Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? DEBATE!

Jimmy Akin dives into a thrilling debate on the question, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” Facing skeptic James Fodor, Jimmy dismantles naturalistic theories like body theft and hallucinations, champions paranormal evidence, and argues the Resurrection best explains the empty tomb, appearances, and ascension. Witty, rigorous, and eye-opening!

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Coming Up

A central claim of the Christian faith is that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Non-Christians have challenged the idea, going all the way back to the first century.

Of course, the debate has continued down to our own day, and it gets discussed on a variety of different levels.

Today, I’m going to be showing you a debate that I recently participated in on a philosophy channel where we looked at the question, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?”

Let’s get into it!

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Howdy, folks!

We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

Introduction

I want to thank Joe Schmid of the Majesty of Reason philosophy channel on YouTube.

Joe is a philosopher and an agnostic who is interested in religious belief claims, and he’s always struck me as engaging with them in an open-minded way on an intellectual level.

A while back, Joe contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in debating James Fodor on the resurrection of Jesus.

James had written a book called Unreasonable Faith, in which he critiqued the case put forward by Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig.

I said, “Sure,” and I read the relevant part of James’s book ahead of time to familiarize myself with his views.

In the debate, James and I both gave 15-20 minute opening statements, and we both used slides for our opening statements, so you may get more out of the debate if you watch the video version of the podcast.

We then basically cross-examined each other for the rest of the two-hour debate time.

And here I want to give James Fodor a compliment, because he avoided doing something that debaters of lesser caliber frequently do.

Back in Episode 10, I told you about a cheap debater’s tactic known as the Gish Gallop.

What people try to do in a Gish Gallop is throw out issue after issue that is either a lesser matter or even completely unrelated to the debate at hand.

The Gish Galloper is hoping that his opponent will start discussing these lesser or unrelated matters and start going down rabbit trails and waste his time rather than discussing the actual subject of the debate.

For example, I remember a while back when I was debating the subject of whether sola scriptura is true, and my opponent had the burden of proving that it is true, yet he complained that I wasn’t discussing issues like

SOME GUY: (1) A single bishop currently Francis (2) Cardinals (3) archbishops, (4) a sacramental priesthood, (5) the immaculate conception, (6) perpetual virginity of Mary, such doctrines as (7) purgatory and (8) indulgences and (9) papal infallibility. (10) The bodily assumption of Mary, (11) ask Augustine, (12) aske Cyprian, (13) sacramentalism, (14) ecumenical councils and (15) conciliarism.

And then—the next night—when we were debating whether we are justified by faith alone, my opponent complained that I wasn’t discussing

SOME GUY: (1) The mass is a propitiatory sacrifice. What about (2) priests? What about (3) Mary? What about (4) Mary’s intercession? What about (5) Mary as the “neck” that turns the head of God’s grace, (6) purgatory and (7) punishments and (8) temporal punishments and (9) forgiveness of sins through a sacramental priesthood, (10) venial and mortal sins? Do we believe in (11) indulgences? Do we believe that you will someday stand before God because you have had (12) imputed to your account the righteousness of Christ, (13) Mary and the saints, (14) sacramental forgiveness (15) to maintain it through the sacraments of the church? Will (16) indulgences increase my righteousness before God in the sense of (17) lowering the amount of time I have to spend in purgatory?

Yeah, none of those issues have a direct bearing on sola scriptura or justification by faith alone. They may all be interesting topics, but they weren’t what we were there to debate.

If my opponent wanted to debate one of those topics, he should have asked for a debate on it instead.

I would be wasting the time I had available to speak—and wasting the audience’s time—if I had fallen for my opponent’s attempts to sucker me into spending time on issues we weren’t there to debate.

Well, I want to compliment James Fodor on not doing that.

Despite the fact that there was even less structure to this debate than the ones that that other debater and I had, James Fodor stuck to the topic and didn’t go Gish Galloping all over the countryside.

So James Fodor, good job! You didn’t stoop to using slimy debaters’ tactics like certain others.

Of course, Fodor and I have quite different views on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection, and I hope you enjoy our discussion.

So, as they say, let’s roll the tape.

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JOE SCHMID: Hey peeps. Today we have a discussion style debate on the resurrection. Many of you will already know my guests, but if you don’t, Jimmy Akin is an author, speaker and senior apologist at Catholic Answers. I’ve put links to his YouTube channel, books and website in the description. James Fodor recently received a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Melbourne. He’s also an author and speaker, and I’ve put links to his book, website and YouTube channel in the description as well. So the resolution for tonight is the following question, what’s the best explanation of the facts about Jesus and the apostles post crucifixion? James will start with an opening statement defending his skeptical perspective. Jimmy will then give an opening statement defending his Christian perspective, and the rest of the video will be a back and forth discussion on points of disagreement that came up. But without further ado, let’s turn it over to James for his opening statement.

JAMES FODOR: Awesome. Thanks very much Joe, and thanks Yumi for agreeing to discuss this with me. So it’s a pleasure to be here. So what I’m going to be doing today is just talking about how I understand the facts relating to the crucifixion and postmortem appearances of Jesus and outlining what I call the RHBS model to account for these. Okay, so let’s start by outlining what I mean when I talk about the historical facts. So on the left here we have Jesus’s ministry, crucifixion and burial. So I’m taking those as given for the purpose of the discussion as essentially background and the three that I have on the right, the empty term, the appearances to individuals in groups and the origins of the belief that Jesus had been resurrected. Those are the facts that I’m particularly interested in trying to account for or to explain.

JAMES FODOR: So when we talk about explanations, let me just outline what I sort of mean by that. So an explanation is something that tells us how and why a particular set of facts or observations occurred or why we observed them. I think Charles Pear did a good job when he said that given an explanation, the facts to be explained should follow as a matter of course, which doesn’t mean that they will necessarily follow logically, but it means that they should sort of make sense and seem natural given the explanation. So we can assess explanations using a number of criteria. Three that I find useful are explanatory scope. So basically the range of facts to be accounted for with an explanation the more the better explanatory power. So this refers to how likely the facts are rendered by the explanation and as well as sort of the internal coherence of the explanation. And then plausibility. So the more likely are the postulated aspects of our explanation given our background knowledge, then the better is the explanation. This will be a key factor that I’ll come back to later.

JAMES FODOR: So in order to motivate what I’m going to be doing here, I first want to say that in my view the traditional Christian explanation for the relevant facts relating to the postmortem appearances and empty tomb of Jesus is not very good. Obviously this will be a point of contention, but some aspects that I think the resurrection hypothesis doesn’t do a very good job at accounting for is things like the idea that God had a reason or a desire to raise Jesus from the dead. The fact that Jesus appeared to his followers after the alleged resurrection, but only to his followers and the fact that Jesus did not meet the requirements for the Jewish

Messiah. So I’m sure we’ll discuss these more later, but the inability in my view of the resurrection hypothesis to account for these in some other aspects motivated the development of an alternate explanation, which I call the RHPS model.

JAMES FODOR: And I want to emphasize that I’m only summarizing the model here. So you can see in my book Unreasonable Faith, which unfortunately has been blurred out if you’re interested in reading a bit more detail. But lemme just outline in brief here what the model says. So first of all, re burial. The idea is that Jesus’s body was removed from the term probably by Joseph and Maroth, the in what was intended to be a temporary storage, the discovery of the empty term as well as the context in which the events were occurring, obviously then triggered individual hallucinations of the risen Jesus, which may be bereavement hallucinations. I’ll explain that a bit later. These individual hallucinations in turn led early disciples to have collective religious experiences of Jesus appearing to them. And again, I’ll talk more about that in a moment. Then following these initial experiences, the disciples discussed what had happened with each other.

JAMES FODOR: They tried to make sense of it. Their memories were then reshaped by processes that I’ll be outlining such as reconstructive recall, social memory, contagion and cognitive dissidence in. And these processes operated to essentially increase the coherence and the impressiveness of the accounts. And then finally we have socialization. So any sort of disagreements or residual doubts tended to be muted over time because of social pressures and injunctions to faith and things like that. So that’s the brief outline of how the model works. Let me now go through and discuss some of the individual aspects in a bit more detail. First of all, burial. Now we know that Jewish law required that the bodies be removed from the cross before the beginning of the Sabbath. And this is repeated for example in John. And the point mentioned there is in particular is that the tomb was nearby.

JAMES FODOR: And so that was actually the reason why those specific led Jesus there. Because it was getting late. Jesus’ body needed to be removed. The term Joseph MA’s tomb was nearby. Mark also emphasizes that the burial was hasty because the evening had sort of come rapidly on the Friday evening and there was a necessity to bury the body. Now we also know that the Romans feared civil disorder and that there was a particular desire for them to avoid the potential of mob riots. Matthew and Luke both mentioned this. So the hypothesis that I make is that they were particularly interested in having the body buried somewhere quiet, somewhere private, somewhere relatively out of the way close but out of the way. So it was to reduce the risk of further disorder which had already been precipitated in the events of Jesus’ trial. And so the hypothesis here is that Jesus was placed temporarily in a nearby private tomb and as soon as possible was reburied.

JAMES FODOR: So this was on Saturday evening after the end of the Sabbath and then leaving the tomb empty on the Sunday morning when it was discovered by some of his web followers. So that’s the basic idea of burial. Now let’s move to hallucinations, individual hallucinations. I’m not going to talk too much about this, but I’m just going to give a flavor of some of the things that I highlight in my book. So we know that individual hallucinations are actually fairly common. They are more

common in people with mental disorders, but that’s not necessary. They’re quite a large proportion of the broader population will experience hallucinations of different types including auditory, visual and even tactile hallucinations. So I’ve just given one reference for this, but there’s many studies that look at that and one type of hallucination that’s particularly relevant are called bereavement or post bereavement hallucinations.

JAMES FODOR: And these are experiences that follow the death of a loved one. These are also very common. One study found one third of people who’ve experienced a recent loss reported seeing, hearing or talking to the deceased. Now it’s true that in most cases of bereavement hallucinations, the person who experiences this does not then go on to believe that their loved one is still alive in some form. However, this can happen in the appropriate circumstances. I just saw one example here of another wise psychologically healthy 26-year-old who came to believe that his mother was still alive and reported having encounters and interactions with her. Again, I cite other examples in my book. And so the take home here is that individual hallucinations are not uncommon and they’re particularly known to occur in the context of bereavement. So then we move on to group appearances. And here I cite the work of Rawcliffe who has conducted studies on these sorts of phenomena.

JAMES FODOR: And I should say, I’ll be showing a number of quotes just to illustrate the literature that I’m signing. I won’t read all of them here if people are interested that they can pause and have a read of the quote. But the basic idea here is that when we’re talking about group experiences, we’re not talking about group hallucinations. The hallucination is a psychological experience that occurs in one person. But what can happen as royal Cliffe documents is that multiple people in a given sort of social context in a given situation can have separate hallucinations but which have shared content because they’re in the same situation. So this is not to say that two people share the hallucination in every respect. They’re not sharing exactly the same experience, but they’re having very, very similar experiences triggered by the context. And the idea is that subsequent comparisons would not typically don’t disclose major discrepancies.

JAMES FODOR: Any discrepancies that do exist are typically harmonized in subsequent recollection and conversation. And I’ll talk more about the mechanisms of those in a bit. So a number of studies have looked at how these sorts of collective experiences of unusual phenomena can occur. One study that I cite here looks at in the context of hauntings and poltergeist experiences, and they talk about how these sort of self-reinforcing attention selective attention processes can operate it so can operate. So people identify something that they label as abnormal or paranormal in this context and then they sort of fixate on that and are hypersensitive to other phenomena that they can then further label as that. And this results in what they call flurries of paranormal observations due to self-reinforcing attentional processes and perceptual contention, one person noticing something and then commenting on that to someone else who then notices it and so forth.

