This blog post is prompted by discussion on my recent entry on Prosblogion on miracles and testimony, and on my reading of Stephen Law's thought-provoking paper in Faith and Philosophy, entitled "Evidence, Miracles and The Existence of Jesus". Unfortunately, almost all my F&P issues are still in my house in Belgium, so I cannot quote from the text verbatim (and I do not have electronic access to F&P).
In the paper, Law offers the following thought experiments: Suppose you have a couple of friends, whom you know have been reliable witnesses in the past (it might be interesting to imagine real friends for this purpose, try to think of normal people not prone to delusions, flights of fancy, and who do not enjoy playing pranks). One day they tell you that they were visited by a man called Ted who came to drink tea. You accept this testimony at face value. Now suppose that they next tell you Ted started flying around in the room (you can add some more miracles, such as that he died there and became alive again, that he made things appear out of thin air, etc.). According to Law, in keeping with Hume, it would not only be unreasonable to believe this testimony, it would actually be reasonable for you to doubt the existence of Ted.
On the basis of this, Law formulates something akin to the following principle (again not quoting verbatim):
If a narrative has a lot of miracles as central elements, we have reasons to doubt the narrative as a whole.
To be sure, the occurrence of miracles is not a definite defeater. Haile Selassie was a real person whose life history became embellished with accounts of miracles. However, Law suspects Haile Selassie is an exception. But what puzzled Law was that new testament scholars do not seem to endorse this principle. Indeed, historical scholarship on Jesus (the Leben Jesu Forschung) was at one time inclining towards the view that most of the gospels are fictitious, or even entirely fictitious (the mythological view).
However, recent scholars like Geza Vermes and James Crossley take much of the gospel at face value. The majority of these authors are not Christian (Vermes was a Christian but lost his faith, yet maintains his belief that the gospels have lots of useful historical information on Jesus; Crossley was, and still is an atheist). So, to Law's puzzlement, new testament scholars do not act in accordance of his thought experiment (similarly, I seem to remember from my classes in East Asian religion that most Buddha scholars are now inclined towards the historicity of Siddharta Gautama). If competent scholars do not follow Law's philosophical intuitions, there must be something wrong with them, or with the Ted example as an intuition pump, or alternatively, there must be something wrong with the epistemic principles used in New Testament scholarship.
Coreggio, Noli me tangere
To pursue this point, take the example of the empty tomb in NT scholarship. A recent survey (Habermas, 2006 In R. B. Stewart (ed.), The Resurrection of Jesus) found that 75 percent of scholars writing between 1975 to 2005 agree that Jesus’ tomb was in fact found empty (the majority, though, do not believe in a supernatural explanation for this). One reason for this consensus is that all gospels (not Paul, though) cite women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb (there is no consensus on the number and identity of these women). New testament scholars think that women were regarded as *unreliable* witnesses and that this provides good prima facie evidence for the reliability of their testimony. The reasoning is as follows: if the gospel authors wanted to write a fictitious account, they would have placed respectable males at the tomb. I find it surprising that the perceived unreliability of witness accounts in the past is now taken as evidence for the reliability of these accounts. Surely, if a person suspected of murder came up with a particularly poor alibi, I would not be compelled to think "He could have surely come up with something more convincing in the meantime, therefore the alibi is probably valid". Am I missing something?
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