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Does Shapiro have a case?
The link can be found here.
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Part 1.
What do I think of Lawrence Shapiro's book published by Columbia University Press? Let's plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
It's been said before that when Christian Philosopher Alvin Plantinga gets a critique of the Christian worldview, he likes to take his opponent's argument and reshape it, not to make it weaker, but to remove any problems he sees in it. He wants to make it as strong as he can. When that is done, he goes and then deals with the argument.
Shapiro seems to take the exact opposite approach of taking arguments of his opponents and making them as weak as possible in this book.
This is a book that does not deal accurately with any of the ideas that it wishes to critique. The author takes straw man after straw man and then announces with joy that the hideously weak case has been knocked down. Unfortunately, Shapiro has knocked down a sand castle while a powerful fortress stands there untouched.
In fact, a striking problem of Shapiro's book is how little time he spends discussing actual miracle claims. There are many times he argues against the idea of miracles and in fact painting them as ridiculous as claims of alien abductions or Bigfoot. The only two claims of a miracle he takes on are the Book of Mormon and the resurrection of Jesus, and while I disagree with the former entirely, even then Shapiro does a horrible job dealing with this.
Fortunately, at the start Shapiro does make clear what he's arguing against. He says "Miracles, I argue, should be understood as events that are the result of supernatural, typically divine, forces." Now at this point, I still wonder what is meant by this term supernatural. I don't see atheists and skeptics define it a lot and the supernatural/natural dichotomy makes no sense to me.
I can't help but wonder how familiar Shapiro is with some miracle arguments when he says "Why do we think that it's perfectly natural that a stone falls when dropped or that metal expands when heated or that days are shorter in the winter than in the summer? We do so because these events and others like them happen all the time." Of course, Hume himself said that dropping a stone 1,000 times and watching it fall will not prove that it will fall the 1,001st time.
At the start of his story The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton wrote about a man who was amazed about all that did happen like that. It is amazing when a train reaches the correct stop or a letter reaches the correct address because there was a potentially infinite number of places it could have gone to. All of these are a way of establishing order in the universe.
Why bring this up? Because unknowingly to Shapiro I suspect, when he makes statements like this, he's upholding the theism he would be arguing against. This is, in fact, part and parcel of the fifth way of Thomas Aquinas. The fact that there is expected order at all is something that needs to be explained and with more than "We see it happen every day." You may see a man kiss his wife every day, but that doesn't mean you don't need to know of a reason behind it.
Right after this, Shapiro does bring up the natural/supernatural distinction which he thinks that nearly everyone accepts. Perhaps they do, but for what reason? I contend that it is not a good one as I have questioned Christians and atheists on this one and never received replies that make sense of the distinction. I prefer to speak of objects acting according to their nature unless other objects or forces or beings intervene.
I'm not surprised when I get to Location 571 in my Kindle reading and read "If science tells us anything, it's that the dead tend to stay that way." Normally, this kind of statement isn't really spelled out which makes it all the more humorous. Perhaps Shapiro just isn't aware that man in the past has always tended to bury or dispose of the dead in some way. We learned pretty quickly that they're not coming back. If this is the discovery of modern science, then please tell me which scientist discovered this and when it took place. We know more scientifically about death, but you don't have to be a scientist to know that dead people stay dead.
Shapiro then says something about the inference to the best explanation. It's understandable that when you see something science can't seem to explain, such as a statue crying, you can infer that the cause must be something outside the realm of science (Which is what he would call supernatural.). There's nothing wrong with the reasoning per se. We do it all the time with what we can't observe.
At this point, I wonder about the question of goodness. Do we observe goodness? Hume would have said we didn't. You talk about how the action feels to you and you impress that onto the action. Myself being a Thomist, would prefer to say that the goodness is in the action itself and you recognize it as such. Science cannot explain this goodness. It's a metaphysical quality. This is not to insult science. It's just properly recognizing the limits of science.
At 841, Shapiro tells us that whatever we assume about God's nature is purely speculative. Really, they're guesses. Somehow, Aristotle and Aquinas and other thinkers didn't get that memo. They used reasoning about metaphysical matters to arrive at a conclusion about God they could argue for. Sadly, Shapiro never bothers to look at such arguments.
Shortly after, he starts to say something about the resurrection. He tells us that there is a better natural explanation, that for instance, the women went to the wrong tomb or the body was stolen by grave robbers. These would surely explain the data better.
