This is a special bonus post in my Comparing Religions series…  I originally wrote it as a section of the post about evidence of fraud, but it seemed to work better thematically as its own post.

Unfulfilled Prophecies

Another point worth considering is the question of false prophecies, that fail to come true on schedule.  As the Book of Deuteronomy indicates, these are one possible sign of a false prophet:

You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?”

If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.  (18:21-22)

As an example, the Watchtower Society is particularly notorious for a history of making false predictions and then creatively reinterpreting them.  For example they claimed Jesus would return to Earth in 1914, and then when that failed to occur decided that that date was when he started reigning “invisibly”, a serious anticlimax.

It would be tedious, and require an entire dissertation, to enumerate all of the examples of failed prophecy among various cults.  (To be truly complete I ought to try to examine at least the major religions, but this post will be mainly Christianity-centered.)

(Incidentially, “prophecy” is a much broader concept than predicting the future—a prophet is anyone with a message from God (or one of the gods, in polytheistic religions); and such messages can concern the past or present just as often as predicting the future.  The questions “What is God like?” and “How should people behave?” are central to how prophecy is conceived in Abrahamic religions.  So the colloquial definition of prophecy,as “predicting the future” is far too narrow to describe prophecy as classically conceived.  Neverthless, prophecy in the Bible certainly does also contain numerous predictions about the future, and that is the concern of this post.)

Prophecy and Evidence

Obviously, if a prophecy comes true in a verifiable manner, that counts as (some) evidence for the religion in question.  (How much evidence, depends on a variety of factors, including (1) how certain it is that the prophecy was written down before the events it predicted, (2) how unlikely the event was to occur naturally, and (3) the degree to which the new prophecy is consistent with previous revelations, etc.)

Conversely, if a prophecy has not come to pass, this could count as evidence against the religion.  It is however important to make a distinction between an unfulfilled prophecy, and a falsified prophecy.

An unfulfilled prophecy is one that simply has not happened yet.  For example, the claim of all Abrahamic religions that God will raise every human being from the dead at the Final Judgement has not been fulfilled yet.  However, the fact that this has not happened yet does not mean it is not going to!  After all, events in the future are not (apart from the prophecy itself) observable in the present.  (Of course, the universal resurrection of the dead is quite impossible in a Naturalistic worldview, but here we are discussing religious worldviewsin which God exists, and has the power to do miracles.)

Thus, an unfulfilled prophecy does not necessarily provide much evidence or or against a religion, unless there is good reason to think it should already have happened, or that it is impossible for it to occur.

(In Bayesian terms, if a prophecy being fulfilled counts as evidence for a religion, a prophecy not being fulfilled always counts as some evidence against the religion, so long as there is a nonzero chance that the prophecy could have already been fulfilled by now.  But under favorable circumstances, for example when the prophecy is plausibly about the distant future, the amount of disconfirmation can be quite small.)

On the other hand, a falsified prophecy is one that is definitely not going to occur.  (At least, absent some major reinterpretation of what it means.  Such reinterpretation is often a logically possibility, but one that must be paid for evidentially if the new interpretation is implausible.  One should be especially suspicious when the prophet himself engages in creative reinterpretation, since there are obvious self-justifying motivations there.  Especially if the prophet tried to convince people to take it literally before the events were falsified, and only spins the prophecy after people start complaining it didn’t happen.)

The most common reason for a prophecy to be falsified is if the prophet placed some date or time constraint on the prophecy.  If the date comes to pass, and the event didn’t occur, and if there is no valid excuse for God to pull a fast one and change his plan, then whoops it looks like you’ve been following a false prophet!  Time to repent and find a better religious guide.  On the other hand, a merely unfulfilled prophecy is perfectly compatible with the truth of a religion.

Swords to Plowshares

All of this makes it sound like prophecy exists solely for purposes of apologetic arguments.  From this perspective, a not-yet fulfilled prophecy is a wash, and may seem irrelevant.

This is a misconception.  Just because a prophecy is unfulfilled, doesn’t mean it isn’t important to the present.  In fact, if it weren’t spiritually relevant in some way to the time period before the fulfillment, there would be no point in God revealing it.  For example, when Isaiah says that:

[The Lord] will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.  (2:4)

it is immediately obvious that this prophecy (universal peace) has not yet come true.  But that is not the only thing going on in the mind of a reader.  We are also struck by the thought that it ought to be true.  The goal is accepted as valid by the heart, even before the mind rejects it as a fact.

Ending war is precisely the sort of thing that a benevolent God should do.  And if he has not done it yet, it still tells us something about God that he has promised to do it.  And it tells us something about the human race, that we instinctively accept it as an ideal, even as we fall so far short of the reality.  This is why the prophet goes on to say:

“Come, descendants of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the LORD.”  (2:5)

In other words, the belief in future universal peace can inspire us to be peacemakers in a more limited way today.  Even though it will take an act of God to make the reality of peace universal, taking it as the ideal still influences how we see the world of today.  (Indeed, it is probably not be an exaggeration to say that the modern international ideal of working towards “world peace” would probably not exist if the Hebrew prophets had never spoken.  This ethical imperative still inspires us as moderns, even if many have forgotten its source.)

The Second Coming

With this in mind, let us consider Jesus’ own claims about his Second Coming, since this is one of the few skeptical objections specific to Christianity which is worth taking seriously.

The ministry of Jesus intersects prophecy along multiple axes.  For example, there is a conversation to be had about the many ways in which Jesus’ ministry fulfilled the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible.  This was the topic of some previous posts.

But Jesus also made some predictions about the future, and the most important one has to do with his return to Earth to judge the world (and to usher in the universal peace between nations we’ve just been discussing!)  This is called the Second Coming.

For those less familiar with Christian theology: it is important that this Second Coming does not refer to some new incarnation as another human person born subsequent to Jesus Christ.  It refers to Jesus himself returning to Earth with the same human flesh that was born of a Jewish girl, nailed to a cross, and which is now immortal and glorified—but still fully human!—in the immediate presence of God.  (Whatever that means… Christians do not believe that God the Father literally has a body, so the sense of “presence” here is some mode other than spatial location.  In the Lord’s Prayer, “Heaven” is identified as the place where God’s will is perfectly done.)

As it says in Psalm 110, in a verse quoted by the New Testament many times:

The LORD says to my lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.” (Psalm 110:1)

In Christian interpretation, this passage means: God says to the Messiah, ascend to where I am and rule from there, until some future time when I will make all of your enemies submit to you.  This logically implies, that there will be a period of time after Christ ascends to Heaven, but before everyone recognizes him as their Lord.

Jesus on the Timing

Now obviously, if Jesus really talked about his coming back after an absence, this indicates that he saw at least some chronological gap between his present ministry and that future date.  The Gospels also portray Jesus as foreseeing his own humiliation and death.  This indicates that he had a far better grasp on reality than the typical first-century Messianic claimant, who expected to overthrow the Romans and set up an earthly kingdom in Judea, along the lines of the Maccabean revolt which took place a couple centuries before.

But it is sometimes claimed (especially by certain biblical scholars) that Jesus made a point of predicting that his return would be soon, within a single generation; and that when this failed to occur the Church retrospectively changed their understanding.  This is a serious accusation, and if true would significantly affect the New Testament’s credibility.  It is true that there are a few passages in the Gospels which can be interpreted as making such predictions.  But this interpretation is not simple, seeing as there are also a great many passages indicating the opposite.

In fact, in most of his parables about the subject, Jesus usually implies that the Bridegroom’s or Master’s return will take a long time, and that many people will get tired of waiting.  Again and again, he makes a point of saying that the timing will be a surprise:

“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.  But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into.  So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”  (Matt 24:42)

and that not even he could predict the date:

“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”  (Mark 13:32)

A More Problematic Passage

But what about the passage in which Jesus says:

“Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” (Matt 24:34) ?

In his essay “The World’s Last Night”, C.S. Lewis interpreted this as a rare example of Jesus being in error, writing that:

It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.

but he suggests it is nevertheless compatible with Christian theology because:

The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance [i.e. Mark 13:32] grow side by side.

However I do not accept St. Lewis’ interpretation as a valid solution to this problem.  Yes, Jesus did confess ignorance (at least with respect to his human knowledge), but the appropriate response to ignorance is to remain silent, not to make a bold and possibly erroneous prediction!

It is true that in orthodox Chalcedonian theology, Christ is regarded as being fully human as well as fully divine.  His human nature was just like ours in every way but sin.  And ignorance is not the same thing as sin.  Thus, even though Christ was God and therefore knew everything with respect to his divine omniscience, it does not follow that he knew every fact according to human modes of knowledge.  (Presumably an infinite number of facts can’t fit into an ordinary human brain, at least in this life, even if that human brain is fully united with the divine Logos.)  Anyway, St. Luke tells us quite explicitly that Jesus “grew in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52) as a child, and growth in wisdom implies learning.

However, none of this leads me to think that Christ could have made a major blunder of theology with respect to his public teaching.  After all, Christ’s words were guided by the Holy Spirit, even more so than in the case of an ordinary prophet, seeing as he was filled with the Spirit “without measure” (John 3:34).  Christ’s teachings in the New Testament have spiritual authority; and thus it would be a major, major problem for Christianity if Jesus had given an untrue prophecy, especially about such a central point.

My Preferred Explanation

I would rather explain this passage with reference to its full context.   All of the verses just quoted are contained within a discourse called the Olivet Discourse, which begins with a question asked by the disciples on the Tuesday before the Crucifixion.  There are three different versions of this speech in different gospels.  Notably, in St. Matthew’s version, the disciples’ question has two parts (numbers and brackets mine):

Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings.  “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said,

(1) “when will this happen, [i.e. the Destruction of the Temple]

(2)  and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

It can be seen that these are two separate questions, and that (whatever the disciples might have thought when they asked them) the correct chronological answers two these two questions are also quite different.

Regarding (1), the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, which is indeed within one generation (the Jews conventionally reckoned a generation as being 40 years long, and Jesus died around 30-33 AD).  So this part of the prophecy is actually a spectacular success.

