At the forefront of American politics at the present time is Obama’s plan to reform the healthcare system in this country. Healthcare reform was one of his biggest platforms during the election, and he is following through with his promise to make it a priority during his presidency.
There are a lot of rumors and unsubstantiated accusations flying around the media, the internet, and the water cooler in regards to this new plan, so I decided it was time to add my two cents into the mix in the hopes of clearing up some confusion for the 1½ people who follow my blog.
Among the most common misconceptions about Obama’s healthcare plan involve catchphrases like “socialized medicine” and “the government takeover of healthcare,” and include the idea that if Obama’s plan is passed, our general welfare and ability to receive good healthcare will dramatically decrease, while at the same time our country will be thrown toward the brink of economic meltdown due to cost.
In this article, I want to specifically address those issues, look at Obama’s plan and compare it to other similar plans around the world, and demonstrate why those concerns are not legitimate, but instead are functioning as fear-mongering political spin aimed at defeating anything Obama brings to the table.
I realize most people have not actually read or studied the legislation that is currently being discussed in Washington. Lucky for you, I have read and studied it. I accessed it through links on the website of the House of Representatives. It is over 1000 pages. Fortunately, there are links summarizing what is contained in each section.
AMERICA’S AFFORDABLE HEALTH CHOICES ACT
This is the title of the new plan being discussed in Congress. As I noted above, the bill is over 1000 pages in length, and seeks to make healthcare more accessible and more affordable for all Americans. It is not a “socialized medicine” healthcare reform bill. I’m not even sure what “socialized medicine” means, but presumably it gives the impression of the government taking control of everyone’s healthcare choices. You pay thousands of dollars a year for health insurance, get bogged down in government bureaucracy, can’t get the treatment you need because some government official decides you don’t need it, you wait for weeks to see a doctor about a cold, months or years for major surgery, your doctors are all haggard government employees who hate their jobs, and you end up dying of government-induced cancer at age 43.
Sound silly? Ask the roughly 273 billion Americans who seem to believe it’s true.
There is nothing in the current proposal that is in any way related to the government taking over American healthcare. The bill is aimed at passing laws that improve healthcare, make healthcare more accessible and more affordable for all Americans, and improve competition among insurance companies. If such efforts represent a “government takeover,” then the same argument would apply to any laws passed by government to control the free market. Does anyone, for instance, have a problem with anti-trust laws – those laws dictating what corporations can and can’t do in the public market? Of course not. We all benefit from laws like that.
The healthcare reform bill is similar. It passes laws that control what insurance companies can and can’t do in the free market; like anti-trust laws that protect investors, the healthcare reform bill passes laws that protect healthcare investors – that is, patients.
It does not establish government-mandated and government-controlled healthcare. It does not eliminate the for-profit nature of the health insurance industry or establish a single government program for everyone. It does not establish precedents that will make going to the doctor similar to standing in line at the DMV or the Social Security office. It’s not a government-run program like Welfare or Social Security. It is a government-protected program like the free market.
KEY POINTS IN THE BILL
There are a number of important reforms to the healthcare industry contained in this bill. I will list the major points and provide commentary.
1. Protects and guarantees private health insurance plans. Private health insurance carriers – like Blue Cross, Humana, etc., will continue on a wide scale, as they do today. Anyone who wants and can afford a private health insurance plan is entitled to enroll in such a plan. No one is required to take a government-funded plan. Those of us with private health insurance that we are happy with will not be forced to change anything.
2. Establishes a “Healthcare Exchange.” Think for a moment of those commercials for LendingTree.com that assert “when banks compete, you win.” That’s what the Healthcare Exchange is like – insurers coming together to compete for business. The Healthcare Exchange will be an organization that allows those who do not have private health insurance plans to find a plan that fits their needs and is affordable. Among the plans on the Healthcare Exchange will be a government-funded public plan.
3. Establishes a Government-funded Public Plan. The public plan will simply be one of dozens that are available to those who do not have private insurance. The public plan will be required to conform to the same standards as private insurance plans. For those who cannot afford the normal premiums of this plan, the premiums will be cut on a sliding scale, based on income. The lower the income, the lower the premium. Even this public plan is not just a free lunch for lazy people – there are premiums associated with it.
4. Maintains Medicare and Medicaid. Sweeping changes to the way money is allocated and spent within Medicare and Medicaid will provide most of the funding for the new healthcare system. However, those two government programs will continue as they have before. Medicaid, for instance, will still be the option for those below a certain income level. That is, if someone is not able to afford the public plan offered on the Health Exchange, even at the reduced rates based on income, then they will be eligible for Medicaid, as they would be now. This would represent, however, only a fraction of the general population.
5. Guarantees coverage. Insurance companies, including the public plan, will no longer be allowed to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, put a limit on how much they will pay, or rescind coverage for any reason other than fraud. Penalties for fraud, on the other hand, are increased. Additionally, insurance companies will no longer determine what treatment a patient can and cannot receive, or what treatments will and won’t be covered. Doctors and patients will now make that decision, not insurance companies, and not the government. This is a vitally important point, because it is one that is often misrepresented by opponents of healthcare reform.
6. Increases training and incentives for healthcare workers. The bill aims at putting more healthcare workers into the field by providing for more attractive loans and grants for healthcare students, better training programs, and more lucrative careers. This includes healthcare workers from doctors to nurses, dentists and dental hygienists.
7. Establishes an agency to analyze the program’s benefits and weaknesses. This agency will analyze how the program works, and seek to strengthen it when weaknesses appear. This provision helps ensure that the program is self-correcting.
OPPONENTS OF HEALTHCARE REFORM
Some health insurance carriers oppose this legislation because of fears that it will reduce their profits. They have long been able to more or less name their own price and determine their own enormous profit margins, all at the expense of patients – you and me. This bill will put an end to that. It’s not difficult to understand, then, why some health insurance carriers are opposed to it. They will now be forced to price their services competitively based on the free market; power is, in effect, being taken from their hands and given to the market.
Some have argued that this plan will hurt healthcare workers. Doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals won’t have as much job security and won’t be able to afford to keep practicing. This is simply not supported by the facts or the content of the bill. It’s simple fear-mongering. The American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association both endorse this new bill, and the reason is because they see that it will help, not hinder, medical professionals. As outlined above, it contains specific provisions to encourage better training and better benefits for doctors, nurses, and others in the industry. Doctors who now enjoy 6-figure salaries are in no way threatened by this legislation. Instead, this legislation is aimed at ensuring that doctors and hospitals get paid for the work they do. Presently, millions of dollars are absorbed every year by hospitals because of uninsured patients who cannot afford to pay their medical bills. That will be all but eliminated under the new plan, making hospitals – and their doctors, nurses, and other professionals, better protected and better compensated.
Many conservatives in Washington are opposed to this healthcare reform bill. For instance, a writer for the Cato Institute – a public policy research foundation in Washington D.C. – wrote that opposing Obama’s healthcare plan was key for maintaining support in the Republican Party. The writer noted that if a universal healthcare plan is passed, many middle-class Republicans who benefit from it may be more likely to vote for Obama and the Democrats in later elections. He pointed to a similar trend in the UK after universal healthcare was passed.
Senator Jim DeMint, of South Carolina, recently argued that it was necessary to delay a vote on the bill until after the August recess, in order to “break” Obama and make healthcare his “Waterloo” – Waterloo, of course, being a reference to the major battle lost by Napoleon that spelled the end of his reign of power. He describes the bill as a “government takeover” of healthcare and a jeopardy to American freedom. Clearly, he agrees with the writer from the Cato Institute – just as passing this bill may lose the Republicans some support, defeating the bill will “break” Obama and the Democrats.
It is easy to see from these stories that opposition to healthcare reform isn’t actually about healthcare; it’s about political ideology and power. “We can’t permit Obama to win, because it may undermine our power,” these sorts of arguments are saying between the lines. So they use distortions, misrepresentations, “spin doctoring,” false analogies, and slippery slope fear-mongering to twist perceptions. And they succeed because they know most Americans don’t actually have a clue what the healthcare reform bill contains. It’s easy to fool people when those people’s only source of information is you. Confirmation biases reign supreme. If I am a Republican, and the Republicans tell me that Obama’s plan is “socialized medicine,” then I accept that on face value and viciously oppose Obama’s plan.
One of the ways opponents of the healthcare reform bill have waged their attack is through “personal testimonies” of people in other countries. I recently saw an ad with a woman in Canada talking about how terrible their “government” healthcare is, and how she would have died of a brain tumor if not for the fact that she was able to travel to the U.S. for treatment. The Canadian healthcare system, she asserts, was going to make her wait 6 months for surgery.
In addition to being full of political spin and unsubstantiated attacks, and in addition to ignoring the millions of Canadians who are happy with their health insurance, it has come to light that the woman in the commercial didn’t even have a brain tumor. She had a benign pituitary cyst that was not life-threatening. That is why she had to wait for treatment. Immediate treatment for her took a backseat to those people who did need immediate treatment.
Still, the woman’s misrepresentation about her condition aside, isn’t “waiting” for health services one of the primary arguments of the opposition? If I had even a benign brain cyst, I certainly wouldn’t want to wait 6 months to get treatment.
The problem, of course, is that Canada’s healthcare program is, in fact, a state-run program. All Canadians have one health insurance carrier – the Canadian government. That is not what the current bill in our Congress is proposing, as I have already argued. A public plan is only one of many available to Americans to choose from. It is simply one of the competitors, competing with private health insurance companies, within the free market. Furthermore, as I have already noted, the current bill denies insurance carriers – including the public plan – to determine who gets treatment and when. Doctors and patients determine that.
The bill currently before Congress is not in any way related to these sorts of fear-mongering, politically-motivated advertisements. They are complete and total misrepresentations of reality. Again, confirmation bias reigns supreme.
A poll on Facebook right now asks if the respondent supports a “government run healthcare plan.” Something like 90% have said no. Well of course not! I don’t support a government run plan either!
Referring to this plan as “government run” is misleading political spin. This plan establishes protocols for interactions between health insurance carriers – of which the public plan will be one – and patients, just as anti-trust laws establish protocols for interactions between publically-traded companies and their investors and clientele. The reason those anti-trust laws exist is to protect Americans and the American economy. The healthcare reform bill seeks to do the same thing in regards to our suffering healthcare system, which is rife with discrepancies, soaring costs, income gaps, and inefficiencies.
WHY WE NEED HEALTHCARE REFORM
This is a section that I shouldn’t even need to write about. Unless you live under a rock, you should be aware that our healthcare system is broken. 50 million Americans live without any health insurance at all. Many who do have health insurance would still be in dire straits should a serious illness arise, because their insurance would only cover a fraction of the cost.
In the last 9 years, employer-based health insurance premiums have increased at four times the rate of wages. They have literally doubled in that period of time. According to one report cited by the Obama administration, nearly half of all personal bankruptcies in America are caused at least in part by healthcare costs. Another report says that in 2007, 60% of personal bankruptcies were related to medical costs. To put that in perspective, about a 1.5 million personal bankruptcies are filed every year. That means medical expenses cause a bankruptcy in America every single minute.
I ask my readers to consider the following scenario. Imagine you have lost your job and have no health insurance. Perhaps you don’t even have to imagine it; it may be a present reality. Now imagine that tomorrow you find out you have a terrible disease that will take months and perhaps years of treatment to control or cure. The ultimate cost will be somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 dollars. A month from now, you get a new job, which offers health insurance. But the insurance company will not cover your condition because it is pre-existing. Would your bank account cover those costs, or would you end up in bankruptcy like so many others, with the economy at large absorbing your medical costs?
We are the only major industrialized country in the world with no public healthcare option. We are also the only major industrialized country in the world with a verifiable “healthcare crisis” on our hands. Will we continue to let healthcare drain our economy, or will we tackle it head on to strengthen our economy and make people healthier?
The current bill does not propose to copy government-run programs like what are present in Canada and Europe – even though those programs, by all accounts, work very well and are strongly supported by the people. Instead, it supports the American free market and maintains private insurance carriers as for-profit businesses, while seeking to make the system better by forcing insurance companies to compete and by laying the groundwork to end exploitation of patients and healthcare workers by the system. It takes the power out of the hands of the insurance companies and puts it into the hands of the patients. It guarantees affordable coverage for everyone. It eliminates personal bankruptcies due to medical bills, eliminates the need for hospitals and healthcare workers to absorb the costs of those millions who are uninsured, and promises to not only protect our health, but also to strengthen our economy.
A BRIEF COMMENT ABOUT THE COST
The cost of this new healthcare bill is a concern for a lot of people. A large part of the present bill seeks to tighten the reigns of expenditures in Medicare, providing up to 66% of the cost of the program from smarter spending itself. A full two-thirds of the cost will be taken care of right there, without the need of a single penny spent by anyone.
The other portion of the program will be paid by a healthcare surcharge on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Specifically, families with joint incomes over $350,000 per year, or individuals with incomes over $280,000 per year, will pay a 1% surcharge on their income to cover healthcare costs. For those over $500,000, the surcharge will be 1.5%. That, of course, is a trifle compared to how much they already make. And it is justified by the fact that these wealthiest of Americans also benefited disproportionately from tax cuts enacted over the last eight years. That 1% of Americans has experienced far more growth in their personal wealth over the last decade than the remaining 99% of us. Despite that, the program provides for lowering the surcharge if cost goals are maintained. The percentages could drop as low as 0.1% - or a few hundred dollars on a $350,000 salary.
CONCLUSION
It’s time to put an end to the political spin-doctoring from conservatives over the healthcare reform bill. It’s time to stop lying about what the bill contains, knowing that it will fool many Americans who only get their information from like-minded politicians, commercials, and slanted media outlets.
If you don’t like the healthcare reform bill, state why you don’t like it, and provide evidence for why your perspective should be taken seriously. Don’t just sit back and say it’s “socialized medicine” and assert that we’ll all be spending $1600 a month to stand in line for 8 hours to get cold medicine, like some pathetic 1960’s Communist toilet paper line.
