Why Christianity Fails (The Testimonial Case)
Why Christianity Fails (The Testimonial Case)
Christianity doesn’t treat the resurrection as a side issue. It treats it as the load bearing claim. Paul says it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). If that claim doesn’t hold as an event in history, the system doesn’t merely lose a doctrine, it loses its foundation.
Christianity stands or falls on a single historical claim: that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. I want to keep this thread narrow. I’m not starting with the assumption that miracles are impossible, and I’m not trying to settle theology by opinion. I’m asking a more basic question: is the testimonial evidence strong enough to justify belief in a bodily resurrection as knowledge, rather than as conviction?
The question here is epistemological because it’s a question about the difference between belief and knowledge. People can be sincere, transformed, and willing to suffer, and still be wrong. Conviction doesn’t settle standing. When a claim is treated as a historical event, it’s the kind of claim where we normally ask what supports it, how the support is transmitted, and what would count as correction if it were mistaken. Since Christianity carries the resurrection forward primarily through testimony, the natural way to test its standing is to examine the testimony by the same criteria we use elsewhere when testimony is asked to carry serious weight.
In my book From Testimony to Knowledge I lay out simple criteria for evaluating testimony. Testimony isn’t a weak route to knowledge. Most of what we know comes through the reports of others. The issue isn’t whether testimony can ever justify belief. The issue is what makes testimony good evidence, especially when the claim is weighty. In Chapter 2 I give five criteria that strengthen testimony: number, variety, consistency, corroboration, and firsthand character. In ordinary life, when these criteria are present, testimony can be strong. When they’re missing, testimony can still produce conviction, but conviction alone isn’t the same thing as justificatory standing.
For clarity, I’m not ignoring the usual Christian supports for the resurrection. Christians typically appeal to a cluster of considerations: the Gospel narratives as witness reports, Paul’s summary in 1 Corinthians 15, the empty tomb tradition, appearance traditions, the transformation and persistence of the early disciples, the rapid emergence of the movement, and, in some cases, philosophical arguments about probability or warrant. My plan is to take these in turn and ask how they fare when measured by the criteria for strong testimony.
Here’s how I’m going to run the discussion. I’ll take each criterion in turn and ask a focused question.
Firsthand character: How much of the resurrection claim rests on direct eyewitness testimony that we can identify, and how much is secondhand report?
Corroboration: What independent confirmation do we have for the central claims, confirmation that doesn’t simply repeat the same tradition in another form?
Consistency: Do the accounts substantially converge on the crucial features without requiring harmonization to make them fit?
Variety: Do we have testimony coming through diverse, independent contexts that would normally reduce shared scripting and group reinforcement?
Number: How many independent lines of testimony do we really have once we separate sources from repetition?
My contention is that the resurrection testimony is weaker than Christians often assume when it’s measured by these criteria. It may sustain belief within a tradition, and it may support participation in a religious life. But the question is whether it has the strength required for the bodily resurrection of a man to be treated as a historical event known to have occurred.
Christianity doesn’t treat the resurrection as a side issue. It treats it as the load bearing claim. Paul says it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). If that claim doesn’t hold as an event in history, the system doesn’t merely lose a doctrine, it loses its foundation.
Christianity stands or falls on a single historical claim: that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. I want to keep this thread narrow. I’m not starting with the assumption that miracles are impossible, and I’m not trying to settle theology by opinion. I’m asking a more basic question: is the testimonial evidence strong enough to justify belief in a bodily resurrection as knowledge, rather than as conviction?
The question here is epistemological because it’s a question about the difference between belief and knowledge. People can be sincere, transformed, and willing to suffer, and still be wrong. Conviction doesn’t settle standing. When a claim is treated as a historical event, it’s the kind of claim where we normally ask what supports it, how the support is transmitted, and what would count as correction if it were mistaken. Since Christianity carries the resurrection forward primarily through testimony, the natural way to test its standing is to examine the testimony by the same criteria we use elsewhere when testimony is asked to carry serious weight.
In my book From Testimony to Knowledge I lay out simple criteria for evaluating testimony. Testimony isn’t a weak route to knowledge. Most of what we know comes through the reports of others. The issue isn’t whether testimony can ever justify belief. The issue is what makes testimony good evidence, especially when the claim is weighty. In Chapter 2 I give five criteria that strengthen testimony: number, variety, consistency, corroboration, and firsthand character. In ordinary life, when these criteria are present, testimony can be strong. When they’re missing, testimony can still produce conviction, but conviction alone isn’t the same thing as justificatory standing.
For clarity, I’m not ignoring the usual Christian supports for the resurrection. Christians typically appeal to a cluster of considerations: the Gospel narratives as witness reports, Paul’s summary in 1 Corinthians 15, the empty tomb tradition, appearance traditions, the transformation and persistence of the early disciples, the rapid emergence of the movement, and, in some cases, philosophical arguments about probability or warrant. My plan is to take these in turn and ask how they fare when measured by the criteria for strong testimony.
Here’s how I’m going to run the discussion. I’ll take each criterion in turn and ask a focused question.
Firsthand character: How much of the resurrection claim rests on direct eyewitness testimony that we can identify, and how much is secondhand report?
Corroboration: What independent confirmation do we have for the central claims, confirmation that doesn’t simply repeat the same tradition in another form?
Consistency: Do the accounts substantially converge on the crucial features without requiring harmonization to make them fit?
Variety: Do we have testimony coming through diverse, independent contexts that would normally reduce shared scripting and group reinforcement?
Number: How many independent lines of testimony do we really have once we separate sources from repetition?