(Many of Jesus’ subsequent predictions also seem to have come true: that Christians would go on to be persecuted, that the Gospel would be preached to all nations, that many false prophets would arise, and that “wars and rumors of wars” would go on during all this time, as they always do.  However, the emphasis of this part of the speech is more about Jesus forewarning the disciples about the problems they will face, rather than gratifying the disciples’ curiosity about the exact shape of future history.)

Regarding (2), Jesus has not yet returned, so there’s been a delay of at least 1988 years, as of the time of this blog post.

And we can give up any idea of an “invisible” coming, or coming in an obscured way as some other historical person, seeing as Jesus is pretty explicit that his Second Coming will be totally obvious to everyone when it finally happens:

“At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it.  For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.  See, I have told you ahead of time.

So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it.  For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

So to fully answer the disciples’ question, Jesus needs to provide two different chronological answers, and in fact Jesus gives both correct answers—the answer to (1) is “this generation shall certainly not pass away”, while the answer to (2) is that nobody has any clue when it will happen, not even the Son himself!  Without this assumption, it is difficult to read the text as even consistent with itself, let alone history.

Indeed, the account in Luke’s Gospel does seem to anticipate a chronological gap between (1) and (2), with a pivot at the verse which says:

Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

which seems to suggest an unknown interval of time, and separates the predictions related to the Destruction of the Temple from the predictions related to the End Times (although not from the sayings about timing).

It is true that the chronological answers to  (1) and (2) are not clearly organized in the Gospels as we have them.  The Synoptic Gospels were most likely written before the Destruction of the Temple (arguments to the contrary tend to be based on the Methodologically Naturalist assumption that predictive prophecy is impossible).

Jesus himself may have been grouping the two events thematically, as two examples of Tribulation/Judgement.  Not unlike how the prophet Isaiah likes to talks about the Resurrection and the Return from Exile in conjunction with each other.  Both are showing history more from God’s perspective, rather than from a human perspective.  (We already knew what the human perspective looks like!)

It seems probable that the disciples themselves were confused by this, and did not clearly distinguish Jesus’ words about timing with respect to their proper referents.  The fact that the Church preserved four different accounts of Jesus’ life, in which the wordings of the same speech is often slightly different, acknowledges the reality that Jesus is a historical figure and that our knowledge of his life is mediated through human witnesses.

(This does not, I think, contradict any Christian doctrines about divine inspiration of the Gospels.  The Christian version of inspiration is that the Holy Spirit guided the writing process so as to reveal the truths he wanted to reveal; and that every single part of the Bible is, in this sense, the word of God; and thus authoritative and Christ-revealing.  It does not mean that all the truths in Scripture are always exposited in an equally clear and manifest fashion, without obscurity.  Nor does it mean that the documents are in no way limited by the human perspectives of their authors, or somehow not subject to the vicissitudes of the textual copying process.  The Bible is divine words and human words at the same time, and neither authorship negates the other.  This means that the Bible is not always the book that Fundamentalists want it to be.  But I very much doubt that having that book would have been good for us!)

Another Verse

As for the similar sounding verse in Mark 9:1:

And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

I would interpret this verse as referring, not to the Second Coming (nor to the Transfiguration which immediately follows, as the guy who divided up the Bible into chapters apparently thought) but rather to Jesus’ Resurrection and the inauguration of the Church, which was indeed the establishment of God’s kingdom in Christian theology.

Jesus overcoming human sin and death, appearing to chosen witnesses, and sending the Holy Spirit to soften human hearts, does not seem like quite as much of an inconsequential anti-climax as a hypothetical coming in 1914 that didn’t seem to change anything for anyone.  But then I would say that as a Christian, wouldn’t I?

Weighing Evidence

Since this is a series about comparing evidence for different religions, the question must be raised: to what extent should these sorts of rationalizations count as plausible explanations to skeptics, or for those in non-Christian traditions?

Here, I think it is important to get over the idea that a problem in biblical theology must either be a killing blow which refutes a religion entirely; or else it is no big deal and can be safely ignored after one accepts a pat explanation.  It is possible for an apparent theological discrepancy to provide some mild evidence against a religion, if there are plausible-sounding explanations, but those explanations also seem a bit contrived in other respects.  To determine how significant the problem is, one would then need to consider the rest of the cumulative case for the religion.

So it is perfectly possible for me to admit that some verses of the Bible provide some evidence against Christian doctrines, without immediately throwing the whole system overboard.  Instead one has to accept some things on the credit of the system as a whole.  I hope I am showing the same courtesy to the non-Christian religions, by not over-emphasizing isolated difficulties, but instead trying to assess what seem to be the key issues.

It would be quite astonishing if there were no difficulties to get over in the interpretation of any text which is thousands of years old, and which purports to reveal the intrusion of something from outside the spacetime continuum.  If there were no difficulties, that would itself be a difficulty, since it would be the mark of a human-made religion with no sharp corners or untidy edges.  (Quantum mechanics is weird, why shouldn’t theology be too?)

Descent of the Spirit

OK, somebody might say, but even if you can get over the fact of Jesus’ own predictions, it’s still true that he didn’t fulfill all of the Messianic prophecies, or any of them in the particular way that the Jews were expecting.  The Jews expected the Messiah to set up an earthly kingdom.  Jesus didn’t.  Even if you can get over the comments about “this generation”, isn’t this still an ad hoc attempt to get over the embarrassing problem that Jesus never fulfilled half the stuff he was supposed to do?  The swords were never all beaten into plowshares, and it doesn’t look like our nuclear missiles are going to be reforged into tractors anytime soon either!

I agree that this delay may seem strange to a person who is not themselves caught up into the story of Jesus.   But I do not think it is so arbitrary as it might seem at first.  Even in the period between Jesus’ Resurrection and his Ascension to Heaven, it was still hard for the disciples to give up the idea of an immediate earthly kingdom:

After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.

On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about.  For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”  (Acts 1:3-6)

Jesus reminds them, quite conspicuously, that the time of the Second Coming is unknown, and re-directs their attention to a different promise:

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  (1:7-8, emphasis mine)

Given these words, it seems pretty hard to imagine that St. Luke (the author of Acts) was under the impression that Jesus had committed himself to a definite timetable for the Second Coming.

The central story of Christianity is that of a rejected, suffering, forgiving Messiah.  What is the natural conclusion of the story?  A ruling, peacemaking Messiah, yes; but first something else.  I am afraid that from God’s point of view, the next installment of the story involves us.  Christ says to his disciples: “I bled and died for you out of love.  Now you must do the same thing.  And if you are willing to do it, I will give you my Spirit to guide you.”  [Not a direct quote, but clear enough from the Gospels.]

I can see why one would not want to hear these words, but from an aesthetic and theological point of view, they make perfect sense.  If we humans are in the image of God, then wherever God leads, we must follow.  As he sacrificed his live for us, we must now sacrifice our lives for one another, even for those who do not yet believe.  We too must live out the Christian life, even if it means we will be rejected and despised (in which case we must also forgive!).

We are called to be saints; the holy ones of God.  How can we think we will be excused from suffering?  If Christ had come in a single generation, then where would St. Francis and St. Corrie Ten Boom and Mother Theresa be?  Where would the martyrs be?  Nowhere; they would not exist.

Nor should we excuse ourselves from the call to holiness.  Even if our own spiritual fruits are not yet so great as these, there is no telling what God may do with us in the future, if we allow him.

Many generations of Christians have been tempted to think that things have gotten bad enough that Christ should return and put an end to human misery.  Yet, looking back on history we can see that the human growth and development of the Church would have been incomplete, without all the chances to build monasteries, universities, reformations, modern science, civil rights movements, etc.  All of these historical situations—with their unique mixes of good and bad—have been settings where the saints have needed to creatively adapt the life of Christ, to new situations.  (In another thousand years, perhaps we will be thinking how much we would have lost if history had ended before space travel!)

We human beings may often fail the tests that history presents, but I do not think this matters quite as much as one might think.  Even failure allows for learning, just as suffering allows for growth.  To be sure, the whole story would come to nothing, if Christ were not coming to deliver us in the end.  But if he does bring the whole thing to a satisfactory conclusion, I think we can see why that conclusion might be better if it comes later, rather than sooner.

Pentecost 2021

Next: Moral Depth

The next questions are best considered together:

8. Did the main witnesses benefit materially from their testimony, or did they suffer for it?

9. Is there significant evidence of fraud among the originators of the religion?

Jesus preached a message of self-sacrifice, and went to the Cross.  His Apostles, although respected in the Christian church, could reasonably expect to live unpleasant lives and be killed for their testimony.  Tradition states that nearly all the Apostles were martyred, and we have pretty good historical documentation of this in the case of a few key eye-witnesses (Sts. Peter, Paul, James the Apostle, and James the brother of Jesus).

On the other hand, many cult leaders have deliberately created religions on purpose in order to get money, sex, and fame.  If the religious leader gets plenty of women, wealth and power, then one can reasonably suspect ulterior motives.  Especially if their “revelations” support their own power-seeking agenda.

Certainly, if a religious leader engaged in other sorts of fraud, confidence schemes, crimes or other immoral conduct, that should be a huge red flag!  (Especially if they did so after starting their religion; but even frauds committed beforehand serve as evidence of character, especially if they didn’t show any signs of remorse.)

If you are a follower of any of the religious founders mentioned below, I ask for your patience and tolerance, as an adequate exploration of this topic is bound to touch on some sensitive issues.  But on a matter as important as this, I think it is important for me to tell the truth as I see it, even when the facts do not seem to be very flattering to the individuals concerned.

L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology)

For example, in the case of Hubbard, he is well known to have told multiple people beforehand that “the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion,” prior to founding Scientology and fleecing tens of millions of dollars from gullible marks.  (The main way to advance in Scientology is to pay the “Church” tons of money for classes.)

This suggests an “Hubbard test” for diagnosing false prophets.  If they get a gazillion bucks or lots of sex from preaching their religion, then any testimony they give about the divine is tainted given the obvious incentives for them to do what they are doing.