Otherwise, you are just buying and selling oceanfront property in Arizona.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Christianity and Giving Money to Beggars
In modern society, beggars are generally not regarded with much respect. Among the religious and non-religious alike, we tend to frown upon begging. Get a job, we might say. Beggars might even present a threat to us, because what if begging turns to mugging?
I've talked before to Christians about giving money/food to beggars. In my experience, most Christians are supportive of giving food to beggars, but not money. What if they use it for drugs/sex/alcohol, etc? I've also had Christians say that even food should be given discriminately, because many beggars are just lazy and would rather sit and beg than go get a job. I've heard this said in specific reference to "familiar" beggars at sporting events, the local intersection, etc.
I've made the argument that, as Christians, we are not instructed to discriminate in that way. The Bible doesn't say "Give to the poor as long as you think they'll use your charity wisely." It just says give.
I wanted to reassert this point with one of the most widely attested sayings attributed to Jesus in the entire canon of Christian literature. I'll provide the saying in all its various forms among the texts that attest it.
Shepherd of Hermas (circa 100 C.E.) - Do good, and of all your toil which God gives you, give in simplicity to all who need, not doubting to whom you shall give and to whom not: give to all, for to all God wishes gifts to be made of his own bounties.
Luke (circa 90 C.E.) - Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Matthew (circa 85 C.E.) - Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
Gospel of Thomas (circa 60 C.E.) - Jesus said, "If you have money, do not lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you will not get it back.
Didache/Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (circa 50 C.E.) - If someone takes from you your goods, do not reclaim them, for you are not able to do so; give to every person who asks anything of you and do not make any counter-demands.
The dates of those texts, of course, are up for debate, but one thing most scholars agree on is that they are all independent of one another. Luke and Matthew's version came from the Q Gospel - an otherwise non-extant source that is imbedded in those two texts; the Q Gospel, Gospel of Thomas, and Didache all drew the saying from the Common Sayings Tradition, which is the earliest oral tradition of Jesus' teachings, going back to the very earliest days of Christianity. The Shepherd of Hermas also probably comes from oral tradition, though it may have used Matthew and/or Luke.
It is for this reason that most Jesus scholars affirm very strongly that this teaching - to give indiscriminately and without expecting anything in return, most definitely goes back to Jesus himself.
Considering that, should we - as Christians - not take it very seriously, and stop giving discriminately to only those poor who we think deserve it and/or will use it wisely?
I've talked before to Christians about giving money/food to beggars. In my experience, most Christians are supportive of giving food to beggars, but not money. What if they use it for drugs/sex/alcohol, etc? I've also had Christians say that even food should be given discriminately, because many beggars are just lazy and would rather sit and beg than go get a job. I've heard this said in specific reference to "familiar" beggars at sporting events, the local intersection, etc.
I've made the argument that, as Christians, we are not instructed to discriminate in that way. The Bible doesn't say "Give to the poor as long as you think they'll use your charity wisely." It just says give.
I wanted to reassert this point with one of the most widely attested sayings attributed to Jesus in the entire canon of Christian literature. I'll provide the saying in all its various forms among the texts that attest it.
Shepherd of Hermas (circa 100 C.E.) - Do good, and of all your toil which God gives you, give in simplicity to all who need, not doubting to whom you shall give and to whom not: give to all, for to all God wishes gifts to be made of his own bounties.
Luke (circa 90 C.E.) - Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
Matthew (circa 85 C.E.) - Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
Gospel of Thomas (circa 60 C.E.) - Jesus said, "If you have money, do not lend it at interest. Rather, give it to someone from whom you will not get it back.
Didache/Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (circa 50 C.E.) - If someone takes from you your goods, do not reclaim them, for you are not able to do so; give to every person who asks anything of you and do not make any counter-demands.
The dates of those texts, of course, are up for debate, but one thing most scholars agree on is that they are all independent of one another. Luke and Matthew's version came from the Q Gospel - an otherwise non-extant source that is imbedded in those two texts; the Q Gospel, Gospel of Thomas, and Didache all drew the saying from the Common Sayings Tradition, which is the earliest oral tradition of Jesus' teachings, going back to the very earliest days of Christianity. The Shepherd of Hermas also probably comes from oral tradition, though it may have used Matthew and/or Luke.
It is for this reason that most Jesus scholars affirm very strongly that this teaching - to give indiscriminately and without expecting anything in return, most definitely goes back to Jesus himself.
Considering that, should we - as Christians - not take it very seriously, and stop giving discriminately to only those poor who we think deserve it and/or will use it wisely?
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
The Infernova
You may have noticed (or probably not) a new blog link on the left side of the page called "Alenthony's Inferno." That's a blog site kept by one of my good friends, and I recommend it to you heartily.
Alenthony has recently published his first book, a work of epic poetry that satirizes Dante's Inferno. It's called "The Infernova."
I read it in about 24 hours. It's not long, but I couldn't put the book down. It's written in rhyming verse, and that had me nervous at first because I've read very little epic poetry in my life, and never rhyming epic poetry.
And yet, shockingly, he pulled it off. It flowed like a Homerian epic, and I mean that sincerely. As I told him, I'm no expert poet, but I do dabble in it now and then and have published some of my own poetry - and I could never pull off what he pulled off. The style fits the symbolic, dream-like state of the story, and the rhyme scheme is authentic and clean; it never distracts from the plot. I was genuinely impressed and I had no problem reading and understanding what was being said.
The book, as I said, is an epic poem that creates a symbolic satire of Dante's Inferno in reverse: instead of gays and Jews and adulterers in this new hell, it's scam artists and conspiracy theorists and scheming politicians and televangelists (among others). It's written as a sort of symbolic dream in a computerized future, so everything seen is not real, but a computer simulation. This is how Alenthony gets around the problem of sounding like a hell-fire and damnation preacher. It's only a symbolic hell, not a real hell. The narrator's guide through hell is none other than Mark Twain, which I thought was a really clever twist.
I would be lying if I described it as anything other than "atheist" fiction. In fact, the small publishing company that my friend set up to publish the book states, on its website, that it caters to: "...freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, pantheists, and humanists."
There is no love lost for religious thinking in this book, though I would describe the book in general as more of an apologetic for rationalism and intellectual honesty than a polemic against religion. Still, traditional believers would find much to offend them, no doubt, in this book. Alenthony doesn't pull any punches in regards to his perception of how religion has affected and continues to affect the world.
Of course, I don't agree with all the ideologies present in the story. I'm not an atheist, after all. I pointed out a few problems to him, in fact. Some of the gods and prophets in his symbolic hell are really just parodies of the original, and he seemed eager to "punish" people in his hell even if they, themselves, were okay but their ideas and teachings got used by others for evil. Be that as it may, most of his ideology is pretty well on target, and it's important to remember that this is epic poetry and satire, not biography.
The punishments he contrives for the various intellectual "crimes" match the real-world crime perfectly in dream-world symbolism. For instance, conspiracy theorists are broken down into pulp inside a paper mill, and their bodies become the tabloids they previously had published, written for, and circulated. Similarly, televangelists are encased inside tombs where they must shout and preach for eternity, and their "hot air" heats the interior of their tombs to hellish proportions.
Alenthony's "hell," like Dante's, is composed of 9 levels, with each level populated by increasingly more horrific sinners against intellect and rationalism. Some notable figures - some surprising and some not-so-surprising - show up: Nostrodamus and Joseph Smith, for instance, but also great scientists like Newton, Faraday, and even Albert Einstein.
As for ideology in specific, there were a few things that I stringently disagreed with. I have already noted how some of his prophets and gods are really just parodies of the original and how he lumps basically "good" religious people into his hell. As I said to him, one would have to wonder if Ghandi, Schweitzer, and MLK Jr. (though they are not named specifically) were also in this vision of hell, since they certainly taught and worked from within a specific religious worldview, albeit a very humanist one.
I also disagreed with his depiction (though not a caustic one) of Jesus. Jesus basically takes the fall because so many people for so many centuries have misused his teachings for evil. That doesn't seem fair.
My belief is that the historical Jesus was a radical ethicist, who certainly would have couched his beliefs in divine language, but whose primary message was one of breaking down social barriers, negating the systemic evil of the world around him, and preaching a new vision of a world without physical and emotional and cultural oppression. In that sense, he is relevant not only for his own ancient, patriarchal and imperial time period, but also for the modern world. Again, that he has been frequently misused by 2000 years of theology is not his own personal fault, nor the fault of his own vision/theology.
There was a specific comment in the text, pg 151, that I found fault with: "We've always had sadistic villains, but to cause benign and otherwise good people to be bad requires organized religion." That seems like an ad hoc fallacy.
Was it organized religion, or systemic evil and fear, that made complicit criminals out of so many Germans involved in the Holocaust? Hitler's actions can be explained as the evil of a madman - but it took thousands of regular joes to carry out the Holocaust. What led them to be complicit in that? Anti-Semitism was certainly rife within Lutheran Christianity, but even Luther himself never suggested genocide. You can think Jews are Christ-killers without actually wanting to go kill Jews. I think it was systemic evil and fear that led to the Holocaust, not organized religion.
Evil does not require religion. And mass evil also doesn't require religion. In addition to the Holocaust, consider Communist Russia and the countless leaders and military personnel complicit in Stalin's reign of terror. Clearly organized religion in that atheist government was not behind their mass complicity in systemic evil.
These really are minor quibbles with the book, however. Again, it is epic poetry with symbolic meaning, not biography or objective history. All in all, I thought the book was absolutely excellent. It was brilliantly composed with a literary style equal to any great writer; it's structure and development was clever and meaningful; and within an atheist worldview, it's ideology was consistent and poignant.
I highly recommend "The Infernova" to anyone who fancies themselves a progressive or freethinker, or any atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist who enjoys and appreciates good literature with a meaningful plot.
Here are a few links:
Blackburnian Press, my friend's small publishing company.
"The Infernova" on Barnes & Noble's website.
"The Infernova" on Amazon.
Alenthony has recently published his first book, a work of epic poetry that satirizes Dante's Inferno. It's called "The Infernova."
I read it in about 24 hours. It's not long, but I couldn't put the book down. It's written in rhyming verse, and that had me nervous at first because I've read very little epic poetry in my life, and never rhyming epic poetry.
And yet, shockingly, he pulled it off. It flowed like a Homerian epic, and I mean that sincerely. As I told him, I'm no expert poet, but I do dabble in it now and then and have published some of my own poetry - and I could never pull off what he pulled off. The style fits the symbolic, dream-like state of the story, and the rhyme scheme is authentic and clean; it never distracts from the plot. I was genuinely impressed and I had no problem reading and understanding what was being said.
The book, as I said, is an epic poem that creates a symbolic satire of Dante's Inferno in reverse: instead of gays and Jews and adulterers in this new hell, it's scam artists and conspiracy theorists and scheming politicians and televangelists (among others). It's written as a sort of symbolic dream in a computerized future, so everything seen is not real, but a computer simulation. This is how Alenthony gets around the problem of sounding like a hell-fire and damnation preacher. It's only a symbolic hell, not a real hell. The narrator's guide through hell is none other than Mark Twain, which I thought was a really clever twist.
I would be lying if I described it as anything other than "atheist" fiction. In fact, the small publishing company that my friend set up to publish the book states, on its website, that it caters to: "...freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, pantheists, and humanists."
There is no love lost for religious thinking in this book, though I would describe the book in general as more of an apologetic for rationalism and intellectual honesty than a polemic against religion. Still, traditional believers would find much to offend them, no doubt, in this book. Alenthony doesn't pull any punches in regards to his perception of how religion has affected and continues to affect the world.
Of course, I don't agree with all the ideologies present in the story. I'm not an atheist, after all. I pointed out a few problems to him, in fact. Some of the gods and prophets in his symbolic hell are really just parodies of the original, and he seemed eager to "punish" people in his hell even if they, themselves, were okay but their ideas and teachings got used by others for evil. Be that as it may, most of his ideology is pretty well on target, and it's important to remember that this is epic poetry and satire, not biography.
The punishments he contrives for the various intellectual "crimes" match the real-world crime perfectly in dream-world symbolism. For instance, conspiracy theorists are broken down into pulp inside a paper mill, and their bodies become the tabloids they previously had published, written for, and circulated. Similarly, televangelists are encased inside tombs where they must shout and preach for eternity, and their "hot air" heats the interior of their tombs to hellish proportions.
Alenthony's "hell," like Dante's, is composed of 9 levels, with each level populated by increasingly more horrific sinners against intellect and rationalism. Some notable figures - some surprising and some not-so-surprising - show up: Nostrodamus and Joseph Smith, for instance, but also great scientists like Newton, Faraday, and even Albert Einstein.
As for ideology in specific, there were a few things that I stringently disagreed with. I have already noted how some of his prophets and gods are really just parodies of the original and how he lumps basically "good" religious people into his hell. As I said to him, one would have to wonder if Ghandi, Schweitzer, and MLK Jr. (though they are not named specifically) were also in this vision of hell, since they certainly taught and worked from within a specific religious worldview, albeit a very humanist one.
I also disagreed with his depiction (though not a caustic one) of Jesus. Jesus basically takes the fall because so many people for so many centuries have misused his teachings for evil. That doesn't seem fair.
My belief is that the historical Jesus was a radical ethicist, who certainly would have couched his beliefs in divine language, but whose primary message was one of breaking down social barriers, negating the systemic evil of the world around him, and preaching a new vision of a world without physical and emotional and cultural oppression. In that sense, he is relevant not only for his own ancient, patriarchal and imperial time period, but also for the modern world. Again, that he has been frequently misused by 2000 years of theology is not his own personal fault, nor the fault of his own vision/theology.
There was a specific comment in the text, pg 151, that I found fault with: "We've always had sadistic villains, but to cause benign and otherwise good people to be bad requires organized religion." That seems like an ad hoc fallacy.
