Resurrection Debate Debrief

Dive into Jimmy Akin’s debrief of his epic debate on Jesus’ resurrection against skeptic James Fodor! Jimmy breaks down strategies, dismantles alternative theories like the RHBS model, crunches probabilities, and explores paranormal evidence that challenges materialism. Packed with insightful analysis and respectful dialogue—perfect for truth-seekers! Listen now on The Jimmy Akin Podcast.

 

TRANSCRIPT: 

Coming Up

Recently I debated James Fodor on whether Jesus rose from the dead.

If you’re interested in watching that debate, it’s Episode 59 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast.

There’s also something to be learned by looking back at a debate, what happened, and the issues it involved.

In other words, there’s something to be learned from a debate debrief.

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

Back in November, Joe Schmid of the Majesty of Reason YouTube channel invited me and skeptic James Fodor to debate whether Jesus really rose from the dead.

That debate is in Episode 59 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, as well as on Joe’s channel, so you can check it out.

After doing debates, it’s common these days to do what’s known as a debrief where you go back over the debate, note particular things you were trying to do in it, and comment on how you think it went.

Originally, I was hesitant to do debriefs, because I remembered examples from years ago where I saw back-and-forth spats develop between certain debaters that I thought were just not constructive.

They would relitigate the entire debate, add new arguments that they didn’t originally make, and—worse yet—they would continue these post-debate exchanges for multiple rounds in a spirit of hostility.

I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I thought, “Just let your work stand, guys! This endless back and forth isn’t constructive. Just let it be what it is.”

I thus adopted a rule for myself that I wouldn’t do such things.

Then YouTube happened, and a YouTube debate culture began to develop.

When I got back into debating, I was asked about doing debriefs, and I initially wouldn’t do them, remembering the endless back-and-forths from the old days.

But eventually I was convinced that debriefs didn’t have to turn into those kinds of exchanges, and so I modified my principle.

Today, I will do a single debrief after a debate—not an endless debate but just one discussion.

I also don’t add new arguments to what I said then, though I will answer questions if I’m asked what I might have said.

For example, in the debrief you’re about to see, I’m asked to explain a point that I raised during the debate even though I was not asked to explain it then, though I would have.

If I think an aspect of a debate contains an instructive lesson, I may even lift out that element and do a video on it.

Like Episode 10, which contained a particularly illustrative example of the debater’s tactic known as the Gish Gallop.

So it’s not that once I’ve done a debate it becomes a forbidden topic that I’ll never mention again.

I’m still discerning what the appropriate ways are to handle things after debates.

But I have modified my earlier position. I’m just not going to engage in rebuttal videos followed by counter-rebuttal videos followed by counter-counter rebuttal videos suffused with hostility.

I still don’t think that those are constructive.

And it may be that it’s really the attitude of hostility that is the really problematic element in what I saw others doing—not the mere extension of a discussion.

In any event, after my debate with James Fodor, I was asked to do a debrief.

The gentleman who asked me was John DeRosa of the Classical Theism Podcast, and he’s debriefed me before.

John is a really kind and intelligent gentleman, and he asks good and challenging questions, so I said yes!

Due to a variety of circumstances, including the holidays and a rather intense snowstorm here in Arkansas, it took us a while to actually do the debrief, but here it is.

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JOHN DEROSA: We are joined again today by Jimmy Akin, who is a senior apologist for Catholic Answers author, the senior apologist,

JIMMY AKIN: The senior apologist author. In fact, for Catholic Answers. I’m the senior employee of Catholic Answers. I’ve been there longer than anybody else.

JOHN: Wow. Author of many books, including, especially the Bible is a Catholic book and the one who has done several debates in recent years on a number of topics, some of which we’ve debriefed before. And today we join him again to do a little debrief on a recent debate he’s done on the resurrection. So Jimmy Akin, welcome back to the Classical Theism Podcast.

JIMMY: Yeah, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

JOHN: So going right to that recent debate, what was the debate resolution and who was your opponent?

JIMMY: Okay, so this was a debate that I had on Joe Schmid’s channel Majesty of Reason, and the resolution of the debate was what’s the best explanation for the facts about Jesus and the Apostles post crucifixion? It essentially was a debate on the resurrection of Jesus, and my opponent was James Fodor. He’s an Australian skeptic and he has a degree in neuroscience from the University of Melbourne. He is the author of a book called Unreasonable Faith, in which he responds to William Lane Craig’s book, reasonable Faith and Critiques the Arguments and proposes Alternatives to the arguments that Bill Craig made. And I had initially been contacted by Joe who said, you want to debate this guy? And he’s got this book and where he talks about his theory of what happened to the resurrection. And I said, sure. So I got the book and I read the relevant section, and then we had the debate.

JOHN: The format was less structured than some of your other formal debates that we’ve debriefed before. So what was this format and how’d you like it compared to those other debates recently?

JIMMY: Well, basically we were asked, both James and I were asked to do 15 to 20 minute opening statements and then the rest of the, it was basically a two hour debate. The rest of the time was cross-examination. And the cross-examination was not structured in any particular way. Joe, as our host would try to ensure more or less equal time, but there weren’t formal time limits for this debate. And I thought I largely enjoyed this structure. It was nice with the opening statements to have a little bit of flexibility so you’re not trying to time it to the second and have a disagreement with the timekeeper and things like that. And I could see the cross-examination going very badly depending on who the debate opponent was, because some debate opponents will try to monopolize the time. But for this, I think the time kept came out more or less even between me and James, I’d have to go back with a stopwatch.