Some other cult leaders pretty obviously fail this test:

Joseph Smith (Latter Day Saints, i.e. “Mormonism”)

Prior to becoming a religious founder, Joseph Smith was already notorious for scamming people out of their money to fund “treasure hunts” using seer stones, to the extent that he eventually faced prosecution:

Smith was arrested for disturbing the peace, a charge commonly used for charlatans and tricksters, and according to the Vagrant Act of New York included those “pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found.” Referred to as “The Glass Looker” in court documents, Joseph openly admitted to indulging in magic arts and organizing hunts for buried gold. New York law provided punishment for disorderly persons, whose definition included jugglers (conjurors), diviners, and those pretending to have skill in discovering lost goods. The charge aligns with uncle Jesse Smith’s description of Joseph: “He says he has eyes to see things that are not, and then has the audacity to say they are, and that the angel of the Lord . . . has put him in possession of great wealth, gold, silver, precious stones.”

Given that no treasure ever materialized, Stowell’s nephew, Peter Bridgeman took legal action after he became sufficiently concerned over Smith’s unfulfilled promises, ever-increasing requests for money and complaints about treasure slipping away at the slightest infraction. In his complaint, he wrote: “Mr. Stowell is represented as being not a very bright man, but he had saved considerable money for those times, and Joe Smith managed to get and spend most of it.”

And after being commissioned as a “Prophet”, Smith came up with a purported divine revelation in which “God” [actually Joseph Smith] tells Emma that he could break his oath to her and marry additional wives, with her consent:

61 And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else. (Doctrine and Covenants 132)

Oh, wait, just kidding about her permission being required: if she rejects the institution of plural marriage God will punish her and Smith will be exempted from that requirement:

64 And again, verily, verily, I say unto you, if any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her; for I will magnify my name upon all those who receive and abide in my law.

65 Therefore, it shall be lawful in me, if she receive not this law, for him to receive all things whatsoever I, the Lord his God, will give unto him, because she did not believe and administer unto him according to my word; and she then becomes the transgressor; and he is exempt from the law of Sarah, who administered unto Abraham according to the law when I commanded Abraham to take Hagar to wife.

(Obviously, any attempts of Smith to state that he only very reluctantly accepted the religious obligation to sleep with a bunch of attractive young women should be regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism.)

Oh, and don’t read too much into the “virgin” bit either, since Joseph also liked to convince married women into sleeping with him, under the guise of offering an “eternal marriage”, including some women he seduced without the knowledge or permission of his first wife Emma!  (Here is corroboration of the factual aspects by a Mormon apologetics site, along with some unconvincing attempts to argue that it isn’t really adultery to have sexual relations with women who are legally married to other men.)

And finally Smith’s “martyrdom” in prison doesn’t really have a huge amount of evidential value regarding his sincerity, given that he was shooting his assailants at the time.  These are not the actions of a man resigned to death.

Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science)

Mary Baker Eddy made some dictatorial rules for her church which include: 1) not bothering her with information she didn’t want to know, 2) always calling her by her proper title, 3) the right to make any female congregant serve her as a personal maid in her home.  What a &$@!

Apparently she was also paranoid that people would “maliciously mesmerize” her, and would excommunicate people for this offense on the turn of a dime.  This is not the kind of suffering for one’s faith that makes it more credible.

Sun Myung Moon (Unification Church)

The abusive antics of Sun Myung Moon (and his supposedly sinless family) are similarly well documented.  Moon’s doctrine was that he could create a new perfect human family by, well abuse.  According to the link above:

While Moon’s theology had geopolitical ambitions, he saw his family as the means for realizing his vision. At the age of 40, he married his cook’s daughter, a delicate 17-year-old beauty named Hak Ja Han. Moon claimed that their union marked the beginning of the “completed testament” era, in which Moon would reverse the fall of man by making his wife pay penance for Eve’s sins. For three years, he stashed Hak Ja Han in a rented room, kept her in bitter poverty, and forbid her from seeing her family. The goal was to rid her of Eve-like defiance and cultivate “absolute obedience” so that she could bear children free of original sin. By the winter of 1960, the first of these perfect children had arrived.

It turns out that when you teach your cult that your children are literally perfect, they turn out kind of messed up:

The task of caring for the messiah’s children fell to his followers, who didn’t dare discipline them. “The Moon kids were like gods—completely and utterly exempt from the rules,” says Donna Orme-Collins, a onetime Unificationist whose father directed the British church. Moon’s eldest son, Steve, a plain, slender boy, was particularly brazen. In the late ’70s, he was expelled from an elite middle school for shooting students with a BB gun. Moon sent him to live with Bo Hi Pak, but Steve’s behavior only deteriorated. He started doing drugs and picking fights, and Pak was unable to rein him in. At one point, according to members of the Moon and Pak families, Pak even resorted to spanking his own son—a sweet, studious boy who went by the American name James Park—when Steve got out of line.

You can click on the link above for the rest of the sordid story.

[Including a connection to Hunter Biden, for you political junkies!  I wrote the first draft of this post well before the Trump scandal, so I was a bit surprised to find him there when I reread the article.]

The cult leaders above are somewhat niche figures, who preached messages which could also be rejected on more philosophical grounds.  But now I would ask you to bear with me as we apply the same test to the founder of a major world religion:

Mohammad (Islam)

While Mohammad’s persistence under persecution during the early phases of his ministry is quite impressive, it would have been more impressive if the later stages of his career did not contain so much retaliation and bloodshed.

Similarly, while his moderation when it came to material possessions was admirable, it is blemished by his lack of self-restraint when it comes to sex; although other Muslim men were limited to 4 wives (plus slave women), he allowed himself 11 at once (plus slave women).  As it says in the Quran:

Prophet, We have made lawful for you the wives whose bride gift you have paid, and any slaves God has assigned to you through war, and the daughters of your uncles and aunts on your father’s and mother’s sides, who migrated with you.  Also any believing woman who has offered herself to the Prophet and whom the Prophet wishes to wed—this is only for you and not the rest of the believers.  We know exactly what We have made obligatory for them concerning their wives and slave-girls—so you should not be blamed: God is most forgiving, most merciful.

You may make any of [your women] wait and receive them as you wish, but you will not be at fault if you invite one whose turn you previously set aside: this way it is more likely they will be satisfied and will not be distressed and will all be content with what you have given them.  God knows what is in your hearts: God is all knowing, forbearing.  You are not permitted to take any further wives, nor to exchange the wives you have with others, even if these attract you with their beauty.  But this does not apply to your slave-girls: God is watchful over all.  (Haleem translation of Sura 33:50-52)

His immediate Companions also received significant quantities of status and booty, through military victory, as a result of their close connection to their prophet.

While many of them fought courageously and died in battle, and many doubtless sincerely believed Mohammad’s prophecies, those who survived were able to profit considerably from the new religion.  This has to be taken into consideration when evaluating their testimony.

Regarding evidence of possible deception, there are a few red flags, in which divine revelations to Mohammad just so happened to come out in an extremely “convenient” way for him personally.  Here are three particularly notable incidents, each of them reported by faithful Muslims (and each partially corroborated by the Quran):

1) Visibly coveting a wife he gave to his adopted son Zayd, then later (after they divorced) making a ruling that adoption isn’t legal in Islam, thus allowing Mohammad himself to marry her (otherwise it would have been considered incest according to the Arab culture of the time).  Part of this event is alluded to in Sura 33:37-40 of the Quran:

When you said to the man who had been favored by God and by you, `Keep your wife and be mindful of God’, you hid in your heart what God would later reveal: you were afraid of people, but it is more fitting that you fear God.  When Zayd no longer wanted her, We gave her to you in marriage so that there might be no fault in believers marrying the wives of their adopted sons after they no longer wanted them.  God’s command must be carried out: the Prophet is not at fault for what God has ordained for him.  This was God’s practice with those who went before—God’s command must be fulfilled—[with] those who deliver God’s messages and fear only Him and no other: God’s reckoning is enough.  Muhammed is not the father of any one of you men; he is God’s Messenger and the seal of the prophets: God knows everything.  (Haleem)

In other words, under the guise of forbidding adoption, he changed the rules about incest in order to benefit himself personally.  Of course he said God was the one changing the rules, but we have only his word for it, and the motivations don’t look good here.

[Incidentally, this is another difference with the New Testament, which talks about adoption as a metaphor for how God welcomes us as his own family.]

2) Raising the number of required eyewitnesses needed for an adultery accusation to 4, after his favorite wife Aisha was accused of misconduct, and (absurdly) mandating punishment for all those who testify, if not enough witnesses are found:

Those who accuse married women of adultery, then fail to produce four witnesses, you shall whip them eighty lashes, and do not accept any testimony from them; they are wicked.  If they repent afterwards and reform, then God is Forgiver, Merciful.  (Sura 24:4)

For all I know Aisha was in fact innocent, but that does not justify introducing permanent injustices into the legal system, to protect the interests of a single person.  It is quite obvious that simply failing to meet an enormously high burden of proof, does not automatically imply that those testifying are guilty of perjury.

Perhaps (as many Western countries now seem to believe) the best legal system should not punish adultery at all.  But what is the point of making it punishable but also virtually impossible to try to prove it without incurring serious consequences?

3) The “Satanic Verses” incident, in which Mohammad apparently revealed some verses for Sura 53 of the Quran, making concessions to Meccan polytheism.  Then he back-pedalled by saying that Satan had actually recited that verse in his voice!

Then he claimed that all previous prophets had had the same issue.  This implausible self-justification can be found in Sura 24:52-55:

And We did not send before you any messenger or prophet except that when he spoke [or recited], Satan threw into it [some misunderstanding].  But Allah abolishes that which Satan throws in; then Allah makes precise His verses.  And Allah is Knowing and Wise.  [That is] so He may make what Satan throws in a trial for those within whose hearts is disease and those hard of heart.  And indeed, the wrongdoers are in extreme dissension.  And so those who were given knowledge may know that it is the truth from your Lord and [therefore] believe in it, and their hearts humbly submit to it.  And indeed is Allah the Guide of those who have believed to a straight path.  But those who disbelieve will not cease to be in doubt of it until the Hour comes upon them unexpectedly or there comes to them the punishment of a barren Day.

This incident is discussed in more detail by early Muslim traditions, which describe the details of the previously revealed verse and how Mohammad corrected it.