Was it organized religion, or systemic evil and fear, that made complicit criminals out of so many Germans involved in the Holocaust? Hitler's actions can be explained as the evil of a madman - but it took thousands of regular joes to carry out the Holocaust. What led them to be complicit in that? Anti-Semitism was certainly rife within Lutheran Christianity, but even Luther himself never suggested genocide. You can think Jews are Christ-killers without actually wanting to go kill Jews. I think it was systemic evil and fear that led to the Holocaust, not organized religion.
Evil does not require religion. And mass evil also doesn't require religion. In addition to the Holocaust, consider Communist Russia and the countless leaders and military personnel complicit in Stalin's reign of terror. Clearly organized religion in that atheist government was not behind their mass complicity in systemic evil.
These really are minor quibbles with the book, however. Again, it is epic poetry with symbolic meaning, not biography or objective history. All in all, I thought the book was absolutely excellent. It was brilliantly composed with a literary style equal to any great writer; it's structure and development was clever and meaningful; and within an atheist worldview, it's ideology was consistent and poignant.
I highly recommend "The Infernova" to anyone who fancies themselves a progressive or freethinker, or any atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist who enjoys and appreciates good literature with a meaningful plot.
Here are a few links:
Blackburnian Press, my friend's small publishing company.
"The Infernova" on Barnes & Noble's website.
"The Infernova" on Amazon.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Don't Stand Too Close to the TV!
I don’t know about you, but I grew up constantly being told by my parents not to stand too close to things. Don’t stand too close to the TV because it’ll hurt your eyes. Don’t stand too close to the microwave because it will give you cancer. I believed the TV thing so whole-heartedly that when my eyesight began to get bad in 6th grade and I had to get glasses, I was convinced it was related to my rebellious tendency to stare close range at the TV when my parents weren’t looking.
I’m sure if I had developed leukemia or something at 13, I would have been convinced it was from the microwave.
But is it actually dangerous to stand too close to a TV or a microwave? Does doing so expose one’s body to dangerous radiation that can do biological damage to eyes, body, and soul?
To figure out the answer to those questions, it is important to understand what radiation is. Most people think of radiation as some mysterious death ray that emanates from radioactive elements and atomic bombs.
To be sure, those things give off radiation, but so do microwaves, televisions, and radios. Does that mean that radiation coming from small electronics is the same as radiation coming from uranium, Hiroshima, or Three Mile Island?
Well, not exactly.
All radiation is measured on a scale that is referred by physicists as the Electromagnetic Spectrum. This spectrum categorizes radiation by its level of energy. The higher the energy of a radiation source, the higher on the EM Spectrum it goes.
There are seven categories of electromagnetic radiation. In order from lowest energy to highest energy, they are: radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays. While each of these categories of “rays” has a different name, it is only the energy level that makes any difference between then. In other words, a radio wave is only different from a gamma ray because of a difference in energy level. The “ray” or “wave” itself is the same – it’s called a “photon” by physicists. It’s like the difference between boiling water and ice. Both are still just water; the only difference is the temperature. Similarly, both a gamma ray and a radio wave are electromagnetic photons, the only difference being the energy.
The energy between the various forms of EM radiation is enormous. Radio waves are the lowest on the list, and gamma rays are the highest – with six degrees of separation between them. But that doesn’t mean gamma rays are six times more energetic than radio waves. In fact, a radio wave has the frequency of 10,000 cycles per second, while a gamma ray, on the other hand, has 10-to-the-20th cycles per second. That would be 1 with 20 zeros behind it. To put that in perspective, many scientists figure there are about 10-to-the-17th grains of sand on earth. That’s 1 with only 17 zeros behind it.
Furthermore, the higher you get on the scale, the closer the categories are together. For instance, visible light, the middle category, has a frequency of 10-to-the-15th – 11 powers higher than radio waves, but only 5 powers less than gamma rays.
The energy determines how dangerous the photon is. The higher it is, the more dangerous it is. But it is not just energy that ultimately determines the risk to humans. Two other factors are also involved: quantity and duration.
A very high energy source of EM radiation may be harmless if the quantity of radiation is sufficiently low and the duration of exposure is sufficiently low. Radiation from a single gamma ray photon for one second – though highly energetic – is not likely to hurt you.
Similarly, a very low energy source of radiation could carry risks with high enough quantity and duration. In other words, radio waves – those photons that make your radio work – could theoretically kill someone if the quantity and duration were great enough, despite having inherently very low energy.
But that’s just in theory. The fact is, no radiation below the level of ultraviolet is known to cause biological damage to human tissue. And in the case of microwaves and the ovens that use them, microwaves are two steps below visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum. That means visible light – the light given off by light bulbs and the sun – is of higher energy than microwaves. That means light bulbs give off a more dangerous form of radiation than microwave ovens. And no one, of course, supposes that it is dangerous to stand beneath a light bulb.
A deadly source of radiation?
Did Mother get sterilized by the Oven o' Death?
The difference, however, between a light bulb and a microwave is not just about energy. Remember that quantity and duration matter too. A microwave oven puts out enormous amounts of microwave radiation, far more radiation than is given out by a light bulb. But since microwave radiation has far lower energy than visible light, and since the duration is usually only a minute or two, standing in front of a microwave for a few minutes is probably no more dangerous than sitting underneath a light bulb for a few hours.
But what about televisions? Does sitting too close to the TV cause eye problems?
In the modern age, you first have to distinguish what kind of TV one is discussing. Old TV’s – the so-called “tube” TV’s – give off radio waves, light rays, and X-rays.
Modern TV’s – flat screen televisions that use digital signals – don’t give off any form of radiation at all except for visible light. There are no radio waves or X-rays being given off.
Older TV’s use a cathode ray tube and a radio antenna to produce the picture. The cathode ray tube, in addition to transforming the radio signal into a picture, emits X-rays. Those X-rays definitely have an energy level that falls into the “dangerous” realm. But the quantity of X-rays produced in old televisions is very low, and those televisions also have a leaded screen on the front that absorbs the few X-rays that are being produced. The visible light and radio waves emitted from the television are so low in energy and quantity that they would not do biological damage to the body or the eyes.
Modern televisions, because they only give off visible light waves, are not dangerous either.
So what we are left with is an example of an old myth dying hard. Televisions never were dangerous for the eyes, and they especially aren’t dangerous in modern, digital versions. In addition, microwaves give off forms of radiation that are very low energy, and despite the high quantities of radiation involved in running a microwave oven, the duration and energy are low enough that there is no legitimate danger in standing in front of a microwave. It is also important to remember that much of the radiation coming from a microwave oven would be absorbed in the metal and plastic that encases the oven, so it never reaches someone standing in front of it anyway.
In the end, I wouldn’t worry much about standing in front of microwaves or sitting too close to the TV. You might want to turn that lamp off on your desk though.
The difference, however, between a light bulb and a microwave is not just about energy. Remember that quantity and duration matter too. A microwave oven puts out enormous amounts of microwave radiation, far more radiation than is given out by a light bulb. But since microwave radiation has far lower energy than visible light, and since the duration is usually only a minute or two, standing in front of a microwave for a few minutes is probably no more dangerous than sitting underneath a light bulb for a few hours.
But what about televisions? Does sitting too close to the TV cause eye problems?
In the modern age, you first have to distinguish what kind of TV one is discussing. Old TV’s – the so-called “tube” TV’s – give off radio waves, light rays, and X-rays.
Modern TV’s – flat screen televisions that use digital signals – don’t give off any form of radiation at all except for visible light. There are no radio waves or X-rays being given off.
Older TV’s use a cathode ray tube and a radio antenna to produce the picture. The cathode ray tube, in addition to transforming the radio signal into a picture, emits X-rays. Those X-rays definitely have an energy level that falls into the “dangerous” realm. But the quantity of X-rays produced in old televisions is very low, and those televisions also have a leaded screen on the front that absorbs the few X-rays that are being produced. The visible light and radio waves emitted from the television are so low in energy and quantity that they would not do biological damage to the body or the eyes.
Modern televisions, because they only give off visible light waves, are not dangerous either.
So what we are left with is an example of an old myth dying hard. Televisions never were dangerous for the eyes, and they especially aren’t dangerous in modern, digital versions. In addition, microwaves give off forms of radiation that are very low energy, and despite the high quantities of radiation involved in running a microwave oven, the duration and energy are low enough that there is no legitimate danger in standing in front of a microwave. It is also important to remember that much of the radiation coming from a microwave oven would be absorbed in the metal and plastic that encases the oven, so it never reaches someone standing in front of it anyway.
In the end, I wouldn’t worry much about standing in front of microwaves or sitting too close to the TV. You might want to turn that lamp off on your desk though.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention
This week, the Southern Baptist Convention - the nation's largest Protestant body - is holding their annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky.
Infamous in the past for hardline stances against Bill Clinton, insistence on a wife's "submission" to her husband, and calling for a denomination-wide boycott of Disney because of its toleration of homosexuality, the SBC this week is attempting to soften its imagine into a kinder, gentler Southern Baptist Convention.
They passed a resolution praising the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first black president, although they made clear their disagreement with his stances on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Daniel Akin, one of the SBC's top leaders, said: "I think it would have actually been irresponsible for us not to speak to the election of the first African American president."
Even as I attempt to analyze the SBC's meeting this week with as little bias as possible (I'm an ex-Southern Baptist), I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow over Akin's statement. He almost sounds apologetic and defensive. Apparently the SBC only praised Obama's election because it would have been socially irresponsible for them not to. I almost have to wonder if his statement wasn't an attempt to deflect criticism from the countless white southerners who make up the majority of the SBC. By no means am I implying that these white, southern SBC members are universally racist. But I have no doubt that many of them are. I personally know at least a few.
Despite praising Obama's election, the SBC did not ask Obama to speak, as they did George W. Bush a number of times during his presidency. In their defense, however, they also did not invite any prominent Republican leaders to speak. Apparently they are attempting to come off less politically-divisive than in years past. As an Associated Press article put it, the SBC is "signaling a desire to stay out of politics."
Their desire to stay out of politics, however, does not mean they haven't managed to pull a few of the punches they are infamous for. Let me tell you two stories.
Rev. Wiley Drake is the pastor of a Southern Baptist church in California and also hosts a radio show. In the past, he has served in leadership roles within the Southern Baptist Convention. He actually drafted the 1996 resolution from the SBC calling for the boycott of Disney over its stance on homosexuals. As recently as 2006-2007, he served as the convention's second vice president.
In January, upon the announcement that Rick Warren, a Southern Baptist megachurch leader in California, was giving the convocation at Obama's inauguration, Drake predicted that God would punish him severely for the "abomination" of associating with Obama, whom he called an "evil, illegal alien."
In May, when Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor, was murdered in a Kansas church, Drake praised the murder, saying he was "glad" and "grateful to God" that George Tiller was killed. He further went on to compare Tiller to Hitler, stating that Tiller was a "brutal, murdering monster" who was "far greater in his atrocities than Adolph Hitler."
A few days later, on June 5, Drake was interviewed by Fox's Alan Colmes, and was asked about Barack Obama. Drake stated: "If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death." When Colmes asked him point blank if he was praying for Obama to die, Drake answered: "Yes."
I trust those remarks are as disturbing to you as they are to me.
That was my first story. The second story concerns a Southern Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas. This church is called Broadway Baptist, and is a moderately large church with some 2,000 members.
Some time back, they began discussing the possibility of allowing same-sex couples within their church to be pictured together in the church directory. Ultimately, they decided not to do this, replacing the pictures in question with group pictures of church members. Although it is not clear how many openly gay members attend Broadway Baptist, they apparently have at least a few, two of whom have served on church committees.
Now, with those two stories in mind, I return to the SBC annual meeting this week. In regards to Wiley Drake, an SBC leader said: "Wiley Drake is far out of the mainstream, in fact, he's in a drainage ditch somewhere."
Fair enough.
In regards to Broadway Baptist Church, a motion was made to break its 127-year-old ties with the church over its homosexual leniency, and the resolution was passed without even the need for any discussion.
An SBC committee member said: "[Broadway Baptist was] allowing members and also people in leadership that were homosexual...The church was in effect saying that it was OK to have members who are open homosexuals."
I will save any long drawn out commentary on this issue because if it requires long drawn out commentary, then something is definitely wrong. I'll point out only that while the SBC basically ignored Wiley Drake and his hate-filled, politically-motivated, almost bordering on criminal remarks, they literally broke ties with Broadway Baptist because Broadway allows homosexuals to be members of their church. Praying for Obama to die vs. letting homosexuals worship God. When the SBC weighed those two things, they evidently decided the homosexual issue was more important and problematic than an SBC pastor and convention leader praying for the president of the United States to die. So problematic, in fact, they essentially excommunicated the church, while leaving Wiley Drake to continue waving the flag of Southern Baptist values.
I was born and raised a Southern Baptist. I attended private Southern Baptist schools and Southern Baptist churches. I went to Southern Baptist church camps. I went to college and got a degree from a Southern Baptist institution.
But I'm not a Southern Baptist, and haven't been one for a long time now. I don't think I need to say why.
Infamous in the past for hardline stances against Bill Clinton, insistence on a wife's "submission" to her husband, and calling for a denomination-wide boycott of Disney because of its toleration of homosexuality, the SBC this week is attempting to soften its imagine into a kinder, gentler Southern Baptist Convention.
They passed a resolution praising the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first black president, although they made clear their disagreement with his stances on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Daniel Akin, one of the SBC's top leaders, said: "I think it would have actually been irresponsible for us not to speak to the election of the first African American president."
Even as I attempt to analyze the SBC's meeting this week with as little bias as possible (I'm an ex-Southern Baptist), I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow over Akin's statement. He almost sounds apologetic and defensive. Apparently the SBC only praised Obama's election because it would have been socially irresponsible for them not to. I almost have to wonder if his statement wasn't an attempt to deflect criticism from the countless white southerners who make up the majority of the SBC. By no means am I implying that these white, southern SBC members are universally racist. But I have no doubt that many of them are. I personally know at least a few.
