Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Argue for and against Christianity

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
Paul of Tarsus
Banned
Banned
Posts: 688
Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2020 8:42 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 150 times

Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #1

Post by Paul of Tarsus »

I've watched the Ehrman vs Craig: Evidence for Resurrection debate video on YouTube several times, and as usual I am less than impressed with the polemics of Bart Ehrman. This time his fallacy involves the historicity of miracles and in particular the miracle of Christ's resurrection. His reasoning goes something like the following:

1. Miracles are the least likely correct explanation for any supposed historical event.
2. The story of the resurrection of Christ is a narrative of an event that if true requires a miraculous explanation.
Conclusion: Any naturalistic explanation of the story of Christ's being raised from the dead is more likely correct than an explanation that allows for the supernatural.

Is it true that miracles are so unlikely that any non-supernatural explanation for a claimed event is more likely true? I'm not sure why Ehrman seems to think miracles are so unlikely. While it's true that miracles are evidently rare, how probable they may be depends on the evidence for them. Ehrman seems to maintain a naturalistic view of miracles based more on an atheistic assumption than on any kind of evidence for them. That's not good reasoning.

I'd like to conclude this OP by pointing out that since I've been debating atheists, I can see that their reasoning is often as bad if not worse than the arguments made by apologists. It seems to me that there would be more atheists in the world if people stopped trying to disprove God.


User avatar
Paul of Tarsus
Banned
Banned
Posts: 688
Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2020 8:42 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 150 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #51

Post by Paul of Tarsus »

brunumb wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 6:34 pm
Paul of Tarsus wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 12:24 pm
brunumb wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:47 am
Paul of Tarsus wrote: Sun Feb 21, 2021 8:09 pm That may be true for some people, but I won't put faith in any claim that lacks good reason and evidence.
Would you please share some of those good reasons and evidence that has convinced you that some of the claimed miracles actually occurred.
Again, this is not a debate about proving miracles, but just for the record, Christian miracles are evidenced by eyewitness accounts and documentation.
OK, so you've actually got nothing.
So that's your response? I have nothing? What am I to reply? I do, I Do, I DO!

Stelar_7
Student
Posts: 39
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2019 1:43 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 10 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #52

Post by Stelar_7 »

[Replying to Mithrae in post #40]

Interesting obfuscation, yet it seems you want to claim miracles are possible, without offering any evidence that miracles are possible. I notice in all your examples of possible probability calculations the events were mundane, spontaneous combustion, arson...not fire sprites or a ill tempered media though.

If my read on the other conversation is accurate you will try to cast doubt on reality to make magic seem like an acceptable candidate explanation for any given event. I see no reason to take such flights of fancy seriously.

The simple fact is I'm not the one offering probability for any event. I'm the one stating such a calculation is impossible for an event until its possibility is established. I wait, so much waiting, for any theist to take up that gauntlet.

User avatar
brunumb
Savant
Posts: 5993
Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:20 am
Location: Melbourne
Has thanked: 6607 times
Been thanked: 3209 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #53

Post by brunumb »

Paul of Tarsus wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 10:54 pm
brunumb wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 6:34 pm
Paul of Tarsus wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 12:24 pm
brunumb wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:47 am
Paul of Tarsus wrote: Sun Feb 21, 2021 8:09 pm That may be true for some people, but I won't put faith in any claim that lacks good reason and evidence.
Would you please share some of those good reasons and evidence that has convinced you that some of the claimed miracles actually occurred.
Again, this is not a debate about proving miracles, but just for the record, Christian miracles are evidenced by eyewitness accounts and documentation.
OK, so you've actually got nothing.
So that's your response? I have nothing? What am I to reply? I do, I Do, I DO!
Please enlighten us on the criteria used and how they were applied in order for those eyewitness accounts and documentation to be elevated to the status of compelling evidence for miracles. Otherwise all you have is unsupported claims.
George Orwell:: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Gender ideology is anti-science, anti truth.