And if I wanted to find out, did one of us have slightly more time than the other? But James, in terms of the substance of the debate, he did a good job sticking to the topic. In fact, when I published the debate on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/jimmy, I did it as an episode of the Jimmy Akin podcast and I included an introduction in which I complimented James for actually sticking to the topic that we were there to discuss. And I compared him rather unfavorably to another debater I’ve interacted with who engages in Gish Galloping where he raises all kinds of issues that are not what we’re there to discuss. And essentially the Gish Gallup is an attempt to do one of two things, either to overload your opponent into trying to take on more than he can reasonably discuss, or B, get him to waste his time on something other than the debate. But that’s not fair to the other debater, and it’s especially not fair to the audience to waste their time by bringing up subjects and trying to get your opponent to engage in subjects that are not the topic of the debate at hand. So James did not do that, and I gave him a credit for that. I thought that was very good of him. He comes from an academic world as opposed to the apologetics world. And so I think that may have helped focus him in a way that some apologetic debaters are not focused.

And so that was good. If there was a flaw to this format of debate, I think that we got a little too much crosstalk. And I can’t say because I don’t want to be self-serving and say, well, James just kept talking over me because that’s a subjective thing and I’d have to go back and do a numerical count and I’m not interested in doing that to see who interrupted whom more. But I thought that there was a little too much crosstalk between the debaters during certain segments of the debate, but overall I thought it was an enjoyable, somewhat more relaxed format.

JOHN: I agree. And I wrote down just the two words that came to mind when thinking about the format is that it was a substantive and respectful exchange. And like you said, if you have two people who are willing to engage on the topic and they’ve already agreed upon that they’re going to interact respectfully and do so in a scholarly way, this format can be great. But as you said, there might be other debaters or other contexts where this format can get a little bit messy. And about the crosstalk thing, it’s interesting, I haven’t really studied this in detail, but my instinct is since now a lot more debates are done remotely or virtually that might contribute to the temptation to do crosstalk just because sometimes there’s a lag of time and you can’t sense when someone’s pausing, whereas when you’re doing an in-person debate, it’s a little harder and a little bit more obnoxious to talk over someone if it’s not allowed in that moment. But nonetheless, I definitely think it was a substantial and respectful exchange. So I want to give credit to that and I’m going to link, just so the listeners know, I’ll link to the original debate in the show notes on your Jimmy Akin YouTube channel or The Majesty of Reason or they can check that out. But your version is cool, it has that juxtaposition in the beginning. So in this debrief, I’ve kind of structured few.

JIMMY: I also want to give, forgive me for the crosstalk, I also want to give Joe Schmid credit for it because he was our host, he arranged the format of the debate and I thought it was very productive.

JOHN: Yes, no, and he did a nice job of moderating it and keeping things on the subject matter. So that was great. I kind of structured my debrief questions around the opening statements first. So I’m going to ask you a few questions about the openings and then we’ll get into the opening dialogue section and we’ll see where it takes us along the way. But as you brought up with the debate topic, it had to do with what best explains a certain set of facts, and many listeners are going to be familiar with that idea of developing a theory or proposal that best explains a set of facts or key claims connected to some event. Sometimes this is called reasoning to the best explanation or abductive reasoning. For example, when trying to explain the evidence surrounding the resurrection, people who deny that Jesus rose from the dead, they may suggest a swoon theory that Jesus didn’t really die or a conspiracy theory that the disciples stole the body and made up the resurrection or a twin theory that he had a twin who was crucified and so forth instead of him. Before we get to James Fodor’s theory itself, what do you think about this general approach and is it the same as minimal facts apologetics when the Christian tries to use these key claims?

JIMMY: Okay, so let me have you break those two questions apart. What’s the first question?

JOHN: Do you use this approach of taking a set of key claims and then trying to show that the resurrection is the best explanation of it? Would you affirm that as an apologist?

JIMMY: Yes, but as I point out in the debate, I’m neither what you could call a minimal facts apologist on the resurrection or a maximal facts apologist. A minimal facts apologist is someone who identifies just a very few key claims like Gary Habermas, for example. I think he identified four facts that are pretty non-controversial and would then try to defend the resurrection based on those four facts. Or I may have the number wrong. It’s been a while since I read Gary’s book on this. A maximal facts person would be someone who just says, well, I’m going to appeal to everything the New Testament says and treat it as if it’s all the inspired word of God. Well being maximal facts is fine. If you’re debating someone else who also believes in the inspiration and an errancy of scripture, then you can appeal to just anything scripture says as if it’s true.

But that’s not so useful for debating the resurrection because scripture clearly teaches that, and that’s not in dispute. What you would want to use maximal facts for is like debating some doctrine or something that is discussed in scripture. But when it comes to the resurrection, if you’re debating did it happen, then you don’t want to take that approach. So when I debate the resurrection, I neither take a minimal facts approach nor a maximal facts approach. The reason I don’t take a minimal facts approach, as I pointed out in the debate is nobody ever sticks with the minimal facts. You read minimal facts advocates, and they inevitably start appealing to things that were not listed in their list of minimal facts, and they start appealing to things that are mentioned in the course of the crucifixion narratives.