Despite praising Obama's election, the SBC did not ask Obama to speak, as they did George W. Bush a number of times during his presidency. In their defense, however, they also did not invite any prominent Republican leaders to speak. Apparently they are attempting to come off less politically-divisive than in years past. As an Associated Press article put it, the SBC is "signaling a desire to stay out of politics."
Their desire to stay out of politics, however, does not mean they haven't managed to pull a few of the punches they are infamous for. Let me tell you two stories.
Rev. Wiley Drake is the pastor of a Southern Baptist church in California and also hosts a radio show. In the past, he has served in leadership roles within the Southern Baptist Convention. He actually drafted the 1996 resolution from the SBC calling for the boycott of Disney over its stance on homosexuals. As recently as 2006-2007, he served as the convention's second vice president.
In January, upon the announcement that Rick Warren, a Southern Baptist megachurch leader in California, was giving the convocation at Obama's inauguration, Drake predicted that God would punish him severely for the "abomination" of associating with Obama, whom he called an "evil, illegal alien."
In May, when Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor, was murdered in a Kansas church, Drake praised the murder, saying he was "glad" and "grateful to God" that George Tiller was killed. He further went on to compare Tiller to Hitler, stating that Tiller was a "brutal, murdering monster" who was "far greater in his atrocities than Adolph Hitler."
A few days later, on June 5, Drake was interviewed by Fox's Alan Colmes, and was asked about Barack Obama. Drake stated: "If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death." When Colmes asked him point blank if he was praying for Obama to die, Drake answered: "Yes."
I trust those remarks are as disturbing to you as they are to me.
That was my first story. The second story concerns a Southern Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas. This church is called Broadway Baptist, and is a moderately large church with some 2,000 members.
Some time back, they began discussing the possibility of allowing same-sex couples within their church to be pictured together in the church directory. Ultimately, they decided not to do this, replacing the pictures in question with group pictures of church members. Although it is not clear how many openly gay members attend Broadway Baptist, they apparently have at least a few, two of whom have served on church committees.
Now, with those two stories in mind, I return to the SBC annual meeting this week. In regards to Wiley Drake, an SBC leader said: "Wiley Drake is far out of the mainstream, in fact, he's in a drainage ditch somewhere."
Fair enough.
In regards to Broadway Baptist Church, a motion was made to break its 127-year-old ties with the church over its homosexual leniency, and the resolution was passed without even the need for any discussion.
An SBC committee member said: "[Broadway Baptist was] allowing members and also people in leadership that were homosexual...The church was in effect saying that it was OK to have members who are open homosexuals."
I will save any long drawn out commentary on this issue because if it requires long drawn out commentary, then something is definitely wrong. I'll point out only that while the SBC basically ignored Wiley Drake and his hate-filled, politically-motivated, almost bordering on criminal remarks, they literally broke ties with Broadway Baptist because Broadway allows homosexuals to be members of their church. Praying for Obama to die vs. letting homosexuals worship God. When the SBC weighed those two things, they evidently decided the homosexual issue was more important and problematic than an SBC pastor and convention leader praying for the president of the United States to die. So problematic, in fact, they essentially excommunicated the church, while leaving Wiley Drake to continue waving the flag of Southern Baptist values.
I was born and raised a Southern Baptist. I attended private Southern Baptist schools and Southern Baptist churches. I went to Southern Baptist church camps. I went to college and got a degree from a Southern Baptist institution.
But I'm not a Southern Baptist, and haven't been one for a long time now. I don't think I need to say why.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Real Lincoln Log Cabin: Fact or Fantasy?
That Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 inside a log cabin on a farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky is an undisputed fact of history. That this log cabin is still in existence, preserved inside a Beaux-Arts structure in Hodgenville, is another story.
The mythos of the Lincoln Log Cabin literally goes back to Abraham Lincoln himself. When running for president in 1860, Lincoln frequently drew on his humble roots, his birth in a log cabin in rural Kentucky, to find common ground with the common man, and to demonstrate his self-made success. He had risen literally from the humblest of beginnings.
After he was elected, interest in this storied log cabin naturally grew. Was it still there in rural Kentucky for anyone to see? Stories from the Civil War suggest that Confederate soldiers moving through the area even went so far as to look for the cabin in order to destroy it.
After the war and Lincoln’s assassination, interest in his birthplace grew even more. It was known that Lincoln’s family had moved to a neighboring farm a few years after his birth, leaving his birth cabin behind, but local residents in the area told cabin-hunters that the original cabin belonging to the Lincoln family had been dismantled by later owners and reused in a much larger home a short distance away.
Subsequently, this dwelling, believed to be built in part from the original cabin, became a sort of shrine for Lincoln enthusiasts in the latter half of the 19th century.
As interest and pilgrimages to the Lincoln farm grew, a New York businessman (of course he was from New York!) named A.W. Dennett came up with the bright idea of making some money off of it. In 1894, he purchased the farm, dismantled the dwelling there, and used what he believed were the original cabin logs to rebuild the cabin itself. How did he know which logs belonged to the original cabin? The answer to that question is anybody’s guess. Presumably Dennett chose the logs that looked the oldest, or perhaps those logs which could, together, be used to construct a cabin. Obviously, any material that was not a log (for instance, a wooden slat) would have been rejected, as would any material that did not meet the appropriate lengths, etc.
As for how he knew what the cabin would have looked like when it was in its original form, that would have been easy enough to determine simply from engineering knowledge about log cabin dimensions in west-central Kentucky in the early 1800’s. This knowledge may also have helped in choosing which logs were original and which were later designs.
Unfortunately for Dennett, the reconstruction of the cabin on the Lincoln farm did not produce the crowds of tourists he had hoped for, so he took the show on the road. Dismantling the cabin, and loading it onto a train, he toured around the country, displaying the cabin at various expositions in major cities throughout the late 1890’s. This proved much more successful for Dennett, and he eventually added a second cabin to the show – one which he claimed had been the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis, Lincoln’s presidential counterpart in the Confederacy during the Civil War, and also born in western Kentucky about eight months before Lincoln. Both cabins were assembled and dismantled at the beginning and end of each show, stowed in separate train cars while on the move to ensure that the logs didn’t get mixed.
After four or five years on the road, and with interest in the cabins waning, Dennett hung up his traveling clothes, stuck the cabins in storage, and moved on to bigger and better things. While in storage, the various logs from the two cabins were not separated.
A few years later, around 1906, a historical society decided to try Dennett’s first idea again – to put the cabin in its original place on the original farm, and advertise it as a tourist attraction. They purchased the cabin at auction (Dennett had gone bankrupt) and had it taken out of storage, not realizing that it was now mixed together with the logs from the Davis log cabin. Upon trying to reassemble the cabin, of course, they quickly realized the problem.
Again, how they ultimately decided which logs had belonged to the Lincoln cabin, and which logs had belonged to the Davis cabin, is anyone’s guess. Dimensions and wood type were no doubt taken into consideration.
A memorial building was erected on the Lincoln farm, in the spot where the original cabin had once stood. The cabin’s actual geographic location on the farm was easy to determine by looking at the original plats of the land, drawn up when the Lincoln family purchased it in 1807.
Once the memorial building was complete (Theodore Roosevelt laid its cornerstone in 1909), the cabin was put inside it. Unfortunately, an immediate problem arose. When rebuilt to its original dimensions (that is, the original dimensions used by Dennett), there was not adequate space around it for tourists. That problem was easily overcome by simply chopping off four feet from one side and one foot from the other. What had originally been 16x18 was now 12x17. Thus, the cabin in its present form is narrower than Dennett’s had been, and narrower than it would have been in 1809.
The memorial building, with the smaller cabin inside, was dedicated by William Howard Taft in 1911, and has now been a tourist attraction for nearly a century.
But the vital question still remains: Is the cabin really the same cabin that Lincoln was born in? Numerous assemblies and disassemblies and a trimming of the dimensions aside, is the cabin one sees inside the big stone building in Hodgenville, Kentucky built from the same logs that Lincoln’s original birthplace cabin was built from? Clearly the logs today are not necessarily in the same locations relative to one another as they may have been in Lincoln’s day, but are they at least the same logs? Did Lincoln’s father lean against those logs to take a rest from the noonday sun? Did the infant Lincoln himself crawl the dirt floor beneath and within those logs?
The answer to those questions has been the matter of much debate for quite a long time. With such a sordid history surrounding the origins and maintenance of those logs, it has been difficult, in the past, to do much more than speculate.
Recently, however, historians have moved a bit more closely to the truth. After decades of requests by various researchers, the historical society that maintains the site finally conceded to letting several scientists come in to take core samples from the logs for laboratory study.
The wood in the logs proved to be in remarkably poor condition. For a time, it even appeared that the researchers might not be able to get a viable core sample because of the extreme state of deterioration. But they persevered and managed to get several good samples from two or three different logs.
The samples were put through a litany of laboratory tests, and the results were fairly conclusive: the “Lincoln Log Cabin” needs to be renamed the “Anonymous Log Cabin.”
The tests on these core samples showed that the trees used to make the logs were cut down no earlier than 1848. That’s 40 years too late for Lincoln’s actual birthplace. The age of the trees at the time they were cut down would have made them, at best, small saplings at the time of Lincoln’s birth. The tests did confirm, however, that the logs came from trees native to the area of Kentucky where Lincoln was born. This means, at the very least, that the logs making up the cabin today did come from Dennett’s Lincoln cabin, and not from his Davis cabin. One of two conclusions is apparent: the 19th century locals were wrong when they claimed that Lincoln’s cabin had been used later to build a larger home, or Dennett chose the wrong logs.
Of course, some dissenters, spurred by romantic ideas of the cabin’s originality, might argue that these tests only prove that those specific logs were not original to the cabin. The cores, remember, only came from a few logs, because most of the logs were in such bad shape that they were untestable. Perhaps the cabin is composed of both original and non-original material. That certainly remains a possibility, but the scientific evidence, coupled with what is already known about the sordid history of the cabin itself, make any hope for original Lincoln materials in the Hodgenville cabin remote indeed.
In fact, as a result of these tests, the cabin is now billed not as Lincoln’s actual birthplace, but as a symbol of Lincoln’s humble beginnings, a replica – albeit a very early replica.
And that last phrase is the important part. As a historian with a flair for the romance of history, it is disappointing for me to know that the cabin in Hodgenville is not actually the cabin Lincoln was born in. But even if it is not Lincoln’s own cabin, it is still a very old dwelling, preserved for history in Hodgenville. Built in the late 1840’s, it remains one of the oldest log dwellings in America, even if its current form is different than its original.
Log dwellings, of course, are abundant today throughout historical sites in states like Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. But most of these structures are relatively modern replicas, built in the 20th century with 20th century technology and 20th century preservation techniques. They were never real log dwellings that real people in the real 19th century built for themselves and lived in.
The Lincoln Log Cabin, however, is just such a dwelling. Even if it wasn’t Lincoln’s family who lived in it, it was somebody’s family who cut the trees down, fashioned the wood, built the structure, and lived in it. And they did so more than 160 years ago, in a time when no one had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln, and slavery was still a thriving business in America.
That makes the dwelling historically important, and romantically significant, even if Lincoln himself never saw it.
The mythos of the Lincoln Log Cabin literally goes back to Abraham Lincoln himself. When running for president in 1860, Lincoln frequently drew on his humble roots, his birth in a log cabin in rural Kentucky, to find common ground with the common man, and to demonstrate his self-made success. He had risen literally from the humblest of beginnings.
After he was elected, interest in this storied log cabin naturally grew. Was it still there in rural Kentucky for anyone to see? Stories from the Civil War suggest that Confederate soldiers moving through the area even went so far as to look for the cabin in order to destroy it.
After the war and Lincoln’s assassination, interest in his birthplace grew even more. It was known that Lincoln’s family had moved to a neighboring farm a few years after his birth, leaving his birth cabin behind, but local residents in the area told cabin-hunters that the original cabin belonging to the Lincoln family had been dismantled by later owners and reused in a much larger home a short distance away.
Subsequently, this dwelling, believed to be built in part from the original cabin, became a sort of shrine for Lincoln enthusiasts in the latter half of the 19th century.
As interest and pilgrimages to the Lincoln farm grew, a New York businessman (of course he was from New York!) named A.W. Dennett came up with the bright idea of making some money off of it. In 1894, he purchased the farm, dismantled the dwelling there, and used what he believed were the original cabin logs to rebuild the cabin itself. How did he know which logs belonged to the original cabin? The answer to that question is anybody’s guess. Presumably Dennett chose the logs that looked the oldest, or perhaps those logs which could, together, be used to construct a cabin. Obviously, any material that was not a log (for instance, a wooden slat) would have been rejected, as would any material that did not meet the appropriate lengths, etc.
As for how he knew what the cabin would have looked like when it was in its original form, that would have been easy enough to determine simply from engineering knowledge about log cabin dimensions in west-central Kentucky in the early 1800’s. This knowledge may also have helped in choosing which logs were original and which were later designs.
Unfortunately for Dennett, the reconstruction of the cabin on the Lincoln farm did not produce the crowds of tourists he had hoped for, so he took the show on the road. Dismantling the cabin, and loading it onto a train, he toured around the country, displaying the cabin at various expositions in major cities throughout the late 1890’s. This proved much more successful for Dennett, and he eventually added a second cabin to the show – one which he claimed had been the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis, Lincoln’s presidential counterpart in the Confederacy during the Civil War, and also born in western Kentucky about eight months before Lincoln. Both cabins were assembled and dismantled at the beginning and end of each show, stowed in separate train cars while on the move to ensure that the logs didn’t get mixed.
After four or five years on the road, and with interest in the cabins waning, Dennett hung up his traveling clothes, stuck the cabins in storage, and moved on to bigger and better things. While in storage, the various logs from the two cabins were not separated.