My contention is that the resurrection testimony is weaker than Christians often assume when it’s measured by these criteria. It may sustain belief within a tradition, and it may support participation in a religious life. But the question is whether it has the strength required for the bodily resurrection of a man to be treated as a historical event known to have occurred.
Comments (60)
I probably won't be contributing much to this thread, but . . . you do know that millions of people call themselves Christians today who don't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, despite Paul? Are they mistaken to do so, according to you? Or is it possible that your version of what Christianity involves is too traditional, given the very active, living presence of this religion in our culture? I wonder how many contemporary liberal and progressive Christian theologians you've actually read.
Thanks for the comment. You’re right about the sociological fact: many people today call themselves Christians who don't believe in a bodily resurrection. I’m not denying that, and I’m not trying to argue against every Christian belief system.
My point is narrower. I’m taking “Christianity” in the sense that is historically and doctrinally central to the tradition’s own proclamation, and on that point Paul’s conditional matters. If someone treats the resurrection as symbolic or non-bodily, they may still find Christian practices and moral teaching meaningful, but they’ve shifted the kind of claim being made. That shift is precisely what I’m trying to keep visible. It doesn’t settle anything by itself, but it changes what needs to be justified. A metaphor doesn’t require the same testimonial support as a claim about what happened in history.
So no, I’m not saying liberal or progressive Christians are “mistaken to do so” in a moral sense. I’m saying that if the claim is no longer a bodily event in history, then the question I’m asking in this thread isn’t aimed at that version of Christianity. This thread is about the bodily resurrection as a historical claim, because that’s the version that is most often defended as something that can be known and proclaimed as fact.
And I agree that liberal and progressive theologians are part of the living landscape. But notice what their move often is: they reduce the evidential burden by relocating the claim, from “this happened” to “this means,” from event to symbol, from history to existential interpretation. That may be a coherent religious posture, but it’s no longer a claim that stands or falls on testimony in the same way. In that sense it supports my framing rather than refutes it.
Fair enough, as long as we can agree that they really are different versions of Christianity, not a correct or authorized version and a series of heresies.
Quoting Sam26
Right, as regards the resurrection, for instance. The life and teachings of Jesus, though, probably do need an evidentiary basis. I'm not aware of a Christian theology that allows that an actual person named Jesus of Nazareth never existed . . . but who knows, maybe there is.
Conviction is always present in a system of beliefs, but conviction alone isn’t enough to justify a belief. In other words, sometimes people claim to know, but this use of "I know..." is not epistemic, it's an expression of a conviction.
In my last post I laid out five criteria for strong testimony. I’m going to start with the one that matters most here: firsthand character.
In ordinary life, testimony is strongest when we can say, with some clarity, who is reporting, what they claim to have experienced directly, and how that report reached us. The point isn’t that secondhand testimony is always useless. We rely on it constantly. The point is that as the claim becomes more weighty, and as the event becomes more unusual, the difference between “I saw” and “someone said” starts to matter a lot. And it matters even more when the chain between the event and our sources is long.
So here’s the question for the resurrection: How much of our evidence is identifiable firsthand testimony, and how much of it is tradition about what others claimed to see?
A few observations to keep the discussion focused:
Paul is early, but he isn’t giving us direct eyewitness narratives of the events in Jerusalem. He gives a summary of what he “received” and “passed on,” plus his own claim that he experienced an appearance. That matters, but it isn’t the same thing as multiple named eyewitnesses giving independent reports we can examine.
The Gospel narratives are our main source of appearance stories, but the witness layer is hard to isolate. They’re written as narratives, not as signed statements from named witnesses. Even if they preserve earlier testimony, the question remains: how much of that testimony can be traced and identified as firsthand, rather than as communal tradition shaped in the process of transmission?
When Christians say “there were eyewitnesses,” what do we actually have access to? Do we have the witnesses themselves, their independent reports, and the conditions that normally allow cross checking? Or do we have later reports about witnesses?
Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the Gospel accounts are firsthand, that concession barely strengthens the case. Firsthand character is only one criterion. A firsthand report can still be weak if it comes to us through an opaque chain, if it can’t be cross checked by independent lines, and if the normal mechanisms of correction are missing.
And the stakes here matter. In ordinary life, two or three reliable witnesses may be enough for an everyday event, especially when the event fits comfortably inside what we already know about the world. But the bodily resurrection of a dead man is not an everyday event. The claim carries far more weight than the cases where we’re content with a thin testimonial base, and that means the supporting testimony has to carry more of the stabilizing features we ordinarily rely on: independence, corroboration, and exposure to correction.
None of this proves the resurrection false. But it does locate the issue. Christianity asks this testimony to bear an enormous load: the bodily return of a dead man. If the evidence is going to reach the level of knowledge rather than conviction, the firsthand character of the testimony matters, and it matters in combination with the other criteria.
Conviction can be sincere and widespread, but that doesn’t give a claim justificatory standing. Corroboration is one of the main things that does.
By corroboration I mean independent confirmation, support that doesn’t just repeat the same report in another form. In ordinary life, testimony becomes strong when it isn’t trapped inside a single chain. When different lines converge, especially lines that don’t share the same incentives, the same community pressure, or the same source material, then testimony starts to earn standing.
So here’s the question for the resurrection: What independent corroboration do we have for the central claims, corroboration that doesn’t depend on the same Christian tradition simply restating itself?
A few clarifications so we don’t talk past each other:
Repetition isn’t corroboration. If one text depends on another, or if multiple accounts draw from the same underlying tradition, we may have multiple tellings, but we don’t yet have independent confirmation.
“The Church says so” isn’t corroboration. It may explain how belief was preserved, but it doesn’t supply an independent check on whether the event occurred.