And my opponent, James Fodor, he wasn’t a minimal facts person either. He would appeal to certain things in the crucifixion narratives, in the passion narratives that are not on anybody’s list of minimal facts. What I would describe myself when it comes to the resurrection as is a key facts advocate, I think there are certain key facts that we can use to organize the discussion in a constructive way, but I think we need to go beyond those for supporting detail when we start arguing the case itself. And when I’m operating in this mode, I am not just assuming that everything scripture says is true or accurate. I’m happy to give different weights to different claims based on various indicators of probability and scholarly criteria like multiple attestation and things like that. So I would acknowledge, okay, here we’ve got a claim in scripture, but it’s weaker than this other claim in scripture because we have multiple attestation or we’ve got admission contrary to interest or something else that strengthens the other claim.

JOHN: Okay. No, that is helpful to distinguish those two approaches. And obviously you are arguing that the best explanation of those key facts, and in the debate you had some nice slides where you showed some tables and illustrations that people could look at, which is a great visual. You said the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead or God raised Jesus from the dead different ways to say it, whereas James Fodor presented an alternative explanation for those facts, and it’s different than any of the ones that I mentioned, the swoon theory, the conspiracy theory, and so on. His was called the Rh RHBS model for explaining the facts.

JIMMY: And

JOHN: So I wanted to ask you, what is that theory and how does it differ from some of the other naturalistic proposals for the facts surrounding the resurrection?

JIMMY: Okay, you’ll have to forgive me because I have a mind that focuses on word play. And so something just occurred to me that had not occurred to me before. When you said its initials are HBS, it does not stand for really high bs. It stands for re burial hallucinations group experiences, actually, was it biases and socialization? Yeah, biases and socialization. I had cognitive biases in my notes, but it’s just biases the way he does it, and basically he’s making a composite hypothesis. It’s very much like the hypothesis proposed by Herman Reus back in the 17 hundreds. Reus proposed that the disciples stole the body and then lied about it to create the resurrection appearances. And James’s theory is very similar to Reimer’s except he takes the deception out because if you’re going to steal the body and then lie about it, you’re using deception. And modern scholars who’ve considered reimer’s proposal have said, this is just not credible given the evidence we have about the first followers of Jesus.

They were sincere. They were not this bunch of crooks. We don’t have evidence that points in that direction. We have evidence that points to their sincerity. And so what James did was he essentially recreated the proposal in a way that doesn’t involve the disciples deceiving anybody. So he proposes to explain the empty tomb and what happened to Jesus’ body. He says someone probably Joseph of e matha reburied it. So he did initially bury it in his tomb like all four gospels say, but then he very quickly reburied it somewhere else. And since the body was not present on the day on Sunday, the first day of the week, that led the disciples to begin having experiences, initially one or more disciples had a hallucination of Jesus as resurrected, and then they began to discuss this and it spread as a kind of mental contagion. There were some group experiences where not everyone didn’t see exactly the same thing, but they had these group experiences and then in talking about ’em with each other, it kind of smoothed off the rough edges and it led to the development in the early Christian community of a widespread belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that he did and said various things after the resurrection, even though he did not actually rise from the dad.

JOHN: Okay. No, that’s helpful. And then in your opening statement, you took his initial theory, the RHBS model as he proposed it with those four things, Robert, burial, hallucination, biases and socialization, and you actually suggested we really should call it the R-S-H-B-S model instead, why did you make that move? How does that adjustment help clarify things?

JIMMY: It calls attention to an element that is part of his model that you can miss the significance of because it’s not just, and he does believe, he mentions in his book that not only did Joseph Athea or whomever rebury the body of Jesus, he also kept silent about it effectively. And this is what I point out in the debate is this is an essential element of his model because if Joseph Arimathea or anybody reburied Jesus and immediately said to the disciples, oh yeah, I reburied him, well then it’s going to short circuit the hallucinations and the collective experiences and the whole process is going to fall at that point. So not only do you need to have a burial for this model to work, you need to have the rebar keep his mouth shut, at least during the early critical stages of this process. I mean at some point you could say it got a life of its own and kept going, but in the early stages he had to keep his mouth shut, or if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, word had to not effectively impact. The word of the re burial had to not effectively impact the core disciples either. Like maybe he said it in passing and they misunderstood or didn’t hear or forgot or something, but you need them to not be aware of the re burial for everything to work. And so that’s a key step that needs to be pointed out, which is why I proposed silence as the S in R-S-H-B-S because even if you’ve got a burial, you need silence before you get to hallucinations and biases and socialization.

JOHN: Okay. I think that’s a helpful clarification in addition, and I just want to ask, how do you think the model fares and how does it compare, let’s say to the swoon theory or the twin theory? Why does FDO propose this sequence of steps as opposed to just one of those simpler theories and how do you think it fares compared to them?

JIMMY: Well, in terms of its explanatory power, it fares better, and I think that’s why James proposed it. One of the things that I identify by going through the key facts concerning the resurrection, things like they found the tomb empty, they reported sea in him and so forth, is a lot of the alternative theories that have been proposed will explain one or a few key facts, but not all of them. For example, the swoon theory, well that explains the empty tomb, but it doesn’t explain the ascension of Jesus because it’s also an essential Christian claim that he ascended into heaven. That’s why you can’t just go to Jerusalem and meet Jesus. Now if you’re an early Christian, he’s no longer on earth. And so of three of the key facts that I focus on, the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances and the ascension, some of the alternatives that have been proposed, we’ll explain the empty tomb, but they won’t explain the resurrection appearances or the ascension or they explain the resurrection appearances and maybe the ascension like they hallucinated the resurrection appearances including the ascension, but they don’t explain the empty tomb.