A few years later, around 1906, a historical society decided to try Dennett’s first idea again – to put the cabin in its original place on the original farm, and advertise it as a tourist attraction. They purchased the cabin at auction (Dennett had gone bankrupt) and had it taken out of storage, not realizing that it was now mixed together with the logs from the Davis log cabin. Upon trying to reassemble the cabin, of course, they quickly realized the problem.
Again, how they ultimately decided which logs had belonged to the Lincoln cabin, and which logs had belonged to the Davis cabin, is anyone’s guess. Dimensions and wood type were no doubt taken into consideration.
A memorial building was erected on the Lincoln farm, in the spot where the original cabin had once stood. The cabin’s actual geographic location on the farm was easy to determine by looking at the original plats of the land, drawn up when the Lincoln family purchased it in 1807.
Once the memorial building was complete (Theodore Roosevelt laid its cornerstone in 1909), the cabin was put inside it. Unfortunately, an immediate problem arose. When rebuilt to its original dimensions (that is, the original dimensions used by Dennett), there was not adequate space around it for tourists. That problem was easily overcome by simply chopping off four feet from one side and one foot from the other. What had originally been 16x18 was now 12x17. Thus, the cabin in its present form is narrower than Dennett’s had been, and narrower than it would have been in 1809.
The memorial building, with the smaller cabin inside, was dedicated by William Howard Taft in 1911, and has now been a tourist attraction for nearly a century.
But the vital question still remains: Is the cabin really the same cabin that Lincoln was born in? Numerous assemblies and disassemblies and a trimming of the dimensions aside, is the cabin one sees inside the big stone building in Hodgenville, Kentucky built from the same logs that Lincoln’s original birthplace cabin was built from? Clearly the logs today are not necessarily in the same locations relative to one another as they may have been in Lincoln’s day, but are they at least the same logs? Did Lincoln’s father lean against those logs to take a rest from the noonday sun? Did the infant Lincoln himself crawl the dirt floor beneath and within those logs?
The answer to those questions has been the matter of much debate for quite a long time. With such a sordid history surrounding the origins and maintenance of those logs, it has been difficult, in the past, to do much more than speculate.
Recently, however, historians have moved a bit more closely to the truth. After decades of requests by various researchers, the historical society that maintains the site finally conceded to letting several scientists come in to take core samples from the logs for laboratory study.
The wood in the logs proved to be in remarkably poor condition. For a time, it even appeared that the researchers might not be able to get a viable core sample because of the extreme state of deterioration. But they persevered and managed to get several good samples from two or three different logs.
The samples were put through a litany of laboratory tests, and the results were fairly conclusive: the “Lincoln Log Cabin” needs to be renamed the “Anonymous Log Cabin.”
The tests on these core samples showed that the trees used to make the logs were cut down no earlier than 1848. That’s 40 years too late for Lincoln’s actual birthplace. The age of the trees at the time they were cut down would have made them, at best, small saplings at the time of Lincoln’s birth. The tests did confirm, however, that the logs came from trees native to the area of Kentucky where Lincoln was born. This means, at the very least, that the logs making up the cabin today did come from Dennett’s Lincoln cabin, and not from his Davis cabin. One of two conclusions is apparent: the 19th century locals were wrong when they claimed that Lincoln’s cabin had been used later to build a larger home, or Dennett chose the wrong logs.
Of course, some dissenters, spurred by romantic ideas of the cabin’s originality, might argue that these tests only prove that those specific logs were not original to the cabin. The cores, remember, only came from a few logs, because most of the logs were in such bad shape that they were untestable. Perhaps the cabin is composed of both original and non-original material. That certainly remains a possibility, but the scientific evidence, coupled with what is already known about the sordid history of the cabin itself, make any hope for original Lincoln materials in the Hodgenville cabin remote indeed.
In fact, as a result of these tests, the cabin is now billed not as Lincoln’s actual birthplace, but as a symbol of Lincoln’s humble beginnings, a replica – albeit a very early replica.
And that last phrase is the important part. As a historian with a flair for the romance of history, it is disappointing for me to know that the cabin in Hodgenville is not actually the cabin Lincoln was born in. But even if it is not Lincoln’s own cabin, it is still a very old dwelling, preserved for history in Hodgenville. Built in the late 1840’s, it remains one of the oldest log dwellings in America, even if its current form is different than its original.
Log dwellings, of course, are abundant today throughout historical sites in states like Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. But most of these structures are relatively modern replicas, built in the 20th century with 20th century technology and 20th century preservation techniques. They were never real log dwellings that real people in the real 19th century built for themselves and lived in.
The Lincoln Log Cabin, however, is just such a dwelling. Even if it wasn’t Lincoln’s family who lived in it, it was somebody’s family who cut the trees down, fashioned the wood, built the structure, and lived in it. And they did so more than 160 years ago, in a time when no one had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln, and slavery was still a thriving business in America.
That makes the dwelling historically important, and romantically significant, even if Lincoln himself never saw it.
Monday, May 25, 2009
The Craig-Ehrman Resurrection Debate: A Commentary
In March of 2006, a now famous debate took place on the university campus of Holy Cross in Massachusetts. The participants were religious scholars William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman, and they debated the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Craig is a noted religious scholar and professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, and Ehrman is a best-selling writer and head of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Bart D. Ehrman
William Lane Craig
Having recently read the transcript, as well as a number of online commentaries, I wanted to add my own perspective to the mix. If you have the time and inclination, I strongly urge you to read the debate transcript yourself, as it is extremely informative in regards to the varied scholarly opinions about the historical rise of Christianity (Transcript link). The video is also available in installations on YouTube (YouTube link to the first segment). Evangelicals will no doubt find Craig’s arguments to be sound and convincing, and progressives and skeptics will find that Ehrman’s arguments seem unassailably rational.
If you don’t want to take the time to read or view the debate (it’s quite long, of course), then (lucky you!) you can simply read what I have written here. I will summarize what each scholar brought to the table, and provide my own commentary and analysis on their arguments.
CRAIG’S OPENING ARGUMENT
William Lane Craig opened the debate by presenting his case for a literal understanding of the resurrection. Although he doesn’t say it openly, he draws heavily on ideas presented by British scholar and theologian N.T. Wright in his book “The Resurrection of the Son of God.”
Craig first provides four “facts of history” (which I will call his “4 points”) which he asserts are agreed upon as reliable by the majority of the scholarly world. These facts are: 1) Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea; 2) Jesus’ tomb was later found empty; 3) Jesus’ followers believed they saw Jesus after his death; and 4) Jesus’ followers came to believe that Jesus had been physically resurrected from the dead. Craig points out that scholars like the aforementioned Wright go so far as to say that we can “know” that these four things are true with as much certainty as we can “know” that Caesar Augustus died in 14 C.E. or that the Temple in Jerusalem fell in 70 C.E. The textual evidence, Craig argues, is simply too strong to suggest otherwise.
Craig then takes these four established facts of history, and draws the conclusion that the “best” explanation for these events is that God truly raised Jesus from the dead. No other naturalistic explanation can better explain it. Craig argues that the Resurrection Hypothesis meets all the normal criteria for a historical explanation: “…explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth,” and that the existing naturalistic explanations do not. He notes that most scholars, including Ehrman himself, have agreed that the naturalistic explanations put forth through the years (conspiracy, apparent death, hallucination, etc.) are inadequate.
EHRMAN’S OPENING ARGUMENT
Bart Ehrman opened his argument by differentiating between a historian and a theologian. A historian, he argues, deals with empirical data, evaluating that data and postulating probable conclusions. As he puts it: “Historians try to establish levels of probability of what happened in the past.” A theologian, on the other hand, discusses what God does or doesn’t do.
Ehrman argues that a miracle, by its very nature, is a theological claim – it presupposes the existence of a God or gods that can perform such things. He points out that a miracle, by its very definition, is always the least likely explanation for an event. If it wasn’t the least likely explanation, it would not be classified as a “miracle.”
Since miracles are theological claims, and are always the “least probable” explanation of an event, no historian can accurately say that the best explanation of the resurrection is that God raised Jesus from the dead. That explanation is a theological one, not a historical one, Ehrman argues. You can’t claim that a miracle – the “least probable” explanation for an event – is, in fact, the “most probable.” In his own words: “And so, by the very nature of the canons of historical research, we can’t claim historically that a miracle probably happened. By definition, it probably didn’t. And history can only establish what probably did.”
COMMENTARY ON THE OPENING STATEMENTS
The argument put forth by Craig is fairly common in modern evangelical circles. If you take what we can know with a fair degree of certainty to be true about the resurrection stories (the “4 points” listed above), then the only hypothesis that adequately explains those four things is that God really did raise Jesus from the dead.
In my opinion, this argument has several problems. First, Craig argues that his “4 points” are generally agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars. This is a classic “appeal to authority.”
While there is certainly a time and place for these sorts of appeals, one cannot base an entire argument on such a claim. It is certainly possible that the majority of New Testament scholars are wrong. Most Egyptologists believed for many decades that King Tut had been killed by a blow to the head, but modern analysis and investigation has cast enormous doubt on that hypothesis now. So the simple fact that most scholars agree that these 4 points are factual does not actually mean they are, in fact, factual.
Furthermore, it is highly debatable whether “most scholars” actually agree with the factuality of these 4 points. In my own personal study of scholarly perspectives, I have not seen evidence that “most scholars” would necessarily agree with these points. Later on in the debate, Ehrman points this out too, arguing that, in fact, most scholars don’t accept these 4 points as indisputable facts of history. Both Craig and Ehrman basically insist that the majority of the scholarly world is on their side. Obviously they can’t both be right; in my own personal experience, I think Craig is overstating the scholarly consensus of these four facts of history.
The first two points – Jesus was buried in a tomb, and that tomb was later found empty – are especially debated among scholars. Many scholars have suggested that Jesus was, in fact, probably not buried in a tomb, and so that tomb could therefore have not ever been found empty three days later. They base this argument on the fact that 1) executed criminals in the 1st century would have been buried in common graves, and 2) the tomb tradition does not enter our textual sources until the Gospel of Mark – around 70 C.E., or 40 years after the event.
In the letters of Paul, which predate Mark, he never mentions a tomb, empty or otherwise. He simply says that Jesus “was buried” and was later raised. In fact, it is highly debatable whether “raised” for Paul meant a physical resurrection or a spiritual one. Judging by his accounts of Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection, it would seem that “raised” for Paul meant “raised in spirit,” not necessarily “raised in the flesh.” In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives a list of those people that Jesus appeared to. He includes several groups that are not known from any Gospel account (such as an appearance by Jesus to a group of 500 people), and he also includes himself. Clearly, Paul was not claiming that he himself encountered the risen Jesus in the days after the first Easter. Paul didn’t even convert to Christianity until several years after Jesus had died. Paul’s inclusion of himself among those who saw the risen Christ is a clue that he is talking about an ecstatic vision, not a literal resurrection of a dead body back into the material world.
Thus, the fourth point – that the earliest Christians came to understand that Jesus had been physically raised from the dead – is also at issue, as I have illustrated in the previous paragraph. Many scholars argue that the earliest Christians understood the resurrection to be a spiritual event, not a physical one, and that the stories of the New Testament are describing that spiritual event, and were never meant to be understood as Jesus’ actual body coming back to life. Instead, they believed Jesus’ soul had been glorified to God. A cursory reading of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels demonstrates that in almost every scene, Jesus seems to be more of a phantasm than literal flesh and blood (he appears and disappears, he looks different and people don’t recognize him, he rises up into heaven, etc.).
Craig’s third point – that the earliest followers of Jesus believed they had visions of the risen Jesus – is about the only one that is probably generally agreed upon by most scholars. It seems likely that apparitions of Jesus, or visions of Jesus, after his death, were indeed part of the earliest Christian experience.
So Craig’s assumption and assertion that “most scholars” agree with his 4 points is a tenuous one at best, and even if it’s true, the appeal to authority doesn’t actually mean anything. Scholars might be wrong.
The second problem with Craig’s argument is that he presupposes that since no existing naturalistic explanation adequately explains the rise of Christianity, the only alternative is that God must have therefore raised Jesus from the dead. This is classic “God of the gaps” reasoning. Since we can’t explain something, it must be God. 500 years ago, this was the basis for believing that thunder and lightning were representations of God’s anger. We now know that it has to do with electrons moving around inside water vapor clouds. So even if it is true that the existing naturalistic explanations of the rise of Christianity are inadequate, that does not mean that we must default to “God did it.” Maybe we simply don’t know yet.
Later in the debate, Ehrman illustrates this same point by suggesting that Craig only assumes God did it because Craig himself comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Perhaps, Ehrman argues, the god Zulu came and took Jesus’ body from his tomb and carried him off to the 12th dimension and subjected him to unceasing torture, allowing him to return from time to time to earth (in resurrection appearances) but disallowing him to let his followers know what was going on in the 12th dimension. This, Ehrman concedes, is an absurd theological explanation, but it demonstrates the point – Craig only assumes that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead and accepted his death as atonement for sin, because that is the religious tradition from which Craig himself comes. Without 2000 years of Christian history behind us, no historian would ever analyze the stories of Jesus of Nazareth and conclude that the ancient Hebrew God Yahweh accepted Jesus’ death as an atonement and raised him back to life. This is why Ehrman argues that Craig’s conclusion is a theological “faith” statement, not a historical research statement.
As for Ehrman’s opening statement, he argues that the historian cannot double as a theologian. This is an argument that I think has merit to some degree, but I also think that it is a cop-out. Ultimately the field of biblical scholarship is a multi-faceted discipline. A biblical scholar is both historian and theologian, academic and preacher. You can’t really draw conclusions about something in religious history without also drawing theological conclusions. The simple conclusion that “Jesus was not raised from the dead” is, in itself, a theological claim as much as it is a historical claim. These disciplines overlap, and it is dishonest not to admit that.