Later belief doesn’t corroborate the original event. A movement can grow quickly and still be wrong about what happened at its origin. Growth can show conviction and social power. It doesn’t, by itself, confirm the event.
Hostile or neutral sources matter here. In ordinary cases, corroboration is strongest when it comes from sources that aren’t invested in the claim, or even resist it. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with everything, but it means the report is exposed to pressure that can correct it.
So I’m putting a straightforward challenge on the table:
What independent corroboration do we have that Jesus’ tomb was found empty?
What independent corroboration do we have that multiple people, in different contexts, experienced bodily appearances, rather than visions, dreams, or interpretive experiences?
What independent corroboration do we have for the timing and circumstances, beyond the internal Christian reporting itself?
If your answer is that the corroboration is mostly internal, that’s not an automatic refutation. But it is a diagnostic feature. It means the resurrection claim is being asked to stand on a narrow evidential base, and that makes the other criteria, firsthand character, consistency, variety, and number, carry far more weight than they would in an ordinary case.
As I said on a different thread, isn’t it generally understood that, resurrection aside, there are no eyewitness accounts of whoever it was who inspired the Jesus story? Was it one person or more than one? Or are the mythicists right in saying it is all fictional? I am inclined to think there may have been some historical origin to the story. But it's accepted that Muhammad was a real historical person, and that does not mean he literally cut the moon in two or rode a flying horse.
The Gospels were written many years after the events they describe by anonymous authors and survive only as copies of translations of earlier copies. The names attached to them were applied later by church tradition. I was taught this, not by atheists, but by Christian lecturers, who were not fundamentalists.
You know the old C. S. Lewis “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument? many have found it interesting that he left out a fourth option: Legend.
Thanks, it's not meandering, it’s actually very close to the point of the thread.
You’re correct that, at a certain level, we’re dealing with texts, and you’re also right that “a couple of witnesses” wouldn’t automatically settle anything centuries later. That’s exactly why I’m not treating this as a courtroom fantasy where we just add two affidavits and call it knowledge. The question is whether the kind of testimonial support we have, taken as a whole, is strong enough to bear a bodily resurrection claim. And part of what makes it hard is what you said: we don’t have direct access to witnesses, we have chains of transmission.
On the mythicist question, I’m not going to make that the center of this thread, because it’s a different argument. You can grant a historical Jesus and still deny that the resurrection testimony reaches justificatory credibility, the Muhammad story is such an example. A real founder doesn’t make miracle reports automatically credible. So, I’m not relying on “Jesus wasn’t real.” I’m asking whether the testimony for a bodily resurrection is strong enough even if we assume some historical origin.
On the Gospels, the anonymity and the gap in time matter here, not because “anonymous” means “false,” but because it complicates firsthand character, traceability, and corroboration. If we can’t identify the witness layer with confidence, and if our documents are late and mediated, then the testimony is structurally less able to meet the ordinary tests of reliability and correction. Again, not a refutation by itself, but it’s a real constraint on how much standing the claim has.
And yes, the “Legend” option is relevant. It’s one of the ordinary alternatives that testimony has to be able to resist if it’s going to rise above conviction. Legends don’t require fraud. They require time, transmission, interpretive pressure, and communities that preserve meaning even when details shift. That’s why my approach isn’t “liar” or “lunatic.” It’s: what does the testimonial record look like, and does it have what we need to treat a claim like this as known? My answer would be no.
Conviction can be sincere and stable, but sincerity doesn’t settle standing. One of the things that strengthens testimony is consistency, not in the sense of word for word agreement, but in the sense of stable convergence on the features that matter.
I’m not arguing that every discrepancy makes a report false. Real witnesses differ. They notice different details. They tell the story differently. In ordinary life, that doesn’t automatically discredit testimony. The question is what the differences look like, and what they do to the claim’s ability to stand without constant repair.
So, here’s the question for the resurrection: Do the accounts substantially converge on the crucial features without requiring harmonization to make them fit?
A few clarifications so we don’t talk past each other:
Consistency isn’t sameness. I’m not looking for identical phrasing. I’m looking for stable agreement on the load bearing elements: what happened, to whom, where, when, and in what kind of mode.
Some differences are minor, some aren’t. Differences about incidental details may not matter much. Differences about the structure of the event, the nature of the appearances, the timing, or the witness list do matter, because they affect what kind of claim is actually being made.
Harmonization is not the same as convergence. If the accounts need to be combined, smoothed, or reinterpreted so they can be made consistent, that itself tells us something about the strength of the testimony. Strong testimony usually doesn’t need a later strategy of repair to keep it stable.
Legend is a live alternative here. Not “fraud,” not “mass delusion,” but ordinary development over time as stories are told, retold, and shaped to carry meaning. Consistency, in the relevant sense, is one of the things that can block the “legend” drift. If the record doesn’t block it, then “legend” remains a serious contender.
So, I’m putting the question plainly: when we read the resurrection accounts, do we find a stable, convergent core that stands on its own, or do we find a pattern that requires later stitching?
Even granting a stable core, “Jesus died, the followers proclaimed he was raised, and there were claims of appearances,” the consistency question turns on what happens when we ask for recoverable particulars. When we move from proclamation to narrative detail, the resurrection tradition shows a pattern of variation that matters, who goes to the tomb, what is encountered there, what is said, where the appearances are centered, and the sequence of events. These aren’t merely stylistic differences, because they shape what kind of claim is actually being made and how well it can stand without later stitching. None of this proves fabrication. But it does mean that the testimony, as it has reached us, is less able to block the ordinary alternatives, development over time, legend drift, interpretive reshaping, without relying on harmonization to stabilize it. And when the claim being asked to stand is a bodily resurrection, that dependence on repair is a weakness under the consistency criteria.