Except they don't. Kirsopp Lake tried the wrong tomb explanation long ago. It never got much ground. Anyone would have been happy to point out the right tomb. As for grave robbers, grave robbers would normally not steal the whole body but only the parts they needed. None of these would explain either the appearances or the conversion of skeptics like Paul and James.
But hey, Shapiro just needs a just so story. Just throw it out and boom, you've shown what a better thinker you are. Obviously, this is something that has never crossed the mind of Christians ever.
It's ironic he says this in response to Licona's book on the resurrection where counter-theories would be dealt with. He also says Licona cannot say that this is a miracle. Unfortunately for Shapiro, Licona regularly speaks about what a miracle is. It's described as an event that goes beyond the laws of nature and takes place in an atmosphere charged with religious significance.
A blind man sits at home one day and all of a sudden, BOOM!, his eyes are open and he can see. Is this a miracle? Maybe.Maybe not. On Licona's terms, it wouldn't look like it just yet. Meanwhile, a blind man is at a church service and people gather around him and pray in faith that in the name of Jesus the man's eyes would be opened. The man can then see. This would be a miracle.
Shapiro also gives an account of Sally. Sally is a little girl who is amazingly accurate with all she says. Unfortunately, she's also boring. She talks about mundane things regularly. Then one day you see Sally and she talks about how she's been an alien hostage for twelve years and had gone through a wormhole and because of that, it will seem to us like she was never gone. After all of the description, he asks if we should believe her. His reply is we shouldn't.
I have a different reply. I understand skepticism. By all means, be skeptical, but instead, ask "Okay. What is the evidence?" Could we take Sally to a doctor to check her for bruises? Could we see where the abduction took place to see some residue? Could Sally tell us facts about the universe and such she would not have known otherwise that we can verify?
Does that seem bizarre to you? Why should it? What is wrong with receiving a strange claim and just asking "What is the evidence?" I'm skeptical of alien abductions, but I am sure that if someone was abducted by aliens, they would want to talk about it. Should I discount the story immediately without seeing the evidence they have?
Shapiro also gives an account of a disease that can only be treated if caught early. The disease is a deadly one, but the treatment leaves one in a horrid state. The test for the disease is accurate when it says someone has it 999 out of 1,000 times. The test says you have it. Should you get the treatment?
Shapiro argues that there is in fact overall a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of getting the disease. Since I am not a specialist on probability, I spoke to my friend Tim McGrew on this, who is a specialist on this. According to him, this means that at the start, the probability you have the disease is .0000001. If the test makes it a thousand times more likely that you have it, your odds are still ,0001.
McGrew says that in that case, it might not be wise to get the treatment regardless of what the test says, but what if there are other tests? What if you can go to other doctors and find other means? Each of these will increase the odds. Should you not at least consider doing this?
McGrew also points out that events like miracles are not like catching a disease where one in a certain population will get it as a random event in the universe. A miracle is a deliberate action by an agent. It is not as if we bury people and one out of every 10,000,000 will rise from the dead.
Shapiro also says with other events, we have more independent sources and other evidence, such as if we take the account that a volcano destroyed Pompeii. I find this one quite amusing since for Pompeii, we only have one direct reference to it. We have allusions to it, but it's only mentioned by Pliny to Tacitus telling about why his uncle died in an off-the-cuff remark. It's not until Cassius Dio centuries later that we learn that Herculaneum was destroyed.
Amazingly, Shapiro does concede that if God exists and He is omnipotent, this raises the probability that the resurrection happened to one. You would think that someone would want to look at theistic arguments at that point, but it looks like Shapiro doesn't. Shapiro in fact asks why not believe in aliens or other entities that raised Jesus. If Shapiro wants to make a case for any of those, he's welcome to it. We will make our case for a theism consistent with the Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments and see which explanation makes the better case.
It's sadly not much of a shock when Shapiro goes also to "the historian Richard Carrier." (Cue Yakity Sax playing in your head right now.) I could repeat all that Carrier says here in comparing Jesus's resurrection to the crossing of the Rubicon, but I have done that elsewhere. Keep in mind also that in historical statements about this event, Shapiro says "We have the written reports that historians produced a couple hundred years after the event." Keep this in mind because this tells us right now that a couple of hundred years isn't a problem.
Doug Geivett was also the one who made the claim originally that the evidence of Jesus rising from the dead is comparable to that of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Shapiro says Geivett would be disappointed to learn that Carrier thinks the Biblical miracles are made up. No, I quite contend that Geivett would not be at all disappointed, other than disappointment for the possible salvation of Carrier. Carrier's positions are getting more and more to the extreme that it looks more and more that if Carrier says something is true, the opposite is far more likely to be true.