(Many Muslim hadith scholars do not accept as authentic any of the hadith giving the story of the previously “revealed” Satanic verse, due to various defects in the relevant chains of transmission.  However, I think some allowance must be made for the unwillingness of Muslims to propogate material so embarrassing to their Prophet.  The tradition is still credible because: a) there are multiple early sources, b) it was accepted by the earliest Muslim biographers, and c) it makes coherent sense of the verses above in the Quran.)

If there were events of this kind narrated in the New Testament, that would make it a lot harder for me to trust it.  Especially if there seemed to be a pattern of self-serving behavior.

What about their justifications for this behavior?

Of course, it is always possible for a person who claims to speak for God to make up some reason for why what they are doing is justified.  When you have the social ability to freely invent stories about why you had to abuse people for the sake of their immortal souls or whatever, and if you have a community who trusts you enough that these claims are believed, this gives you a lot of power!  So it’s playing with the net down to ask whether the religious founder was justified by their own strictures, given their ability to amend those rules at any moment (although many cult leaders do not even meet this low standard).  It’s better to ask:

1. To what extent did these religious leaders follow the ordinary conventional moral rules about fair play, chastity etc. that everyone in their culture already knew about?

2. To the extent they argued for changes to the rules, did they follow the same rules which they imposed on everyone else?  Are they a good example of what they are preaching?

(We can also ask if the new moral teachings are an improvement on what came before, but that is the subject of the next post in the series.)

From the perspective of a prospective follower who has to decide whether to place their trust in a claimed religious leader, one cannot simply accept at face value a prophet’s claim to be a good person.

If I am supposed to accept somebody as a representative of God on the basis of their moral character, then that moral character needs to, at a minimum, be recognizably good by my own standards, even if in certain respects it goes beyond what I already know.  If I also have to take their moral goodness on faith—if they use their status to behave like a person on a power-trip would—then there is no good reason to take their claim seriously.

Jesus (Christianity)

It is generally pretty easy to tell whether a religious founder craves money and sex and ego.  Just look to see whether they in fact fleece their followers for money and pressure a bunch of girls into sleeping with them!  These kinds of religious leaders justify Jesus’ statement that:

All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them.  I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.  They will come in and go out, and find pasture.  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep.  So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.  Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it.  The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.  (John 10:7-13)

This should not be interpreted as saying that no sincere religious leaders ever existed before Jesus, since we know for a fact that Jesus regarded Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah etc. as authentic followers who served him beforehand.  Nor does it imply the nonexistence of wise (albeit sometimes misguided) sages, such as Confucius, Laozi, Plato, certain rabbis, or even Buddha.  These people never intended to put forward themselves as the object of veneration.

Christ did put himself forward as an object of veneration, but he also rejected earthly ambitions and power-games.  Instead he humbled himself to the point of voluntarily accepting death by torture.  It was in this way that he sought to save humanity, while remaining a humble suffering servant, not craving the praise of human beings.  He only cared for what his Father thought was important.

To be sure, Jesus’ contemporaries definitely accused him (and his apostles) of fraud and malfeasance.  If you can take seriously the accusations that were actually made in the first century (e.g. that he did miracles by magic, or that his disciples stole his body on Easter to fake the Resurrection) then I suppose nothing I can say here is likely to make a difference to you.  But I don’t see in the New Testament any smoking guns, of the sort one would expect from a con artist trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes in order to turn a profit.

(The New Testament does tell people to put their faith or trust in the message, even when circumstances seem dark and discouraging, but I am not so cynical as to interpret this as an admission of fraud all by itself.  It’s when you catch a religious leader pilfering from the money-box, or diddling a kid, and then they tell you that you just need more faith—that’s when you should kick them to the curb.)

I do not, however, want to give the impression that Jesus was perceived as impeccable by his contemporaries.  Far from it!  His sinless perfection (if Christianity is true) consisted not in perfect conformity to human social convention, but rather the overthrowing of those standards in favor of God’s new kingdom.  To be fair, I ought to therefore show the more “scandalous” side of Jesus, and we can see if it is in any way parallel to the transgressions above.

One accusation found in the Gospels is that Jesus was

a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

but this related to a controversy over whether religious people ought to socialize with “bad people” who don’t keep all the rules.  Jesus’ self-conception, as someone sent by God to “seek and save the lost”, is what sent him to these parties, more than a lack of ascetic discipline.  Many modern people, more sympathetic to the idea of universal love, will probably not find this quite as objectionable as the religious leaders of the day did.  Although I’ve heard that there are still a few “Pharisees” around in some Christian circles, who would object to a religious leader doing the same thing today.

(As for excessive use of food and alcohol, these are bad habits by definition, but it involves a judgement call.  We can reasonably doubt whether the critics who didn’t want him going to these parties in the first place, were very attentive to the exact quantities involved.)

Let’s leave aside for the moment all these controversies related to Jesus’ mission and identity, his interpretation of the law and welcoming of sinners, and his vehement critique of the religious establishment.   These kinds of topics are the subjects of other posts in this series, and are not really analogous to the kind of moral transgressions and self-serving “revelations” that we’ve been discussing.  We are looking for a more personal abuse of authority.

From that perspective, what is the most outrageous action of Jesus?  Perhaps it is this:

While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard.  She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.  Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.”  And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” said Jesus.  “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.  The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.  But you will not always have me.  She did what she could.  She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial.  Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

An unsympathetic reading of this passage would be as follows: Jesus takes advantage of his religious charisma, in order to receive inappropriate public attention from a woman he isn’t married to.  And in the process he accepts a luxury item so expensive, that arguably nobody is justified in consuming it—let alone a person who strongly advised his followers to “sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Luke 12:33, Matt 19:21).

It is true that Jesus did not (so far as the story indicates) command the woman to act in this way.  But instead of rebuking her for the waste, he encourages her; and even presents himself as a more worthy recipient of the gift, than the numerous poor who existed in the land.  Does this make him a hypocrite?

The disciples were scandalized, and John even hints that this was the precipitating event that motivated Judas Iscariot to plan to hand Jesus over to the religious authorities.  So we are not here dealing with an event unfavorably interpreted by outsiders, but rather an event capable of alienating a close disciple, who had given up quite a bit to follow Jesus (and was now apparently regretting that investment).

It is important not to accept a tendentious explanation, of a sort that I would find absurd if given by some random cult leader.  At the same time, we also need to think about what this action would mean, if Jesus is really who he says he is.  The question is: which hypothesis explains better Jesus’s reactions to the situation?

Taken in full context, I think the disciples’ objection shows itself to be superficial.  Less than a week after this event, Jesus is arrested and killed.  He sees this act of sacrifice as the culminating point of his ministry.  As a general rule, Jesus never joined with those who criticized people for their spontaneous acts of devotion to God.  But in this case, he justifies the woman’s act as particularly suitable, because he is about to become a corpse.  So this event is not really about a lifestyle of sensuality, but rather Jesus acknowledging a station on the road to Golgotha.

From an aesthetic point of view, her act is fitting and beautiful, and will be remembered long after other acts of charity are forgotten.  Jesus does not forget the poor, but he affirms this woman’s act precisely because of its consonance with the Gospel proclamation.

The term Christ taken literally means someone anointed with oil (as kings of Israel used to be anointed, when they began to rule).   This refers primarily to his anointing with the Holy Spirit, but it was fitting that one who wore a crown of thorns should also be literally anointed.  This was done by a woman totally outside of the usual structures of religious authority, who nevertheless recognized his glory.

Jesus recognizes her love, and elevates her act to a sacramental anointing which reveals God in operation.  Just as (at the beginning of his ministry) his submission to John’s baptism transformed its meaning into an enactment of death and new birth.  If the onlookers don’t understand, and view his conduct as inappropriate for a decent rabbi, that’s their problem.  Like David dancing before the ark, his spiritual compass points in a different direction than his detractors.  In the light of all the acts of self-forgetting devotion which will follow from future saints, the critic’s perspective seems more limited here.

In any case, the context clearly shows that Jesus was not aiming at the same thing as a typical cult leader, which is the important point for the time being.

Good Friday, 2021.

——
Next: An Unfulfilled Prophecy?

Recently in this series we have been looking at the historical documentation of supernatural claims.  For our next question, we will examine whether these events could have occurred naturally:

7. What are the odds that the purported supernatural events could have occurred for non-supernatural reasons?

From a Bayesian perspective, the probability of a religion is basically given by the prior probability times the evidence for it, and the only thing that counts as evidence for a religion is an observation which is more likely to happen if the religion is true, then if it is false.  So a religion cannot be strongly confirmed by a (seeming) miracle, unless that miracle is unlikely to happen if the religion is false.

Plausible Naturalistic Explanations

Many purported “miracles” have perfectly plausible explanations in terms of known natural processes.

For example, I’m not particularly impressed by weeping statues or milk-drinking idols, since they can be easily explained by capillary action.  These sorts of phenomena are not hard to produce by fraud and/or accident, and shouldn’t count as any sort of demonstration of the supernatural.  A similar statement applies to any guru or holy man who does miracles that are similar to the sorts of things a stage magician does by slight-of-hand, e.g. causing small objects to appear in one’s hand (especially if, like the supposedly divine Sathya Sai Baba, one is occasionally caught blatantly cheating…)

As far as I know I was raised in the only household in America which subscribes to both Christianity Today and the Skeptical Inquirer.  If the good folks at the Inquirer can refute your Bigfoot sighting or paranormal abilities by their critical investigations, then probably you should pay attention to that.  (However, along with their high quality empirical investigations showing how various paranormal phenomena can be faked, you also get a bunch of tendentious articles about how philosophy of science proves religious people are ignoramuses, ranging along a whole axis of philosophical sophistication.  In any given issue you usually get articles of both sorts from different people.)

Implausible Naturalistic Explanations

Other types of miracle stories involve claimed events for which there is basically no reasonable natural explanation.  In such cases, the only reasonable options are: either to postulate something supernatural, or else to deny that the claimed event actually happened as stated.  (The difficulty of the latter path obviously depends on the degree to which there is high quality historical documentation of the event.)