User avatar
Mithrae
Prodigy
Posts: 4304
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:33 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 100 times
Been thanked: 190 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #54

Post by Mithrae »

[Replying to bluegreenearth in post #50]
brunumb wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 6:12 pm
Mithrae wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 10:24 am Except of course for those - such as myself - without religious belief who have nevertheless concluded the probability that miracles do occur.
Perhaps I need a refresher on exactly what you regard as a miracle. Thanks.
If a chap claiming power from or appealing to a god were raised from the grave or regrew an amputated leg or walked on water without any kind of human trickery or reproducible method, I'd regard those as probable miracles, acts of god.

Similarly if a chap were convinced he was in contact with aliens, and accordingly beamed a message up into space requesting for a kilogram of gold to be materialized at his location, and shortly thereafter a kilogram of gold was indeed materialized there, I'd regard that as probably the work of his aliens.

Bluegreenearth (who suggests that my position is more akin to solipsism) argues that we don't know those conclusions to be the case and they are not viable 'explanations' due to limitations in our understanding of this god or these aliens (while quietly glossing over comparable limitations in our understanding of the natural universe). I can readily agree that upon further investigation we may one day find that reported events like the 'miracle of Calanda' were caused by leprechauns or by reproducible processes conforming with the 'laws of nature' or by the IT nerds working on the computer simulation which is our universe :lol: But until that happy day, the most reasonable conclusion seems to be that some significant fraction of the reported miracle observations - particularly among the hundreds of thousands of miracle healings reported by experts in the medical field - are indeed miracles.


brunumb wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 6:27 pm
Mithrae wrote: Wed Feb 24, 2021 10:24 am Thus in the case of the thoroughly investigated instances of rapid, medically unexplained cures of serious illnesses which have been documented at Lourdes for example, they cannot be situated within a theory of naturalism without various ad hoc suppositions (at the expense of parsimony) which contribute little or nothing towards understanding of other observations (hence having little breadth of explanatory power), although in some cases may have some depth or specificity regarding the speculated mechanism for the healing.
How do you propose that these non-naturalistic miracle cures were achieved? Given the enormous failure rate of cures being delivered at Lourdes, is it not reasonable to think that the cures that did occur were the result of natural but not understood complex processes within the human body. Remissions occur all the time without any appeal for divine assistance.
By similar reasoning, if a child is rebuffed 9 times out of 10 when asking for candy, then each time she finds a sweet gift left out for her in the morning she should suppose that it is not from her parents? Or that if our alien guy had 99 friends who also asked for a kilo of gold but didn't get it, it should then be reasonable to infer that natural processes spontaneously created the one which did appear? Your argument implicitly relies on a theology in which gods should be expected to grant all or most of our wishes, such that an "enormous failure rate" somehow becomes a reason to dismiss any significance of the rapid, lasting and medically-unexplained cures which do occur no matter how remarkable they may have been. I imagine one of the most frustrating things about Lourdes for its religious fans is the length of the processes required to confirm (among other criteria) that an alleged cure is not merely a temporary remission, over fifteen years on average.

To be clear, it's certainly possible that even among the seven most remarkable healings since 1960 some were the result of natural processes (and in some cases sceptical investigators such as James Randi have found doctors willing to advance ad hoc possibilities which might account for them), and obviously the proportion of misidentified 'miracles' would increase considerably for older reports less thoroughly investigated and with poorer medical knowledge. The question is simply how likely do you imagine that probability of misidentification is, in each case? If we assumed in each case a 70% probability that the investigating medical committee's assessment of the suddenness, permanence and inexplicability of the cure was simply wrong - which is arguably an unreasonably high assumption - that would still leave us with a ~92% probability that at least one of the seven most recent miracles reported there was indeed genuine (1 - 0.7^7). Even assuming a ninety percent probability of misidentification would leave better than even odds that at least one of them is genuine... and a ninety-nine percent probability of misidentification for all the 'miracles' reported before that would leave almost even odds that one of them is genuine too!