JAMES FODOR: This is a paranormal context, but other studies have looked at in a more religious context as well. Another relevant phenomena is suggestibility. So just

a couple of studies here that I cite people are, many people are readily able to have experiences solicited in them by suggestion. So one study actually constructed a haunted room and basically were able to elicit unusual sensations and hallucinations in a large proportion of the subjects, basically by just suggesting to them that they might experience something abnormal. Another study, which is that the second court here looked at asked people to keep a diary while living in a house that was labeled as haunted. And again, they noted an increasing frequency of anomalous or unusual events that were reported just because volunteers were primed to notice particular things. And the authors suggest that the best explanation for that is suggestibility.

JAMES FODOR: Another study that looked at similar sort of factors, but in this case, in a Pentecostal healing context described mechanisms for how these sort of miraculous healing events are constructed socially. So they talk about different techniques like suggestion, use of music is important, contextual factors, so the expectation of the audience and the beliefs that they have going into it. And then highlighting attention, selection effects, editing. So highlighting things that are consistent with the account are not those that aren’t. And so this is an interesting case of documenting how these effects, these sort of collective experiences of the paranormal or supernatural can be constructed in kind of real time. Now another thing that I do in my book is I cite a number of examples of how these sort of processes come together, how we or plausibly they have come together. We can explain how miraculous events can occur historically using these processes by historical example of when we have accounts of groups of people reporting miraculous or supernatural occurrences.

JAMES FODOR: These are just a few that I’ve shown here. I’m not going to talk in detail about them. You can see my book for more information, but we have ti and me Mendel Sen who were both Messiah Jewish Messiah claimants. Mendel Sen is a particularly interesting case because he is quite a recent figure who still has an active following and including people who believe that although he has died, but they believe he is in some sense still alive or has returned and report experiences of him. We have Southeast side Baba and Anand Damia Ma who were both Indian religious figures who were believed to be reincarnations of Indian gods, both of whom have a vast array of miracles attributed to them. And I document some of these in my book.

JAMES FODOR: Simon Kangu was some sort of charismatic Christian leader in the Congo in the early 20th century and he was actually persecuted by the Belgian authorities, a very interesting case there. People are interested in that. A lot of miracles attributed to him. One last case, which I couldn’t help but include, this is not actually a religious leader, but this is an American anthropologist Bruce t Grindle, and he records an account of experiencing what he describes as a corpse coming back to life and dancing in an anthropological context of when he was conducting research. I think it was in Africa in the 1960s. And what’s interesting is he didn’t actually believe that that’s what happened. He just reports experiencing that in that particular context. So a very interesting account to look at there. So these

are just some examples of how these processes that I mentioned can come together to generate these sorts of collective experiences.

JAMES FODOR: Another slightly different set of phenomena called mass hysteria. So this is less a single event and more when many people in a given community or given context of report having some sort of experience which we can demonstrate is not actually vertical. And again, I won’t go through these here, you can look these up if you’re interested. The one that I find most interesting is genital shrinking epidemics, which actually have been documented multiple times in history. So this is when in a particular social context there comes to be a widespread but lymph amongst males that they genitals are shrinking due to some sort of disease even though there is no such disease. And the doctors can tell that no such thing is happening, but nonetheless, people can still come to believe that this is happening, which is sort of somewhat surprising. Okay, so that finishes up the collective religious experiences component.

JAMES FODOR: And now I’m going to talk a bit about memory on cognitive biases. So here again, I’m just going to touch on a few key ideas. So one is the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. So there’s been extensive documentation in recent years, recent decades about how eyewitness testimony is not always reliable and many details can be wrongly remembered and also how false memories can be encoded. The particular example that I’m highlighting here is a very unfortunate story of a rape victim, Jennifer Thompson Canino, who what’s particularly interesting about her case is that she particularly made an effort to consciously encode and study the details of her attacker so that she’d be able to identify them later and later in court she confidently identified her attacker, said she’d never been so sure of anything before she was a hundred percent sure that that was her attacker, the person that she identified Ronald Cotton was convicted and sent to prison.

JAMES FODOR: But several years later it was found that he was actually innocent using DNA evidence. And there’s an interesting book written about that experience and how both of them then have come together and to highlight the problems with the use of reliance on eyewitness testimony in the legal system. Other studies have looked at mechanisms of how memories can become distorted and or contaminated over time. And so there’s a large body of literature looking at the reconstructive nature of memory. So when we remember things, we don’t just encode them like it’s a videotape or a recording. We record memories as connections of associations and every time we recall or repeat an event, we’re actually sort of modifying reconstructing and editing their memory. And this particularly in social context, this sort of selective rehearsal, identifying things that are important and reiterating those and leaving other things out because of that particular reasons for sharing things like the social context of sharing that exacerbates these tendencies as well as what it mentions here, the schema activated during retelling.

JAMES FODOR: So that’s essentially the way we make sense of something, the conceptual apparatus to make sense of it. So it’s not like we just remember a set of facts. The way we remember things is shaped by the story that we used to make sense of it and that in turn distorts the memory over time towards greater

coherence with that chema. There’s another study here that talks about how false memories can be quite readily elicited in participants. So this one story, sorry, this one study elicited a memory, a false memory of seeing film of a sinking passenger lineup in 36% of participants, which is already quite a lot. But then they found out that when they exposed those participants to another participant who reported that they had seen the event, so essentially a confederate who was saying that they had seen the same thing, the proportion of people who remembered seeing that non-existent footage increased to 76%. And this is just one example of other studies showing that we readily incorporate details from other people into our own memories and then think that we’ve remembered them ourselves even if we actually got them from someone else. Cognitive dissonance is another important phenomenon some people may have heard of. So this essentially occurs when people are resistant to belief change.

JAMES FODOR: When one of our deeply held beliefs is threatened by discon confirmation, we’re resistant to changing that belief and so we come up with cognitive strategies in order to avoid that. A good example of this is 1844, what’s called the Great Disappointment when the millerites believed that Jesus would return, but that didn’t happen. And so there was a lot of soul searching and attempt to make sense of that, but the movement didn’t die out. It sort of morphed into what’s now the Seventh Day Adventist church and scholars have developed explanations for how this happens and one of the mechanisms that is I think very relevant for us here is what’s called spiritualization. The idea is that the event, the prophesied event, which was initially stated to be a visible verifiable event, is reinterpreted to be an invisible spiritual occurrence. And so that’s what the Seventh Day Adventist sort of reinterpreted their prophecy to be.

JAMES FODOR: And I actually think that this is very similar to what happened with Jesus’s followers expectations of what the Jewish Messiah would be that was reinterpreted from a physical earthly kingdom to a spiritual heavenly kingdom. There’s also a lot of evidence about irrational belief, persistence of people, persistent beliefs that are demonstrably false and have overwhelming evidence even in spite in many cases of substantial costs or risks to themselves. Again, I won’t go through those examples here. I document those in my book. So let me conclude with a summary of the RHBS model. And this is maybe a lot to see at once, but let me just walk you through the steps. These rectangles here represent the sort of facts that I’m trying to account for, and these ovals represent essentially beliefs or psychological states of the apostles or the followers of Jesus. And then the dotted rectangles here represent the factors that I’m hypothesizing as being relevant to the process here.

JAMES FODOR: So the idea is that the death of Jesus triggered a state of fear and despair and the disciples gospels mentioned that the re burial accounted for the empty tomb. Now the empty tomb combined with cognitive dissonance about having the Messiah killed and trying to make sense of that and their sort of vulnerable bereavement state that triggered a sense of expectancy in the disciples, which then led to individual hallucinations and reports of those then increased that sense of expectancy those. So there’s a sort of a self-reinforcing cycle there, these

expectancies following these individual hallucinations operating in the context of some of these mechanisms that I’ve discussed. So the spiritual context of trying to understand Jesus’ mission, selective attention, suggestibility and those other social mechanisms that we talked about, these then generated the collective experiences. And so I mean here I’ve just indicated a potential way that that could have worked.

JAMES FODOR: Obviously this is just supposition, we don’t know exactly what happened, but this may have begun with a felt presence, which then became a heard voice then as seeing an angel and then seeing the risen Jesus. And once those experiences begin, presumably not a single instance but multiple instances over time, those become a self-reinforcing process whereby expectations then shape the subsequent experiences. So those collective experiences operative in the context of irrational belief, persistence, memory conformity, memory contamination and some of the other effects we discussed before those then generated memories of experiences of the risen Jesus, not necessarily identical to those in the gospels. I think that there’s a subsequent development on from those, but at least memories of some sort of encounters with the risen Jesus. Now those memories combined with the empty tomb, and this is important, the memories combined with the disciples belief of the empty tomb then generated the belief that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. So that concludes the RHBS model and while I acknowledge it’s not a perfect explanation, no explanation is, and I’m sure we’ll discuss some of the issues going forward, I think it is a plausible explanation for the relevant facts that is internally coherent and does not appeal to any postulates that are not plausible given the historical context or the knowledge we have about human psychology and social mechanisms of belief formation in these sorts of context. So that’s all I have and thanks very much for listening.

JOE SCHMID: Awesome, thanks James. Let’s turn then to Jimmy’s opening statement. So I’ll add this to the stage and Jimmy you can take it over.

JIMMY AKIN: Okay, so I’m going to share with you all some thoughts on the resurrection of Jesus, and this isn’t going to be a full orbed presentation because by agreement we have 15 to 20 minute opening statements and it’s not possible to give a full orbed presentation in that amount of time, but I will share some relevant thoughts. One of the things that I thought I’d begin with is actually a point of agreement between me and James. I was in reading his book, very pleased to discover a passage where he says the burden of proof always lies with the person making the claim, whatever the claim happens to be, not on those who are dubious about the claim. And this is something I’ve said for a long time, for years. In fact, back in 2003 I wrote that whenever two people disagree and one wants the other to change his view, then the person advocating the change always has to shoulder the burden of proof.

JIMMY AKIN: Anytime somebody wants us to change a belief we have, that person needs to give us reasons why we should do so. And so in that sense, he takes the burden of proof. So for example, I think a lot of people in philosophical and apologetic discussions kind of get off on a wrong track by assuming one side always has the burden of proof, but that’s not the case. If an atheist wants to convince a

theist to reject belief in God, then he needs to give the theist reasons to do so. He has the burden of proof. And similarly, if a theist wants to convince an atheist to embrace belief in God, well then he needs to give the atheist reasons to do that. So the theist has the burden of proof and that case a point of difference is what’s between James and me is what’s the most reasonable explanation for the post crucifixion data we have regarding the disciples? James believes that Jesus rose from the dead is not the most reasonable explanation of the data at hand, whereas I think it is. And so in our discussion tonight, James shoulders the burden of proof for convincing believers in the resurrection that they should believe in something else and I shoulder the burden of proof for convincing disbelievers in Jesus’s resurrection that they ought to believe in it.

JIMMY AKIN: Now I’ll tell you right now, my final conclusion is going to be that the conclusion that you come to on the resurrection will largely depend on the prior beliefs or what are sometimes called priors that you start with. And the way this works is we all have a variety of previous beliefs before we encounter specific data and then we encounter that data, we look at it in terms of our priors or prior beliefs, and then that allows us to arrive at posterior conclusions. At conclusions we arrive at after looking at the new data. And so what your priors are are very important. For example, if you are of a perspective that some event, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ll just call it event X. If you’re of the perspective that well, that’s just impossible, then even if you encounter some data supported event X, you’re likely to conclude that well event X just didn’t happen because that’s impossible.