To be clear, you can always come up with a naturalistic explanation for any event, if you try hard enough and don’t care how implausible your explanation is.  But sometimes these naturalistic explanations remind me a bit of the classic TV cartoon Scooby-Doo.  The original incarnation of the show featured some amateur detectives who investigate paranormal phenomena.  However, they invariably turn out to actually be hoaxes, contrived by the machinations of some villain.

Sometimes, the naturalistic explanation given is far more contrived and implausible than it would be for the supernatural entity to actually exist!  For example, in one episode, at first you think that a certain character Lisa has been turned into a vampire, but it turns out that all that’s actually going on is that somebody hypnotized Lisa so that, whenever she answers the phone and hears a bell ringing, she puts on a false set of vampire teeth and pretends to be a vampire!

In other words, so long as an explanation belongs to the realm of Victorian sensationalized psychology, rather than the realm of Victorian Gothic thrillers, we can accept it as the final explanation for what happened—even if that explanation is completely implausible for anyone with a superficial understanding of human behavior.

(In this style of thinking, the Demarcation Problem apparently reduces to a question of genre classification.  A similar thought pattern can be seen in those who believe that the multiverse or simulation hypothesis are science fiction and therefore potentially credible, whereas angels and ghosts and miracles are fantasy and therefore not potentially credible.  But thematic flavoring is not the test of truth.  UFO cults base their mythology around science fiction tropes, but can be seen to engage in many of the same patterns of pathological reasoning that similar religious-themed cults engage in.  And while there is a certainly a nonzero amount of claimed observational evidence for angels, ghosts, and miracles, as far as I know nobody has ever claimed to have met the aliens who are simulating our universe in their computer.)

Rationalized Miracles

Sometimes, the proponents of “scientific” explanations for miracles are actually religious people, who believe they are supporting the biblical narrative rather than undermining it.  As if finding ways that the “miracles” might have happened without appealing to God would somehow allow people to find religion believable again.  But this seems quite silly to me.  If the “miracle” has a fully natural explanation, which doesn’t point to anything outside of the universe, then by definition it is no longer a miracle in the religious sense of the word.

Some theists of a rationalistic bent seem to think it is somehow better if God never strictly suspends the laws of physics we moderns know and love, but only does miracles which are technically naturally possible (yet are still extremely improbable from a naturalistic perspective).  This approach would make all miracles special cases of God’s providential control of ordinary natural processes.  And indeed, in quantum mechanics, a lot of things which we think of as impossible, such as an object passing through a wall, are technically possible (albeit with an exceedingly minuscule probability, in the case of macroscopic objects).

But this seems to defeat the point of having a quantum theory in the first place.  The reason why we regard QM models as predictive, is that they still allows us to make statistical predictions about what will happen.   So if you want to postulate an extreme violation of these rules of probability, it seems to me that this violates the laws of QM, and is therefore just as much a suspension of the usual laws of physics as e.g. violating electric charge conservation would be.

Also, this kind of “Religious Naturalism” (to coin a phrase) doesn’t seem to fit very well with events like appearances of angels, or the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven.  Biblical events like these, if you accept them, cannot be understood merely as improbable events taking place within our own universe, but imply the existence of other worlds, containing new types of entities.  If such events really happened then I don’t see how to make sense of them, except on the hypothesis that our physical universe is not a closed system!  In addition to the physical universe, there has to be some sort of spiritual realm, so to speak, where the angels and the departed saints and possibly other things dwell.  Given the limitations of human thought, we can only visualize this as a kind of  “place”, even if it transcends our own spacetime.  But however we imagine it, it means that God’s actions cannot be thought of as limited to merely the physics of our own universe.

This is not necessarily a problem if you believe, as I do, that our physics models are just an approximate description of a limited aspect of reality, and that a full description of reality would require discussing the actions of various supernatural agents.  But, if there are indeed forms of reality outside of our model, then why not just admit that the model is inapplicable in certain situations, where these other realities become important? 

*            *            *

Case Study #1: Miracles of the Exodus

To give an obvious example of miracles for which the proposed naturalistic explanations are rather obviously futile, consider the Ten Plagues, the Crossing of the Red Sea, the Manna from Heaven, and the other miracles described in the Book of Exodus.  I am not aware of anything else in ancient literature that is remotely parallel to these dramatic miracles, among texts which were intended to be taken as serious history rather than as entertainment.

It seems obviously futile to try to explain these miracles in purely natural terms.

(Of course, even on a supernaturalist interpretation of these miracles, there might still be some natural causes involved in performance of the miracle.  For example, before the Israelites crossed the Sea, Exodus 14:21 states that “the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land”; in other words, the wind was God’s physical instrument for driving away the water.  But that just raises the question of how a wind powerful enough to create “walls of water on either side” came along in the first place.  The important question here is not whether physical causality was involved at any stage of the process—the entire point of doing a miracle in the physical world, is that it leads to some tangible physical consequences—but whether it is plausible that the event could have originated from only natural causes, without those natural causes being diverted from their usual course by some special supernatural exception to the usual rules governing the physical universe.)

Yet there is still a misguided intellectual parlor game which tries to explain these grand miracles using only natural causes.  The most notorious contender was the arch-crackpot Immanuel Velikovsky, who tried to explain several miracles in the Bible by proposing near misses with other planetary bodies in the solar system, but less insane versions of such conjectures keep being rolled out by naturalists of various sorts.

Most of these attempted naturalistic explanations aren’t really very scientifically plausible in the first place.  But there is a deeper problem with this project.  Such naturalistic explanations utterly fail to explain the extraordinary degree of coincidental timing that is required.

For example, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we’ve found an explanation for why some body of water (whether or not it was the same as the traditionally understood Red Sea location) might have drained very quickly, leaving a dry path for the Israelites to walk through.  The fact that this—presumably extremely rare—event happened just as Moses was leading an escaping band of slaves from the Egyptians, and that the unusual phenomenon ended just in time to kill the Egyptian army, is one helluva coincidence!

Taking into account further coincidences, such as these Ten Plagues arising (and ceasing) in ways coordinated with Moses and Aaron’s threats to Pharaoh, a plague which only targets firstborn sons (but not the Israelites who celebrated the Passover) and the description of the manna as only appearing 6 days a week (skipping the Sabbath Day so that the Israelites could rest)—it is clear that no purely naturalist explanation can serve as a plausible explanation for such phenomena.

Of course the proponents of such naturalistic theories are free to suppose that textual details such as these are later embellishments of the story.  But for the proponent of a specific naturalistic explanation for a miracle, this move is rather problematic.  A scientific explanation requires there to be some data supporting it, after all.  So this sort of skeptic tends to adopt a weirdly deferential reading of the text, hunting for clues that identify one particular natural phenomenon.  “If my scientific hypothesis is correct”, they say, “It makes sense that the plagues should have occurred in this exact order, and lasted exactly this length of time, and look how well this particular Hebrew word describes this natural phenomenon!”  But to take those parts of the text hyper-literalistically and dogmatically, while at the same time proposing that all the other inconvenient bits (whatever doesn’t fit your theory) are later legends, seems like special pleading.  So the methodology here isn’t especially coherent.

If you wish to deny that the Exodus was supernatural, there is a much more sensible and obvious strategy, which is to simply declare that the whole event is legendary.  (Or, if there was a historical core event, that it has been buried under so many layers of legend that it is impossible for modern scholars to reconstruct what really happened.)

Yes, it’s a bit strange that Jewish priests should have invented a national epic that portrayed the Israelites as hapless and cowardly slaves rescued by unprecedented miracles.  Nevertheless, that’s nothing like so improbable as accepting the historicity of the Torah yet denying the hand of God in the process!

Thus, while the miracles of the Exodus score very well on this particular criterion, they are unfortunately too far in the past (and insufficiently corroborated) to clearly belong to the realm of history, rather than mythology.  This does not necessarily make a Jew or Christian irrational for believing that the events occurred, but it must be in the context of a broader worldview, and not because the historical proofs for it are overwhelming, considered in themselves.

We will therefore next consider some more recent historically documented miracles, particularly focussing on two important miracle claims with particularly good source documentation: namely 1) the Splitting of the Moon, and 2) the Resurrection of Jesus.  The testimonial chains for these events were the subject of the last installment; in this post we will ask whether—assuming, as we have already argued for, that these claims do go back to the testimony of those who claimed to be eyewitnesses—it is plausible that they could have happened naturally.

In each case, I will also compare these miracles to other, arguably parallel events, in order to make sure that the events in question are truly unique.

Case Study #2: The Splitting of the Moon

As previously discussed, the “Splitting of the Moon” is seemingly briefly mentioned by the Quran, and is also reported in the Hadith, via multiple chains of transmission going back to four of the original Companions of Mohammad.  According to these reports, in order to provide a miraculous sign, God split the moon into two pieces, which temporarily moved to different sides of a mountain.

Let’s look at the primary sources.  Anas bin Malik narrated:

“The people of Mecca asked Allah’s Messenger to show them a miracle. So he showed them the moon split in two halves between which they saw the Hira’ mountain.” (Sahih Al Bukhari)

Abdullah Ibn Masud narrated:

“During the lifetime of Allah’s Messenger, the moon was split into two parts; one part remained over the mountain, and the other part went beyond the mountain.  On that, Allah’s Messenger said, `Witness this miracle.’” (Sahih Al Bukhari)

Ibn ‘Abbas narrated:

“The moon was split into two parts during the lifetime of the Prophet.” (Sahih Al Bukhari)

Finally, from Jubayr ibn Mut’im we have the following:

 “The moon was split into two pieces during the time of Allah’s Prophet; a part of the moon was over one mountain, and another part over another mountain.  So they said: `Muhammad has taken us by his magic’.  They then said: `If he was able to take us by magic, he will not be able to do so with all people.’ “

I should pause here and say that these are not excerpts from more elaborate descriptions of the miracle.  To the best of my ability to tell from the English translations available on the Internet, what I have just quoted is the entire text (apart from the chain of narrators) of the four hadiths which form the root of the tree of testimony about this miracle.  (In some cases, when the hadith was transmitted by multiple routes, there are minor textual variants, and in such cases I have attempted to select the more elaborate version.)

(I did find a more elaborate narrative version online; but as far as I can tell, it is not a primary source, but rather a composite stitched together from many hadith, including what I think must be information from later, secondary sources.  I am therefore going to disregard this version, although I am open to correction on this point from any experts in this area.)