Absolutely and it's clear that this is your argument. No problem there.
Quoting Sam26
Yes. For me, it has always been a question of whether we have good reason to accept these stories and my answer has always been no. Setting history aside, there are many contemporary accounts of Indian gurus healing the sick or performing miracles. But does that mean people are actually healing the sick or performing miracles? No.
Quoting Sam26
Yes I think this is well phrased.
I think it is useful to identify that religious stories are not necessarily generated by malevolent people seeking to manipulate others and lie abotu truth claims. Intersubjective communities build stories and traditions over time.
Quoting Sam26
I know this is a different strand, but I don’t understand how the resurrection is supposed to be useful in the first place. Let’s assume it is true. Why would an immortal god enact a primitive blood sacrifice and ruin a weekend just to free people from rules he himself created? Why not simply appear and set people straight? It seems unnecessarily convoluted: if the goal is to guide or save humanity, there are far clearer ways to communicate or intervene. The story reads less like a practical solution and more like a patchwork of old religious myths woven into a narrative.
The resurrection is supposedly God's stamp of approval on Jesus, that he's God. It's also supposed to solve the problem of sin, etc.
There are plenty of reasons someone might reject Christianity besides the weakness of the testimonial evidence. For instance, why would an omniscient God create human beings knowing in advance that many would reject him and end up in hell? That isn’t a small side issue. It raises a moral and philosophical problem about divine goodness and foreknowledge, and it forces Christians to explain why a world with that outcome the world is a perfectly good and all-knowing creator would choose to bring into existence.
Lewis also failed to note that Jesus never claimed to be God in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The claim is made only in the Gospel of John, which scholars believe was written much later than the others.
Quoting Sam26
For roughly 1500 years humanity believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. Supposedly, some folk named Aristotle and Ptolemy rationally demonstrated this geocentric claim. For 1500 years their knowledge was handled down as gospel. I can’t imagine how many folk, from different areas of the world consistency spreading the same message over and over again that the Earth is the center of the universe, sometimes explaining the rationale argument sometimes just blindly repeating the words. I guess what can be passed down can be what is the case or what is not the case.
There was a time when people would only hire Christians over the local pagans. Fear of discipline, honor not rooted in animal or "naturalistic" order (ie. law of the jungle AKA "if I steal or kill and get away with it, it's right"), among other things. So, people being people, guess what. They lie. Overnight everybody was "Christian." And ironically, not long after, nobody really was.
All you have to do is say a sentence and basically live without being blatantly and overtly terrible (which people, especially con men, were literally doing all day everyday anyway) and you're "Christian" (according to 99% of people). "Judge not lest ye be judged" seems to intrinsically allow that, in hindsight. Murphy's Law was not consulted, I fear.
Conviction can spread even when the evidence is thin. One of the things that keeps testimony from collapsing into group reinforcement is variety.
By variety I mean diversity in the lines of testimony: different contexts, different audiences, different pressures, and different routes of transmission. In ordinary life, testimony is stronger when it doesn’t all come through the same social channel or the same interpretive community. Variety matters because it helps separate what’s being reported from what’s being carried along by shared expectations and shared identity.
So here’s the question for the resurrection: Do we have genuinely diverse and independent streams of testimony, or do we mainly have one community preserving and repeating its own founding story?
Volume isn’t variety. Repetition isn’t independence. And a single community can preserve a tradition and also shape it, even when nobody is trying to deceive. When the same circle supplies the report, the meaning of the report, and the setting in which it’s repeated, the conditions for drift are present.
Since you insist on keeping this topic narrow, I have a counter-question for you: Why do you think Christianity rests solely on the assertion that Christ is risen? What is the basis for this?
To clarify this question, I will share some of my research on this topic.
The early Christians anticipated the imminent return of Christ and the resurrection of all the dead (1 Thessalonians 4:13–17: "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first"; Mark 13:30: "Truly I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away until all these things take place"). When this did not occur (the so-called "delay of the Parousia" – from the Greek parousia, "coming"), a theological crisis arose. It was resolved by introducing a Platonic approach into Christian practice: resurrection will come later, but for now there is a body and soul, which separate after death. Although initially there was no dualism of body and soul in the main sources.
I wrote about this in detail here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16096/the-origins-and-evolution-of-anthropological-concepts-in-christianity/p1
Thus, the problem of the resurrection was resolved back in the 1st-2nd centuries AD, and since then it hasn't particularly bothered anyone or hindered the development of religion.
From this, I conclude that you can prove, even with the utmost precision and consistency from the perspective of modern science, that the resurrection never happened, yet this has no bearing whatsoever on the existence of Christianity or its failures. Any believer covers up any logical contradictions with an adaptation: "God decided so", and "it is His will", and "you are not given to know". This is not news.
This is where my question to you, which I formulated at the beginning, arose: Why should the proof of the absence of the resurrection, no matter how strict it may be, suddenly dissuade a believer from his faith?
I've actually noticed this. This message isn't a complaint, but rather a tease, so please don't take it seriously. :razz:
At the same time, I'd like to ask you personally: do you think atheism differs from indifference? My working hypothesis is that it does. Atheism is more of an "anti-religion" than simply "non-religion." An atheist always needs to be convinced of atheism, whereas someone who is indifferent doesn't. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm curious how you think your argument would land with the historian Dale Allison. Are you familiar with his book on the resurrection?
My understanding is that Allison would largely grant everything that you said with regards to the weakness of the testimonial case for the resurrection, but would push back is on the implicit assumption that if a claim fails to meet public historical standards of testimonial knowledge, then that belief lacks adequate epistemic warrant simpliciter.