The link can be found here.
----------
Part 1.
What do I think of Lawrence Shapiro's book published by Columbia University Press? Let's plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
It's been said before that when Christian Philosopher Alvin Plantinga gets a critique of the Christian worldview, he likes to take his opponent's argument and reshape it, not to make it weaker, but to remove any problems he sees in it. He wants to make it as strong as he can. When that is done, he goes and then deals with the argument.
Shapiro seems to take the exact opposite approach of taking arguments of his opponents and making them as weak as possible in this book.
This is a book that does not deal accurately with any of the ideas that it wishes to critique. The author takes straw man after straw man and then announces with joy that the hideously weak case has been knocked down. Unfortunately, Shapiro has knocked down a sand castle while a powerful fortress stands there untouched.
In fact, a striking problem of Shapiro's book is how little time he spends discussing actual miracle claims. There are many times he argues against the idea of miracles and in fact painting them as ridiculous as claims of alien abductions or Bigfoot. The only two claims of a miracle he takes on are the Book of Mormon and the resurrection of Jesus, and while I disagree with the former entirely, even then Shapiro does a horrible job dealing with this.
Fortunately, at the start Shapiro does make clear what he's arguing against. He says "Miracles, I argue, should be understood as events that are the result of supernatural, typically divine, forces." Now at this point, I still wonder what is meant by this term supernatural. I don't see atheists and skeptics define it a lot and the supernatural/natural dichotomy makes no sense to me.
I can't help but wonder how familiar Shapiro is with some miracle arguments when he says "Why do we think that it's perfectly natural that a stone falls when dropped or that metal expands when heated or that days are shorter in the winter than in the summer? We do so because these events and others like them happen all the time." Of course, Hume himself said that dropping a stone 1,000 times and watching it fall will not prove that it will fall the 1,001st time.
At the start of his story The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton wrote about a man who was amazed about all that did happen like that. It is amazing when a train reaches the correct stop or a letter reaches the correct address because there was a potentially infinite number of places it could have gone to. All of these are a way of establishing order in the universe.
Why bring this up? Because unknowingly to Shapiro I suspect, when he makes statements like this, he's upholding the theism he would be arguing against. This is, in fact, part and parcel of the fifth way of Thomas Aquinas. The fact that there is expected order at all is something that needs to be explained and with more than "We see it happen every day." You may see a man kiss his wife every day, but that doesn't mean you don't need to know of a reason behind it.
Right after this, Shapiro does bring up the natural/supernatural distinction which he thinks that nearly everyone accepts. Perhaps they do, but for what reason? I contend that it is not a good one as I have questioned Christians and atheists on this one and never received replies that make sense of the distinction. I prefer to speak of objects acting according to their nature unless other objects or forces or beings intervene.
I'm not surprised when I get to Location 571 in my Kindle reading and read "If science tells us anything, it's that the dead tend to stay that way." Normally, this kind of statement isn't really spelled out which makes it all the more humorous. Perhaps Shapiro just isn't aware that man in the past has always tended to bury or dispose of the dead in some way. We learned pretty quickly that they're not coming back. If this is the discovery of modern science, then please tell me which scientist discovered this and when it took place. We know more scientifically about death, but you don't have to be a scientist to know that dead people stay dead.
Shapiro then says something about the inference to the best explanation. It's understandable that when you see something science can't seem to explain, such as a statue crying, you can infer that the cause must be something outside the realm of science (Which is what he would call supernatural.). There's nothing wrong with the reasoning per se. We do it all the time with what we can't observe.
At this point, I wonder about the question of goodness. Do we observe goodness? Hume would have said we didn't. You talk about how the action feels to you and you impress that onto the action. Myself being a Thomist, would prefer to say that the goodness is in the action itself and you recognize it as such. Science cannot explain this goodness. It's a metaphysical quality. This is not to insult science. It's just properly recognizing the limits of science.
At 841, Shapiro tells us that whatever we assume about God's nature is purely speculative. Really, they're guesses. Somehow, Aristotle and Aquinas and other thinkers didn't get that memo. They used reasoning about metaphysical matters to arrive at a conclusion about God they could argue for. Sadly, Shapiro never bothers to look at such arguments.
Shortly after, he starts to say something about the resurrection. He tells us that there is a better natural explanation, that for instance, the women went to the wrong tomb or the body was stolen by grave robbers. These would surely explain the data better.
Except they don't. Kirsopp Lake tried the wrong tomb explanation long ago. It never got much ground. Anyone would have been happy to point out the right tomb. As for grave robbers, grave robbers would normally not steal the whole body but only the parts they needed. None of these would explain either the appearances or the conversion of skeptics like Paul and James.