As far as can be told from the authentic hadith, it seems that nobody else outside Mecca noticed this event.  Two of the Companions do indicate that the pagans in Mecca also witnessed the miracle, but nobody claims that they came to believe in Islam as a result.

It is of course quite obvious that no ordinary natural power would have been capable of actually physically splitting the moon in two and then bringing it back together again.  This is indeed, the strongest aspect of the miracle, since manipulating heavenly bodies would be quite out of the reach of a human impostor.

At the same time, there is no astrophysical evidence of such a disruptive event.  Of course God could have miraculously healed the cracks and cleaned up any other inconvenient astronomical evidence of the event happening, but this is a little bit like saying he could have left dinosaur bones in the Earth to trick us into thinking evolution happened.  It seems deceptive.  If you want to say that a miracle actually affected the physical world, I think it should leave behind at least some messy physical evidence suggesting it actually happened.

(Some Muslims use misleading photographs to claim that the Rima Ariadaeus trench is evidence left over from the Splitting of the Moon, but this trench is only about 300 km long so it doesn’t go nearly all the way around, and it is similar to many other trenches on the Moon.  It is also unclear why, if God was deleting nearly all of the physical evidence for this event, he would leave this one little crack behind to prove his work.)

It is true that, depending on the nature of a miracle, it might not leave enough physical evidence behind to convince skeptics.  But when the miracle is such that it ought to have left some evidence behind and didn’t, then even I, who already believe in God, become skeptical.  In other words, the splitting of the Moon is actually 2 miracles, the 1st being to divide the Moon, and the 2nd being to rejoin it in such a manner as to erase all physical effects of the 1st miracle (apart from any changes in the brains of those who supposedly saw it).

Hence, it appears that the sole purpose of such a miracle would be to serve as a temporary sign to instill belief, not to actually accomplish any lasting physical purpose.  (In this respect it is quite unlike the Exodus miracles, which rescued Israel from slavery and provided for her in the wilderness; nor is it like the Resurrection of Jesus which rescued Christ from death, and points forward to humanity being likewise rescued from death.)  Splitting the Moon does indeed suggest an extreme degree of power, and perhaps a certain degree of capriciousness.  But considered in itself, the miracle is sterile and does not lead to any further consequences.

Because of this lack of physical evidence left behind, there are other ways of interpreting the miracle besides the moon literally splitting into two physical pieces and then rejoining.  For example, God might have merely miraculously caused the appearance of the moon being split in two.

To my mind, that is a more reasonable interpretation of the event.  (Similarly, I would rather not explain the biblical miracle of Joshua commanding the Sun and Moon to stand still as a miracle which affected orbits in the solar system, but rather as a local event which affected the perceptions of those in the valley of Ayalon.)

Even taken in this sense, the Splitting of the Moon is definitely one of the more impressive non-Christian miracles, assuming the reports are accurate.  A sign in the heavens would be very difficult to fake with any kind of slight-of-hand trick.

Possible Parallels: More Signs in the Heavens

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem totally crazy to say that people may have witnessed some real atmospheric or visual effect, which was then misinterpreted by people eager to believe that they had seen a sign.  There are many other instances of groups of religious people temporarily seeing strange things in the sky, when primed to do so by expectation.  Or to take an example less related to traditional religions—but still conducive to fanaticism—there are lots of people who claim to have sighted UFO’s in the sky.

As a general rule, I don’t think such people are lying about having seen something; I would instead question their interpretation of what they saw, since merely seeing a collection of lights moving around in the sky that you can’t identify, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is actually an alien spacecraft.  As someone once said, I have no objection when people claim to have seen unidentified flying objects, it’s only when people try to identify them with conspiracy theories about alien invaders, that skepticism is warranted.

Another possible parallel is the very heavily witnessed Roman Catholic Miracle of the Sun, supposedly seen by thousands of people—though different people saw different things, and some people saw nothing.  A large crowd had been gathered together and told that they would see a miracle if they looked at the Sun, and many of the people there saw some odd visual effects when they did so.

But as we were all warned before the recent total eclipse, it is quite dangerous to stare at the sun for any extended period of time, since doing so can damage the retina.  It is not really particularly surprising that the participants saw a variety of dazzling visual phenomena after doing this foolish thing, and then interpreted it as confirmation of the miracle they were already expecting.

(Obviously, the Moon is less likely to cause these kinds of dazzling effects, so this is not a perfect parallel to the Islamic claim, but it does illustrate the way in which crowds primed to accept a miracle can interpret any strange thing they see in the sky as a confirmation of their beliefs.)

A solar miracle of a somewhat different kind is reported in the Gospels, which state that the Sun was darkened for the final three hours that Jesus hung on the Cross.  In addition to the Gospels, this miracle appears to have been reported by two different non-Christian historians (although these works are now lost so we know about them only because of Christian commentary).  It might be possible to explain this strange Darkness by natural causes (although due to the timing of Passover it cannot have been a normal solar eclipse).  However, one should take into account the fact that, if the cause were natural, there would have been no reason for its timing to match up with the death of Jesus.

(Like the Resurrection, this miracle is at cross-purposes with the Quran which, as we have already discussed, states that Jesus was not actually crucified.)

These parallels, together with the sparseness of how the miracle was actually described, make me rather uncertain how much evidence a miracle like this really provides.  There is no question in my mind that it counts as some significant evidence for the truth Islam, but it seems to me that the evidence described in the next section will surpass it.

Case Study #3: The Resurrection of Jesus

The Gospels and Acts together record about a dozen different examples of Jesus appearing to people after he had died.  The following passage taken from the 24th chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke describes three of these events:

[To 2 disciples on the Road:]  Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem.  They were talking with each other about everything that had happened.  As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him.

He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”

They stood still, their faces downcast.  One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

“What things?” he asked.

“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people.  The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place.  In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive.  Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!  Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?”  And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther.  But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.”  So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.  Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.  They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

[To St. Peter individually:]  They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem.  There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.”  Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.

[To the larger group of disciples:]  While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost.  He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds?  Look at my hands and my feet.  It is I myself!  Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet.  And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?”  They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.

He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”

Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.  He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.  I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Several aspects of these Resurrection appearances are worth mentioning (most of which are apparent from the passage above, but I am interpreting them within the broader context of the other New Testament accounts):

1) It involved multiple events, in which Jesus appeared to different overlapping groups of people, or sometimes to individual persons.

2) Many aspects of the experience were quite strange, and don’t fit anyone’s preconceptions about how bodies and spirits work.  Jesus appears and disappears instantly, and yet he is at pains to prove to his disciples that he is not a ghost.  He can be recognized, yet some people seem to have difficulty doing so at first.

3) In order to release the disciples from their doubts about whether he was really alive, Jesus allowed himself to interact with the world according to at least 4 of the 5 sense modalities:

SIGHT – Jesus was visible to all of them at the same time, and showed them his limbs (these are mentioned specifically, presumably because that is where the crucifixion wounds were).
HEARING – Jesus spoke audibly to all of them at the same time.
TOUCH – Jesus allowed them to touch him in order to feel his flesh and bones.
TASTE – Jesus shared several common meals with the disciples, including events where he ate food, and at least one event where he cooked the food himself and gave it to the disciples.

4) Each of these experiences were prolonged over a considerable time, long enough to allow for extended conversations, in which Jesus was able to give them significant instruction about how his suffering fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies, and what they should do next.

and of course we mustn’t forget the first event on Easter Day:

5) Jesus’ tomb was found mysteriously empty, with the stone rolled away and the body missing, with the women reporting a message from angels that Jesus rose from the dead.

Assuming these events happened as stated, it is really quite hard to come up with any reasonable explanations for how such a large group of people could have been deceived in all of these ways simultaneously.  Only if we throw out half of the reported data, can explanations such as group hallucinations even be considered; even apart from the antecedent improbability of such a hallucination affecting a dozen people at the same time.

And yet, on the other hand, after the Resurrection, Jesus’ body was also capable of instantly appearing and disappearing, things which aren’t consistent with any of the more eccentric skeptical theories (such as Identical Twins or the Swoon Theory) in which the disciples saw an actual living person.

The only simple naturalistic explanation, which doesn’t require the conjunction of multiple weird things happening separately, is that the Resurrection was a lie promulgated by the earliest disciples.  Indeed, this is the earliest known contemporary rebuttal (“the disciples stole the body”, as relayed in Matt 27:64, 28:13).

A Possible Parallel: “Seeing the Rebbe”

In order to check whether there are parallel events to this event, it is instructive to consider the case of a much more recent Jewish rabbi who inspired a Messianic movement.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was an extremely pious Jew with a reputation for great seriousness and holiness, and under his leadership he developed the nearly extinct Chabad (or Lubavitch) movement into a worldwide Jewish revival movement (here is a balanced discussion of his ideals).  As a result, there was much speculation that he would be the Messiah, despite the fact that (unlike Jesus) he seemingly never made this claim himself, nor approved of it being explicitly said in his presence.

However, the most relevant aspect to the present discussion, is the reports from people who say they saw him after his death.  There is in fact an entire website, Seeing the Rebbe, dedicated to collecting these claims.

The parallels to (certain aspects of) the early Jesus movement are striking.  But, when it comes to evaluating the strength of an evidential case, the details matter.  A closer inspection of these claims shows that there are also some pretty key dissimilarities to the Gospels, which make it much easier to explain the Lubuvitch rabbi’s “appearances” without recourse to the supernatural.

The first story on the website is quite different from the others.  In this case alone, a photograph is shown in which, it is claimed, the rebbe has mysteriously appeared in the photograph of a child, taken with a disposable camera.  There is a very sharply defined man with a Jewish hat in the photo.  The image is not at all like the ghostly apparitions which normally appear in claims of spirit photography; rather it is very clearly the image of an actual physical person.  But the back of the man is turned.  Apart from his clothing, only his neck and ears (and what might be a small portion of his beard) are visible.  From the picture, he could easily be almost any Orthodox man (although the lightish color of the hair suggests someone elderly).  This is hardly sufficient information to make a definitive identification.  To explain this event naturally, the only mistake required is that the child didn’t recall the man being there when the picture was taken.  Since the photograph was developed days later, after the child returned from his trip, this memory lapse is hardly surprising.