He seems to argue along the following lines:
(1) The resurrection is not an inference to the best explanation
(2) The resurrection is a singular event that resists historical capture
(3) Belief in the resurrection arises from a convergence of factors, not historical evidence alone
With regards to (3) specifically he seems to say that belief in the resurrection is more akin to committing to a total vision of reality or interpreting history through a larger horizon. He often frames belief as a reasonable risk in light of the moral vision of Jesus, the coherence of Christian hope and the way the resurrection belief "fits" into a total viewpoint, etc.
What are your thoughts on this type of approach?
The Persian Zoroastrianism was very much about the resurrection at the end of time. Mithraism, coming from Zoroastrianism, was popular in the Roman military and dealt with resurrection.
The Greeks had notions of resurrection, but there was no single story of resurrection that everyone shared. At first the Romans could not accept the trinity of God. Until they had a word for that, they were killing each other, because for some, father/son/holy ghost was 3 gods, not one. So here we have a debate of the substance of the soul. I want to clarify that the Greeks had a concept of the trinity, and that Hellenized Jews were the first to write the Bible.
The Celts believed we were immortal and that we could be reborn. Hinduism, Buddhism, are Indian beliefs about immortality and being reborn.
This whole thing gets more complex because it involves not only belief in souls and life after death, but also the idea that Jesus is more than a mortal. This can be hard for some to believe.
I’m interested in all religion; always have been. It's an easy subject to engage with given its ubiquity around the planet and it's influence on geopolitics. But I'm interested in a lot of subjects.
Quoting Astorre
It depends on the atheist. A common mistake some people make is to treat atheism as a worldview. It isn’t, it’s simply a claim about one’s position on gods. I know atheists who believe in the occult, ghosts, and other paranormal phenomena. So atheism isn’t necessarily connected to skepticism. Some atheists are conservative and some are progressive, so there's that too.
Quoting Astorre
Again depends. I think for many atheists it isn’t really a conviction. A conviction of what, exactly? For many, atheism is simply a lack of belief in a god. Contemporary atheists are more likely to say they don’t believe in gods rather than claim that there are no gods. Generally this is called an agnostic atheist since atheism goes to belief not knowledge. Of course some philosophers take issue with this formulation. That said, how can one be “convinced” of a lack of belief? You either believe or you don’t. What you may be is "unconvinced" that there are gods. I think it's well understood that there are hard atheists and soft atheists and atheists who are without any philosophical interest.
I don't know why, but you inspire genuine trust in me, and a genuine desire to argue. This is probably an unconscious response to your honesty.
I'd like to clarify my position. By calling atheism "anti-religion," I'm declaring that it is the same construct for understanding the world as religiosity. The only difference is that a religious person (religious, not a sincere believer) constructs their understanding of the world by allowing for the presence of God, whereas an atheist constructs their understanding of the world by consciously excluding God.
As for me personally, neither is surprising, since I construct my understanding of the world based on feelings. Blind and irrational feelings. Feelings that are not formalized into judgments. Thus, I call myself a believer, although I rationally agree with neither position.
Why have you drawn attention to yourself? I get the impression that you experience something similar, but it doesn't fit into your analytical approach. And your rational constructs don't support the presence of ideas about God that fit into the religions we have. However, this doesn't preclude the feeling within you.
I apologize for my blunt judgments, and rather, their nature is also rooted in the irrational. The thing is, I accept the irrational just as you accept the rational. Hence this genuine interest in your atheism.
Forgive my quick response. Sounds like Allison holds to a variation of the Non-Overlapping Magisteria between history and faith. I think there are a lot of games people can play to preserve a belief in a system. I met a Christian once who said Christ was a myth but he “believed” Christianity anyway because he liked the contemplative aspects of the faith and the hymns. Perhaps not much different to the Marxist who thinks history proves Marx wrong but the hope for a classless society and workers paradise keeps him committed to the Movement.
When someone talks of Jesus’ moral vision like this, of hope, etc, it does seem likely that they were raised and socialised in a Christian culture and ultimately captured by one version of that vision.
I've met similar people and even identified as one for a short time. I get the impression, though, that Allison would likely reject he NOMA label. While he denies that historical method can establish the resurrection, I think he would accept that historical method nevertheless constrains belief. I think he is saying something more like "history places limits on what can responsibly be believed, but it does not exhaust rational judgment". My impression is that he would reject the resurrection if, say, the skeletal remains of Jesus were to be found. Barring something like that, he sees his belief as responsible judgment under evidential underdetermination, constrained by history but not produced by it -- or something like that.
Thank you. I'm not honest so much as limited in scope.
Quoting Astorre
Again, that may apply to some forms of atheism, but it is not a sufficiently consistent line of thought.
What you may be thinking of is secular humanism, which is a more developed system and often presents itself as an alternative to religion.
Quoting Astorre
I hope I draw attention to others. I enjoy hearing what other people believe and why. That, to me, is the unique appeal of this forum: engaging with those beliefs. I’m not particularly attached to my own views; they are what they are largely because I have not found other beliefs to hold.
Quoting Astorre
I tend to think that those who derive satisfaction from rationality or whatever else, do so because it ultimately appeals to them emotionally. Most of our beliefs are likely arrived at because they align with our feelings, with rational explanations often supplied afterward as ad hoc justifications.
I'm sure he would, it just seemed to be a similar formulation with history standing in for science.
I often wonder, in such cases, why Christianity rather than Hinduism, Islam or Buddhism. When read deeply, they too offer vast contemplative opportunities. But it seems to be that Hindu children tend to see visions of Krishna in the woods, while Christian children see Mary by the river.
I have to agree with you completely here. I'm convinced of this too.
