex, natural processes are insufficient to explain it, thus a "designer" exists.
Secondly, it hasn't predicted anything or accomplished anything. Evolution has been validated with mountains of falsifiable predictions and has given us advances in medicine, agriculture, wildlife conservation, behavioral sciences and ecology. What has ID given us? Real science wins because it works.
Cole, Denton is regarded with derision by biologists. It matters not whether he claims to be "agnostic" or not; his misrepresentations and misunderstandings of evolution are spectacular in their scope.
The particular example you quote is just one specimen of his inability to get his head round the way biology works. Biological organisms are systems; genetics provides the informational part of that system; genes build proteins using particular building blocks. There are no "platonic forms" - just a finite number of ways that aas can fit together.
You can safely ignore Denton; like Behe, he has nothing.
Mike D and Shane,
I wasn't arguing for a designer and neither does Michael Denton. He's an evolutionist who believes that some evolution is explained by natural law and not natural selection. Regardless of his correct views on proteins, the scientific journals clearly point to fine-tuning and complexity. The intelligent design of the cell can be seen in things such as irreducible complexity, chicken and egg sytems, fine tuning in the cell, optimization, biochemichal information systems, the structure of biochemical information, biochemical codes, genetic code fine tuning, quality control in biochemical systems, molecular convergence, strategic redundancy,
life's minimum complexity, molecular-level organization of simplest life etc.,etc. The list could go on. I think this off topic though so this will be my last post on this.
John, I applaud how you're trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Chippy: 'I'm ready to accept Chippy as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' No, that will not do. We're forced to choose whether Chippy was a liar, lord, or lunatic.
Cole
"He's an evolutionist who believes that some evolution is explained by natural law and not natural selection."
There is no such thing as "Natural Law" if by that you mean something distinct from physics. The function of my bones is also explained by physical laws, proteins fold according to physics, my inner ear works according to physics, so does my eye.
So what?
"The intelligent design of the cell can be seen in things such as irreducible complexity, chicken and egg sytems"
ID proponents have failed to show that the biology of life is irreducibly complex. What they have done is to propose puzzles where it is difficult to see how some processes could have evolved.
Creationists used to love to bring up the bombardier beetle as an example of "irreducible complexity" (not the word they used at that time but it's the same concept) that evolution could not explain. Then evolutionists explained how such a sophisticated defense mechanism could have evolved and even provided other precursor species of beetles with progressively less complex defense mechanisms.
The same is true for the biology of the cell. Just because we see very complex systems working in harmony doesn't mean that there were not previous systems that were less efficient.
Evolution builds on the successes of the past so if a more efficient solution evolves than what came before it will jettison the older inefficient process. Then we come along and observe the culmination of 3.9 billion years of tinkering. It looks miraculous to us, and it is, but that don't mean there is no natural explanation for how it got there.
Rob, that's "satire" ( wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly), not "satyr" (mythological half-man, half-goat companion of Pan and Dionysius).
Cole, I'm sorry, but that is simply nonsense. Natural selection works with what is there. Complexity and indeed irreducible complexity is EXPECTED from evolution. I accept that many people (and it would seem that Denton is/was included in this) do not seem to comprehend the modern conception of evolution, but complex systems do not require "intelligence" to observe - they emerge all the time from natural phenomena and mathematical interactions. What I am saying is that the ID gaggle need to show that the modern evolutionary synthesis is deficient in some way. They have not done that.
That is not to say that there are not puzzles and unresolved questions - we have those aplenty. What there is NOT is any discrepancy that would be "better" solved by the interjection of (say) a magic space pixie. There is precisely NO evidence of a designing or co-ordinating intelligence in evolution.
Brenda---I agree with nearly everything you said except:
"Evolution builds on the successes of the past so if a more efficient solution evolves than what came before it will jettison the older inefficient process."
I'm not a philosopher of biology, but I think it's statements like that might get the evolution-deniers a foothold. Those words almost sound to me like the "directed" evolution Cole is talking about. I know what you're saying, but...
I think of evolution as attempting to find what works in a given environmental niche. I like that term of Dawkins, "blind watchmaker."
For example I don't know that "building on successes" and "efficient" are the words we want to use to explain that if we start cooking ourselves more with global warming, probably cockroaches and rats will be the winners.