And so you need a composite hypothesis that will explain all of them. And Reimer’s deception theory does that they stole the body that explains the empty tomb and then they lied about the resurrection appearances and they lied about the ascension. Well, James is a non deceptive theory, will do the same thing. You’ve got a re burial which explains the empty tomb, then you’ve got these various psychological processes. He proposes to explain the resurrection appearances including the ascension. And so just like the resurrection hypothesis that I advocate explains all those key facts, his body, he was resurrected, so that explains the empty tomb. He was resurrected. So that explains the ascension appearances, including the resurrection appearances, including the ascension. And so basically you’ve got three theories that have sufficient explanatory power to explain all the key facts resurrection. The disciples are crooks and then James’s model.

And so I think it fares better than most of the other models like twin or swoon or went to the wrong tomb or things like that. In terms of do I think it’s successful overall, I would say that your conclusion is going to be driven by your prior beliefs and what you’re willing to accept. James is a naturalist or he terms himself a naturalist. You could also say he’s a materialist. He doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as spirits. He doesn’t believe there are such things as paranormal phenomena. And so I would say that his prior beliefs drive him to conclude that, well, anything must be more probable than a resurrection. Any natural explanation must be more probable than that. He didn’t want to admit that, but that’s functionally how I saw him operating in the debate.

JOHN: I’m going to come back to that point about the paranormal because that played a key role in some of the dialogue. I just want to hop down to one other thing though that you had said because you brought up the fact that it was a composite theory, the

JIMMY: R-S-H-B-S

JOHN: Model. And then so I’m kind of hopping ahead to the dialogue because I wanted to ask you about the numbers that were involved because toward the end of your opening statement, you gave some numbers or illustrations with numbers and probabilities to highlight the composite nature of his theory. But then in the dialogue section you said you were not attempting a mathematical formalization of assessing hypotheses and then Foor objected and said, well, you did present numerical values in your opening statement. Can you just help us disentangle what was going on there with the numbers? Why did you use some numbers in your opening statement and what are these ideas behind mathematical formalization or informal analysis?

JIMMY: Okay, well, one of the things that I pointed out in my opening statement is that composite explanations where you have two things like a burial and a bunch of psychological processes, they do give you more explanatory power, but they do so at a probability cost because every composite explanation has lower probability than each of its individual components. For example, if I have a hypothesis that has a 50% chance of being true and I propose a second hypothesis that independently has also a 50% chance of being true, then the odds of both of them being true are less than the 50% of the initial one. In fact, if they’re independent and they’re both 50%, the odds of both of them being true are going to be 25%. This is sometimes pointed out with an illustration that we didn’t actually get to in the debate, but it’s known by the phrase, Linda is a bank teller, and it’s an experiment where from a couple decades ago where you read a description of this woman, Linda, and so she’s very studious, she majored in philosophy in college, she’s active in the women’s movement and so forth.

You give this basic description of Linda and then you say, which is more likely, Linda is a bank teller, or Linda is a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement. And people want to say, Linda is a bank teller who’s active in the feminist movement because it explains more of the data in the description, but actually if she is active in the feminist movement and a bank teller, and the alternative is Linda is a bank teller that has to be more probable than the conjunction of Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

So what I did was I said, here we have these elements of James’s model and how likely his model is to be true is going to depend on not if we wanted to formalize this, which is what we would do in the ideal, I mean we couldn’t in this debate, but in the ideal we’d want to be able to put numbers to this. And what you’re going to come out with will depend highly on those numbers. So if we’ve got R-S-H-B-S, we’ve got five elements in his composite hypothesis. Let’s say we thought they were all very probable. Let’s say we gave them all an 80% chance of being true, well 80% times 80% times 80% times 80% times 80% comes out to 31%. So even if you gave high odds to all of his elements, the odds of the whole thing being true is still just like 30%.

On the other hand, if you think the odds are lower, like let’s say you thought they each have a 20% chance of being true, well 20% times 20% times 20% times 20% times 20% is 0.03% chance of the overall hypothesis being true. And I use those two sets of numbers to illustrate how sensitive composite hypothesis probability is to the numbers you plug in for each individual element in the composite. I said now I don’t know exactly what numbers I would give him. I would put ’em on the low side. I don’t think his individual elements are certain ones of them in particular. I don’t think they’re very probable at all. I don’t know what numbers James would assign to him because he didn’t present any numbers in his book or in the debate. I suspect he would rank them higher, but the probability of his proposal is going to be very sensitive to what numbers you would ultimately choose. And then later, even though I had mentioned in my opening presentation, these are just for purposes of illustration, I’m not committing to any numbers here, and I alluded back to the fact that I hadn’t proposed any numbers. He said, well, yes you did, and I am not sure why. I mean maybe he just remembered some numbers and assumed I was proposing them, but I refreshed his memory of that’s not what I was doing with these numbers. I wasn’t proposing them, I was using them for illustration purposes, and I think he eventually saw that point.

JOHN: It’s helpful to have that distinction though between the composite nature of the theory because you talked about how his theory is set apart from the others like swoon and twin and so forth because it has better explanatory power and explains those key facts. But that composite nature, all those different elements definitely is a weakness in the sense that you need all of those different things to come out true for it to fare well. And actually why don’t we jump to just one of them, the first one about re burial because that was a big part of the discussion and you said during your opening statement that you found the idea of burial and effective silence to be highly implausible, and that was the first element in his model. What are some of your reasons for thinking that?