JIMMY AKIN: On the other hand, if your prior belief is that event X is likely to occur and then you encounter some data support in event X, then your conclusion is likely to be well, event X must have happened, it’s likely to happen. And I have data that it happened, so it must have happened. Now in our discussion tonight, there’s flexibility in how terminology works, but I’m interested in talking about what are called paranormal events. And this is understood rather broadly. A paranormal event, as you could tell by the parts of the word is any event that is not considered normal in our culture, that’s what makes it paranormal. Para is a Greek preposition that means beyond or alongside. So paranormal events are beyond or alongside normal events. And examples of paranormal events include miracles, angelic or demonic experiences, visions, ghosts, psychic abilities, all kinds of things like that.

JIMMY AKIN: And one specific paranormal event that our discussion is focused on tonight is the idea that Jesus rose from the dead. Normally people don’t rise from the dead. So if Jesus rose from the dead, well that would be a paranormal event. But different people have different perspectives on the paranormal and here are three common positions. One of them, which I take James to be representative of is what could be called skeptical materialism. And this view holds that paranormal events are either not common or they’re not possible. So different skeptics may have different perspectives. Some might say they’re altogether impossible. Others might say, well, I’m not going to say they’re impossible, but they’re certainly not common, they’re rare. Another perspective is represented is represented by the Evangelical William Lane Craig, and this view is common in evangelical Protestantism and it

holds that paranormal events are either not common or not possible outside of Christianity.

JIMMY AKIN: They will say things like miracles, yeah, that happens in the Bible, that happens in conjunction with Christianity, but they’re going to be much more skeptical of paranormal events outside of a Christian context. Then there’s what I regard as the early Christian perspective, which I represent and it holds that paranormal events are both possible and common both inside and outside of Christianity. So it’s a fundamentally different perspective that allows lots more paranormal activity to occur. Now when it comes to the specific paranormal event of the resurrection of Jesus, these three perspectives are going to dispose individuals towards taking different attitudes toward it. A skeptical materialist like James would say, well, that paranormal event likely didn’t happen. There’s some other better explanation for the data. On the other hand, an evangelical like Bill Craig is likely to say, no, no, I think it did happen. And on that I would agree with Bill Craig.

JIMMY AKIN: I think that the resurrection of Jesus is the most likely explanation for the data we have, but things are going to come out differently if we look at other paranormal events. For example, in reading his book Unreasonable Faith, I got the impression that James would likely be very skeptical that an apparition of a ghost, meaning a departed human spirit really appears to you that kind of experiences likely not to happen. It’s either not common for that to happen or it’s even impossible for the soul of a departed human being to appear to you. Bill Craig for theological reasons would agree with James on that he doesn’t think that apparitions of ghosts happen. On the other hand, as a representative of the early Christian view, I think apparitions of ghosts happen all the time. That doesn’t mean we need to be credulous about them and never cross examinee them, but I think they happen a lot. In fact, we’re going to get into that a little bit. When it comes to other paranormal events like let’s say precognitive experiences where someone somehow knows the future based on what he says in his book about psychics, I would assume that James is skeptical of those and thinks that precognitive experiences likely don’t happen. Bill Craig, he doesn’t seem to have a firm view on this, but I do. I would say that precognitive experiences likely do happen. In fact, we have some really good scientific evidence that they do.

JIMMY AKIN: And I would also mentioned that just to document that my belief is the early Christian view and it’s also the historic Christian view. I would point to both of these as examples throughout history. For example, when the gospels report Jesus walking on water mark’s gospel reports that when the disciples saw him walking on water, they thought it was a ghost. And this is not the only place in the New Testament where you have people interpreting things in terms of ghosts. So that was part of early Christian belief. Also in the Book of Acts, there’s an instance where outside of a Christian context, Paul and one of his traveling companions encounter a woman who has, in this translation it says a spirit of divination in Greek, it’s a spirit of python, Python being a figure connected with prophecy, but they have this spirit of divination who brings her owners much gained by her sosay, and this is not presented even as a demon.

JIMMY AKIN: In fact, under the influence of this spirit of python, the woman actually is telling people that Paul and his traveling companion are servants of the most high God, and they’re going to tell you the way of salvation. So that’s not something you’d normally expect a demon to do, but it’s also not in a Christian context. Later in church history, you find doctors of the church like St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope St. Gregory, the great supporting these ideas. St. Thomas Aquinas had a number of apparitions of his departed sister, and they’re recorded, for example, by his younger contemporary Bernard of guy who wrote his life, Pope Saint Gregory. The great said that sometimes it is through a subtle power of their own that souls can foresee the future. So he believed in what we would call precognition, so did Thomas Aquinas. He referred to it as natural prophecy to distinguish it from the supernatural prophecy that God gives.

JIMMY AKIN: So things like paranormal activities like apparitions of ghosts or precognitive experiences. These are part of the historic Christian worldview. But I’m not here to represent all of Christianity, bill Craig and I have some differences, and so I’m not going to be further exploring the common evangelical viewpoint. Instead, I’m going to be talking about my own viewpoint and just to let you know a few things about how I approach the resurrection of Jesus. The first thing I’d say is I am not what’s sometimes called a minimal facts advocate. There are various people who say I’m a minimal facts advocate. I think there are a certain minimum number of facts that we can use to demonstrate that Jesus rose from the dead, but I don’t find that credible because when you actually read their write-ins on the subject, nobody ever sticks to the minimal facts. They invariably go into additional considerations.

JIMMY AKIN: James, for example, does that in his book. So whether you’re pro resurrection or anti resurrection, nobody ever sticks with the minimal facts. I’m also not what you could call a maximal facts advocate. I don’t assume not for apologetic purposes that everything the New Testament says is true. If I did that, I could just point to the passages that, well, it just says Jesus was resurrected here, so he must have been. Well, I don’t do that for apologetic purposes. I’m more than happy to give different weights to different early Christian claims, but even though I’m not a minimal or a maximal facts advocate, there are certain key facts that can help us organize our discussion. Also, I have a principle that I think James May have actually approve of, which is that since normal events are more common than paranormal ones, we should start we normal explanations for a reported experience or a set of experiences and only resort to paranormal explanations if the normal ones don’t work out.

JIMMY AKIN: So I think he and I would probably be on the same side in saying, yeah, we should look at normal experiences or normal explanations first and only resort to paranormal ones if there is a problem with the normal ones. So here are some key claims about Jesus. All of these are early Christian claims. They’re very easy to document from the New Testament and other early Christian sources. They include things like on Good Friday, Jesus was crucified. He died as a result and he was buried by Joseph of Matha. That’s in all four gospels. But on the third day or the first day of the week, Jesus’s tomb was found empty. He then appeared alive to the disciples, and

40 days later he ascended into heaven. And that last fact is often overlooked in discussions of the resurrection, but I actually think it’s important for reasons we’ll see, but also because this just was an early Christian claim that is very easy to document.

JIMMY AKIN: It’s the reason for example, that a person in the first century couldn’t just go to Jerusalem and meet Jesus and look at the nail prints in his hands for themselves. He wasn’t on earth any longer. He had ascended to heaven, and that’s something that the early Christians clearly believed. Now, James is happy to concede most of these facts. He agrees that Jesus was crucified, at least for purposes of discussion, that Jesus was crucified, he died, he was buried, and on the third day his tomb was found empty. I would put an asterisk by what James would say in terms of the resurrection appearances. He doesn’t think Jesus really appeared to them, but he does think they had experiences where Jesus seemed to appear to them.

JIMMY AKIN: I don’t know exactly what James would say about the early Christian claim about the ascension, but my suspicion is that he would interpret it the same way he interprets other post-resurrection appearances of Jesus as a hallucination or some kind of collective experience caused by the different naturalistic factors he covered. The three of these that I want to focus attention on for purposes of our discussion are the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the particular resurrection appearance of the ascension because these are the post crucifixion things that are most central to our discussion. Now, in looking at the data that we have, I want to detour for just a moment to look at the earliest theories we have on record about what could explain the post crucifixion facts. There are a number of theories, and this is commonly not recognized, but there are a number of theories that the early Christian community itself went through, and the first two of them were explanations proposed by the women who visited the tomb on the first day of the week when they discovered the empty tomb, their first conclusion was somebody has moved the body of Jesus.

JIMMY AKIN: It’s not in the tomb anymore, so somebody must have moved it. That’s their first interpretation. That’s their first explanation for the empty tomb, it’s purely natural. Somebody must have moved it. But then they encounter angels and even Jesus himself, and they adopt a second theory, which is that, and it’s a little unclear because it’s not as specific as it could be, but they either think they’re encounter in an apparition of Jesus or he’s just been resurrected, and you could read different passages in slightly different ways, but it’s one of those two explanations. They then report all this to the men, and the men’s first reaction is disbelief. They don’t believe the women’s report, but then Jesus himself appears to the disciples, and the New Testament contains evidence that their first thought is it’s a ghost. Just like when they were seeing Jesus walk on water and they saw him doing that, they thought it was a ghost.

JIMMY AKIN: And in the gospels, Jesus similarly has to say, Hey, look, I’m not a ghost. A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see, I do. And then he does things to demonstrate to them that he really is physically alive, he’s able to eat food, he’s able to let people probe the nail prints and the spear wound in his side. He does things to

physically demonstrate I am alive, and that’s when they conclude he’s been resurrected. So both the women and the men have more than one initial theory, and they don’t immediately leap to the resurrection hypothesis. They cross examine the situation and only find their way to the resurrection as a fallback once the other theories they’ve considered have been shown to be problematic. But those are the earliest theories. So what about more recent theories? Well, we know that the early Christian proposal was that Jesus rose from the dead, but others have proposed a lot of alternatives.

JIMMY AKIN: For example, maybe the disciples went to the wrong tomb and thus they thought it was empty when it really wasn’t. Or maybe someone moved the body or maybe Jesus just swooned on the cross, he went unconscious and then later revived or maybe he had a twin, or maybe the disciples hallucinated the resurrection appearances or maybe they made ’em up or maybe they both moved the body and then made up the resurrection appearances. Well, most of these have problems if you look at what they do and don’t explain, well, the idea that Jesus rose from the dead, that would explain the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances including the resurrection appearance of the ascension. But if they just went to the wrong tomb, well that would explain the empty tomb, but it wouldn’t explain the resurrection appearances or the ascension. On the other hand, if Jesus had a twin, well that would explain the post-resurrection appearances, but it wouldn’t explain the empty tomb and it wouldn’t explain the ascension since unless you’re from Krypton, your twin probably can’t fly.

JIMMY AKIN: So what tends to happen with most of these explanations is they’ll explain either the empty tomb or the resurrection appearances, but they don’t explain all three of these. However, one that would was proposed by the German philosopher Hermanus back in the 17 hundreds. He said, the disciples are just crooks. They stole the body. So they moved it and then they made up the resurrection appearances. But this theory has some problems, but note first before we move on, these two, that Jesus rose from the dead and the disciples moved the body and made the resurrection appearances up. Those will actually explain all three of the relevant points of data. But Herman Reimer’s theory has a few problems. One of them is that this is a composite theory. It requires the disciples to do two different things. First, they move the body, that’s thing one, and then they make up the resurrection appearances.

JIMMY AKIN: That’s thing two. But composite theories are guaranteed by logic to be less likely to be true. Then single theories. For example, if you assign theory one, a 50% chance of being true and theory two, a 50% chance of being true, then the combined theory one and theory two is only going to have a 25% chance of being true. Now, the math changes a bit if you say that theory one and theory two are not independent of each other, but composites are still less likely than single explanations. For example, suppose if you said, well, if the disciples moved the body, that means they were willing to use deception, and so that makes it more likely that they would then make up the post-resurrection appearances. Let’s say you design it an 80% likelihood they would do that instead of a 50% likelihood. Well, in that case,

the combined theory one and theory two would have a probability that goes up to 40%, but it’s still less likely than theory one alone, which would still have its 50% probability.