In all the rest of the eleven accounts, the rebbe is perceived by a human, not in a photograph.  The rebbe is suddenly visible, during a religious ritual, or while visiting a place associated with him.  Each appearance is quite brief, lasting just a few seconds, or half a minute at most.  Usually, only a single person sees the rebbe in any given story, while the others in the room don’t notice him at all; however, in two of the stories another person confirms seeing him (among a larger group of people that don’t).  Some of the stories provide minor circumstantial coincidinces that seem to confirm the experience, but none of it is extraordinarily implausible.  One of the persons was skeptical beforehand, but was still present at a ritual intended to “to greet the Rebbe with song and melody”.

These experiences were almost exclusively visual, although in a single case the rabbe also speaks a brief sentence: “Don’t worry, the financial situation of your parents will be okay.”  (This was part of a vision a yeshiva student had immediately upon waking up from sleep, a time when dream-like hallucinations are particuarly common.)

Nobody claims he shared a Shabbat luncheon with them, or that he got into an extended argument about the Talmud.

Given this data, it does not seem improbable to me to claim that all of these experiences (except the one involving the camera) were hallcuinations of one sort or another.

(By the way, this would not automatically prove that the experiences have no spiritual value, or even a supernatural cause.  Nothing I believe is inconsistent with the claim that a holy Jewish leader might be allowed by the Almighty to appear to members of his religious movement, in visions after his death, in order to encourage them.  Although the Lubavitch idiom that they “merited to see him” bothers me from a Christian spiritual framework, in which God reaches out to us by grace, not because we somehow earned it.)

Contrary to popular belief, minor hallucinations are not at all uncommon, even among people who are perfectly sane.  For example, around half of widowed individuals have “bereavement hallucinations” of their loved ones, while they are grieving their deaths.

These experiences are not very difficult to explain from a neurological point of view.  Our brains store information about a large number of concepts, which we use to interpet our sensory data.  If you have known a person for a long time, then your brain develops an intricate concept of them, which is associated with many other concepts.  In some cases, your idea of a person may be triggered so strongly that it overrides your normal sensory interpretation.  In that case, you may see or hear the person in a situation where they aren’t there.  Similarly, a strong religious expectation may also cause a sensory override.

Or, to take a more mundane example, just the other day I was walking along the street and I thought I saw a dog moving out of the corner of my eye.  When I looked at it more closely, it was just a normal construction cone sitting there.  Apparently, my “dog” neurons had been triggered by some feature of the situation, and had fired inappropriately.

In such cases reality usually re-asserts itself pretty quickly.  Such neural misfires do not usually lead to a long term disassociation with reality; since as time passes, additional sense data quickly convinces the brain that its initial classification of stimuli was wrong.

Back to Jesus

So could the Resurrection appearances of Jesus in the Gospels be explained by such “sensory overrides”?

I think there are serious problems with that theory.  One of the problems, obviously, is that Jesus was seen by larger groups, for example by more than a dozen men simultaneously.  For a neurological misfire to affect many people at once, in the same fashion, would be a stunning coincidence.  Two at once, perhaps, but never a dozen.

A second problem, is that if the accounts are at all accurate, Jesus remained present during his meetings long enough to have theological conversations involving multiple scriptural passages, and to interact with them in other ways.  This would require a sustained, contagious distortion of reality, much more intense than anything needed to explain the Seeing the Rebbe website.

But I think there is an even more fundamental difference between the two types of appearances.  Those who saw Rabbi Schneerson always immediately perceived it as being him.  No doubt is ever expressed regarding his identification (despite the fact that many of these individuals never saw him during his life); in general the only doubt expressed is whether the experience was veridical or just a hallucination.  This is exactly what we should expect in the case of a “sensory override” where the persons’ concept of “the Rebbe” was being imposed on the sensory data.  In such cases, the vision is immediately recognized as fitting the mental concept, because it really is just the person’s mental concept triggering.

(A partial exception: in one case the rebbe looked older than the person was expecting.  However, old age is a stereotypically rabbinic quality; and it is always possible that the person had seen other pictures of him, which she was not consciously remembering.)

On the other hand, those who saw Rabbi Yeshua after his death, sometimes failed to recognize immediately it was him (cf. John 20:11-18), despite the fact that they had seen him before he died.  Perhaps this was because, knowing intellectually that he had died, there was a mental block in accepting that he could be alive.  Or perhaps, there was something about his post-Resurrection appearance that was confusingly different from the way he had looked on earth.

Mary Magdalene thinks Jesus is the gardener at first; while Cleopas and his companion have an extended theological discussion with him, thinking he is just a mundane (but slightly clueless) stranger.  Not until later in these encounters, is there an “aha!” moment and they realize they are looking at Jesus.  None of this would be possible if their “Jesus” neurons had been misfiring, causing them to experience Jesus’ presence even though nobody was there.

In other words, the disciples experienced Jesus’ body as objectively clearly present, even though it was subjectively confusing (who and what is this person?).  This is in many ways the exact opposite of a hallucination, which is subjectively experienced as some definite entity, but is confusing in its relation to objectivity (I knew it was the rebbe, but maybe it was a hallucination?).

The disciples who express doubts about the Resurrection, nearly* always do so either because they were not present during a previous appearance (e.g. the male disciples doubting the women, or Thomas doubting the other male disciples in John 20), or because they are trying to figure out how to fit the event into their belief system (e.g. thinking maybe Jesus was a ghost).  Although the disciples express both doubt and wonder, we are never told of anyone who doubts because they were unable to see Jesus, even though other people in the same room did see him.  All of this speaks to something objectively present.

[*The one possible exception is Matt 28:17, in which we are not told which disciples doubted or what the source of their doubt was.  Since we are not told, this loose end could easily be given either a favorable or unfavorable interpretation.]

Of course, the fact that Jesus’ tomb was found empty, while the other rabbi’s tomb is presumably still occupied, is another difference suggesting a greater objectivity in what happened to Jesus.

Another Claimed Parallel: The Golden Plates

Some skeptics bring up as another possible parallel to the Resurrection Appearances, the invisible golden plates I briefly mentioned before, which Joseph Smith supposedly translated the Book of Mormon from.

Although Smith normally kept these “plates” hidden from sight, in order to bolster his claims he did attempt to collect a set of Twelve Witnesses (counting Smith himself) to swear to having seen the plates (presumably in an attempt to construct a deliberate parallel to the 12 Apostles.  These witnesses were all taken from among his family, close friends, and financial backers.

Now let me be clear on one point: the accumulated evidence for Smith being a charlatan is so compelling that I don’t think there is any way that this testimony could overcome that hurdle.  The only reason I am spending words on this, is to discuss whether it is a sufficiently close parallel to the Apostolic testimony to undermine the evidence for Christianity.

One notable lack of parallelism is that, oddly, almost every member of these 11 witnesses eventually broke away from following Joseph Smith (except for two members of the Whitmer family who died a few years after signing the declaration), although one was eventually reconciled.  Obviously, this vision did not have the same spiritual power to transform these witnesses into fearless leaders, the way that the Resurrection transformed the Apostles.  (However, some of the witnesses continued to assert quite strongly that they had seen the plates.)

A more important point here is that the behavior of at least the first 3 witnesses makes it pretty clear that there wasn’t really an object there to see in the first place.  Let’s look at this more closely.  Wikipedia summarizes the event like this:

On Sunday, June 28, 1829, Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris went into the woods near the home of Peter Whitmer, Sr. and prayed to receive a vision of the golden plates.  After some time, Harris left the other three men, believing his presence had prevented the vision from occurring.  The remaining three again knelt and said they soon saw a light in the air overhead and an angel holding the golden plates.  Smith retrieved Harris, and after praying at some length with him, Harris too said he saw the vision.

In other words, we are clearly not dealing here with some object that reflects light normally, and can be seen without the use of faith.  We are dealing with an object which cannot be seen at all without first engaging in intense prayer.  Indeed the fact that the most skeptical individual had to leave the area in order for the other witnesses to see the plates, and that, after Harris returned, Smith had to pray with him “at some length” suggests to me that quite a bit of psychological pressure had to be applied by Smith, in order to get the witnesses to agree that they saw something.

And after his testimony, Harris admitted on multiple occasions that he had only seen the plates “with the eyes of faith” or “spiritual eyes”, not his “natural eyes”.  (Although later in his life he tried to backtrack on this point.)

Of course, there is no doubt that Jesus also had a lot of charismatic pull over his disciples. But if Christianity were false, then Jesus would still have been dead, and thus not in a very good position to do the necessary browbeating and cajoling of reluctant witnesses.  To tell a convincing story, one would have to cast some of the disciples into this role, say St. Peter and St. Mary Magdalene.  But if that is what really happened, one might expect the accounts to reflect this guiding role, just as the Mormon texts reflect the role of Smith.

If the New Testament texts seemed to point towards this sort of “sort of there, sort of not” experience one might expect from a manufactured vision, then I would not consider that kind of evidence to be remotely sufficient for purposes of founding a new religion.  But they don’t.

Of course, it is always possible to imagine that the texts are not accurately reporting the disciples’ actual historical experiences.  Maybe, a skeptic might say, if we had interviewed the Twelve disciples just a few weeks after the event, we would have found lots of tell-tale signs of falsehood, only they’ve all been cleaned up from the accounts that ended up in the New Testament.

Well, maybe.  But note that this is all speculation about evidence we don’t have.  The point of this blog series is to compare different religions with respect to the evidence that we do have, to see how they measure up to each other.  I don’t expect anything in this post to convince the sort of skeptic who has a strong commitment to Naturalism to give up their deeply held belief that all religions are false.  But, I do think that a fair-minded person should agree that not all religions have the same degree and types of evidence.

(By the way, I don’t consider the minor discrepancies between the Gospel accounts to be a sign of falsehood; rather this is a normal feature of witness testimony.  I would consider it to be far more suspicious if discrepancies weren’t there, since it would be a sign that this “cleaning up” process had happened.  Indeed, I don’t think that the things that I, as a 21st century person would regard as tell-tale signs of fakeness, are necessarily the same things as the things a 1st century person would notice as potential problems.)