JIMMY: Well, I went through some of them in the debate and I’ll recap those. We didn’t get to all of them. We focused more on the burial than the silence, but okay, so burial itself is implausible for multiple reasons. The first one is it was not customary. It is not what Jews typically did when they buried you. What would typically happen is you die, they’d bury you and they let your body, they’d have period of mourning for like a week and then they’d move on with life and then they’d come back a year later after your flesh had rotted off your bones and they’d go in and clean the bones and then put ’em in long-term storage in what’s known as an ossuary or box for bones. And so that’s what normally happened. Normally they put you in the tomb and they didn’t come back for a year.

So here James is proposing that they came back the next day and moved his body. That is not what normally happens. So that’s reason number one, why re burial is not probable. It’s not what you would normally, it’s not what would normally happen and that’s not what you would expect. The second thing is that Joseph Ofra matha, according to the evidence we have, was a follower of Jesus. And so he thought Jesus was a holy man. He was worthy to be buried with Joseph’s own family. Why would he move him to another location when we have no evidence of him moving to another location? The reverence that he would have towards Jesus as his spiritual master would motivate him to leave Jesus there and if we’d expect evidence of him being moved, if there was some compelling other reason, and there’s not so that second reason why the al hypothesis is improbable, the third reason it’s improbable is it can only happen during a very short timeframe because they buried Jesus in Joseph’s tomb just as the Sabbath was beginning and they got a rest, all the Sabbath and the Sabbath lasts from what we would call Friday night to the beginning of Friday night to the beginning of Saturday night.

So they got to rest all that time. And in fact, the gospels even note they rested on the Sabbath then the earliest they could. Now they’ve got to get him out of the tomb before Sunday morning. They find it empty. So the only time that they could move him would be on Saturday night while it’s dark, reburying a person at night without, I mean they can’t turn on floodlights and stuff to light up the place. It’s going to be dark. They’re going to be using torches at best. And why would you rebury someone on Saturday night? That’s a third reason. It’s improbable. It’s even more improbable because they could have just waited until the next morning when it’s going to be light and we can go and we can get everything done when it’s light. Why would they implausibly bury him earlier when it’s more inconvenient and much harder to do?

So there are multiple problems with the idea of a rebar. I said, I think it’s not only improbable, I think it’s highly improbable that this set of facts for which we have no evidence would happen. Now, if you have evidence for this happening, great bring out the evidence, but James didn’t have any when it comes to maintaining silence, he proposes that like maybe Joseph’s family, well, he proposes either maybe Joseph really wasn’t a Christian. It’s still an implausible. There are a couple of problems there. One is he’s departing from the evidence that we do have because all four gospels point to Jesus, to Joseph being a follower of Jesus. And so we’ve got multiple attestation of that fact. So he’s departing from the evidence we do have, and it would still be improbable anyway for the reasons I’ve just named at most would pull the fact that he was a follower out, but the other reasons would remain for its improbability.

But then Joseph has to keep his mouth shut effectively. Now why would he also, I should. So this ties into part of it, actually this ties in more to the re burial itself, but he proposes maybe like Joseph’s wife got mad and wanted him to move it and that’s why it happened. And okay, that’s a proposal for which James has no evidence, so he’s departing from the evidence. Also, men back in the day, especially high ranking elite men like Josepha was according to the evidence, women didn’t have so much say in things like this. So that’s an additional reason to be skeptical of that proposal. When it comes to the silence, silence is implausible on human grounds. Either Joseph was a Christian or he wasn’t. If he was a Christian, we would totally expect him to tell the core disciples, by the way I moved our master’s body, the idea he’s going to keep his mouth shut is very implausible.

And once he hears reports, even if he didn’t tell him initially, once he hears reports, they’re saying Jesus is raised from the dead, it’d be like, oh no guys, I’ve got his body right over here. He would as a Christian, speak up and correct any initial misimpression. On the other hand, if he’s not a Christian contrary to the evidence we have, which is multiply attested, then we would still expect him to notify these people that he moved the body and we would especially expect him to notify them that he had moved the body as soon as he hears the first claim that they’re saying the tomb is empty and their master has been resurrected and we have no evidence for Joseph keeping silent. Not only do we have no evidence for Joseph moving the body, we have no evidence for Joseph keeping his mouth shut afterwards. So that’s why I found these two elements of James’s proposal very implausible on their faces when it comes to the later elements of James’s proposal. And I pointed this out in the debate, but he only mentions that well, there have been people who have had cognitive biases of this or that nature. He presents zero evidence that any of this applied to the disciples or that it happened in the case of Jesus.

I was more polite than this in the discussion, but this is really hand wavy. If you actually look at one point, he’s got a diagram of how he thinks the different elements interrelate, and he doesn’t even have his core elements on that diagram in the debate. He’s just saying, yeah, this kind of stuff could have happened, but he doesn’t have evidence that it did happen. And just because some phenomena is known to happen to some people in history doesn’t mean you can just infer therefore it happened here.

JOHN: Okay? I think that’s a strong critique of those elements of his hypothesis, especially the re burial and the silence and those ideas there. But in response to those points of yours, James pointed out that well, okay, it’s important not to just consider the points against re burial, but also to compare them of the likelihood or likelihood to the resurrection of hypothesis. And I will be honest, this part of the dialogue got a little bit tricky. You said you two were operating on different levels, and James Porter wanted to know why he wasn’t allowed to ask a question about, okay, about the relative plausibility of re burial compared to the relative plausibility that God raised a specific person from the dead,

JIMMY: And

JOHN: That’s where you brought up this idea of different levels. Would you be able to help disentangle that part of the exchange and what were the different levels? Why did you keep pointing that out?