Maybe you would argue that there is a 100% probability the medical committee was wrong in each case? That's pretty much the dogmatic stance which you would have to adopt, if we were to take your earlier claim of "no verified accounts" seriously.

User avatar
Mithrae
Prodigy
Posts: 4304
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:33 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 100 times
Been thanked: 190 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #55

Post by Mithrae »

Stelar_7 wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:36 am [Replying to Mithrae in post #40]

Interesting obfuscation, yet it seems you want to claim miracles are possible, without offering any evidence that miracles are possible. I notice in all your examples of possible probability calculations the events were mundane, spontaneous combustion, arson...not fire sprites or a ill tempered media though.

If my read on the other conversation is accurate you will try to cast doubt on reality to make magic seem like an acceptable candidate explanation for any given event. I see no reason to take such flights of fancy seriously.

The simple fact is I'm not the one offering probability for any event. I'm the one stating such a calculation is impossible for an event until its possibility is established. I wait, so much waiting, for any theist to take up that gauntlet.
I have offered substantial evidence for the occurrence of miracles of course, most notably in post #26 and now in #54. But the real issue here is that your argument itself is fundamentally flawed. If you were reading and understanding my conversation with others then you would know and - if you had an answer - would have answered this little problem for me: How do you prove that 'laws of nature' (or consistency of behaviour beyond the scope of observation) are possible?

Bluegreenearth and Brunumb and everyone else I've asked something similar have all so far failed to substantiate any perspective along those lines. The closest we've seen is the inductive calculation of a prior probability that the speed of light etc. will remain consistent, but prior probabilities obviously aren't the same thing as physical laws or genuine explanations for why things behave in the patterns we observe. When we've got an atom with one proton and one electron over here and another atom with one proton and one electron over there, why should we imagine that atom A must behave and interact in the same way as atom B despite their different spatial and temporal properties? How is it even possible that objects in different locations and with different causal histories should nevertheless behave and interact within identical parameters?

You call that "mundane," that asking such awkward questions is tantamount to "casting doubt on reality," but it seems to me that these are simply attempts to sneak naturalist assumptions in through the back door rather than comparing and contrasting theories or worldviews on their merits. Or (more to the point) rather than recognizing that the presumption of impossibility approach you are using simply doesn't work, and leads to obviously untenable results unless it is just special pleading applied only to reported observations you don't agree with.

User avatar
bluegreenearth
Guru
Posts: 1917
Joined: Mon Aug 05, 2019 4:06 pm
Location: Manassas, VA
Has thanked: 681 times
Been thanked: 470 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #56

Post by bluegreenearth »

Mithrae wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 7:09 am How do you prove that 'laws of nature' (or consistency of behaviour beyond the scope of observation) are possible?
The statement, "Physical Laws are consistent," is treated as an axiom in a scientific epistemology. Do you understand why axioms are necessarily exempt from further justification in an any epistemology? Do you understand that if a Physical Law were observed to be inconsistent, it would no longer be considered a Physical Law?

User avatar
Mithrae
Prodigy
Posts: 4304
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:33 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 100 times
Been thanked: 190 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #57

Post by Mithrae »

bluegreenearth wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 7:44 am
Mithrae wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 7:09 am How do you prove that 'laws of nature' (or consistency of behaviour beyond the scope of observation) are possible?
The statement, "Physical Laws are consistent," is treated as an axiom in a scientific epistemology. Do you understand why axioms are necessarily exempt from further justification in an any epistemology? Do you understand that if a Physical Law were observed to be inconsistent, it would no longer be considered a Physical Law?
It seems you want to claim physical laws are possible, without offering any evidence that physical laws are possible :? If online sceptics cannot know if physical laws could possibly occur in reality or not, how can they calculate the probability that an event was caused by physical law?

Do you understand that this presumption of impossibility argument is absurd?

User avatar
bluegreenearth
Guru
Posts: 1917
Joined: Mon Aug 05, 2019 4:06 pm
Location: Manassas, VA
Has thanked: 681 times
Been thanked: 470 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #58

Post by bluegreenearth »

Mithrae wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:00 am It seems you want to claim physical laws are possible, without offering any evidence that physical laws are possible :? If online sceptics cannot know if physical laws could possibly occur in reality or not, how can they calculate the probability that an event was caused by physical law?