Craig points this out several times in his rebuttals by suggesting that Ehrman is arguing for a sort of “methodological atheism.” He concedes that in a scholarly paper, or in front of a classroom, one must differentiate between history and theology, but for the purposes of a debate, or sitting at home at the kitchen table, a historian certainly can and does make theological claims. He accuses Ehrman of dodging the issue by arguing for methodological atheism.
The problem with Ehrman’s assertion is that if a miracle occurred, and if God, in fact, raised Jesus from the dead, Ehrman’s position would disallow him to ever draw that conclusion. His position precludes that possibility, as much as it precludes the possibility of the god Zulu having taken Jesus to the 12th dimension. In fact, by saying that Jesus probably did not rise from the dead, Ehrman is, in fact, making a theological claim – he’s saying that God probably didn’t have anything to do with it. In that sense, his refusal to consider a miracle as a possibility draws a certain level of bias into his conclusions, though in my opinion this is to a far lesser degree than the bias that is drawn into Craig’s work by his commitment to evangelical Christianity.
THE REBUTTALS
After the opening statements, each scholar was given the opportunity for two rebuttal speeches, with Craig rebutting first, then Ehrman, then Craig again, and then Ehrman again.
In Craig’s first rebuttal, he attacks Ehrman’s argument about history vs. theology. He asserts that Ehrman’s arguments are self-refuting because if a historian cannot talk about God, then that same historian cannot comment on whether a miracle occurred or not – since to do so would necessitate talking about God. He goes on to say: “In order to show that the hypothesis is improbable, you’d have to show that God’s existence is improbable. But Dr. Ehrman says that the historian cannot say anything about God. Therefore, he cannot say that God’s existence is improbable. But if he can’t say that, neither can he say that the resurrection of Jesus is improbable. So Dr. Ehrman’s position is literally self-refuting.”
This is what we might call a philosophical “Gotcha!”
Craig goes on to discuss a probability analysis in regards to the resurrection of Jesus. This includes overhead slides and discussions of mathematical probability theories.
Craig’s argument gets somewhat convoluted at this point, but essentially he asserts that probability ratios demonstrate that Ehrman’s conclusions are fallacious. Ehrman, he asserts, is only considering the intrinsic probability of resurrection alone (up against our “background knowledge,” or what we know about how the world works). He is not considering it up against the historical facts (his “4 points”) or against the alternative naturalistic explanations. He argues that the naturalistic explanations are sufficiently improbable enough to “outbalance” the low intrinsic probability of resurrection. Ultimately he concludes, using a probability ratio, that it is probable, given our background knowledge of the world and the evidence for resurrection (the “4 points”), that God raised Jesus from the dead.
If the preceding paragraph was confusing, that’s because Craig’s argument was also confusing and vague. I admit that I did not really “get” the crux of his argument, and I don’t think Ehrman did either. Craig simply seems to be playing card tricks…using a convoluted mathematical ratio to prove that his position is “probable.”
Ehrman responds to this by saying: “I do have to tell you that if you think I’m going to change my mind because you have mathematical proof for the existence of God, I’m sorry, but it ain’t gonna happen!”
It’s also interesting that in the Question and Answer session at the end of the debate, an audience member asked Craig how he plugs the numbers into his ratio to conclude, mathematically, that the resurrection is “probable.” Not surprisingly, Craig admits that scholars can’t possibly assign numbers to the ratio calculations, which to me simply demonstrates that his argument is little more than a philosophical sleight of hand. It may sound good in a debate, but it doesn’t really mean anything as far as reality is concerned.
In Ehrman’s first rebuttal, he argues that Craig makes four mistakes. First, he makes “dubious use of modern authorities.” This is the argument noted above about Craig’s appeal to authority in regards to the “majority” of Biblical scholars. Ehrman argues that, in fact, most scholars do not agree with his 4 points, and even if they did, it still wouldn’t mean anything. He argues that Craig only thinks “most scholars” agree with him because Craig works in a very conservative, evangelical academic environment.
Second, Ehrman accuses Craig of making “dubious use of ancient sources.” He notes that Craig argues that Paul is our earliest source for the empty tomb tradition, saying the source is within 5 years of the resurrection. This, however, is insupportable. As noted above, Paul never mentions a tomb at all, empty or otherwise. He simply says Jesus “was buried,” and the word he uses there is the word that means, literally, to bury something in the ground. The Gospels, for instance, when talking about Jesus’ “burial” in a tomb, do not actually use the word “bury.” Instead, they say Jesus “was placed” in a tomb. You bury a body in the ground. You put a body in a tomb. So not only does Paul not mention a tomb, but his word implies very strongly that he was talking about a traditional in-ground burial. Secondly, Ehrman points out that Paul was writing 25 years after the resurrection, not 5 years as Craig asserts. Craig no doubt claims that Paul’s source is within 5 years because that’s when Paul was converted and when the traditions of Christianity were passed to him. But even if that’s true, that only demonstrates that the earliest source – within 5 years of the resurrection – says nothing whatsoever about a tomb, and instead refers to Jesus’ burial in the ground!
Third, Ehrman says that Craig makes “dubious claims and assertions.” He points out that Craig argues that the women discovering the empty tomb must be historical because no self-respecting 1st century Jew would invent a story where women are the heroes. This is a very common argument among evangelicals. Lee Strobel, in his best-selling book “The Case for Christ” makes similar arguments.
The problem, Ehrman asserts, is that taken in context, it makes perfect sense that Mark (the first Gospel writer) may have invented this story. Mark’s Gospel, Ehrman shows, is all about how no one in Jesus’ inner circle ever understood – his disciples didn’t understand, his family didn’t understand, his townspeople didn’t understand, etc. Instead, Mark continually depicts outsiders, people on the fringe, as being the only ones who “get it.” He states: “For Mark, only outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples! It’s a group of previously unknown women.” Ehrman argues, essentially, that this is a literary technique used by Mark. Having women find the tomb fits with Mark’s theme of how only outsiders and people on the fringe really ever understood Jesus. For Mark, Jesus’ message was for these people – the fringes of society, the outcast, the despised, the oppressed.
Finally, Ehrman accuses Craig of “drawing dubious inferences from his claims.” He states that Craig assumes Paul believed in an empty tomb because Paul talks about the risen Christ. If Christ was seen later, then the tomb must have been empty. But he notes that for someone living in the 1st century, a vision need not be physical in nature. He points out the Gospel stories of the transfiguration, where Jesus is seen in conversation with Moses and Elijah. “Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision? Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that bodies can be phantasmal, not physical.”
I think, generally speaking, that Ehrman’s arguments here are sound. The only point of disagreement I have with him is on his third point – that the stories of the women at the tomb may be fictional. While I understand Ehrman’s point that the women at the tomb fit Mark’s literary theme, I agree with Craig that it is unlikely that any Jewish male in the 1st century would have invented such a story. In fact, I think Ehrman’s argument on this point inadvertently demonstrates what Craig asserted. Mark, and the other Gospel writers, continually paint images of Jesus as challenging authority, uplifting the poor and outcast, and attempting to tear down societal and cultural boundaries that kept people in oppression. For Jesus, God’s kingdom was a kingdom where everyone shared the same table, rich and poor, strong and weak, powerful and oppressed, male and female, slave and free. So while the women at the tomb may have fit Mark’s literary purposes, I believe Mark’s literary purposes have a strong hint of history in them – that is, Jesus’ message was all about the outcast of society.
In Craig’s second rebuttal, one of his key arguments goes back to the discussion about Paul and the empty tomb. He argues that Paul’s language implies an empty tomb because it is part of what is essentially a 4-part outline of the Gospel resurrection message. This 4-part homily from the Gospels is something like: “Jesus was crucified, Jesus was buried in a tomb, Jesus was raised up, and Jesus was seen.” With the exception of Mark (which contains no appearances by the risen Jesus), all the Gospels essentially follow this resurrection homily. Likewise, in the passage from 1 Corinthians where Paul talks about Jesus’ burial, he states: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter.” Therefore, Paul’s statements seem to outline the 4-part homily from the Gospels: death, burial, resurrection, appearance. For Craig, then, burial in a tomb is implied in Paul’s words, because his outline of the story mirrors what was later written down in expanded form in the Gospels.
This is a fairly well-reasoned argument, but there are several problems with it. I’ve already discussed the first one – Paul’s use of the phrase “was buried” clearly implies burial in the ground. Paul is the only New Testament writer that ever refers to Jesus being “buried.” The Gospel writers all say he “was placed” in his tomb. Second, even if this 4-part homily is an early development in Christian history, that does not mean the later Gospel stories, which expanded on the homily, could not have included legendary material – such as a tomb, later found empty. I simply see no reason to suppose there is an implied tomb in Paul’s account. It seems like grasping at straws. Furthermore, even if there is a tomb implied in Paul’s account, it is dubious (to borrow a word from Ehrman) to base a big portion of a historical conclusion on implied words in one text.
Craig also responds to Ehrman’s comments about the women at the tomb. In this response, he makes a curious statement, claiming that we have “five independent sources” for the women’s presence at the tomb. I can’t for the life of me figure out what five sources he’s talking about. In the Bible, we have four Gospels, and only two of those Gospels are independent of the others – Mark and John. It is essentially universally agreed among scholars that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. Thus, Matthew and Luke’s account of the women at the tomb are not “independent” accounts. As to Craig’s fifth source, I can only assume he is referring to Gnostic texts not found in the Bible, although it is not clear which one he is referring to. It would be difficult to assert, however, that any Gnostic sources were “independent” of the Biblical Gospels, as they were written many decades, and in some cases centuries, later. I can only, therefore, come up with two verifiably independent sources for the story of the women at the tomb.
THE CONCLUDING STATEMENTS
After debating back and forth in their rebuttals (I might actually call it “bickering”), each scholar gave a concluding statement, more or less summing up their arguments.
Craig reasserted his 4 points (Jesus was buried in a tomb, the tomb was found empty, his followers had visions of him, his followers came to believe he had been physically resurrected), again claiming that most scholars agree they are historically probable. He then affirms his conclusion that the best explanation of these 4 points is that God raised Jesus from the dead. He points out that naturalistic explanations cannot adequately explain these facts of the Jesus story. Specifically, he attacks an alternative theory put forth by Ehrman (and certainly others) that perhaps Jesus’ family (or someone else) stole the body. He notes that there would have been no sufficient motivation for this, nor would there have been time before the third day to hatch and carry out such a plan. He also argues that the grave clothes disprove this theory. He asserts: “Nobody would undress the body before taking it away.”
He finishes by giving a short personal testimony of his beliefs and an invitation to the audience to convert to Christianity.
Ehrman concludes first by thanking Craig for his testimony, but then pointing out that the testimony is evidence of the fact that Craig is: “…at heart, an evangelist who wants people to come to share his belief in Jesus and that he’s trying to disguise himself as a historian as a means to that end.”
This may have been a bit unnecessarily antagonistic, but ultimately that does seem to be Craig’s core motivation. He is an evangelical Christian; does anyone suppose that it is simply chance that all his historical conclusions fit perfectly with the evangelical form of Christianity he has already accepted?
Ehrman goes on to reassert his opinion that while anything is possible, a historian can only conclude was is most probable in any given historical scenario. He seems to concede that naturalistic explanations of the rise of Christianity seem improbable; however, any of these naturalistic explanations are less improbable than the explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead. The idea that Jesus’ body was stolen by his family or followers, for instance. This may be historically unlikely, but it is not as unlikely as the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected.
Ehrman finishes by outlining his own theory on how Christianity may have risen. He asserts that Jesus’ followers, grieving after his death, went to their scriptures – what we call the Old Testament – and came to understand Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of Man, the one who would justify a broken world. If Jesus was the Messiah, then he must have been exalted to heaven upon his death, like Elijah and Enoch before him. But the Messiah couldn’t die and go to heaven without justifying the world, so Jesus must be returning soon to inaugurate God’s kingdom. They came to understand him as a spiritual Messiah, not an earthly Messiah. After that time, stories began circulating and people began having visions of the resurrected Jesus. By this time, several years would have passed and no one could reasonably go back to check the grave because the body would have long since decomposed. Stories eventually made it to Paul and then to later Christians, who embellished the stories into narratives which ultimately culminated in the Gospels, 40 to 70 years later.
Although this is not a scenario that can be proven, it seems to me to be a historically-reasonable explanation for how Christianity may have started, and – as Ehrman asserts – more probable, historically- and scientifically-speaking, than the assertion that God must have raised Jesus from the dead. That does not mean, of course, that God did not raise Jesus from the dead. It simply means that based on what we can know about the world, and what we can discern from an analysis of the evidence, it seems likely that a natural explanation is more probable.
CLOSING REMARKS
It will come as a surprise to no one that I tend to think Ehrman “won” this debate. Naturally, since I tend to agree with Ehrman more than Craig, it follows that I will perceive him to be the victor. An evangelical would listen to the debate and no doubt draw the exact opposite conclusion. There can be no doubt that William Lane Craig is an intelligent, well-spoken, highly-educated academic who is not afraid to delve deeply into the evidence. For that reason, I hold a certain amount of respect for him. But at the same time, I felt that most of his arguments could not stand up to historical scrutiny, and I felt like he attempted to “win points” with the audience by pulling philosophical sleights of hand. This was particularly notable in his convoluted mathematical argument, and in his attempt to twist Ehrman’s words about history vs. theology into a self-refuting argument on Ehrman’s part. Craig may have won philosophical points there, but none of those debater’s tricks actually means anything as far as reality is concerned.
Ironically, Craig accuses Ehrman of pulling a “debater’s trick” on him in the Question and Answer session. In one of his rebuttals, Ehrman had been trying to show that Craig’s conclusions were biased, being informed by his own evangelical belief systems. He asked Craig to answer several questions for him. The first was whether Craig believes the texts of the Bible are infallible or not. If so, Ehrman asserted, how can anyone be expected to believe that Craig is able to approach them as a critical historian? The second question was on the topic of other historical accounts of miracle workers. If the stories of Jesus are historically reliable, then aren’t stories of other miracles workers also historically reliable, based on the same criteria? Finally, he asked Craig to explain how the religious faith he accepted at the age of 16 just happens to be the only one that his historically credible. Again, his point was to show that Craig’s conclusions are biased by his own worldview.