JIMMY AKIN: Just use the numbers for purposes of illustration. There’s a second problem though with Riis’s theory, which is that most scholars, both skeptics and Christians have not found the deception that he charges the disciples with to be credible. And James, at least for purposes of argument, seems to agree. He doesn’t propose that the disciples stole the body. He proposes that somebody most likely Joseph affair matha moved the body. And then he explains the resurrection appearances, not in terms of the disciples consciously making them up, but experiencing hallucinations, biases, and socialization. So James has proposed a composite theory like Reus did, but with the deception taken out, and James’ proposal is a composite theory. The way he expresses it, it involves re burial of the body that explains the empty tomb, and then hallucinations, biases and socialization, which explain the resurrection appearances. So that’s why he calls it the RHBS model.

JIMMY AKIN: I think though that it needs to be refined a little bit because there’s another step that even though he discusses it in his book, he doesn’t make it explicit as part of his acronym, but merely having Jesus’s body reburied is not enough because if someone, let’s say Joseph Verma moved Jesus’s body and reburied it elsewhere, he also needs to be effectively silent to the core disciples about that fact. If he just said, oh yeah, hey guys, just wanted to let you know, I just reburied Jesus’s body elsewhere. If he tells him that on Saturday night after he is moved the body, then it’s not going to cause any confusion on Sunday morning. So one way or another, either Joseph or whomever needed to be effectively silent so that the message never got through to the core disciples and thus helped lead them towards a hallucination experience.

JIMMY AKIN: But James’s model is a composite, and that has implications for how likely it is. Now, as I’ve said, what your priors are, your prior beliefs are going to affect how you read things. And I don’t know exactly what numbers James would put on these possibilities, but here is what the math can look like. Depending on the average value you might choose to assign to the different elements of James’s proposal. If you go with high priors and say, oh, yeah, there is an 80% chance that Jesus was reburied and there was an 80% chance that haven’t reburied Jesus, Joseph Verma would be silent, and then that would give us an 80% chance that they might then go on to develop hallucinations and so forth. Well, once you combine all these different factors, you’d be down at a probability of basically 33% that for this theory. On the other hand, you might not be willing to give 80% as a chance to all of these different factors.

JIMMY AKIN: I don’t think that 80% is reasonable. I think some of them are much, much lower than 80%, but let’s low ball it a little bit and say maybe you’d give 20% probability to each one of these factors. Well, if you do that, then it takes the chance down to 0.3 of 1%. So this is a three in 10,000 probability if you assign 20% probabilities to all five of these factors. Now, different people may have different

numbers they would assign here, and since this is only a short 15, 20 minute presentation, I can’t explore that in detail, but I can tell you my own appraisal, my own appraisal, is that I find the idea of burial highly implausible, and we can go into why I say that. I also find the idea of effective silence in the wake of a re burial highly implausible, not just implausible, but highly implausible.

JIMMY AKIN: And so I don’t find the R-S-H-B-S explanation of the empty tomb to be plausible when it comes to the resurrection appearances explanation. Under this theory, I find that the idea that the disciples experienced hallucinations implausible the evidence at hand, shows that the disciples cross-examined their experiences and concluded that Jesus was physically alive after he physically demonstrated this. Remember that chart I showed you earlier, the implausibility of the hallucinations then undercuts the rationale for the proposals of biases and secularization. So I don’t find the R-S-H-B-S explanation to be plausible for the resurrection appearances overall, I do not find paranormal experiences impossible or implausible, and I’m happy to talk about that further. But in view of the commonality of paranormal experiences and in view of the difficulties of the rival theories in this case, including R-S-H-B-S, I find the resurrection to be the most plausible explanation of the data we have at hand. But as I told you earlier, the conclusion you come to on the resurrection will largely be based on the prior beliefs that you start with. And that’s it. Thanks.

JOE SCHMID: So let’s turn it over to James and James. How about you probe on something in Jimmy’s opening statement?

JAMES FODOR: Sure. Well, thanks Jimmy for your comments. I think my main issue at this point is the topic we have is what the best explanation is for the relevant facts, and we’re in broad agreement about what those facts are that we’re looking to account for. Obviously, I put my preferred explanation or a summary of it out there, and Jimmy, what I felt like is that you talked about a bit about my RHBS model. You’ve talked a bit about what other people think. You talked a bit about paranormal claims and other things in general. I don’t think you really said anything about the resurrection explanation, like what that is, why it’s plausible and actually defended it. So I would like to hear more about that.

JIMMY AKIN: Well, I think I covered that. Perhaps I could have been more explicit about it, but as I indicated, I think that investigating any paranormal claim, you make a list of the proposed normal explanations and you examine them. And only if you find that there are problems with them, do you embrace a paranormal explanation. So that’s what my presentation did. I made a list of here are all these alternative explanations, all of them except rhymes and yours I think were very easy to eliminate. And then I spent more time on rhymers and yours to show that I think that they also have problems. And so since all of the alternatives have problems, and since I don’t think that paranormal explanations are impossible at all or even uncommon, I therefore conclude that the resurrection is most likely to be true. Now, I didn’t have time to mathematically formalize that, and you also didn’t give us a mathematical formalization, but that’s the essential structure of my argument. Assume the normal until you’ve shown it’s problematic. And if you can show that all

of the normal explanations are problematic, then you’re warranted in embracing a paranormal explanation.

JAMES FODOR: So it seems to me that that methodology is completely untenable. Is it? So do you not tell me why? Because if we followed that approach, every single instance of any phenomena that didn’t have a fully worked out and complete scientific explanation, we would just accept some sort of paranormal explanation because there’s always going to be a problem with any scientific explanation that’s not complete yet. And therefore, using your methodology, you would go through the proposed natural explanations or scientific explanations. All of them would be found wanting, and therefore you would adopt a paranormal explanation. That’s what you’ve done in this case, and it seems like that’s what you’re saying scientists should do if they followed your methodology.

JIMMY AKIN: No, that’s not what I’m saying, and that’s not what I’ve done in this case. I would say that I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable explanation. However, I don’t know, does not have good explanatory power. And so it’s not to be preferred in theory selection unless you are suffering from unusual constraints. I don’t have a problem with scientists saying, well, I, we see galaxies rotate in a way they shouldn’t under Newtonian dynamics. So either there’s a bunch of dark matter out there that we can’t detect presently or we need to modify Newtonian dynamics, and we may not know which of those should be prepared, should be preferred, since we don’t yet have the data we need to decide between them as theories.

JIMMY AKIN: But I don’t leap to the assumption therefore God is making the galaxies rotate fast miraculously. Why not? Because I have a background assumption that God tends to work through secondary causes and I don’t see the need to invoke a divine cause here when we have perfectly plausible natural causes, even though I don’t know which one to prefer based on the data at hand. Let me though flip the situation around though, because it seems to me that you’re in danger, and I’m not accusing you of doing this, but just based on the argument you just made, you’re in danger of eliminating any paranormal explanation because either you need some other way to identify, and this is a general epistemological question, you need some other way to identify when a paranormal event has happened, or if you just always assume that a natural explanation or a normal explanation must be found for it, then you’re never going to be able to admit anything paranormal happened, in which case we have a fundamental difference of worldview and we might be able to save some time if we clarify that. Do you think that paranormal events are actually possible?

JAMES FODOR: Well, I don’t think that paranormal events are metaphysically possible because I’m a naturalist, just as you presumably think that it’s metaphysically necessary that God exists, but that doesn’t mean that I am opposed to the idea epistemically, that it’s possible as far as we know I could be wrong. And so there’s a distinction about the type of possibility of talking about there. Now, actually, when we’re investigating particular cases, I don’t think it’s very interesting to distinguish whether an explanation is paranormal or normal or non paranormal, whatever you want to call it, which is why I think that your methodology is completely flawed because you suggest that we go through all of the non paranormal

explanations, and if any of those have problems, we accept a paranormal explanation. What I think we should do is put all of the candidate explanations on the table, or at least whatever pool we think is reasonable to look at, and then assess them on their comparative explanatory merits. We don’t go through a process of elimination where it’s sort of a winner by default if there are problems with all of the others.

JIMMY AKIN: Okay,

JAMES FODOR: I’m not going to rule out a paranormal explanation just to clarify. I’m not going to rule out a paranormal explanation on the face of it. I spend a lot of time on my channel talking about possible paranormal explanations for all sorts of phenomena. So that’s why I’m interested in you articulating what your preferred explanation is for the resurrection and why you think it’s plausible, and then we can assess the merits of those cases.

JIMMY AKIN: Okay. I just want to be clear that I understand your position. Sure. It sounds like what you just said is I think this is your opinion. I’m asking you correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you just said, I think that paranormal events are impossible, but I’m willing to concede for purposes of discussion or for apologetic purposes, I’m willing to act like that’s not the case.

JAMES FODOR: Yeah, I mean partly because that’s useful for discussion. Partly I might be wrong. Maybe they are possible, but I don’t think they’re possible.

JIMMY AKIN: Okay. So it seems that you and I have similar viewpoints coming from different angles in this area, but I still think that it is more reasonable to look for natural explanations before resort into a paranormal one. One of the difficulties with proposing the paranormal, and there are actually a couple that are relevant here, but one of the difficulties is that we don’t know how the paranormal world works, and we do know a lot about how the normal world works Exactly. So I think that since we can’t predict ahead of time what a paranormal experience is likely to be, in the same way that we can predict what a normal experience is likely to be, we need to start with normal explanations and see if any of them work and only resort to a system where we don’t know the rules as well if we can’t explain events under the normal set of rules.

JIMMY AKIN: The other reason that I think that the approach that you’re advocating is problematic is that these particular paranormal experiences like Jesus being resurrected are dependent on agency such as God raised Jesus from the dead or something like that, or Jesus raised himself or God and Jesus raised him, however you want to put it. It depends on agency and what an agent does cannot be predicted ahead of time in a philosophical way. We can make guesses, but they don’t exceed guesses under normal circumstances. And so once again, I think the logical approach is to say, well, can we explain this in purely normal terms? And if we can’t, then it makes sense to appeal to systems that we know less about the paranormal world and systems that are less predictable, like the free agency see of agents who are making choices about what to do.

JAMES FODOR: Okay, so I have a question about that. So let’s take a specific example of a proposed mechanism that Joseph of Mame, the, or maybe someone else moved to Jesus’ body and didn’t tell the disciples about it. Let’s take that as

JIMMY AKIN: That. Is that what we’re assuming, or is that what we’re going to

JAMES FODOR: Discuss? No, I’m just saying consider that for a moment.

JAMES FODOR: You think that’s very unlikely, and I don’t think that’s particularly unlikely, but let’s then consider, okay, so there’s a question about how probable that is, how likely that is to have occurred given our other accepted knowledge. Right Now we have another issue on the table or another possibility, which is that God rose Jesus from the dead, or Jesus raised himself again, however you’d like to phrase it. Now we have a question, it seems to me is how plausible is that given our background knowledge, given our accepted knowledge now as you say, that relates to agency? So maybe that’s harder to assess what, in my opinion, what we need to do is assess the relative plausibility of these two claims. Obviously it’s not just those two. I’m just using this to illustrate the point. We need to compare the plausibility of those two claims given our background knowledge. Obviously, our background knowledge will differ, and you’ve highlighted that point, which I agree with. I discussed that in my book as you would’ve known. But the point is, what I don’t think we can do is just say, well, the natural explanation, the re burial say is unlikely. Therefore, the supernatural or paranormal must be correct. What we need to say is what’s the relative plausibility of those two claims? And then assess them against each other.