I'm just not so fortunate in my imagination that I can cover up my feelings with rationality or analytical thinking. And why bother, when you can honestly and upfront admit what's serving what purpose?
How does this impact Christianity in light of the OP? Do we have sufficient reason to think that Jesus was God and died for our sins? Personally, my conclusion is no. But I have never thought that an old book asserting something is, in itself, a reliable tool in the first place, regardless of what can be proven historically.
This is precisely what I'm writing about. There are no rational grounds for believing this to be true. Religion, in general, deals with this successfully and easily overcomes it. Faith lies in something more than just rationally understanding what's written in a book. This makes any rational refutations seem ridiculous. After all, the believer will cleverly negate all of this. So, my question is: what is the usefulness of these judgments?
That could be said of practically all of the major religions, couldn’t it? That it doesn’t come down to peer-reviewed evidence, so much as a moral vision of the nature of reality or the meaning of life itself.
I notice in Allison’s book description, “Allison moves on to consider the resurrection in parallel with other traditions and stories, including Tibetan accounts of saintly figures being assumed into the light, in the chapter "Rainbow Body" (‘In Tibetan Buddhism, a supreme state of spiritual realization where an advanced practitioner's physical body transforms into pure light at death, signifying complete enlightenment, often leaving only hair and nails, or even vanishing entirely’). This is something I heard about when a participant in Buddhist forums.
Philosophically speaking, my view is that religions generally are an attempt to communicate insights into such radically different states of being. They are extremely hard to communicate, and rarely understood, hence clothed in symbolic language and mythological allegories (thus also prone to enormous misunderstandings). I also notice in the comments on Allison’s book ‘his willingness to take seriously the reality of religious experience’. Such ‘experiences’ (better, ‘realisations’), do sometimes result in the complete re-orientation of an individual’s sense of what is real. Again, very hard to communicate or describe. (See William James Varieties of Religious Experience for a classic on this.)
(Around the mid 2000’s, an archaeologist made the startling claim that he had discovered an ossuary in Israel that contained the physical remains of Jesus. We had a dinner-table conversation about this news story, during which I said that, were it proven, it would be catastrophic for Christianity, undermining the foundational mythos of the religion. Others at the table were more sanguine, saying that the Resurrection was ‘only symbolic’ and that Christ’s moral commandments and teachings were the real essence. I insisted that to say that, betrays an ignorance of what Christianity means, which provoked a furious row. But I still believe it to be the case. I’ve also found with other family members, that even those who have remained Christian express doubts that the resurrection was literally true, whereas I, who am not a Church-going Christian at all, have no trouble believing that it was, for reasons I can’t really defend. The claim about the ossuary, by the way, was soon dismissed by other archeologists.)
“Number” matters in testimony, but only when it means independent lines, not just a large headcount or a story repeated many times.
In ordinary life, testimony gets stronger when multiple witnesses report the same event independently, through different channels, with the possibility of cross checking. But when many reports trace back to the same source, the “number” can look large while the evidential base stays narrow.
So here’s the question for the resurrection: How many independent lines of testimony do we actually have, once we separate sources from repetition?
A few quick ways to keep this honest:
Lists aren’t automatically independent. A later summary that reports “many people saw” doesn’t give us many independent reports, it gives us one report about many.
Multiple documents don’t automatically mean multiple lines. If documents share a tradition, depend on one another, or arise from the same inner circle, the apparent number can outpace the real independence.
Sincerity doesn’t add independence. A community can sincerely repeat what it inherited without adding new evidential weight.
If someone’s Christianity doesn’t rise or fall on a bodily event in history, then my argument won’t work in the same way, because it’s aimed at the attempt to treat that event as knowledge on the basis of testimony.
I think many belief systems cheerfully overcome facts: that’s a function of belief systems, whether religious or not. I think this applies to football teams and schools of literary criticism just as much as it does to Christianity.
Indeed they do, and it's a good question. I'm guessing that Allison would concede that his affinity for Christianity is rooted in his cultural background. I know that he has engaged honestly with other traditions and I don't think he would try to say that Christianity is demonstrably superior to them according to any neutral, public criteria. That said, he also seems to think that the Christian tradition captures something unique that helps him to make sense of the world in a way not replicated by other traditions, and that the resurrection plays a role in that. I'm not sure if he'd be willing to say anything stronger than that.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think the second quote is an articulation of the first. It would make sense for the religion of one's cultural background to capture something the others don’t. Not that the reverse isn’t sometimes true for some people.
I’d be curious about the resurrection’s importance.
I have never understood the resurrection story, or, as some put it: God sacrificed Himself to Himself to save us from Himself because of a rule He made Himself.
That may be a bit glib, but the blood sacrifice element never made sense to me. The fact Jesus could walk away from it just demonstrated how little was sacrificed, he was omnipotent to begin with. No doubt there are innumerable theological exegeses to offer to redeem (sorry) this account.
It fits into a larger narrative. The idea that God created the heaven and earth so that beings could live a life independent of his direct control. Or in other words like a puppet that has come to life and doesn’t need strings to move any more and a puppet master to operate them. This inevitably results in some personal autonomy in these beings. Then we have the garden of Eden story, where the beings partake of the tree of knowledge, signifying the fall.
If one takes this narrative on board then it makes sense for a representative of God to be introduced to attempt to guide the beings when they go astray.
Now the crucifixion story signifies that these autonomous beings, due to their independent autonomy have the agency to crucify themselves, or pervert their autonomous behaviour. In the crucifixion this is demonstrated writ large. The resurrection signifies that those beings can be released from the guilt and shame of this behaviour and be reinstated as pristine beings in the garden of Eden, so to speak, as they were prior to the fall.