JIMMY: Okay, so I had pointed out that James is departing from the evidence we have in order to maintain these elements of his proposal. He’s not just proposing things without evidence. He’s proposing things contrary to the evidence that we do have. And he wanted to turn that around on me by saying, well, you’re doing something similar. You’re proposing he rose from the dead. Why can’t I just propose that for which you don’t otherwise have evidence for was his argument, whereas I’m just proposing that he was reburied, which is something that we also don’t have evidence for. So if I can propose that he was reburied without evidence, why can you propose that he’s resurrected without evidence?

And so I pointed out we’re operating on two different levels of argumentation here. I do have evidence for the resurrection. I have multiple arguments for the resurrection. I use a process of elimination where I say, here are the proposed explanations. These don’t work, and that leaves us with the resurrection hypothesis, but I have to jump to that top level and present the problems with all these alternatives. In order to do that, what he’s doing is trying to subvert one element of my overall argument for the resurrection, it would be for comparison, let’s say we’re take it out of a religious context. Let’s say we’re debating hypothesis X, and I’m pro hypothesis X. So I say hypothesis X is true for these five reasons. And then my opponent comes along and says, I propose that hypothesis X is not true because I can undermine reason number one. And then I say, well, you don’t have any evidence that reason number one is untrue. And then he would be saying the same thing with, well, you don’t have any evidence that hypothesis X is true. And it’s like, no, yes I do. I’ve got these five reasons, you’re just trying to undermine one of them.

And he kept inviting me to say, well, what’s your evidence for the resurrection? And it’s like, I gave that to you already. I’d have to rehearse all that again. I can’t give it to you shortly in a debate all over again without wasting people’s time and boring them. So that’s what I was referring to when I said he’s jumping levels. I’m talking, he’s trying to make an argument about the overall conclusion when being unsupported, which it’s not versus his rebuttal of a subsidiary point being unsupported, which it is.

JOHN: Okay, that’s a really helpful distinction between the subsidiary points and the overall conclusion. And we’re going to get back to some of the dialogue that you two had. But I did want to ask about two other points that James made in his opening statement, which bear on this idea of best explanation because you critiqued the re burial, the silence and aspects of his case. He did at least mention ways that he believes the resurrection hypothesis struggles. And sometimes we can fall into this where we spend a lot of time just critiquing our opponent’s hypothesis and our opponent’s explanation and just say that we win by default. But James was saying, no, you can’t do that because you also have some struggles or some weaknesses or some ways that it fails to be a good explanation. And he mentioned three in his opening statement, they didn’t become a super big part of the ongoing dialogue, but I did want to bring them up because some Christians might be caught off guard if they haven’t heard these. He said the resurrection hypothesis is not a great explanation because one, there’s the issue of knowing God’s reason for raising Jesus from the dead. Two, there’s the issue of why does Jesus only appear to his followers and not to others? And three, there’s the issue of Jesus not truly fulfilling all the prophecies of the Jewish Messiah. And so for those three reasons, the resurrection hypothesis, although maybe it does have some evidence, still has these strong counterpoints against it. So do you think those areas present major difficulties for proponents of the resurrection?

JIMMY: Not at all the resurrection. This is why I’m not a minimal facts person. The resurrection occurs in a particular theological context. And so if you asked believers in the first century in the resurrection hypothesis, why would God do this? What’s God’s reason for raising Jesus from the dead? They would probably point to three things. First thing is, well, it validated his ministry. It proved his ministry that he is an agent of God. The second thing, as opposed to just a false messianic claimant. So it proved his messiahship. The second thing is it provided the salvation of the world. The third thing is it’s the inbreaking of the new creation. That is what God is doing at this phase in history. So that’s Jesus’s gospel, repent and believe the kingdom. Well, Jesus coming back from the dead is this inbreaking of the kingdom. So it’s not like resurrection believers don’t have an explanation for this.

They got a perfectly sensible explanation for it. So it’s not a threat to the resurrection hypothesis because the complex of beliefs that the resurrection occurs in explains this perfectly. You got not just a reason, but multiple reasons when it comes to why didn’t Jesus appear to others besides the witnesses he did appeal to? And I think that there’s more reason to question here, but I think that we have sufficient reasons to understand the basics. The first basic is to understand here is only certain people knew who Jesus was. If Jesus teleported to Rome and appeared to Tiberius, Caesar Tiberius isn’t going to know who he is. Okay, what about Pilate? Well, he could appear to Pilate and Pilate would conclude unless Jesus starts doing miracles, which goes beyond just appearances. Pilate’s going to conclude, oh, my guards lied to me. They didn’t crucify you. So there’s no real way for Jesus to prove who he is to people who don’t know him or don’t know him well, unless he starts doing a bunch of miraculous stuff, and that was not his intention to start doing a bunch of miraculous stuff.