JIMMY AKIN: In principle, I agree with the two caveats I mentioned earlier about the difficulty of making probability assessments when it comes to the paranormal and agents. However, I don’t think that we’re in a position to assign formal mathematical treatments to this. I did not do that. And you have not done that either. And this points out this or leads us to something that I find characteristic of your arguments in this area, which is that once you get past explaining the empty tomb, you’ve got a lot of conjecture about, well, some of these things here are various studies that report some effect. Sometimes I think the study is reasonable, sometimes I think it’s not, but you never cash it out in terms of, well, how would this explain the resurrection hypothesis? It’s just kind of in the ballpark. Then, so because someone, some win in human history has cognitive biases, you then kind of hand wave and say, oh, well therefore that played a role in the resurrection.

JIMMY AKIN: But you don’t go into detail about how, and that shows me that you’re also not in a position to assign a mathematical formalism to the elements of your hypothesis because, and thus we’re left with comparing things in a non-formal way, in an informal way. That’s why I noted in my presentation, I’m not proposing a mathematical formalism here and neither are you. We’re both looking at this in terms of what do we informally regard as more plausible and we simply have, and that’s largely governed by our priors. And that’s why I simply said what conclusion you come to is going to be dependent on what your prior beliefs are because we’re both left in a position of what do we informally think is more plausible. And I agree,

we disagree about that, but fundamentally we’re both in the same boat. And so it doesn’t really advance the discussion to say, well, I think what we need to do is compare their intrinsic probability, the intrinsic probability of these two options and decide between them because there’s no way to do that in an objective formal way. We’re both proceeding from an informal gut feel based on our priors.

JAMES FODOR: So I never said that we should be trying to apply specific numbers. I mean, you said that you didn’t do that, but you did do that in your slides. That’s not something I would do about these sorts of You did

JIMMY AKIN: I proposed numbers for my case for purposes of illustration.

JAMES FODOR: Well, you still did it, right? So don’t say that you didn’t do it.

JIMMY AKIN: Okay. I may have to ask for a ruling on this, but I proposed numbers to illustrate

JAMES FODOR: The

JIMMY AKIN: Principles. Obviously talking about, I said I am not assigning these numbers. I don’t know what James would think these numbers are. I don’t know what I would think the numbers are. I just know they’re on the low side. And then I transitioned to saying, but I can give you my final assessment. So I did not propose specific numbers. I just illustrated using numbers. And then, but

JAMES FODOR: The exercise of illustration is what you did, and that was what I was saying and I never in my book, nor in my opening remarks said that we should be trying to do that because we don’t have enough information to apply a quantitative framework. And so my point is I agree with you, we can’t apply numbers to these. We don’t, or at least for most of the claims, we don’t have enough information. But I don’t see how that undermines my point, that what we should be doing is trying to consider the reasons for and against the plausibility of different explanations. Now you’ve said that there’s no objective way to do that, in which case I would say, well, why were you having this discussion? I think there are objective ways to do that. It’s not easy and it does depend on your background knowledge. I completely agree with those things. I’m asking you to tell me what reasons that you think I should adopt or move towards your worldview. I’m trying to give some in the reverse for mine. So that’s what I’m saying we should be doing. I don’t think it’s enough for you to just say, well, you don’t find my case plausible because of your worldview and therefore you accord low plausibility to the things that I propose. I know that the audience all knows that as well. I’m asking what are your reasons for giving those low plausibility?

JIMMY AKIN: Well, it depends on which one

JAMES FODOR: To talk about. Sorry. And high plausibility for the contrary case,

JIMMY AKIN: It depends on which ones you care to talk about. So I’ll leave that up to you. What would you like me to tell

JAMES FODOR: You? Perhaps Joe actually has a direction he thinks might be more useful. Obviously there’s lots of particularities.

JIMMY AKIN: Yeah, I can suggest I haven’t proposed specific ones. I can propose one, but then I don’t know if you’re going to want to talk about that one.

JOE SCHMID: Yeah, well we initially had James pose a question to Jimmy and you guys have gone back and forth, so maybe Jimmy, you can either sounds good probe James’s opening statement or you can propose one aspect in particular that you think, let’s say the RHBS model or RS HBS model suffers from where you think that your model has an advantage.

JIMMY AKIN: Sure. And I may be able to kill two birds with one stone because even if I can’t assign a mathematical formalism to it, I can give you reasons for why I think this element of your model is problematic. Specifically I’ll focus on the empty two, which you explain as a combination of someone most likely Joseph of Matha reburying the body and then keeping his mouth shut about it, at least to the extent that it doesn’t make a decisive impression on the core disciples because they think the tomb, they think Jesus has been resurrected. And that wouldn’t be the case if they knew Joseph Arimathea had just reburied the body. Now I think that you’re right that if anybody moved Jesus’s body, you’ve got an argument that it would be Joseph Vmaa. You yourself argued that the Romans wanted a private burial and that’s something that you could argue in favor of with Joseph Verma providing.

JIMMY AKIN: But when we come to what are the odds that having buried Jesus, Joseph Verma would want to move the body to another grave to 24 hours later, I think it becomes very problematic and there are multiple problems with it. One of ’em is why would he want to, first of all, let me set the stage by talking about who Joseph Ver matha was because that’s a name that most people won’t know outside of Monty Python. And the Holy Grail Joseph Eth is reported by all four gospels to have buried Jesus’s body in his own tomb and Joseph Arimathea. Now that of itself suggests it doesn’t prove, but it suggests that Joseph Eth is a disciple of Christ. If you move someone into your own tomb that shows you’re comfortable with this person being buried alongside your family either temporarily or permanently, but that suggests a follower of Jesus.

JIMMY AKIN: Two of the gospels, Matthew and Mark both say that Joseph was looking forward to the kingdom of God, which means he’s aligned with Jesus’s message because that’s the gospel that Jesus preaches. The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel. So that also indicates Joseph of Arimathea is a follower of Jesus and the other two gospels, mark, Luke, and John explicitly say that Joseph Verma was a disciple of Jesus. So we’ve got multiple lines of evidence indicating that Joseph Verma was favorable towards the Christian movement. Why then would he be planning to move Jesus from his tomb when that was not the normal Jewish custom? Typically what happened was you buried someone in a tomb and you had a period of mourning that went on for like a week and then a year later once the flesh had rotted off the bones, you come back, you clean the bones and you put ’em in a long-term ossuary or bone box to keep them. So that would be what we would expect Joseph Vmaa to do, especially if he’s a Christian. If he’s favorably disposed to Jesus in his movement, he’d want to treat Jesus with reverence as a holy

man. But according to your theory, Joseph Vmaa was moved Jesus 24 hours later because he’s buried late in the day on Friday.

JIMMY AKIN: The Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and then it lasts through all of the day on Saturday and then they find the tomb empty on Sunday morning. So the only time to move the body would be Sunday night. So Joseph ver matha, contrary to the normal expectation of what a follower of a holy man is going to do once he’s buried him in his own tomb, chucks him out of the tomb in just over 24 hours and he’s doing it at night, which is just you would need some powerful motivation to say, Hey, let’s just wait until the morning and do this when it’s light. So the idea of a nocturnal removal of Jesus from the tomb is implausible, both because it’s not what Joseph Matha would be expected to do according to Jewish culture and secondly because he’d be doing it at night and reburying someone at night is profoundly difficult. So I think for those two reasons alone, the idea of a re burial is problematic. I think there are further problems when we get to the idea that he would’ve stayed silent about this, but I’ll let you give a chance to respond to those points before we move on.

JAMES FODOR: Sure. So there’s two levels to this that I mean sort of be good to discuss both. One is discussing the plausibility of removal and the other is contrasting the plausibility of removal to the plausibility of resurrection. So lemme start with the first. So Jimmy, you’ve argued that there are two main reasons that you think that the removal of the body, the re burial was implausible. One is that according to the gospels, Joseph was a follower of Jesus and so he wouldn’t want to do that. And second of all, oh no, there are three reasons because the second one was that rebar was not the normal Jewish custom and the third one was that it would had to have been at night, which indicates a particularly strong desire. It’s sort of an odd thing to do. So it seems to me that all of these are readily answered if we assume that Joseph either was not a follower of Jesus or if he was, was prevailed on by other people to move the body out of the tomb.

JAMES FODOR: I actually mentioned this in my book, the idea that if Joseph was sympathetic, I mean obviously being a follower of Jesus is not a binary thing. He may have been sympathetic but not necessarily fully involved, right? The idea is that he may have offered his tomb to serve as a site of burial, perhaps initially it was intended to be permanent or maybe it was only temporary, but bracket that he then goes off on the Sabbath, he mentions what he did perhaps to his wife because as you mentioned, but Jewish tombs family owned by the family and it was a une tomb, so that would’ve been expensive. Obviously he was a man of means. The idea is, well, someone in his family didn’t like the idea of having Jesus’ body there, and so he was prevailed on to remove it as soon as possible. So either he was prevailed on to change his mind or the alternative is that he never was a follower of Jesus and he never really wanted Jesus’ body there.

JAMES FODOR: He was prevailed on possibly by the Jewish authorities or the Roman authorities or both. They needed a site that was nearby and that was relatively private, so not a publicly known and accessible area might have led to that. If the body had been moved there, there may have been further upheavals. So that’s the

hypothesis, right? That either one of those things is true that Joseph of Athe wasn’t really a follower of Jesus, contrary to what the gospels say or some of the gospels say or that he had initially been sympathetic but was prevailed onto move the body. So then let me follow up. Oh, you can follow up. I have another element

JIMMY AKIN: Prevailed on to move the body by whom you’ve named his family, his family. Okay. Now I want to be clear about the reason you’re making this proposal. I recognize you can propose this, but from an evidential point of view, I want to say what’s motivating this proposal? Well, to account for the data clearly. Hang on, because you’re actually departing from the data we have. You’re speculating, you’re introducing new proposals that we don’t have evidence that supports, and I want to know why you’re doing that. It seems to me that the reason you’re doing that is not because you have data that supports the idea that he got home and his wife got out a rolling pen and promised to thunk him if he didn’t move Jesus immediately. As soon as the Sabbath is over, you’re proposing this not because you’ve got evidence for it, but because you need to make this proposal because you find the resurrection less plausible than any natural alternative. And so I think what you’re doing is cherry picking the data. You’re accepting those things that the gospels say when they support your thesis, but you’re perfectly willing to cast what the gospels say aside if it doesn’t support your thesis of course, or invent,

JAMES FODOR: How could I do anything else? Well, the gospel say that Jesus rose from the dead. You could, I can’t possibly believe everything in the gospel has an atheist. Right? That makes no sense.

JIMMY AKIN: I’m not saying you should, like I said about myself, I am not a minimal facts person or a maximal facts person. I’m happy to assign different weights to different claims that the gospels make just like atheist New Testament scholars do.

JOE SCHMID: Yeah,

JIMMY AKIN: Exactly. And so atheist New Testament scholars would not say that they feel completely unconstrained and are just able to reject what the gospel’s claim when it doesn’t support their personal theory. I didn’t say that they would say, you just did actually say that.

JAMES FODOR: No, I said, of course I don’t believe everything in the gospels.

JIMMY AKIN: Yeah. And before that you said you couldn’t do anything other than reject data when it didn’t support your theory.

JAMES FODOR: I couldn’t do anything other than reject least some of the things that are in the gospel. So obviously I cherry pick in that sense.

JIMMY AKIN: Anyway,

JAMES FODOR: Maybe we’ll call up

JIMMY AKIN: This point. I’m proposing that you’re cherry picking in the sense of you reject data when it does not support your theory and you are willing to invent propositions. We have no evidence for when it’s needed to prop up your theory.

JAMES FODOR: Okay, well let me explain using different terminology what I’m doing here

JIMMY AKIN: Please.