Do you understand that this presumption of impossibility argument is absurd?
It is not physical laws that cause events. The physical laws describe consistent events. We know the events are possible because they are observed. For some events, the cause of those events can also be observed. For other events, the cause of those events cannot be observed.

User avatar
Mithrae
Prodigy
Posts: 4304
Joined: Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:33 am
Location: Australia
Has thanked: 100 times
Been thanked: 190 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #59

Post by Mithrae »

bluegreenearth wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:26 am
Mithrae wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:00 am It seems you want to claim physical laws are possible, without offering any evidence that physical laws are possible :? If online sceptics cannot know if physical laws could possibly occur in reality or not, how can they calculate the probability that an event was caused by physical law?

Do you understand that this presumption of impossibility argument is absurd?
It is not physical laws that cause events. The physical laws describe consistent events.
Okay, good. That's an accurate description of our current state of knowledge, though it seems to be at odds with Brunumb's post #28 suggesting miracles require that "the natural laws of the universe were somehow broken," as if these natural laws were constraining things' behaviour.
bluegreenearth wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:26 am We know the events are possible because they are observed. For some events, the cause of those events can also be observed. For other events, the cause of those events cannot be observed.
Can the causes really be observed? If you hit a ping-pong ball with the a blast of light from a torch it's not going to move, but if you hit it with a blast of air it will. At the simplest level we could say that air has a bit more 'oomph' than light, but that's hardly the same thing as observing causation in any intellectually satisfying sense - certainly not to the level of criticism we apply to reported miracles! On a slightly deeper level what we're seeing in action are Newton's laws of motion and the equation force equals mass times acceleration, but these merely describe consistent events, they don't cause them. At a still deeper level we could delve into our understanding of why air has mass while light does not, the nuclear forces holding the protons and electrons of air and ping-pong molecules together and so on. I and I'm guessing you don't observe those things at all, but physicists have observed some of them, and developed consistent explanatory models with strong predictive capacity which give a high level of confidence that they're probably on the right track, despite major questions still remaining unanswered.

Is it accurate to say that we observe the cause of the ping-pong ball's movement, or is that more of a colloquial expression and the reality is that we infer with ~100% confidence that it's being moved by the blast of air rather than by tiny undetectable demons or by the parameters of a computer simulation?

Non-repeatable/non-consistent events are less amenable to such thorough scientific scrutiny of course, so any inferences about causation of those events must rationally have less than 100% confidence; far less, in each particular case. But so far I have not seen any merit (and on the contrary, some noteworthy fallacies) to the claim that inferences of divine causation belong in an entirely different and unjustified category to inferences of physical causation. As far as I can tell the difference between the two lies solely in the strength of the respective explanations - the degree to which scientific explanations or good physical explanations meet the criteria of parsimony, comprehensiveness and specificity generally being much better than explanations involving external agency such as gods or aliens - rather than any kind of fundamental epistemic difference. And after so many exchanges with many intelligent critics over the years, it's looking quite unlikely that there is any good basis for asserting such a distinction. Presumption of impossibility obviously doesn't cut it!

User avatar
Paul of Tarsus
Banned
Banned
Posts: 688
Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2020 8:42 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 150 times

Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #60

Post by Paul of Tarsus »

brunumb wrote: Thu Feb 25, 2021 3:14 amPlease enlighten us on the criteria used and how they were applied in order for those eyewitness accounts and documentation to be elevated to the status of compelling evidence for miracles. Otherwise all you have is unsupported claims.
Why are you asking for "compelling" evidence for miracles? If I don't know what compels you, then I'm not sure I can answer that question. I've also said that I'm not out to prove miracles, and since I started this thread, it is I who properly asks the questions.

So how does the probability of miraculous explanations for events compare to the probability of non-miraculous events, and how do you determine those probabilities?

Post Reply