I mean that would end up if he just stayed and changed the world order, that would mean a major deviation from God’s plan. So God’s plan was to have a period in which the gospel spreads orally. Now, you can ask, well, why did God choose this path rather than one where he just generates miracles constantly and overturn the entire world order? But that’s a separate question Within this framework, it’s explained. Unless Jesus is going to basically bring on the renovation of the world right now and start doing major miracles, he’s not, he’s going to convince people who didn’t know him. Same thing with the temple authorities. They would divert to some other explanation if he showed up alive and convinced them, oh, that’s Jesus of Nazareth. We must have crucified someone else. Grab this guy and crucify him. It’s not going to advance their belief in him unless he starts doing major miracles, which was not part of the plan at this point. So I think there are within this framework reasons, well, yeah, why Jesus doesn’t appear to them, and thus he would appear to those who did follow him and they could be his witnesses and convince people orally by preaching and describing what happened with Jesus, which was in accord with how he wanted his message to spread. So that’s the second point.

—

I want to break in here for a moment to clarify what I just said, because I could have said it better.

In speaking of Jesus doing miracles in these scenarios, you’ll notice that I envisioned situations where Jesus does lots of miracles and basically overturns the world order.

In other words, he would basically use miracles so extensively that it would disrupt the current world order, which is something Christians expect to happen at the end of this age, and it was not God’s will to bring on the end of this age that soon.

Of course, Jesus could have appeared to people and performed miracles in a different way and on a much smaller scale.

He had already done that in his earthly ministry, and even many skeptical scholars acknowledge that Jesus had a reputation as a miracle worker on this smaller scale.

So what if Jesus had done that in appearing to Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, or the Jewish authorities?

Well, he wouldn’t have convinced them that he had risen from the dead or that he was the Messiah.

There were lots of miracle workers in the ancient world, so just because you can perform some smaller miracles isn’t automatically going to convince an ancient person that you’ve risen from the dead or that you’re the Jewish Messiah.

If Jesus appeared to Caesar and—let’s say, healed a blind man or turned water into wine—Caesar might say, “Well, that’s interesting. You’re a Jewish miracle worker, but that doesn’t mean you just rose from the dead or that you’re the Jewish Messiah. In fact, how do I know you’re not just using magic to perform these miracles?”

And magic was the standard thing that people in the ancient world charged miracle workers with if they came from a different belief system.

They’d say, “You’re just a magician—a sorcerer,” and then the discussion would devolve into a debate about sorcery and the gods.

If Jesus appeared to Pontius Pilate and did minor miracles like healing individual people, Pilate would conclude, “Oh! This is Jesus of Nazareth. He’s just doing those miracles that I’ve heard so much about.”

But he wouldn’t conclude from this that Jesus had risen from the dead or that he was the Messiah.

Jesus had already been reported doing miracles of that sort, and it hadn’t convinced Pilate of either of those things.

On the other hand, the Gospels record that Pilate was so surprised that Jesus died so swiftly on the cross that he had a centurion check to make sure he was dead.

You can read about that in Mark 15:44-45.

Well, if Jesus then appeared to Pilate and convinced Pilate that he was really Jesus, Pilate would have simply concluded that the centurion had been wrong, and he needed to do the crucifixion all over again.

And if Jesus appeared to the Jewish authorities and did minor miracles, they also might be convinced that Jesus was alive, but that wouldn’t force them to conclude that he had risen from the dead or that he was the Messiah.

He’d already been doing small-scale miracles in his ministry, and it didn’t convince them of those things.

So in this case they’d conclude that the wrong guy had been executed, or that he had swooned, or something like that, and he needed to be crucified again.

They’d also explain his miracles as sorcery—that being a standard charge if you didn’t like someone’s miracles—and we actually have some quite good evidence from Jewish sources that one of the charges against Jesus in his Jewish trial was being a magician.

If you’d like me to do an episode on that, let me know in the comments.

In any event, Jesus would need to do truly extraordinary things to convince people who had rejected belief in him that he had risen from the dead and that he was the Messiah.

In The Wizard of Oz, the wicked witch of the west once used her magic to write “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky, and for someone who rejected belief in Jesus, even if the words “This is my beloved Son the Messiah, back from the dead” appeared in the sky, they also could be dismissed as just magic.

Unless God just reached into these people’s heads and took away their free will, the kind of miracles that would be needed would have to be much more involved and would be inconsistent with the framework God has chosen to have operate in our world for now.

There’s more that can be said about this topic, but I’ll save it for another time.

The point here is that simply appearing to people who had rejected belief in him—even if he performed the kinds of miracles he had during his ministry—would not convince them.

Whereas appearing to those who already knew and believe in him—which is what he actually did—would convince them that he had risen from the dead and that he really was the Messiah.

Now, back to the debrief.

—

JIMMY: The third point, can . . .

JOHN: I just add one in there?

JIMMY: Yeah.

JOHN: I think we do get some textual support for what you’re saying at the end of Matthew’s gospel. There’s a famous verse, I think it’s Matthew 28 17, I want to say where it says, and they worshiped him at the appearance on the mountain, but some doubted. And so not everyone necessarily, and there’s various reasons proposed for this maybe due to the nature of the appearance and being outdoors and so forth, there was a large crowd. Not everyone could have had a great view of him, but perhaps is the case. Not everybody really who was there at that large appearance necessarily knew him super well or was a disciple the entire time. And so perhaps they didn’t recognize him. And then there’s always aspects of the fact of a glorified body that can be brought in. All of that to say is I think that verse might give some support to the type of explanation you’re proposing there.

JIMMY: It might, although I can also see the verse being taken in other ways when we say, oh, I can’t believe it. It doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize what’s right in front of me. It means I’m astonished. And that same verse can mean, and some of them they were astonished.