JAMES FODOR: So I’m taking a set of data I do not following people like irman except everything that the gospel say and I don’t feel compelled to do so. There are certain facts that I’ll accept, I think that’s reasonable. Others I’ll take as potential, I’ll take maybe for the sake of argument. So I may appeal to things that I wouldn’t necessarily accept, but for the sake of argument we can appeal to that for a particular purpose. So for example, was Joseph of Mammoth, a sympathizer of Jesus? I’m actually not saying one way or the other, I’m saying well maybe he was, in which case perhaps he was prevailed on by his family to remove the body or maybe he wasn’t, in which case he never intended to leave Jesus here in the first place. So I’m actually not taking a position on that. But let me then make the broader point that I wanted to make before. So obviously we don’t have specific evidence that the body was removed.

JIMMY AKIN: I’m

JAMES FODOR: Not saying that we do. I’m postulating that as part of my explanation. Now here’s where I think that you don’t see that you do exactly the same thing because I’m postulating, psychological sociological processes about people being prevailed onto contemporarily, store a body by the Roman authorities or being prevailed on by his wife to move the body later, those sorts of things like that. And we dunno if that occurred. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. We could talk about the plausibility as we’ve been doing. You are proposing instead that God raised Jesus from the dead and that’s why the body wasn’t in the tomb. So why are you allowed to postulate that? Which is not something that we observe, it’s something that’s postulated. Whereas I’m not allowed to postulate more ordinary psychological processes between people.

JIMMY AKIN: Okay? We have a mismatch between the different levels on which we’re operating here. I propose the resurrection because I don’t have a problem with it the way you do as a naturalist. And there are problems with the other theories, some of which we’ve discussed. On the other hand, I am not proposing things as part of this argument that I don’t have evidence for. When I specifically addressed the question of would Joseph Matha rebury the body I pointed to, this is not what would be expected and I laid out the process that normally happened in Jewish society at this time. So that’s what we would expect. You want us to propose something or you want us to accept something that deviates from that,

JAMES FODOR: Correct?

JIMMY AKIN: That’s exactly what you want to say. And you don’t have evidence to support that beyond the need to save the hypothesis that to explain that whatever else must be true. So let me ask you this. If you object to my characterization of your point of view as being made in order to rescue your rejection of the resurrection hypothesis, what would convince you that the resurrection hypothesis was true?

JAMES FODOR: Oh, that’s very easy. Well, I mean one thing, but the thing relevant in this particular case, we’re talking about the empty tomb, right? So you just said, which I agree with that in ordinarily when Jews buried a body, they didn’t move it out the next day. I agree with that. So what I’m proposing is contrary to what normally happened in most circumstances. Now ordinarily when someone dies, they don’t return to life on the third day, right? You are also proposing something because you believe that Jesus rose from the dead. You are also proposing something out of the ordinary. Now, I contend that what you’re proposing is more out of the ordinary than what I’m proposing. Obviously there’s further factors to consider there, but what I would

JIMMY AKIN: Answer your, I’ve got a whole bunch of constraint and additional factors of

JAMES FODOR: Course you do, which I was asking I’ve been asking you to talk about. But to answer your question, what would convince me in this particular case is arguments that my postulate about why things went out of the ordinary, which is about Joseph Mahy having a change of mind or the Roman authorities prevailing on him and so forth, that that’s less plausible, all things considered than your postulate about why God wanted to raise Jesus from the dead. Because one of those two things, let’s say, has to be the case. So what would convince me is reasons to favor yours over mine.

JOE SCHMID: Well, that might be a good bridge if we want to talk because we’ve talked now about burial and silence. That could be a good bridge if

JIMMY AKIN: You want talk silence, but okay.

JOE SCHMID: Okay. I mean if you do want to talk about silence, we could go onto that because presumably Jimmy, the way you would answer his question there would just be to highlight some other factors that make in your view his view less likely. Correct. So how about we kind of shift gears a little bit?

JIMMY AKIN: Sure.

JOE SCHMID: I’ll turn it over to you, Jimmy, to steer the discussion. Then if you want to go into silence you can or you can go on to hallucination.

JIMMY AKIN: Yeah. Well one thing that I think is, like I said, James and I are operating on different levels because in our discussion thus far, I’ve looked at one specific thing, the idea that there was a re burial and he’s pit in that against the resurrection hypothesis and saying, well, we’re both evident, we’re both proclaiming something that is not obvious from the data and that’s true, but we’re doing it on different levels because I’m talking about a subsidiary point and the case for the resurrection hypothesis is made up of multiple points. It’s not just the issue of re burial, it’s all this other data too. And there’s problems all along the line with the other data. So if you say to me, well why are you objecting to me proposing this when you’re making a similar claim? My similar claim is on a higher level and I can’t make the case for it without being able to appeal to other factors that go beyond the individual point we’re discussing at the moment.

JIMMY AKIN: So if you say, well, why do you believe in the resurrection? I need to give you a whole bunch of different reasons that converge on that. I can’t just give you a single thing to explain it. Whereas with why did this happen with Joseph Ver matha? Why would he rebury the body you are not able to give me, even though I’m asking about a simple thing that is not part of a larger construct or that is not the result of a larger construct. It seems to me that you’re motivated to say that by just the fact that you find the resurrection hypothesis implausible.

JAMES FODOR: Well, hang on a minute. That seems a bit unfair. So you’ve just said you can’t give a single reason as to why it’s plausible to say that God raised Jesus from the dead, which thereby accounts for the empty tomb

JIMMY AKIN: Because you’re asking for a top level, the justification of a top level claim instead of a subsidiary claim.

JAMES FODOR: What would the subsidiary claim be in your case there? That I should appeal to

JIMMY AKIN: Some kind of evidence that actually I’m not advocating that you need to, I don’t think you have any evidence for,

JAMES FODOR: I’m asking what evidence you have. Oh sorry. Maybe that’s what you’re saying. Sorry. Sorry.

JIMMY AKIN: I don’t think you do have any evidence for Joseph Arimathea’s family force him to move the body on

JAMES FODOR: Saturday night. No, hang on, maybe I don’t. I’m asking what evidence you have for your, because you said I shouldn’t appeal to the top level claim about the resurrection. I appeal to the subsidiary point. So what is that subsidiary point in your case?

JIMMY AKIN: I’m not currently, so I’ve already told you my evidence for what you would normally expect to happen on this subsidiary point. I went through the whole process of here’s what normally happened. You’re proposing a deviation.

JAMES FODOR: Yeah, but you don’t think that that’s what actually happened. Do you think something different happened?

JIMMY AKIN: I think what happened is what normally happened, well,

JAMES FODOR: What normally happened to someone stays dead.

JIMMY AKIN: You don’t think

JAMES FODOR: That’s what happened?

JIMMY AKIN: You just shifted again.

JAMES FODOR: What frame should I

JIMMY AKIN: Be using? Hang on. You just shifted up to the top level frame of was Jesus resurrected? The specific point we’re talking about is did Joseph move the body? I think that what normally happened in that circumstance, namely the body was not moved, is what happened. So you keep jumping levels.

JAMES FODOR: No, no, no. I’m just talking about a different aspect. So you want talk about why the body was moved because normally bodies aren’t moved and so it’s more plausible to say it wasn’t moved. But I’m saying in this case it’s more plausible to think that it was moved because that accounts for how the tomb was empty. Your proposed explanation involves God raising Jesus from dead, which is even less plausible than someone moving a body only

JIMMY AKIN: On the, it only becomes more plausible if you are committed to Jesus did not rise from the dead. That’s what’s motivating.

JAMES FODOR: No, we’re contrasting different explanations. I’m asking you to explain why it’s more plausible on your view. You can’t just say that it’s automatically more plausible just because it’s not more plausible, just because my view was wrong. You have to show my view could be wrong and your view could be even less plausible. You have to show why it’s more plausible

JIMMY AKIN: On the subsidiary view. I’ve already showed you why it’s more plausible because that was the standard practice. Why

JAMES FODOR: It’s more

JIMMY AKIN: Plausible. Keep trying to jump to another one.

JAMES FODOR: Why is it more plausible that God raised Jesus from the dead, which doesn’t normally happen than Joseph moved the body, which also doesn’t normally happen. That’s what I’m asking. You keep saying I’m not allowed to ask that question. I dunno why I’m not allowed to ask that question.

JIMMY AKIN: You’re allowed to ask the question, but if you want me to answer it, you’ve got to give me way more time because you’re asking for a detailed, complex answer.

JAMES FODOR: You can have as much time as you’d like.

JIMMY AKIN: I think our kind host, sleepy Joe might be a little too sleepy for that.

JOE SCHMID: Okay, how about listen, let’s turn to hallucinations. You guys have gone back and forth and of course there’s much more to explore on these topics. You both have explored it in different venues, which I will link in the description for the audience to check out both sides of the issue. But let’s turn to hallucinations. I don’t know who I should turn it over to there. Does one of you want to?

JAMES FODOR: Jimmy can go. That’s fine.

JOE SCHMID: Okay. Yeah, Jimmy, so how about you start probing what James said in his opening statement there?

JIMMY AKIN: Well, certainly hallucinations are something that occur as part of human experience, but that doesn’t mean that we’re entitled to just assume that a given experience is hallucinatory. In read James’s book, and I know I’m going beyond what he presented right here. Yeah, that’s fine. But in read James’s book, he presents multiple examples of things that he considers to be hallucinatory, such as experiences people report after a loved one has died, which he refers to as grief

induced hallucinations. Now in technical literature, sometimes the term hallucination is used to refer to any experience where there’s not a sensible physical object that’s produced in that experience. But it has come to generally be regarded as not just something that doesn’t have an external physical cause, but as an error. So if I said to you after my wife died, she appeared to me and told me X, Y, and Z, you could look at that as a vertical experience of my wife even though she wasn’t physically here.

JIMMY AKIN: Or you could say that was a hallucination in the sense of some kind of error happened. Your grief caused you to have this experience of your wife. And it’s not just that there was nothing physical here, we both would agree on that, but you ultimately actually did not experience your wife and that’s what’s typically meant by hallucination. Well, in his book James cites a variety of different sources that all make that assumption and that anytime someone reports an experience after someone has died, that that is a non-critical experience, that it is a hallucination in the colloquial sense and he therefore is able to say, Hey, post bereavement hallucinations are common, and just assume that these are hallucinations. And I would say that is not the case. Some people have hallucinations after their loved one passes on where they mistakenly think that they are in communication with their loved one.

JIMMY AKIN: But many people have experiences of their loved ones after their loved one’s death that are actual experiences of their loved one. These are what are known in the parapsychological literature as after death communications. And the rate of ADCs is very, very high. Between 40 and 50% of the population reports at least one a DC during the course of their life. Depending on which studies you look at, it varies a little bit, but it’s almost half the population. But in his book, James just assumes none of these are vertical experiences. And I would say that’s a mistake. Many people have actual communication with their departed loved ones, which gives us reason to look at the experiences in the New Testament and say these may not all be hallucinations in the sense that you mean, for example, when St. Paul has an experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus.

JIMMY AKIN: I agree with James that we can’t confidently say that was a physical appearance because in Acts 22, Paul says it was a heavenly vision, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t really encounter Jesus because it turns out that vertical after death communications are very prominent and we have good evidence for that, which I can give you a taste of if you want. But I would say that this is another example of a naturalized assumption that is not actually supported by the data that we have here, and it’s one of many. We also have extraordinarily good evidence, I mean better than six sigma results in favor of precognition happening, which is also difficult to explain on a purely naturalistic philosophy. And when you’ve seen multiple different domains in which we have very good evidence that the normalizing naturalizing explanations are false, then that builds a cumulative reason to be more open to supernatural claims like Jesus rose from the dead. That’s how I would look at it. What would your response be, James?