I maybe quibble with your good thoughts though. Thank you.
christophermencken said...
"For example I don't know that "building on successes" and "efficient" are the words we want to use"
That's a fair point but our language just hasn't caught up yet. We just naturally tend to attribute intent to natural causes and it's very difficult to come up with substitute words sometimes.
We still say the sun rises in the morning even though we know it does no such thing. So we say that evolution "finds solutions" even though we know there is no teleology working behind the scenes.
But that feeling that we have that there MUST be someone pulling the strings behind nature is very powerful and difficult to overcome.
Brenda is quite right - humans see teleology all over the shop. But when we say that "evolution finds solutions", it manifestly does. It is a solution-finding algorithm par excellence. It's also a total bollocks-finding algorithm, as we see daily, but the mistakes don't reproduce as well as the successes over time, and that's the point.
Yes, William Lane Craig really has no idea how history works; especially in ancient times. Would Craig, for example, argue for the historical "facts" of the emporer Vespasian miraculously healing the blind and the lame? In Tacitus' (a historian!) account, it is said that several witnesses attest to it! (The History, Book IV, Chapter 81)
Of course he wouldn't, and no modern historian would, because it is obviously legendary and based on hearsay. The only reason Jesus, a man written about not by historians of his own time but by anonymous biographers, gets special treatment by so many is because of that fact that there is a religion surrounding him.
Not to mention that one of the historical "facts" Craig cites in his debate with Ehrman, oddly enough, is the birth of Jesus. This is an event which the Gospels disagree on from a historical perspective.
thank you Gearhed.
Brenda, Shane--- You make an interesting point. That the inexact language of our culture can push a religious belief system.
Your example "We still say the sun rises in the morning even though we know it does no such thing" is good because imagine if we were in a pagan culture instead of a Christian one. We'd probably be arguing with an Evangelical Pagan who'd say, "Well, the sun isn't floating up by itself! It's common sense to figure the Sun God is ascending to the heavens!"
And in a similar way, we're stuck with imprecise language like "evolution finds solutions" in our Christian culture....which could contribute to the thought process of a believer: "Aha! Even the evolutionist knows 'Something' is finding solutions."
I don't know whay all of these lexicon jiving is in any way necessary in respect to the term
"metaphor." A metaphor, in short, is nonliteral figure of speech--that's it; it needs no more rambling. Here's where I'm going with this. I grew up in the church
with a father preaching, and not once did I hear my preacher father
explaining the "Rising of the Son"
in a metaphorical context. When Christians, at least in my experience, talk about the "Rising of the Son"--as in the purported
physical resurrection of the god-man (Jesus)--they talk of it as a
[literal] historical event that took place and not metaphorically.
And this is essentially the foothold of the Christian creed. A man who literally--they believe--had risen from the process of putrefaction, which according to the science of Taphonomy, begins
immediately after physical death occurs; I mean, bone, flesh, blood,
and everything!
Shane,
It's not nonsense. And you are right to say that there are "puzzles." And the list is growing not getting weaker. Just to name a few:
1. Most researcher's now admit that the universe's age is far from sufficient to explain life's origin as a strickly natural occurance.
2. The geophysical record shows that life arose on Earth 3.8 billion years ago in a time span briefer than 10 million years. And it did so without the benefit of a prebiotic soup, or prebiotic mineral substrate, under chemical conditions that would naturally thwart the assembly of life's building block molecules.
3. RNA and DNA molecules and all their nucleotide building blocks are chemically unstable outside the protective environment of living cells. In other words molecules cannot survive under inorganic conditions.
4. Because the nucleotide building blocks for RNA molecules require such radically different chemical conditions (two need freezing environments, while the other two require boiling conditions) it's unreasonable to conclude that all of them formed in the same location.
5. Complex multicellular life appeared suddenly about 575 million years ago. This event marks the introduction of Edicarian life. During the subsequent 32 million years, no new phyla appeared, and thereafter the Edicara phylum experienced serious decline.
6. Creatures such as horses and whales, which yeild the most obvious fossil evidence of transitional forms, are among the least likely to evolve by natural process and the most likely to be driven to extinction by natural process. Theese transitional forms, then, are evidence for Divine replacement of extinct species.