But hey, Shapiro just needs a just so story. Just throw it out and boom, you've shown what a better thinker you are. Obviously, this is something that has never crossed the mind of Christians ever.
It's ironic he says this in response to Licona's book on the resurrection where counter-theories would be dealt with. He also says Licona cannot say that this is a miracle. Unfortunately for Shapiro, Licona regularly speaks about what a miracle is. It's described as an event that goes beyond the laws of nature and takes place in an atmosphere charged with religious significance.
A blind man sits at home one day and all of a sudden, BOOM!, his eyes are open and he can see. Is this a miracle? Maybe.Maybe not. On Licona's terms, it wouldn't look like it just yet. Meanwhile, a blind man is at a church service and people gather around him and pray in faith that in the name of Jesus the man's eyes would be opened. The man can then see. This would be a miracle.
Shapiro also gives an account of Sally. Sally is a little girl who is amazingly accurate with all she says. Unfortunately, she's also boring. She talks about mundane things regularly. Then one day you see Sally and she talks about how she's been an alien hostage for twelve years and had gone through a wormhole and because of that, it will seem to us like she was never gone. After all of the description, he asks if we should believe her. His reply is we shouldn't.
I have a different reply. I understand skepticism. By all means, be skeptical, but instead, ask "Okay. What is the evidence?" Could we take Sally to a doctor to check her for bruises? Could we see where the abduction took place to see some residue? Could Sally tell us facts about the universe and such she would not have known otherwise that we can verify?
Does that seem bizarre to you? Why should it? What is wrong with receiving a strange claim and just asking "What is the evidence?" I'm skeptical of alien abductions, but I am sure that if someone was abducted by aliens, they would want to talk about it. Should I discount the story immediately without seeing the evidence they have?
Shapiro also gives an account of a disease that can only be treated if caught early. The disease is a deadly one, but the treatment leaves one in a horrid state. The test for the disease is accurate when it says someone has it 999 out of 1,000 times. The test says you have it. Should you get the treatment?
Shapiro argues that there is in fact overall a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of getting the disease. Since I am not a specialist on probability, I spoke to my friend Tim McGrew on this, who is a specialist on this. According to him, this means that at the start, the probability you have the disease is .0000001. If the test makes it a thousand times more likely that you have it, your odds are still ,0001.
McGrew says that in that case, it might not be wise to get the treatment regardless of what the test says, but what if there are other tests? What if you can go to other doctors and find other means? Each of these will increase the odds. Should you not at least consider doing this?
McGrew also points out that events like miracles are not like catching a disease where one in a certain population will get it as a random event in the universe. A miracle is a deliberate action by an agent. It is not as if we bury people and one out of every 10,000,000 will rise from the dead.
Shapiro also says with other events, we have more independent sources and other evidence, such as if we take the account that a volcano destroyed Pompeii. I find this one quite amusing since for Pompeii, we only have one direct reference to it. We have allusions to it, but it's only mentioned by Pliny to Tacitus telling about why his uncle died in an off-the-cuff remark. It's not until Cassius Dio centuries later that we learn that Herculaneum was destroyed.
Amazingly, Shapiro does concede that if God exists and He is omnipotent, this raises the probability that the resurrection happened to one. You would think that someone would want to look at theistic arguments at that point, but it looks like Shapiro doesn't. Shapiro in fact asks why not believe in aliens or other entities that raised Jesus. If Shapiro wants to make a case for any of those, he's welcome to it. We will make our case for a theism consistent with the Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments and see which explanation makes the better case.
It's sadly not much of a shock when Shapiro goes also to "the historian Richard Carrier." (Cue Yakity Sax playing in your head right now.) I could repeat all that Carrier says here in comparing Jesus's resurrection to the crossing of the Rubicon, but I have done that elsewhere. Keep in mind also that in historical statements about this event, Shapiro says "We have the written reports that historians produced a couple hundred years after the event." Keep this in mind because this tells us right now that a couple of hundred years isn't a problem.
Doug Geivett was also the one who made the claim originally that the evidence of Jesus rising from the dead is comparable to that of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Shapiro says Geivett would be disappointed to learn that Carrier thinks the Biblical miracles are made up. No, I quite contend that Geivett would not be at all disappointed, other than disappointment for the possible salvation of Carrier. Carrier's positions are getting more and more to the extreme that it looks more and more that if Carrier says something is true, the opposite is far more likely to be true.
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