JAMES FODOR: Yeah, so what I do in my book, so you characterize Jimmy, what I do in my book is I state that all of the encounters or appearances and so forth, bereavement and otherwise are hallucinatory. And it’s true that I use that word. And it’s also true that some of the authors whom I cite use that word in the quotes, but I think I make it quite clear that what I’m actually doing, because the context in which I’m developing my argument, you sort of highlighted this earlier, is a response to William Lane Craig. And he claims that these sorts of experiences are, when I say these sorts of experiences like paranormal, spiritual or miraculous experiences are not common

JAMES FODOR: Particularly in group settings and he makes some other claims about hallucinations and so forth. So the point is that is the context in which I’m presenting this information I’m presenting in, sure actually these things happen. They’re actually quite common. And so in that sense, I’m agreeing with you now, I’m not going to agree about the mechanism. I do think that these experiences are either hallucinatory or illusory in nature, but that’s actually, this is the point that I want to make. That’s actually not critical to my argument. The argument that I was making is that these experiences are relatively common regardless of their origins. Now let’s put aside from the moment. So as a naturalist, I don’t believe that there is any real spiritual or supernatural or paranormal realm, but I want to bracket that for the moment. I don’t think that that’s critical for the point that I’m trying to make with respect to the resurrection hypothesis.

JAMES FODOR: The point that I would want to make is that these sorts of both individual and group spiritual and paranormal experiences are relatively common. People often do have encounters with the dead or see people that they believe who have died and so forth. So given that the question would be, let me rephrase that. It seems that given that that’s a relatively common baseline, it’s not that inexplicable that the apostles or that Jesus’ disciples would also experience such things and the relevance of that is then going to be, well how well, why does that then warrant an inference to a resurrection when in most cases where these sorts of experiences occur that’s not associated with a resurrection. And that’s the key point there, right? Regardless of whether they’re hallucinatory or illusory or they’re seeing a ghost or whether it’s something else, they’re not associated with resurrections.

JIMMY AKIN: So

JAMES FODOR: Why then we warranted from appealing to a resurrection in the case? Perfectly

JIMMY AKIN: Happy to answer that. Perfectly happy to answer that. I’ve already alluded to it in my opening presentation because as I mentioned, the disciples entertained several different theories about what explained what was going on. And before they concluded that Jesus had risen from the dead, they thought it’s a ghost, it’s an apparition of a ghost. It was only after he said, Hey look, a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones. You can see that I do look at my hands, look at my side. You’re welcome to probe him. I’m going to eat fish in your presence. It was only after he demonstrated his physicality that they concluded that they were not looking at a

ghost that he had been physically raised. So that’s what differentiates the resurrection hypothesis from the proposal that they had simply an experience that they regarded as being an experience of a ghost.

JAMES FODOR: So that’s your explanation for why the disciples believed that it was a resurrection. Is that also why you believe that it was a resurrection?

JIMMY AKIN: Yeah, otherwise, which

JAMES FODOR: Is what I’m interested in.

JIMMY AKIN: Otherwise, if he hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t demonstrated his physicality in various ways, and Luke indicates that there are more than just what he records, he said he demonstrated this in many ways, but if he hadn’t demonstrated then I’d be perfectly comfortable saying, oh, okay. Jesus appeared to them from heaven as a ghost. He was just an apparition.

JAMES FODOR: Right. Well, okay, so there’s a couple of things about that that I wanted to ask about. So one is, do you think it’s possible or maybe likely with the relevant question? Oh

JIMMY AKIN: Sorry, actually just let me add this. I think Jesus has appeared to people without physically manifest into them. So I think there are apparitions of Jesus and if he didn’t demonstrate his physicality in the gospel context, I would have no problem saying, yeah, well this is just an apparition of Jesus, like other apparitions of Jesus in history.

JAMES FODOR: Yeah. One question I have is do you think that people can have an experience of, or either have an experience or remember having an experience of say, touching someone’s hands for example, or someone eating in front of them that when that didn’t actually happen, I didn’t ask that very well, but you think that people can have, lemme ask it.

JIMMY AKIN: Title hallucination?

JAMES FODOR: Well, no, that’s one explanation, but what I mean is you think that people can see visions of say Jesus being to them or someone else, dead relatives. But what I don’t see is why someone couldn’t see a vision of someone eating fish or even have an experience of touching someone but who is nevertheless not physically there.

JIMMY AKIN: They can have those tactile experiences in after death communications are reported, that’s the handle me parts and visual experiences are also reported so that you could see if you see your departed loved one hypothetically, you could see your departed loved one eaten food. So visual and tactile experiences are part of after death communications, but they’re not part of after death. Communications in such a way that when the person is done eating their fish, that the fish that was on the table is not still there. The fish doesn’t vanish when if you see someone eating it and it’s just a subjective experience.

JAMES FODOR: So that’s a critical difference

JIMMY AKIN: And especially it doesn’t happen when the person you’re seeing is saying, Hey, I’m not a spirit. A spirit has not flesh and bones look. And then they show you these things as proof of the fact that they are still physically alive.

JAMES FODOR: So the explanation that I give is obviously I do appeal to hallucinations, but I’m wanting to emphasize here that I can substitute out hallucinations for paranormal experiences for the sake of argument and the rest of my argument goes through and other people have argued this, so I think objective visions or something that’s been called. But

JAMES FODOR: The point is the disciples could have had some sort of objective vision of Jesus, but that doesn’t mean that Jesus really said exactly what is reported in the gospels. It doesn’t mean that it follows that he actually said test and feel to prove that I am to prove that I’m physical because the rest of the processes that I document could have operated to bring about the disciple’s belief that that’s what Jesus was doing or for the memory distortion and contamination and other effects for them to believe that that’s what Jesus had done with them. So Jesus appeared to them, but it wasn’t actually a resurrection prince. They came to believe that and that would be likewise how they came to believe that there had been fish leftover even though, well we don’t actually know if there was, but that’s what I’m saying. Maybe there wasn’t. They came to believe that

JIMMY AKIN: In pursuing this line of argument, you’re deviating from the data we have at hand and you’re imagining data that we do not have at hand. What

JAMES FODOR: Data am I imagining?

JIMMY AKIN: You just spun several scenarios that say, well

JAMES FODOR: No, I said Jesus appeared to them in an objective vision, but then they had subsequent memory distortions that affected how they remembered that and came to remember it say in line with what John says.

JIMMY AKIN: And those memory distortions are not evidence that we have. They go beyond the evidence we have. And so this is another form of cherry picking the data. No, because you’re going beyond the data at

JAMES FODOR: Hand. Well, this is what we had before. So again, let’s say that Jesus appeared in an objective vision but was not resurrected. Right? So my explanation as to how the disciples came to believe that he was resurrected and how you get the reports in John is mate, I could appeal to the perceptual biases and memory distortions and so forth that I talked about the socialization processes. So all those other aspects of the model, the only difference from what I actually discussed is that we’re swapping out a hallucinatory experience for some sort of objective vision experience. But the point I want to make is that a resurrection doesn’t follow from that because there is an alternate explanation that I just outlined. Now you say, but those processes, you are just speculating those to which I respond, but that’s no different from hypothesizing that Jesus was raised from the dead because that’s not data we have either. We’re postulating that as an explanation for the data of the

disciples reporting, feeling and touching Jesus and seeing him eat fish. I’m doing the same thing from my postulated mechanisms for how that came about.

JIMMY AKIN: So one thing that I think is relevant to discussion here is another philosophical principle that neither one of us is mentioned yet, but there is a certain attitude towards the data that one has where you can either trust the data as your starting assumption or distrusted as your starting assumption. And my proposal is that anytime we have data, we need to trust the data until we get evidence of some form that we need to entertain an alternative hypothesis. Let’s suppose back when my wife was alive, let’s suppose I came home from grad school and I saw a woman who looked just like my wife and she said, hi honey, and it was her voice and she was making dinner for us. Well, the logical thing to do with that data is assume, okay, this is my wife and she’s making dinner for us. It would not be logical for me to say just based on that information, this must not be my wife.

JIMMY AKIN: It must be her evil twin that I’ve never had any evidence for. That would be systematic distrust of my data. And we refer to that kind of systematic distrust as paranoid schizophrenia and it is a sign of mental illness. So it is an axiom of sound reasoning to trust the data you have until you have reason not to. Like if I learn my wife does have this principle is also called phenomenal conservatism for those who want a label for it. But if I later learn my wife does have an evil twin that changes the complexion of how I read the data now,

JAMES FODOR: Or if a wife died yesterday

JIMMY AKIN: Or if my wife died yesterday, then I may have an A DC going on, which is relevant in this case. But in the two cases that you’ve put on the table, one of them where the Jesus has really been raised from the dead and according to the data we have is saying, Hey guys, I’ve really been raised from the dead. Let me prove it to you in these different ways versus well, they had an objective vision of Jesus. He was really in communication with them, but he didn’t say any of the things he’s reported to have been said. He said something else. And then these various processes kicked in some hand wavy way to result.

JAMES FODOR: No, it’s documented in the literature, not hand wavy way

JIMMY AKIN: To result. No, it is hand wa because even though the effect is reported in the literature, that doesn’t prove it happened in this case or explain how it happened in this case, just because someone has had a cognitive bias doesn’t prove that these people in this case case were subject to it.

JAMES FODOR: But just because God could raise Jesus from the dead doesn’t prove that in this particular case he did. We have to look at relative plausibility. I agree. And the precise reason I have for suggesting I’ll let you finish.

JIMMY AKIN: What I find consistently occurring is you are not proceeding with a, let’s take the data at face value until we have evidence not to your manufacturing evidence that we don’t have in order to subvert the direction that the data would lead you in.

JAMES FODOR: Not at all. I’m postulating explanations for the facts that we observe now for we have now, as you said before, facts have different levels of plausibility. The facts that I’m most interested in explaining are those that I outlined at the start, those that are well attested to particular details in the gospels, I’m much less committed to. I’m much less sure about whether any particular detail in the gospels is correct. I mean, and you’ve acknowledged this with your debates with bar erman that the gist is correct, that details may differ.

JIMMY AKIN: And there are other criteria like multiple attestation, which I have for the physicality of Jesus. I have multiple attestation for that.

JAMES FODOR: So the story,

JIMMY AKIN: It’s not a single source

JAMES FODOR: Recording the story in John, where else does that appear,

JIMMY AKIN: Luke? And it also appears in acts and it appears in the Pauline literature.

JAMES FODOR: When does Paul talk about the idea of touching Jesus’ hands to feel that he’s real?

JIMMY AKIN: He doesn’t say that. He says Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.

JAMES FODOR: Oh, right. But that’s just a conclusion. That’s not evidence. That’s what they believe. The evidence would be a particular experience that they’re counting. If that counts as evidence, then all you have to do is say, Hey, look, they believe this and then again, we’re done. So I don’t think that we’re going to get very far on that.

JIMMY AKIN: Even if you want to exclude that, we still have multiple attestation of specific experiences that indicated physicality.

JAMES FODOR: Well, I’m specifically talking about where John Jesus appears and says, test me and touch my hands and things like that. But anyway, even if that’s true, that’s a minor point. So the point that I wanted to make is I’m not just rejecting any evidence that I don’t feel like what I’m doing is taking the evidence that we have, waiting it according to its plausibility and then asking what’s the best explanation for this? And it’s perfectly reasonable to take your example of if you walk in and see your wife cooking normally you would think, Hey, my wife’s cooking unless your wife just died. And then you think, oh, something strange has happened here. And you might consider different explanations.

JIMMY AKIN: So

JAMES FODOR: Why is it that I might think that memory distortions and other factors operated to lead the disciples to believe that Jesus had been resurrected when he actually hadn’t? Well, it’s because Jesus just died. And as we’ve both agreed experiences of communicating with the dead, again bracketing, whether they’re hallucinations or something else, experiences of that sort are actually not that uncommon, but resurrections are uncommon.