Craig passed up two opportunities to fully answer these questions, despite having 5 minutes left to speak during his second rebuttal. He did address, briefly, the question about other stories of miracle workers, asserting that stories of 1st century miracle workers similar to Jesus are actually later legendary developments based on the Jesus stories – an attempt, in other words, to create a Jesus that fit into Roman paganism.
In the Question and Answer session, however, one of the audience members asked Craig to respond to Ehrman’s questions directly. Craig said: “Dr. Ehrman is trying to play a little debater’s trick here on me, in which I simply refuse to participate.”
This is ironic, of course, considering that much of Craig’s argument against Ehrman’s assertions were little more than debater’s tricks, as I have indicated. His explicit refusal to answer Ehrman’s questions is also quite telling. He recognized that Ehrman had backed him into a philosophical corner, so he simply refused to play the game. One may see that as philosophically savvy, or intellectually dishonest. Instead of answering Ehrman directly, he deflected the argument by suggesting that his beliefs about the inerrancy of scripture are irrelevant. He asserted that regardless of what he believes about the inerrancy of scripture, he is approaching this topic using the same unbiased historical criteria that Ehrman or any other historian uses. He stated: “My attitude theologically toward the reliability or the mistakes in the Bible is just irrelevant tonight. The question is, what can you prove positively using the standard criteria? And my argument is that when you use those criteria, you can prove positively those basic four facts about the fate of Jesus subsequent to his crucifixion.”
I felt that this was definitely a deflection of a relevant point on Craig’s part. He may assert that his arguments are not influenced by his own beliefs, but his conclusions strongly suggest otherwise. No one comes to the table free of worldview biases. Even the atheist/agnostic scholar will bring that worldview to the table when he attempts to delve into the story of Jesus. No one can be theologically-neutral. The question, then, turns on who brings more bias to the table, the believing historian or the non-believing historian? It is my opinion that since the believer has far more to lose in drawing conclusions contrary to his beliefs, it is the believer who brings the most bias to the table. Both the believing historian and the non-believing historian stand to lose intellectual pride by drawing conclusions contrary to their worldviews, but it is only the believing historian who stands to lose God and eternity.
All in all, I felt that Ehrman out-dueled Craig in this debate, primarily because Craig’s arguments are largely theology dressed up as history, peppered with philosophical games that, when put up against real historical scrutiny, seem to lose their strength.
Having recently read the transcript, as well as a number of online commentaries, I wanted to add my own perspective to the mix. If you have the time and inclination, I strongly urge you to read the debate transcript yourself, as it is extremely informative in regards to the varied scholarly opinions about the historical rise of Christianity (Transcript link). The video is also available in installations on YouTube (YouTube link to the first segment). Evangelicals will no doubt find Craig’s arguments to be sound and convincing, and progressives and skeptics will find that Ehrman’s arguments seem unassailably rational.
If you don’t want to take the time to read or view the debate (it’s quite long, of course), then (lucky you!) you can simply read what I have written here. I will summarize what each scholar brought to the table, and provide my own commentary and analysis on their arguments.
CRAIG’S OPENING ARGUMENT
William Lane Craig opened the debate by presenting his case for a literal understanding of the resurrection. Although he doesn’t say it openly, he draws heavily on ideas presented by British scholar and theologian N.T. Wright in his book “The Resurrection of the Son of God.”
Craig first provides four “facts of history” (which I will call his “4 points”) which he asserts are agreed upon as reliable by the majority of the scholarly world. These facts are: 1) Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea; 2) Jesus’ tomb was later found empty; 3) Jesus’ followers believed they saw Jesus after his death; and 4) Jesus’ followers came to believe that Jesus had been physically resurrected from the dead. Craig points out that scholars like the aforementioned Wright go so far as to say that we can “know” that these four things are true with as much certainty as we can “know” that Caesar Augustus died in 14 C.E. or that the Temple in Jerusalem fell in 70 C.E. The textual evidence, Craig argues, is simply too strong to suggest otherwise.
Craig then takes these four established facts of history, and draws the conclusion that the “best” explanation for these events is that God truly raised Jesus from the dead. No other naturalistic explanation can better explain it. Craig argues that the Resurrection Hypothesis meets all the normal criteria for a historical explanation: “…explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth,” and that the existing naturalistic explanations do not. He notes that most scholars, including Ehrman himself, have agreed that the naturalistic explanations put forth through the years (conspiracy, apparent death, hallucination, etc.) are inadequate.
EHRMAN’S OPENING ARGUMENT
Bart Ehrman opened his argument by differentiating between a historian and a theologian. A historian, he argues, deals with empirical data, evaluating that data and postulating probable conclusions. As he puts it: “Historians try to establish levels of probability of what happened in the past.” A theologian, on the other hand, discusses what God does or doesn’t do.
Ehrman argues that a miracle, by its very nature, is a theological claim – it presupposes the existence of a God or gods that can perform such things. He points out that a miracle, by its very definition, is always the least likely explanation for an event. If it wasn’t the least likely explanation, it would not be classified as a “miracle.”
Since miracles are theological claims, and are always the “least probable” explanation of an event, no historian can accurately say that the best explanation of the resurrection is that God raised Jesus from the dead. That explanation is a theological one, not a historical one, Ehrman argues. You can’t claim that a miracle – the “least probable” explanation for an event – is, in fact, the “most probable.” In his own words: “And so, by the very nature of the canons of historical research, we can’t claim historically that a miracle probably happened. By definition, it probably didn’t. And history can only establish what probably did.”
COMMENTARY ON THE OPENING STATEMENTS
The argument put forth by Craig is fairly common in modern evangelical circles. If you take what we can know with a fair degree of certainty to be true about the resurrection stories (the “4 points” listed above), then the only hypothesis that adequately explains those four things is that God really did raise Jesus from the dead.
In my opinion, this argument has several problems. First, Craig argues that his “4 points” are generally agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars. This is a classic “appeal to authority.”
While there is certainly a time and place for these sorts of appeals, one cannot base an entire argument on such a claim. It is certainly possible that the majority of New Testament scholars are wrong. Most Egyptologists believed for many decades that King Tut had been killed by a blow to the head, but modern analysis and investigation has cast enormous doubt on that hypothesis now. So the simple fact that most scholars agree that these 4 points are factual does not actually mean they are, in fact, factual.
Furthermore, it is highly debatable whether “most scholars” actually agree with the factuality of these 4 points. In my own personal study of scholarly perspectives, I have not seen evidence that “most scholars” would necessarily agree with these points. Later on in the debate, Ehrman points this out too, arguing that, in fact, most scholars don’t accept these 4 points as indisputable facts of history. Both Craig and Ehrman basically insist that the majority of the scholarly world is on their side. Obviously they can’t both be right; in my own personal experience, I think Craig is overstating the scholarly consensus of these four facts of history.
The first two points – Jesus was buried in a tomb, and that tomb was later found empty – are especially debated among scholars. Many scholars have suggested that Jesus was, in fact, probably not buried in a tomb, and so that tomb could therefore have not ever been found empty three days later. They base this argument on the fact that 1) executed criminals in the 1st century would have been buried in common graves, and 2) the tomb tradition does not enter our textual sources until the Gospel of Mark – around 70 C.E., or 40 years after the event.
In the letters of Paul, which predate Mark, he never mentions a tomb, empty or otherwise. He simply says that Jesus “was buried” and was later raised. In fact, it is highly debatable whether “raised” for Paul meant a physical resurrection or a spiritual one. Judging by his accounts of Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection, it would seem that “raised” for Paul meant “raised in spirit,” not necessarily “raised in the flesh.” In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives a list of those people that Jesus appeared to. He includes several groups that are not known from any Gospel account (such as an appearance by Jesus to a group of 500 people), and he also includes himself. Clearly, Paul was not claiming that he himself encountered the risen Jesus in the days after the first Easter. Paul didn’t even convert to Christianity until several years after Jesus had died. Paul’s inclusion of himself among those who saw the risen Christ is a clue that he is talking about an ecstatic vision, not a literal resurrection of a dead body back into the material world.
Thus, the fourth point – that the earliest Christians came to understand that Jesus had been physically raised from the dead – is also at issue, as I have illustrated in the previous paragraph. Many scholars argue that the earliest Christians understood the resurrection to be a spiritual event, not a physical one, and that the stories of the New Testament are describing that spiritual event, and were never meant to be understood as Jesus’ actual body coming back to life. Instead, they believed Jesus’ soul had been glorified to God. A cursory reading of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels demonstrates that in almost every scene, Jesus seems to be more of a phantasm than literal flesh and blood (he appears and disappears, he looks different and people don’t recognize him, he rises up into heaven, etc.).
Craig’s third point – that the earliest followers of Jesus believed they had visions of the risen Jesus – is about the only one that is probably generally agreed upon by most scholars. It seems likely that apparitions of Jesus, or visions of Jesus, after his death, were indeed part of the earliest Christian experience.
So Craig’s assumption and assertion that “most scholars” agree with his 4 points is a tenuous one at best, and even if it’s true, the appeal to authority doesn’t actually mean anything. Scholars might be wrong.
The second problem with Craig’s argument is that he presupposes that since no existing naturalistic explanation adequately explains the rise of Christianity, the only alternative is that God must have therefore raised Jesus from the dead. This is classic “God of the gaps” reasoning. Since we can’t explain something, it must be God. 500 years ago, this was the basis for believing that thunder and lightning were representations of God’s anger. We now know that it has to do with electrons moving around inside water vapor clouds. So even if it is true that the existing naturalistic explanations of the rise of Christianity are inadequate, that does not mean that we must default to “God did it.” Maybe we simply don’t know yet.
Later in the debate, Ehrman illustrates this same point by suggesting that Craig only assumes God did it because Craig himself comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Perhaps, Ehrman argues, the god Zulu came and took Jesus’ body from his tomb and carried him off to the 12th dimension and subjected him to unceasing torture, allowing him to return from time to time to earth (in resurrection appearances) but disallowing him to let his followers know what was going on in the 12th dimension. This, Ehrman concedes, is an absurd theological explanation, but it demonstrates the point – Craig only assumes that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead and accepted his death as atonement for sin, because that is the religious tradition from which Craig himself comes. Without 2000 years of Christian history behind us, no historian would ever analyze the stories of Jesus of Nazareth and conclude that the ancient Hebrew God Yahweh accepted Jesus’ death as an atonement and raised him back to life. This is why Ehrman argues that Craig’s conclusion is a theological “faith” statement, not a historical research statement.
As for Ehrman’s opening statement, he argues that the historian cannot double as a theologian. This is an argument that I think has merit to some degree, but I also think that it is a cop-out. Ultimately the field of biblical scholarship is a multi-faceted discipline. A biblical scholar is both historian and theologian, academic and preacher. You can’t really draw conclusions about something in religious history without also drawing theological conclusions. The simple conclusion that “Jesus was not raised from the dead” is, in itself, a theological claim as much as it is a historical claim. These disciplines overlap, and it is dishonest not to admit that.
Craig points this out several times in his rebuttals by suggesting that Ehrman is arguing for a sort of “methodological atheism.” He concedes that in a scholarly paper, or in front of a classroom, one must differentiate between history and theology, but for the purposes of a debate, or sitting at home at the kitchen table, a historian certainly can and does make theological claims. He accuses Ehrman of dodging the issue by arguing for methodological atheism.
The problem with Ehrman’s assertion is that if a miracle occurred, and if God, in fact, raised Jesus from the dead, Ehrman’s position would disallow him to ever draw that conclusion. His position precludes that possibility, as much as it precludes the possibility of the god Zulu having taken Jesus to the 12th dimension. In fact, by saying that Jesus probably did not rise from the dead, Ehrman is, in fact, making a theological claim – he’s saying that God probably didn’t have anything to do with it. In that sense, his refusal to consider a miracle as a possibility draws a certain level of bias into his conclusions, though in my opinion this is to a far lesser degree than the bias that is drawn into Craig’s work by his commitment to evangelical Christianity.
THE REBUTTALS
After the opening statements, each scholar was given the opportunity for two rebuttal speeches, with Craig rebutting first, then Ehrman, then Craig again, and then Ehrman again.
In Craig’s first rebuttal, he attacks Ehrman’s argument about history vs. theology. He asserts that Ehrman’s arguments are self-refuting because if a historian cannot talk about God, then that same historian cannot comment on whether a miracle occurred or not – since to do so would necessitate talking about God. He goes on to say: “In order to show that the hypothesis is improbable, you’d have to show that God’s existence is improbable. But Dr. Ehrman says that the historian cannot say anything about God. Therefore, he cannot say that God’s existence is improbable. But if he can’t say that, neither can he say that the resurrection of Jesus is improbable. So Dr. Ehrman’s position is literally self-refuting.”
This is what we might call a philosophical “Gotcha!”
Craig goes on to discuss a probability analysis in regards to the resurrection of Jesus. This includes overhead slides and discussions of mathematical probability theories.
Craig’s argument gets somewhat convoluted at this point, but essentially he asserts that probability ratios demonstrate that Ehrman’s conclusions are fallacious. Ehrman, he asserts, is only considering the intrinsic probability of resurrection alone (up against our “background knowledge,” or what we know about how the world works). He is not considering it up against the historical facts (his “4 points”) or against the alternative naturalistic explanations. He argues that the naturalistic explanations are sufficiently improbable enough to “outbalance” the low intrinsic probability of resurrection. Ultimately he concludes, using a probability ratio, that it is probable, given our background knowledge of the world and the evidence for resurrection (the “4 points”), that God raised Jesus from the dead.