Case Study #4: Miracles of the Buddha

This section is going to be very short, because (as discussed in previous posts in this series) none of the miracles of Gautama Buddha are sufficiently established by nonlegendary, provably early texts to be worth considering in this regard.  If our historical evidence is consistent with a story being written centuries after Buddha’s death, and if it reads like a folk tale with an obvious moral, then I’m going to discount it.

Of these legendary miracles, the one that some traditions identify as the greatest sign of a true Buddha is the “Twin Miracle”, the earliest versions of which are discussed here.  In which the Buddha simultaneously shoots fire and water out of every pore and limb of his body (while walking in the air).  While this is admittedly impressive—and yes, quite inexplicable on Naturalism—let’s be honest: it’s also ludicrously, preposterously silly.

Fortunately for Gautama’s reputation, it’s not very hard to believe that it never happened.

*            *            *

Alternative Supernatural Explanations

So far in this installment, we’ve been operating under the unstated assumption that if a religion is false, then any claims it makes to supernatural power are also false.  In other words, I am assuming that a Christian would try to explain e.g. a putative Muslim or pagan miracle using the same types of explanations (fakes, mistakes, legends) that a naturalistic skeptic would resort to.  However, a religious worldview also opens up the possibility of supernatural explanations of what is going on with other religion.  Such arguments must be considered as well.

For example, someone might try to explain miracles in other religions by saying that they actually have an origin in a non-divine supernatural power (e.g. demons, or psychic powers, or something).

As a Christian, I do believe in the existence of supernatural fallen angels.  These demons are, unlike God, created beings with limited power and wisdom, who have chosen to abuse their free will by trying to resist God’s kingdom.  Even in the contemporary world, Christian missionaries who evangelize foreign tribes occasionally report encounters with “witch doctors” who appear to have actual supernatural powers to levitate objects or curse people—even if said manifestations subside when the Christian missionaries pray to the greater power of Jesus.

Just because a paranormal event is genuine in the sense of being caused by an actual paranormal being, does not necessarily mean that the paranormal being is not itself a liar trying to deceive people.  In a Christian worldview, any such “miracles” caused by demons would be just as fraudulent as the miracles caused by human slight-of-hand.  The fact that the fraud might involve some physical powers that a materialist would have trouble believing in, would not really change the spiritual reality of what is going on in such situations.  (Including, perhaps, that the demon’s power is quite limited, and that it relies largely on terror and suggestion to trick human beings into accepting bondage voluntarily.)

However, if a non-Christian miracle can be given an obvious natural explanations—and most of them can be—then resorting to this more complicated hypothesis is completely unnecessary.  And such accounts do involve making the significant concession that something is really “going on” in the other religion.  In such cases, judging between the two religions would then require consideration of some other factor (e.g. the degree of goodness or power displayed by the competing miracles).

For example, the Gospels report that after Jesus did a certain healing miracle, some of his enemies accused him of “driving out demons with the help of Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Matthew 12:24).  In other words, Jesus’ religious opponents did not deny that he performed supernatural feats, but proposed that he had made some sort of Faustian bargain with the Devil.  (A similar accusation is perpetuated in the Talmud, which claims that Jesus was executed for “sorcery” among other offenses.)

In his reply, Jesus pointed out that it doesn’t make that much sense for the Devil to be going around undoing his own work: “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (12:25).  And if a person is capable of seeing with their own eyes, a miraculously blind and mute person being healed, and not seeing it as an obvious sign of goodness, then it’s hard to imagine any possible set of experiences which could convert such a person.

(An even more extreme version of “a house divided” would be if God deliberately creates such false miracles in order to fool or trick people, or to test their faith.  I already rejected one such claim of divine deception in a previous post.)

Modern Supernatural Healings

But do such dramatic healings still happen today?  I think they sometimes do.

I’ve previously mentioned St. Craig Keener’s book on modern-day miracles.  In addition to consulting secondary sources, he personally interviewed hundreds of individuals reporting miracles (including several individuals he knows well enough to vouch for their honesty).  Keener discusses many miracles (mostly healings) some of which are extremely difficult to explain naturalistically.

He describes (with so many examples that it becomes quite tedious) many cases of instant or rapid healing of blindness, deafness, tumors, various disabilities, and even raising the dead, usually in response to prayer in the name of Jesus.  In many cases the conditions clearly had organic causes (hence were not psychosomatic) and the healings were confirmed by before & after medical scans (including cases where the doctors had difficulty believing it was the same person, since the prognosis was so dire).  He does not presume a supernatural explanation, but carefully considers alternative explanations.  All in all, I found this book an extremely convincing refutation of Naturalism.

What Keener’s book is not, is an exercise in comparative religion.  Except for a brief chapter—which honestly felt like it was in the wrong book—discussing possible ancient parallels (e.g. temples to Asclepius, the god of healing), he confines his attention to Christian miracles.  So far as one can tell from this book, it is at least possible that there are equally impressive healings in completely separate religions (although if so I am not aware of them).

Another possible foil might be the claims of Christian Science, which has “Christian” in its name, but is an extremely heretical interpretation of Christianity which denies the existence of evil, encourages its members to seek spiritual healing instead of getting medical treatment, and basically ignores anything in the Bible which doesn’t contribute in some way to these ideas.

There are excellent reasons (one of them will be described in the next post) for not taking this movement seriously, but they might well serve as a “control group” for how often one would expect seeming healings to happen naturally by chance.  (It’s a delicate thing theologically though, because it is certainly not a doctrine of Christianity that God never heals anyone unless their beliefs about him are completely correct.)  In any case, this topic would require doing further research on another blog post entirely, which I don’t have much time for at the moment.

Genuine Non-Christian miracles?

In light of Jesus’ arguments, I am unwilling to use demonic influence as an excuse to explain away any miraculous event which is both obviously good (e.g. a physical healing) and obviously real (i.e. the person was actually healed, and we aren’t just talking about fakery, or coincidence, or people ignoring their cancer symptoms, or something like that).

In my worldview, any such supernatural grace (even if it were to occur in the context of a non-Christian religion) must always be attributed to the one true God.  This is so even if the individual who receives the miracle has superstitious or unreasonable ideas about how the miracle came about.

Such a miracle might well provide some significant evidence for the basic validity of the religious tradition in question (at least to the extent of sometimes putting its worshippers in touch with the real God) but there is no reason I know of to think that God would be so stingy as to never do a miracle for anybody who was theologically misguided in any respect.  (Though obviously, a Christian can’t accept as valid any miracles that are specifically designed to authenticate a false prophet’s religion.)

This is why I have no problem recognizing that there may be genuine religious miracles received by some people whose theological ideas I may not agree with in other respects (e.g. Roman Catholics, Pentecostals who subscribe to aspects of prosperity gospel thinking).  And for all I know, God might also grant such miracles to some Muslims, modern Jews, pagans, etc.

As St. Keener says:

One of Hume’s arguments against miracles is that incompatible religions claim miracles, and thus, on his view, their claims cancel each other….

He probably drew this argument from the deists, who in turn had used similar arguments of Protestants and Catholics polemicizing against each other’s miracles.  Hume advances this observation to argue that miracle claims as a whole are therefore suspect (part of a universally or at least widely tendentious religious rhetoric).  But using this observed incompatibility as an objection to miracles fails to reckon with multiple potential philosophic alternatives to the objection.  For example, such miracles could be understood as supreme power’s “goodwill” toward people of different faiths “without necessarily endorsing” particular beliefs; the related idea that most miracles in response to prayers do not explicitly specify a particular religious system; the systems could be less incompatible than their adherents suppose; or one could argue that there are multiple supernatural or at least superhuman powers, a view held by traditional religion and even by most traditional forms of monotheism.  (Miracles, p. 193, 195-196)

St. Brandon Watson, a historian of philosophy, makes a similar point:

Hume is turning popular anti-Catholic tropes and arguments, as used by Protestants, against Protestants as well.  Protestant arguments about the gullibility of Catholics with regard to the miracles of the saints become Humean arguments about the gullibility of religious people generally with regard to miracles generally; Protestant arguments that we cannot rationally believe that transubstantiation occurs against the evidence of our senses find parallels in Hume’s arguments against believing in religious miracles; and so forth.  What is more, this seems not to have been lost on Hume’s early critics; George Campbell, for instance, sees quite clearly what Hume is doing in (for instance) his long note on the Jansenist miracles, and, obviously, refuses to play the game, insisting that the parallels are artificial and based on false assumptions.  In any case, these tropes were not typically in-principle arguments; they were based on claims about the mendacity of priests, the gullibility of poorly educated Catholics, and so forth.

In other words, the most famous example of a skeptical “Argument from Other Religions” is an adaptation of inter-religious Christian disputes, back when what was most often meant by a “false religion” was a rival interpretation of Christianity.

This raises the interesting question of whether this particular skeptical attack on religion would have had the same rhetorical appeal, if the Church had remained united—at least by the bonds of love, if not identical belief—rather then splintering into warring religious factions in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Could it be that the “Argument from Other Religions” really inspired by the long shadow of the religious wars of the Early Modern era?

Even if that thesis is too extreme, I think it is easy for people in the Western world to make arguments from comparative religion, without realizing that they are really projecting features of Christian doctrine onto other religions, which—when understood from a sympathetic view—don’t even really pretend to base themselves on the same kinds of concrete historical miracle claims that support Judaeo-Christian doctrines.

In other words, many skeptics are too lazy to actually do any research about what a totally non-Christian religion looks like.  Instead of doing research, it’s easier to just compare Christianity to an imagined clone of itself, and find that on the whole Christianity comes out looking rather unoriginal.

So long as the skeptic confines himself to religions that actually are explicitly attempts to copy and surpass Christianity (e.g. Islam, Mormonism…) these expectations won’t be totally misleading.  But it is a mistake to think that a random Eastern religion with no connection to Christianity will appeal to the same kinds of evidential support that Christianity does.  Such an approach would, ironically, project Christian values onto an essentially foreign milieu, and thus fails to see what is really going on in Eastern religions.

Next: Honest Messengers