I am not a Christian, or a Christian scholar, but do find the Christian mysticism of these narratives compelling.
I see what you mean, but I would say that this is a bit overly reductionistic. People choose to align themselves to religious traditions for many reasons that cannot be reduced solely to the influence of their cultural backgrounds.
Quoting Tom Storm
Again, I would say that this is probably overly reductionistic and perhaps even a bit uncharitable. I think that "blood sacrifice" is not the best historical description of how the earliest Christians understood the crucifixion. The language of sacrifice is indeed one of several interpretive strands running through the tradition, but (as far as I know) it was not understood by early Christians as an expression of primitive blood magic. The crucifixion (and the resurrection) were seen primarily as a symbolic condemnation of violence, not a sacralization of it.
I’m not attacking Christians, and I’m not trying to score points. I’m evaluating a specific historical claim, and I’m asking whether the testimonial evidence is strong enough for it to be treated as knowledge rather than conviction.
My metaphysics doesn’t rule out God. What it rules out are many of the particular religious pictures people inherit, especially when they present themselves as public historical knowledge without the kind of evidential support that would justify that status. In other words, I’m not arguing against spirituality as such, and I’m not denying metaphysical depth. I’m arguing for clarity about what can be responsibly treated as knowledge, what functions more like orientation and practice, and where conviction has outrun justification.
No. Not even close to being in the realm of the same vicinity as being strong enough. William Lane Craig is probably the best example for why: It rests on incredulity about people's reportage which is, itself, derived from a bare acceptance of hte testimonies, despite their contradictions, time-lapses and what not.
I don't even think it rises to the level of a serious claim, let alone supporting supernatural side-lines.
It is bewildering to me that anyone who can understand, for instance, mass delusion, could neverhteless rest their entire cosmic, moral and practical life on such utterly thin and empty reasoning. I have no problem coming across harsh and judgmental. I have absolutely no respect for these positions (religious ones, generally, in lieu of anything sensible in support)
Well, I did point out that there were “innumerable” other interpretations so not necessarily.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Really? How so? One only has to look as the Christian tradition of self-flagellation, not to mention conservative Catholic, Mel Gibson’s The Passion to see how central suffering and bloody sacrifice are to notions of atonement for many believers. Suffering seems to be a path to redemption. I’m not saying that’s all there is, I’m asking how else can this be understood without resorting to idiosyncratic and poetic interpretations? What was the point of the crucifixion story, it seems incoherent?
In the Baptist tradition I grew up in, Jesus had to die to save us. His death leads to forgiveness and reconciliation. How so, I don’t think we were ever taught.
That's the point of my thread, viz., that the testimonial evidence doesn't come close to justifying the belief in the resurrection.
Quoting AmadeusD
The problem is epistemological for me (not mass delusion), i.e., that most people don't know how to justify a belief, including many of the people in this forum. I don't have much respect for many religious beliefs either, but that's different from treating religious people with disdain as many do. I try not to but fail at times.
I treat the beliefs with disdain, not the people. They are ridiculous, culturally destructive and intellectually antithetical to truth, progress and reason. Anyone who actively choose to reject those notions probably wont be someone I could be friends with.
Here's one possible alternative framing that I think would be endorsed by someone like Allison. I'm not going to try to defend this framing, I'm just going to offer it:
Crucifixion in the Roman world was a state execution designed to humiliate, terrorize, and erase. It was reserved for slaves, rebels, and the socially disposable. It was not a religious ritual. It was political violence, publicly justified as “law and order.”
The Gospels go out of their way to show that Jesus is innocent, the legal process is corrupt, religious and political authorities collude, and the crowd is manipulable. The cross is not staged as a sacred offering; it is staged as a miscarriage of justice.
The agents of violence are the state, institutional religion, respectable authority, and the crowd. This is what the world does to truth, fidelity, and love: violence is normalized, justified, and sanctified by “order”.
But the gospel story insists that God is found not on the side of power, but on the side of the executed. That’s not sacralizing violence. It’s exposing it. The cross says: this is what our systems do when they feel threatened.
The New Testament sometimes uses sacrificial imagery, but that imagery is metaphorical, drawn from Jewish covenantal language and morally reworked, not mechanically applied. When early Christians say Jesus “gave himself,” the emphasis is on self-giving, not divine requirement. A key shift happens here: God is not the one demanding blood; humans are the ones shedding it. That’s the inversion many later atonement theories obscure.
If the story ended on Friday the cross would simply be another example of justified brutality: suffering would be ennobled and violence would win.
But the resurrection functions as a reversal of meaning: the executed one is vindicated, the judgment of history is overturned, the logic that “might makes right” is exposed as false.
So the resurrection does not say: “suffering redeems because suffering is good”. It says: “the world was wrong to do this, and God does not side with those who did it.”
That’s why the resurrection is not an optional decoration, but a moral key.
That's true of many systems of beliefs, not just religious beliefs.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Well, we know what Nietzsche thought of this framing: that it valorised suffering and weakness and distorted life. Not that I’m a fan of his work.
Earlier you used the term reductive to critique my comments (and this isn’t intended as any kind of attack, just a friendly word game), but couldn’t it be said that this formulation is also reductive, in that it ignores the contours of the text and reduces the story to ethical symbolism?
Plenty of other versus to draw from, but when I read key passages like Mark 10:45:
“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." I feel ritual sacrifice is central to the story.
Anyway, don't want to distract from the thread's main purpose. Perhaps we need a separate thread on the philosophical meaning of the crucifixion, which I'm sure will range from the prosaic to the exotic.
Or an ethical one.