If the preceding paragraph was confusing, that’s because Craig’s argument was also confusing and vague. I admit that I did not really “get” the crux of his argument, and I don’t think Ehrman did either. Craig simply seems to be playing card tricks…using a convoluted mathematical ratio to prove that his position is “probable.”
Ehrman responds to this by saying: “I do have to tell you that if you think I’m going to change my mind because you have mathematical proof for the existence of God, I’m sorry, but it ain’t gonna happen!”
It’s also interesting that in the Question and Answer session at the end of the debate, an audience member asked Craig how he plugs the numbers into his ratio to conclude, mathematically, that the resurrection is “probable.” Not surprisingly, Craig admits that scholars can’t possibly assign numbers to the ratio calculations, which to me simply demonstrates that his argument is little more than a philosophical sleight of hand. It may sound good in a debate, but it doesn’t really mean anything as far as reality is concerned.
In Ehrman’s first rebuttal, he argues that Craig makes four mistakes. First, he makes “dubious use of modern authorities.” This is the argument noted above about Craig’s appeal to authority in regards to the “majority” of Biblical scholars. Ehrman argues that, in fact, most scholars do not agree with his 4 points, and even if they did, it still wouldn’t mean anything. He argues that Craig only thinks “most scholars” agree with him because Craig works in a very conservative, evangelical academic environment.
Second, Ehrman accuses Craig of making “dubious use of ancient sources.” He notes that Craig argues that Paul is our earliest source for the empty tomb tradition, saying the source is within 5 years of the resurrection. This, however, is insupportable. As noted above, Paul never mentions a tomb at all, empty or otherwise. He simply says Jesus “was buried,” and the word he uses there is the word that means, literally, to bury something in the ground. The Gospels, for instance, when talking about Jesus’ “burial” in a tomb, do not actually use the word “bury.” Instead, they say Jesus “was placed” in a tomb. You bury a body in the ground. You put a body in a tomb. So not only does Paul not mention a tomb, but his word implies very strongly that he was talking about a traditional in-ground burial. Secondly, Ehrman points out that Paul was writing 25 years after the resurrection, not 5 years as Craig asserts. Craig no doubt claims that Paul’s source is within 5 years because that’s when Paul was converted and when the traditions of Christianity were passed to him. But even if that’s true, that only demonstrates that the earliest source – within 5 years of the resurrection – says nothing whatsoever about a tomb, and instead refers to Jesus’ burial in the ground!
Third, Ehrman says that Craig makes “dubious claims and assertions.” He points out that Craig argues that the women discovering the empty tomb must be historical because no self-respecting 1st century Jew would invent a story where women are the heroes. This is a very common argument among evangelicals. Lee Strobel, in his best-selling book “The Case for Christ” makes similar arguments.
The problem, Ehrman asserts, is that taken in context, it makes perfect sense that Mark (the first Gospel writer) may have invented this story. Mark’s Gospel, Ehrman shows, is all about how no one in Jesus’ inner circle ever understood – his disciples didn’t understand, his family didn’t understand, his townspeople didn’t understand, etc. Instead, Mark continually depicts outsiders, people on the fringe, as being the only ones who “get it.” He states: “For Mark, only outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples! It’s a group of previously unknown women.” Ehrman argues, essentially, that this is a literary technique used by Mark. Having women find the tomb fits with Mark’s theme of how only outsiders and people on the fringe really ever understood Jesus. For Mark, Jesus’ message was for these people – the fringes of society, the outcast, the despised, the oppressed.
Finally, Ehrman accuses Craig of “drawing dubious inferences from his claims.” He states that Craig assumes Paul believed in an empty tomb because Paul talks about the risen Christ. If Christ was seen later, then the tomb must have been empty. But he notes that for someone living in the 1st century, a vision need not be physical in nature. He points out the Gospel stories of the transfiguration, where Jesus is seen in conversation with Moses and Elijah. “Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision? Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that bodies can be phantasmal, not physical.”
I think, generally speaking, that Ehrman’s arguments here are sound. The only point of disagreement I have with him is on his third point – that the stories of the women at the tomb may be fictional. While I understand Ehrman’s point that the women at the tomb fit Mark’s literary theme, I agree with Craig that it is unlikely that any Jewish male in the 1st century would have invented such a story. In fact, I think Ehrman’s argument on this point inadvertently demonstrates what Craig asserted. Mark, and the other Gospel writers, continually paint images of Jesus as challenging authority, uplifting the poor and outcast, and attempting to tear down societal and cultural boundaries that kept people in oppression. For Jesus, God’s kingdom was a kingdom where everyone shared the same table, rich and poor, strong and weak, powerful and oppressed, male and female, slave and free. So while the women at the tomb may have fit Mark’s literary purposes, I believe Mark’s literary purposes have a strong hint of history in them – that is, Jesus’ message was all about the outcast of society.
In Craig’s second rebuttal, one of his key arguments goes back to the discussion about Paul and the empty tomb. He argues that Paul’s language implies an empty tomb because it is part of what is essentially a 4-part outline of the Gospel resurrection message. This 4-part homily from the Gospels is something like: “Jesus was crucified, Jesus was buried in a tomb, Jesus was raised up, and Jesus was seen.” With the exception of Mark (which contains no appearances by the risen Jesus), all the Gospels essentially follow this resurrection homily. Likewise, in the passage from 1 Corinthians where Paul talks about Jesus’ burial, he states: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter.” Therefore, Paul’s statements seem to outline the 4-part homily from the Gospels: death, burial, resurrection, appearance. For Craig, then, burial in a tomb is implied in Paul’s words, because his outline of the story mirrors what was later written down in expanded form in the Gospels.
This is a fairly well-reasoned argument, but there are several problems with it. I’ve already discussed the first one – Paul’s use of the phrase “was buried” clearly implies burial in the ground. Paul is the only New Testament writer that ever refers to Jesus being “buried.” The Gospel writers all say he “was placed” in his tomb. Second, even if this 4-part homily is an early development in Christian history, that does not mean the later Gospel stories, which expanded on the homily, could not have included legendary material – such as a tomb, later found empty. I simply see no reason to suppose there is an implied tomb in Paul’s account. It seems like grasping at straws. Furthermore, even if there is a tomb implied in Paul’s account, it is dubious (to borrow a word from Ehrman) to base a big portion of a historical conclusion on implied words in one text.
Craig also responds to Ehrman’s comments about the women at the tomb. In this response, he makes a curious statement, claiming that we have “five independent sources” for the women’s presence at the tomb. I can’t for the life of me figure out what five sources he’s talking about. In the Bible, we have four Gospels, and only two of those Gospels are independent of the others – Mark and John. It is essentially universally agreed among scholars that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. Thus, Matthew and Luke’s account of the women at the tomb are not “independent” accounts. As to Craig’s fifth source, I can only assume he is referring to Gnostic texts not found in the Bible, although it is not clear which one he is referring to. It would be difficult to assert, however, that any Gnostic sources were “independent” of the Biblical Gospels, as they were written many decades, and in some cases centuries, later. I can only, therefore, come up with two verifiably independent sources for the story of the women at the tomb.
THE CONCLUDING STATEMENTS
After debating back and forth in their rebuttals (I might actually call it “bickering”), each scholar gave a concluding statement, more or less summing up their arguments.
Craig reasserted his 4 points (Jesus was buried in a tomb, the tomb was found empty, his followers had visions of him, his followers came to believe he had been physically resurrected), again claiming that most scholars agree they are historically probable. He then affirms his conclusion that the best explanation of these 4 points is that God raised Jesus from the dead. He points out that naturalistic explanations cannot adequately explain these facts of the Jesus story. Specifically, he attacks an alternative theory put forth by Ehrman (and certainly others) that perhaps Jesus’ family (or someone else) stole the body. He notes that there would have been no sufficient motivation for this, nor would there have been time before the third day to hatch and carry out such a plan. He also argues that the grave clothes disprove this theory. He asserts: “Nobody would undress the body before taking it away.”
He finishes by giving a short personal testimony of his beliefs and an invitation to the audience to convert to Christianity.
Ehrman concludes first by thanking Craig for his testimony, but then pointing out that the testimony is evidence of the fact that Craig is: “…at heart, an evangelist who wants people to come to share his belief in Jesus and that he’s trying to disguise himself as a historian as a means to that end.”
This may have been a bit unnecessarily antagonistic, but ultimately that does seem to be Craig’s core motivation. He is an evangelical Christian; does anyone suppose that it is simply chance that all his historical conclusions fit perfectly with the evangelical form of Christianity he has already accepted?
Ehrman goes on to reassert his opinion that while anything is possible, a historian can only conclude was is most probable in any given historical scenario. He seems to concede that naturalistic explanations of the rise of Christianity seem improbable; however, any of these naturalistic explanations are less improbable than the explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead. The idea that Jesus’ body was stolen by his family or followers, for instance. This may be historically unlikely, but it is not as unlikely as the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected.
Ehrman finishes by outlining his own theory on how Christianity may have risen. He asserts that Jesus’ followers, grieving after his death, went to their scriptures – what we call the Old Testament – and came to understand Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of Man, the one who would justify a broken world. If Jesus was the Messiah, then he must have been exalted to heaven upon his death, like Elijah and Enoch before him. But the Messiah couldn’t die and go to heaven without justifying the world, so Jesus must be returning soon to inaugurate God’s kingdom. They came to understand him as a spiritual Messiah, not an earthly Messiah. After that time, stories began circulating and people began having visions of the resurrected Jesus. By this time, several years would have passed and no one could reasonably go back to check the grave because the body would have long since decomposed. Stories eventually made it to Paul and then to later Christians, who embellished the stories into narratives which ultimately culminated in the Gospels, 40 to 70 years later.
Although this is not a scenario that can be proven, it seems to me to be a historically-reasonable explanation for how Christianity may have started, and – as Ehrman asserts – more probable, historically- and scientifically-speaking, than the assertion that God must have raised Jesus from the dead. That does not mean, of course, that God did not raise Jesus from the dead. It simply means that based on what we can know about the world, and what we can discern from an analysis of the evidence, it seems likely that a natural explanation is more probable.
CLOSING REMARKS
It will come as a surprise to no one that I tend to think Ehrman “won” this debate. Naturally, since I tend to agree with Ehrman more than Craig, it follows that I will perceive him to be the victor. An evangelical would listen to the debate and no doubt draw the exact opposite conclusion. There can be no doubt that William Lane Craig is an intelligent, well-spoken, highly-educated academic who is not afraid to delve deeply into the evidence. For that reason, I hold a certain amount of respect for him. But at the same time, I felt that most of his arguments could not stand up to historical scrutiny, and I felt like he attempted to “win points” with the audience by pulling philosophical sleights of hand. This was particularly notable in his convoluted mathematical argument, and in his attempt to twist Ehrman’s words about history vs. theology into a self-refuting argument on Ehrman’s part. Craig may have won philosophical points there, but none of those debater’s tricks actually means anything as far as reality is concerned.
Ironically, Craig accuses Ehrman of pulling a “debater’s trick” on him in the Question and Answer session. In one of his rebuttals, Ehrman had been trying to show that Craig’s conclusions were biased, being informed by his own evangelical belief systems. He asked Craig to answer several questions for him. The first was whether Craig believes the texts of the Bible are infallible or not. If so, Ehrman asserted, how can anyone be expected to believe that Craig is able to approach them as a critical historian? The second question was on the topic of other historical accounts of miracle workers. If the stories of Jesus are historically reliable, then aren’t stories of other miracles workers also historically reliable, based on the same criteria? Finally, he asked Craig to explain how the religious faith he accepted at the age of 16 just happens to be the only one that his historically credible. Again, his point was to show that Craig’s conclusions are biased by his own worldview.
Craig passed up two opportunities to fully answer these questions, despite having 5 minutes left to speak during his second rebuttal. He did address, briefly, the question about other stories of miracle workers, asserting that stories of 1st century miracle workers similar to Jesus are actually later legendary developments based on the Jesus stories – an attempt, in other words, to create a Jesus that fit into Roman paganism.
In the Question and Answer session, however, one of the audience members asked Craig to respond to Ehrman’s questions directly. Craig said: “Dr. Ehrman is trying to play a little debater’s trick here on me, in which I simply refuse to participate.”
This is ironic, of course, considering that much of Craig’s argument against Ehrman’s assertions were little more than debater’s tricks, as I have indicated. His explicit refusal to answer Ehrman’s questions is also quite telling. He recognized that Ehrman had backed him into a philosophical corner, so he simply refused to play the game. One may see that as philosophically savvy, or intellectually dishonest. Instead of answering Ehrman directly, he deflected the argument by suggesting that his beliefs about the inerrancy of scripture are irrelevant. He asserted that regardless of what he believes about the inerrancy of scripture, he is approaching this topic using the same unbiased historical criteria that Ehrman or any other historian uses. He stated: “My attitude theologically toward the reliability or the mistakes in the Bible is just irrelevant tonight. The question is, what can you prove positively using the standard criteria? And my argument is that when you use those criteria, you can prove positively those basic four facts about the fate of Jesus subsequent to his crucifixion.”
I felt that this was definitely a deflection of a relevant point on Craig’s part. He may assert that his arguments are not influenced by his own beliefs, but his conclusions strongly suggest otherwise. No one comes to the table free of worldview biases. Even the atheist/agnostic scholar will bring that worldview to the table when he attempts to delve into the story of Jesus. No one can be theologically-neutral. The question, then, turns on who brings more bias to the table, the believing historian or the non-believing historian? It is my opinion that since the believer has far more to lose in drawing conclusions contrary to his beliefs, it is the believer who brings the most bias to the table. Both the believing historian and the non-believing historian stand to lose intellectual pride by drawing conclusions contrary to their worldviews, but it is only the believing historian who stands to lose God and eternity.
All in all, I felt that Ehrman out-dueled Craig in this debate, primarily because Craig’s arguments are largely theology dressed up as history, peppered with philosophical games that, when put up against real historical scrutiny, seem to lose their strength.
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