JIMMY AKIN: Yeah, they’re

JAMES FODOR: Not unknown. So that’s why I would suggest it’s a better explanation to postulate that there wasn’t a resurrection. There was some kind of other interaction with or experience of the risen Jesus. And then some of the things that the disciples came to believe on the basis of that were distorted on the basis of memory distortions and other things, it’s awaiting of different plausibility.

JIMMY AKIN: So if in order to arrive at that probability assessment on the current theory that they had a vertical experience of Jesus where he really was in communication with them and to say that he must not have been resurrected and they were subject to various biases and so forth, that led them to later conclude that then you’re going to need to propose something that I find very implausible, which is that I’m having repeated because we have evidence for multiple experiences that we have repeated non bodily after death communications that are genuine in which, and yet despite these, the figure of Jesus who is the teacher of these disciples, you’ll have to forgive me because fleshing out the implications of this on the fly. Take your time. The teacher is not going to talk to them about the resurrection when this is a prominent element of Jewish belief. This is the mainstream view in Judaism. The Sadducees didn’t buy it, but the Pharisees and the Senes and so forth, and it’s a prominent element to be considered. And he is established as their teacher. He’s this traveling rabbi who imparts destruction instruction. That’s why they’re called his disciples. That means student in Greek.

JIMMY AKIN: And so the idea that I’m in serious after death communication with my teacher and he’s not going to talk to me about the resurrection, even though he’s dead and he’s appearing to me, this is going to be a relevant question. And to propose that someone who is specifically a teacher of me and then not talk to me about the resurrection is very implausible. Now, if he doesn’t talk to me about the resurrection, I can see that various biases and things could kick in to explain why I come up with memories of him talking to me about the resurrection because it would be so implausible that he would establish communication with me from beyond the grave and not talk to me about the resurrection. But that only underscores the point of how unlikely it would be that Jesus would genuinely talk to the disciples from beyond the grave and not address the subject of the resurrection.

JAMES FODOR: Well, I didn’t say that he didn’t address the subject of the resurrection. All I said is that he wasn’t actually resurrected according to the hypothesis. I dunno what he might have said about it.

JIMMY AKIN: But then you said that they came up with these beliefs where he had,

JAMES FODOR: That he had been resurrected,

JIMMY AKIN: That he had been resurrected and that are based on him doing things to physically demonstrate I’m really alive and I No,

JAMES FODOR: No, I’m not saying that he necessarily did that. They came to believe that he did that on the basis of their belief in their resurrection. Maybe he did tell

’em things about their resurrection, which they misunderstood. It wouldn’t be the first time according to the gospels that they’d misunderstood what Jesus was telling.

JIMMY AKIN: You could propose that too, but notice what position you’re in, which is you’re already conceited for purposes of this part of our discussion that Jesus is really alive in the afterlife and is really in regular communication with his disciples. And yet you’re saying, oh, but I don’t think he could have been resurrected. I think that’s less plausible.

JAMES FODOR: You’re

JIMMY AKIN: Conceding that you’ve established regular communication with a person in the afterlife.

JAMES FODOR: But here’s the thing, according to, again, I don’t believe that there is an afterlife, but we’re saying for the purposes of discussion, because I think this is a profound point, that’s why I’m going down this route. You’ve said that communication with people in the afterlife is fairly common. That’s not that unusual. So the fact that Jesus communicated with his disciples in the afterlife according to this theory, okay, that’s interesting. But that’s not exactly earth shattering. What’s earth shattering is if God resurrected him to vindicate him being the son of God. And so if my account is correct, if the account we’re talking about here is correct, Jesus could have communicated to his followers but not be the son of God. Now that does matter,

JIMMY AKIN: And

JAMES FODOR: That’s why I’m asking to take the extra step because that’s very important how we establish that extra step.

JIMMY AKIN: And how I would establish that extra step is by appealing to the fact that he had announced himself as the son of God repeatedly during his earthly ministry and in ways that were consistent with Jewish expectation. And then he shows up to them after he’s dead. And then as part of that experience, he says, and I’ve been resurrected and goes on to show it in various ways. Now what you’re attacking is the idea that he actually showed them this in various ways. And so I find that less plausible than the scenario of Jesus claims to be the son of God, and then he shows up and genuinely communicates with them and says, I’m the son of God and I’ve been resurrected.

JAMES FODOR: So I think, but we have other cases of people who claimed to be the Son of God or something culturally analogous and none of them were resurrected and none of them, well, why do they have to be resurrected? The point is that they had appearances to the point is not whether they’re resurrected. The point is that you are saying that Jesus must have been resurrected or as very likely to have been because he claimed to have been the son of God and then he had communications with his followers after death. But we have analogous cases for that in other traditions.

JIMMY AKIN: Not that I aware

JAMES FODOR: Of. They don’t use the exact same. Well, I document that in my book.

JIMMY AKIN: No,

JAMES FODOR: I’m not saying that they claim that they claim to be resurrected. They’re not all in a Jewish

JIMMY AKIN: Context. I understand that, and it doesn’t matter to me that they’re not all in a Jewish context. But what you don’t do in your book is cite any examples of vertical after death communications with someone who claimed to be the son of God or the Messiah or anything comparable to that. You don’t treat any after death communications as vertical in your book.

JAMES FODOR: No, no, no, that’s true. But the point is to illustrate examples of when communications or appearances occur. And a good example is Medic Mendelson who meets all these criteria he has had after death communications with people who follow and he did claim to Messiah. No, but it doesn’t matter whether I think they’re vertical in my book for the purposes of our discussion here, we’re saying, look, the communications existed. He claimed to be the Messiah. That’s a parallel with Jesus. Obviously not everything is the same, but what I’m asking is how we go from, and there are again other analogous cases, that’s just the one that’s clearest. It was in a Jewish context. The question is how we go from a claimant who then had followers who then after he died or she died, they had some sort of communications or experiences with them. Why we infer from that to they resurrected and where the son of God or really were the son of God,

JIMMY AKIN: If you want to propose that Neesen has had after death communications with some of his relatives or followers.

JAMES FODOR: So the purposes of our argument here,

JIMMY AKIN: I’m happy to entertain that proposal, but I don’t think that I, we have evidence for Manum Sen’s resurrection the way we do for Jesus. We have already looked at multiple, going back to my initial presentation, we’ve already looked at multiple alternative theories that all have significant problems, but we don’t have equivalent facts about that have those same set of problems. So I would say is the case for Jesus being resurrected stronger than the case for Manaen being resurrected? I would say yeah, it’s stronger.

JOE SCHMID: So if I could exercise my posting powers, here we are at the end of time. Well very close. I know we

JIMMY AKIN: Could keep going for another 12 hours at least.

JOE SCHMID: Right? Of course. We could rival my most popular and longest video on. I

JAMES FODOR: Think Joe will fall asleep though,

JOE SCHMID: Right? Yes, I am sleepy Joe today. So, okay, let’s just have two minute closing statements. Try not to introduce new stuff when you’re doing this, but just summarize things. Thank your lovely opponent. Maybe say something nice about

them. That’s always a fun thing to end on. But actually, let’s start with Jimmy. This time we started with James for the debate. So we’ll start with Jimmy.

JIMMY AKIN: Well, I want to thank my lovely opponent for this invigorating discussion tonight. I like his headgear. He’s got a hat too, and I do appreciate that he is trying to engage on this issue in a way that is sophisticated enough to go beyond what a lot of historical proposals are. Essentially, he has an improved version of Herman Riis’s proposal because he takes the deception out of it. So I think that’s good. I like the fact that he’s made these proposals, but I think that he goes beyond the data in a way that violates phenomenal conservatism. And I think he is suffering from a naturalistic bias that I simply disagree with. I’ve done a lot of study of parapsychology. I’m a member of the Society for Cyclical Research. Actually, I publish in peer-reviewed journals on parapsychology. I actually teach parapsychology. And I have to say that even though I once held a position very much James’s, the more I’ve dug into the data, the more I’ve, and we haven’t even really touched it tonight, and so I won’t expand on it in this closing statement, but I’ve just seen very good evidence that the naturalistic assumption, the naturalistic worldview is very problematic.

JIMMY AKIN: And that makes me open to possibilities like someone has risen from the dead. And I think that in this case, given that paranormal events are actually common and that there are multiple problems with the alternatives to this hypothesis, that the most probable is that Jesus was resurrected. But as I said at the beginning, I recognize that the conclusions you come to are going to depend on what your priors are.

JAMES FODOR: Cool. Thanks very much Joe for inviting me and Jimmy for the invigorating discussion. I do appreciate, Jimmy, your willingness to engage with the questions that I asked and also Joe asked and to work things through. I think that that was quite productive actually. So I really do appreciate that. In terms of just a bit of a summary of where I’m at, I never claimed that the RHBS model is like a perfect explanation or it gives maximal probability. The point is, the point of the explanation is really to provide a contrast to the traditional Christian resurrection hypothesis, which, and one which I think is more plausible overall as an explanatory account. Now, as Jimmy has mentioned numerous times, and I completely agree with how you assess the plausibility, the plausibility of an explanation will depend on your prior commitments. And I flagged at the beginning of my remarks, we didn’t talk about it too much, but the resurrection hypothesis has a number of issues with respect to assessing the plausibility of things like why would God want to raise Jesus from the dead?

JAMES FODOR: Or how likely is it that he would do that, given that most people are not raised from the dead and why Jesus would appear to his followers and only his followers questions like this. Now many Christians I think will take these as fairly plausible or just not that big of a deal, or they’ll have theological reasons to give for them and from their worldview, that’s fine. I think that there’s a question about defending those obviously. But what I want to emphasize, and this is I think a key contrast with Jimmy, is that when I’m attempting to explain something like the accounts of the resurrection, I invoke explanatory postulates like that Joseph wanted

to move the body because he wasn’t really a follower of Jesus, or maybe his family said something or whatever else, or I invoke the memory distortions and things like this. Now I think that these are postulates that we cannot directly demonstrate and in that sense, go beyond the data.

JAMES FODOR: I completely agree there. Where I disagree with Jimmy is that I think we can establish that these are reasonably plausible given our background knowledge about the world and in particular that they are more, the postulates that I need to make are more plausible than the contrasting postulates that Christians must make about God’s motivations and reasons for acting. Obviously, that requires further detailed discussion to work through all the details. We only had a little bit of space for that this evening, but what I want to emphasize is that whenever anyone is providing an explanation, they must do that. If they’re not just to regurgitate the facts, they invoke postulates beyond the facts which are supposed to explain the facts. So I think both explanations do that. I try to give a defense of why I think the R HB S is a better way to do that is more plausible. And one final point to emphasize is that the RHBS model does not assume that the paranormal does not exist. I think largely irrelevant to the RHBS model in that it’s quite possible that there could be paranormal events. But the question really is what is the best explanation for the facts surrounding Jesus’ postmortem appearances and the beliefs of the disciples, and are we justified in invoking an actual resurrection to account for that? And that’s I think, the question I want to leave people thinking about. So thanks very much.

JOE SCHMID: Awesome. Well, thank you guys both for coming on. For the audience. Please, please check the links in the description to the work of both of my guests. Lots of cool stuff down there. And of course, if you have made it this far, you probably see value in the work that I do. So please consider becoming a Patreon. You get exclusive access to videos, access to scripts and notes and early access to things. It’s really fun. It’s really great. It’s amazing with that way. What better way Ends there, then I’m Josh Schmid. This is the Majesty of Reason and peace out.

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In conclusion, I want to thank James Fodor for an invigorating discussion—and for sticking to the topic, unlike some debaters I could name.

And I especially want to thank Joe Schmid once again for the invitation to do this debate.

Be sure to check out his Majesty of Reason channel on YouTube.

* * *

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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!

SOURCES:

The Majesty of Reason YouTube channel