Mithrae wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 7:42 amTo be more accurate, the problem is with the claims of Craig and others that the resurrection is certain or highly probable. Claiming high probability in a case where the available evidence is extremely weak obviously opens the floodgates to everything else. But by the same token, claiming impossibility or extremely low probability in cases with more robust evidence would be equally problematic.
You are exactly right. I was being sloppy.
Mithrae wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 7:42 amThe alleged '
miracle of Calanda' is a useful example in both cases, a report of a regrown amputation with formal sworn testimony from dozens of named observers, notably including 3-4 medical workers involved with the amputation itself. For non-Catholic Christians loathe to attribute miracles to a shrine of Jesus' long-dead mother it's a good example for the OP question, since the evidence is unquestionably far better than the anonymous propaganda sources of the NT. But that very fact that the evidence for this alleged miracle (among numerous others) is far better also raises the question of whether we can really use "that never happens" as a basis for dismissing such reports time and time again... or even more troubling, whether the same scepticism should be applied to
all of what we thought we knew.
For me, the question is under what circumstances and to what degree we can rely on testimony alone. These discussions always remind me of the entry for
inadmissable from Ambrose Bierce's
The Cynic's Word Book (which later became the better known
The Devil's Dictionary for marketing purposes). The entry ends with these words:
Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there are no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
While I wouldn't say that they're destitute of value, I would say that the value assigned to them is often misplaced. Between the Gospels, Book of Mormon, miracle you discussed, and the Salem witch trials, there are as many important differences as similarities. In the case of the miracle of Calanda, though, I expect that the biggest confounder of the testimony is that people's minds fill in missing details when they're needed. Broadly, I expect the guy with the "new" leg really had gone to the hospital for treatment and had his broken leg set without it having been removed. Thereafter, he took up the occupation of a one-legged beggar, neglecting (perhaps crucially) to tell his mom that he was fibbing a bit about the count. Three years later, the doctors, nurses, orderlies, and whoever else were asked about one specific patient and told that it involved an amputated limb. This was in the middle of a war and amputations weren't that uncommon. They all knew how they would have dealt with an amputation, remembered details from real amputations, and their minds created and filled in the details about one more.
These techniques for personally evaluating stories about the past usually work pretty well. Most people are honest most of the time, so if someone offers their own recollection, one can usually safely incorporate it into the narrative (that's why gaslighting works so well). It's a heuristic process that we as people have come to trust, but it only takes one or two bad actors (or even sincere mistakes) to completely subvert the process. If the beggar was telling the truth, then a miracle happened. If Joseph Smith, the "three" and the "eight" were telling the truth, an angel of God delivered the golden plates.
I'm starting to digress a bit here, but I think the New Testament is more interesting from several points of view.
First, it would take a lot of work at this point to convince me that any of the Gospels were intended by their authors to be read as nonfiction. The tradition that they weren't seems to be primarily a response to early forms of gnosticism that may ironically be closer to the intentions of the authors. The alternative to too much allegory was the dogmatic assertion of no allegory at all. Once this was entrenched in the Christian tradition, the apologetic machine worked to reinforce it.
Second, I've come to think that there was at least one person in the early church that forged a career out of claiming to be the Apostle John and it may have been a sort of cottage industry. John had a reputation for having lived a really long time, for one thing. For another, the "Church Fathers" couldn't seem to agree on exactly who knew him when or even how many Johns there were. Instead, they recounted a series of second- and third-hand stories about people that heard him preach once or to whom he expounded on some interesting bit of doctrine.
I've mentioned both of these books before, but I think they're important to evaluating Christian apologetic arguments that hinge on the reliability of personal testimony:
Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy and, more recently, Bart Ehrman's
Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. Both deal with the malleability of human memory and how open we are to even unintentional manipulation.