7. For some mass extinction events in the fossil record, the replacement of extinct species with new and different species occurs far too rapidly to be explained by any known naturalistic cause.
8. Long term evolution experiments establish severe limits on what changes and rates of change are possible by natural selection, mutations, and gene exchange.
9. Natural selection leads more frequently to stasis than to divergence.
I don't follow alot of the I.D. movement. I'm more of a progressive creationist.
Cole, I have some questions about what you wrote.
1. Researchers in what field? Do you have a source for your statistic (i.e., "most")?
2. I don't understand what 10 million year time period is being measured here. What defines the beginning of this 10 million year time period and what defines the end of it?
6. On what do you base your first sentence here?
7. On do you base this calculation? Can you show your math?
Cole, ALL of those points are untrue, simplistic, misleading or just plain wrong. None of them cause the remotest problem for evolution. I say that as a geneticist. I suggest you take your points, hit the lit, and see if you can work out for yourself why they do not work. You have been lied to.
Sorry, but there's no kinder way to say it.
Shane,
I have the documentation. All the points above are true and are documented in the scientific literature.
Paul,
1.Some of the information can be found in:
Robert Shapiro, Origins.
Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evoution from space.
I was refering to origin of life researchers.
2.The period I was discussing is that of the early bombardment of earth by asteroids and comets.
3. The smaller the population, the larger the body size, the longer the generation time, and the fewer proginy per adult, the less likely a downward spiral to extinction. Horse and whale species manifest no realistic probability of evolutionary advance. Neither can survive any longer than several million years before experiencing complete extinction. Whales and horses are not even in the evolutionary race.
4. I haven't worked out the Math but scientists have. I have the resources for this you can look up if you like.
Cole, your answer to #1 doesn't create much confidence in your other answers and documentation.
You said
Most researcher's now admit that the universe's age is far from sufficient to explain life's origin as a strickly natural occurance.
and cited Shapiro's "Origins" in support, and yet
Shapiro's own web site about "Origins,"
http://www.robertshapiro.org/a_simpler_origin_for_life_78187.htm
merely describes another completely naturalistic method the creation of life.
Paul,
I was referring to his book. This is a 2007 article where he thinks that MAYBE they may have found a simpler way that life could have originated. It hasn't been confirmed though.
The entire quote:
"If the general small-molecule paradigm were confirmed, then our expectations of the place of life in the universe would change. A highly implausible start for life, as in the RNA-first scenario, implies a universe in which we are alone. In the words of the late Jacques Monod, "The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game." The small-molecule alternative, however, is in harmony with the views of biologist Stuart Kauffman: "If this is all true, life is vastly more probable than we have supposed. Not only are we at home in the universe, but we are far more likely to share it with unknown companions."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-simpler-origin-for-life&page=8
Also Paul,
I predict that life may have originated more than once, before and/or after the Late Heavy Bombardment. The Late Heavy Bombardment (3.85 billion years ago) made the entire planet temporarily uninhabitable for any concievable life form. Such findings would only cause things to be alot worse for naturalistic models. Insted of explaining just one "virtually impossible" origin of life, they would need to explain several.
Cole, exactly where does Shapiro argue or provide evidence for a non-naturalistic origin of life? I'm not seeing it yet.
Cole, you do realize that ID is useless don't you? Even if you can establish that there may exist some sort of creative force, there is a long way to go to show it is Yahweh and even then you have to show that Yahweh sent a man to earth to then change his religion.
Quite a bit of work to do, and most of the above can be refuted just be reading the Bible objectively.
Are we really supposed to believe that Angels had sex with daughters of men, that God has a council of angels and other divine beings, that God can smell scents, that God can wrestle with people, and that God had to descend from heaven to see the Tower of Babel?
Come on now, if you put this in any other mythological framework you would be laughing at it and you know it.
Cole, I'm terribly sorry, but you are wrong. Your points are untrue, misleading, or both. I can cut you some slack; you think you have the scientific literature to back it up, but what you really have is a series of quotemines generated by people with the nefarious but straightforward agenda of hoodwinking you. Yes, we are off-thread, but let's have a look at some of your assertions: (sorry this is going to take a couple of comments).