I would say symbolic of the possibility of redemption. The narrative indicates this, that Jesus’s life and life story was to demonstrate an acceptance/recognition of human frailty by God. That people by their very nature do crucify each other, do deceive, enslave, etc each other. But that they can be redeemed, can be freed from the guilt and shame, it leaves them. That they can be restored to the purity they enjoyed prior to the fall,(something which is impossible without redemption).
In other religions this issue of destructive human nature is dealt with in other ways. But the goal is the same. To reduce this behaviour in the population, by offering a benevolent alternative and to provide an off ramp for the guilty.
I don't know exactly how Allison would respond to this. I suspect he would say something like "I think my interpretation is better grounded than alternatives, and I am prepared to defend that claim even if it is ultimately not coercively demonstrable by appeal to neutral, public criteria."
Quoting Tom Storm
My familiarity with Neitzche is mostly second-hand, but I think that his critique may not land against the framing given above. That framing does not valorize suffering and weakness; it valorizes fidelity to truth, love and goodness despite suffering and weakness.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think Allison would push back on the charge that he's reduced the story to mere ethical symbolism. I think that he'd acknowledge that the cruxifiction has multiple dimensions— theological, eschatological, political, moral—but that its moral axis is the condemnation of judgment and violence and that the other dimensions revolve around that axis rather than override it.
I suspect he'd also push back on the notion that his interpretations ignore the contours of the text. Allison is the co-author of a three-volume, 2400 page commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that is widely regarded as one of the best scholarly treatments available. I bring this up not as an appeal to authority, or to say this exempts him from criticism, but merely to point out that he is world-renowned for the depth of his engagement with the texts.
Quoting Tom Storm
Here are some brief thoughts with regard to the interpretation of that verse:
(1) In the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century CE the word "ransom" primarily referred to a price paid to liberate captives, or the cost of freeing slaves or prisoners. In that context, paying a ransom is an act that releases others from domination.
(2) Mark 10, the chapter in which the verse is situated, is not a cultic discussion, but a discussion about power. The disciples are arguing about status, greatness and who gets to rule. Jesus responds by contrasting gentile rulers who “lord it over” others with his own model of authority as service to others.
(3) Seen in context, then, Mark 10:45 does not seem to be answering: “How does God forgive sins metaphysically?” It is answering: “What kind of power does God exercise, and what kind of Messiah is Jesus?” The answer is not domination, violence or coercion, but self-giving service, even unto death.
(4) The phrase “to give his life” evokes a voluntary self-offering, not divine extraction. Nothing in Mark suggests God needs blood, demands violence, or is appeased by suffering. The "giving" is Jesus’s fidelity to his mission in the face of violent resistance. That coheres nicely with the “condemnation of violence” reading.
(5) It's noteworthy that the author of Mark never specifies to whom the ransom is paid. Later atonement theories fill in the blank, but the text itself doesn’t.
(6) With the resurrection, God vindicates the executed one. The system that killed him is exposed and violence is judged, not justified. Seen in this light the meaning of the resurrection becomes: "liberation is costly because the world violently resists it — and God sides with the one who bears that cost". That is not blood-fetishism, but moral realism.
Hmm, almost anyone can make that point and then go on to assert virtually anything about a given matter with impunity.
There are few things more tedious than debates about the meaning of Bible verses, so I apologise for even raising Mark, which interestingly never presents us with a resurrected Christ.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I’m not convinced by this account, but it’s nicely argued. Perhaps it's a bit too small to fully explain the significance of the crucifixion, or why an omnipotent God would find it necessary to undergo such a ritual to make a point about violence that seems largely lost on the religion inspired by the story; particularly given the extreme brutality the Church has employed over the centuries in imposing its vision.
But I’ll include this in my list of potential interpretations and, in time, perhaps further material will emerge that will make sense of this story. Maybe we need a competition for the best interpretation of the story. Apologies to we should probably stop here.
That wasn't quite what I was getting at. The point was to acknowledge the possibility of reasonable disagreement, not to license unconstrained assertion.
Quoting Tom Storm
Fair enough. Thanks for the discussion.
If people are assuming an omnipotent God, when discussing what God is up to, all discussion is pointless.
Even when testimony is sincere, it’s strongest when it’s exposed to conditions that can correct it: hostile questioning, independent checking, and clear mechanisms for identifying and revising error. When those conditions are missing, conviction can remain stable even if the story drifts.
Here’s the question for the resurrection: What correction pressure did the resurrection reports face, and what trace do we have of that pressure working?
In ordinary cases, when a claim is publicly asserted, especially a weighty claim, we expect some combination of cross-examination, competing records, independent confirmations, and correction when mistakes are found. With the resurrection tradition, the gap between the event and our sources, the dependence on internal transmission, and the lack of independent confirmation make that correction pressure hard to locate. That doesn’t prove the claim false. But it does mean the testimony is structurally less able to earn standing, because one of the main stabilizers of strong testimony, exposure to correction, is largely absent from what we can access.
In BoT §9 Nietzsche contrasts the Aryan Prometheus myth with the Semitic Fall. For the Greeks, man’s crime (Prometheus stealing fire) is a proud, tragic transgression—culture born through bold defiance of the gods. By contrast, the Semitic Fall locates the origin of evil not in man’s daring but in woman’s seduction: curiosity, wantonness, beguilement. Sin is feminized; woman is cast as corrupter. Here Nietzsche sees the beginning of the Judeo-Christian attack on the Dionysian: noble crime transformed into moralized sin, creative defiance replaced by narratives of female weakness and corruption.
This, for Nietzsche, is the root of how morality—especially through Socratism, Platonism, and the Judeo-Christian myth—works to kill off the Dionysian, the very “feminine” nature of life.