1. Most researcher's now admit that the universe's age is far from sufficient to explain life's origin as a strickly natural occurance.
This is simply poppycock, even allowing for your poor grammar and spelling. So score one for "untrue". Unless you have stats. And I don't think you have - I think you mean "some polemecists".
2. The geophysical record shows that life arose on Earth 3.8 billion years ago in a time span briefer than 10 million years. And it did so without the benefit of a prebiotic soup, or prebiotic mineral substrate, under chemical conditions that would naturally thwart the assembly of life's building block molecules.
Sure, life arose early, but precisely how early is a matter of some debate. The early earth was (and still is) a giant thermal cycler, rich in carbon and exotic organics, cycling each day from hot to cold, light to dark, wet to dry. Hydrothermal vents were kicking out complex organics, cracked and reformed under a lot of heat and pressure, at a bonkers rate; UV was generating more; these were permeating little cracks and fissures amounting to zillions of square metres of surface chemistry for maybe half a billion of these thermal cycles. It would have been astonishing in these circumstances (according to most researchers sitting at this computer, i.e. me - that's 100%!) if life had *not* arisen! What we do not know is precisely HOW it arose, but the event itself seems spectacularly *likely*.
3. RNA and DNA molecules and all their nucleotide building blocks are chemically unstable outside the protective environment of living cells. In other words molecules cannot survive under inorganic conditions.
Nonsense - DNA and RNA can survive perfectly well in solution for at least reasonable amounts of time to allow replication. But we don't actually know that RNA was the FIRST informational substrate of life (I think it probably was, however some people disagree). They're not vastly stable long term in warm water, but they don't have to be - they just need to kick around long enough to reproduce, and standard nucleic acid kinetics does the rest.
4. Because the nucleotide building blocks for RNA molecules require such radically different chemical conditions (two need freezing environments, while the other two require boiling conditions) it's unreasonable to conclude that all of them formed in the same location.
This is simply nonsense - there are several ways to generate nucleotides, and several ways to get different nucleotides to the same reaction surface before they degrade. Again you are mixing up the fact that we don't know precisely how something happened with us knowing that it can't have happened. Personally I think that rather complex chemical reactions were happening all over the place a good while before "life" arose (in this case the first informational replicator). You are choosing a very simplistic view.
5. Complex multicellular life appeared suddenly about 575 million years ago. This event marks the introduction of Edicarian life. During the subsequent 32 million years, no new phyla appeared, and thereafter the Edicara phylum experienced serious decline.
Your point being?
[TBC]
[Continued from above]
6. Creatures such as horses and whales, which yeild the most obvious fossil evidence of transitional forms, are among the least likely to evolve by natural process and the most likely to be driven to extinction by natural process. Theese transitional forms, then, are evidence for Divine replacement of extinct species.
That is just pure fantasy. Utter cobblers. Sorry. Not even anything to get our teeth into there.
7. For some mass extinction events in the fossil record, the replacement of extinct species with new and different species occurs far too rapidly to be explained by any known naturalistic cause.
Just wrong. Evolutionary radiation can be FAST, as evidenced sweetly by our little cichlid pals in the African Great Lakes.
8. Long term evolution experiments establish severe limits on what changes and rates of change are possible by natural selection, mutations, and gene exchange.
No they do not. They do indicate that it is possible to select to a degree that you outstrip the genetic variation that has arisen within a population; then you really have to wait a bit until the variation picks up again. This is rather well understood in evolutionary terms.
9. Natural selection leads more frequently to stasis than to divergence.
No it doesn't. Genomes are dynamic, even in species that are morphologically well matched to their niche, and hence not under selective pressure to change much (e.g. sharks). But sharks themselves are incredibly diverse.
I don't follow alot of the I.D. movement. I'm more of a progressive creationist.
So then why is your space pixie so dumb that she couldn't get it right first time? Why all the extinctions? Why not just go for the Real Thing?
Sorry, Cole, but you're out of your depth.
-Shane
So then why is your space pixie so dumb that she couldn't get it right first time? Why all the extinctions? Why not just go for the Real Thing?
Listen. It's cosmic squirrel. And for goodness sakes, you try creating a universe from scratch! He's already admitted he made a few mistakes this being his first project and will do better the next time around.
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