JOHN: Okay, that’s helpful as well as an alternative explanation. And so then the third issue that he brought up though was Jesus not fulfilling all the prophecies of the Jewish Messiah, and he didn’t spell them out in detail

JIMMY: Or

JOHN: Go ahead. Do you want to comment on that?

JIMMY: Yeah. This is a charge that one often hears. It’s sometimes made by non-Christian Jews and almost nobody has studied, well, what were the prophecies? And you just hear this, oh, well, he didn’t fulfill ’em. But almost nobody has done a detailed study of what were the different ideas about the Messiah that were in circulation at this time. And one of the things that became very obvious to me when studying the history of the Jewish idea of the Messiah is nobody could fulfill them all because there are too many different ideas about the Messiah. They go in a bunch of different directions. The most that could happen is for someone to fulfill a subset of the different prophecies that were made about the Messiah because they conflict and Jesus fulfills a bunch of ’em. So what this does is it means you can’t just say Jesus didn’t fulfill the prophecies.

He fulfilled a bunch of ’em, and there’s no promise that he was going to fulfill all the prophecies at one time. I would say he’s fulfilled some many prophecies and there are other prophecies he’ll fulfill at the second coming, but once you’ve seen enough to show you this is the Messiah, it becomes problematic to say, oh, well, I haven’t seen everything fulfilled, so I’m going to reserve judgment until I see everything fulfilled. At some point you get enough evidence, and I would say he fulfilled enough, but nobody can fulfill everything because there are just too many different prophecies. For example, according to some Jewish sources, there are going to be two Messiahs, the Messiah bin David and the Messiah bin Israel, the Messiah bin David is the Messiah who’s a descendant of King David, who is from, who reigns over the southern kingdom. The Messiah of Israel reigns over the northern kingdom.

So that’s a different model than the Koran sect had, which is there’s going to be a Messiah son of David, and there’s going to be a Messiah son of Aaron who is a priest. And then there are other models where the Messiah son of David was born after the Jewish War of Rebellion, the first one, and lived in hiding in Rome and was going to come out at some point and get involved with a Roman emperor called armless and so forth. And there are other versions of the Messiah where he’s up in heaven and is not a son of David at all. So you’ve got bunches of different ways of imagining the Messiah. There is no way to simply say, well, he didn’t fulfill all the prophecies because nobody could. They’re voluminous and they contradict each other Jesus. Thus, in terms of prophetic space, could define what kind of Messiah is he going to be, and he chose not to be the kind of Messiah that is a worldly conqueror. Instead, he chose to be a Messiah who would suffer and redeem people through that process like the suffering servant in Isaiah 53. And he also chose to combine in himself. This is something, the book of Hebrews discusses this priestly aspect where he’s offering himself as well. So it’s not like there’s a separate Messiah bin David and Messiah bin Aaron. They’re really one guy. So he fulfilled a large number of the predictions, but not all of them because that’s physically impossible.

JOHN: Okay, those are some very helpful thoughts. I wanted to follow up on just one of them though, because James did seem to say that, okay, maybe he would grant that there’s different views in the Messiah, but we have in Isaiah and we have in an Old Testament that the Messiah would rule over a physical earthly kingdom that would usher in a universally peaceful state of affairs, like in Isaiah two, four when it says they would beat their swords into Plowshares, talks about later the lion lying down with the lamb. And since Jesus didn’t do that, and we don’t see this universal peaceful state of affairs, therefore he can’t be that same messiah that’s found in Isaiah and that’s in sacred scripture, not just in some traditions that were found, let’s say in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

JIMMY: Okay. James didn’t raise anything like that in the debate, but if you want to know what I would say to that argument, I would say that there are two factors that are relevant here. The first one is the Messianic passages in the Old Testament give a variety of states, give a variety of descriptions of the Messianic state, and there’re all positive, or many of them are positive I should say, but they don’t all have to be fulfilled. Literally. For example, one of the recurring themes in Isaiah about the Messiah’s kingdom is the lion will lie down with the lamb and or similar animal metaphors, and a little kid is going to stick its hand in the serpents den and the as won’t bite him and stuff like that. Okay? This is a symbol of peace. This does not mean little babies are going to be sticking their hands in snakes, dens and not getting bit by the poisonous snake, that this is a symbol of universal peace.

You’re misreading the prophecy if you try to take it as a literal description. Lions are also not going to cease to be predators in the Messiah’s age. They don’t have the, at one point it says, the lion shall eat straw like the ox, except lions are obligate carnivores that don’t have the requirements in their gut system to be able to digest grass. So this is just not a literal description. You have to read it in a more general way as a spiritual symbol. And that applies to a lot of the Messianic texts, which are not simply describing political peace, but spiritual peace

That makes brothers of men from all different nations and so forth. Second point that’s relevant is give it some time. You’ve got some messianic prophecies like Isaiah 53 that say the Messiah is going to die. And then you have other messianic prophecies that say the Messiah is going to reign forever. Well, he can’t rain forever and then die, so he must die first, come back from the dead and then reign forever. Okay. We would expect to the extent there is a political aspect to the Messiah’s reign, we would expect that at the second coming, not the first. So I don’t see how this harms the Christian claim in any way.

JOHN: Okay. Thank you for entertaining. That was more my follow-up than something James specifically raised, but to go back to his opening statement, he did bring up some other historical miracle claimants that might throw some Christians off guard because we like to argue that the evidence for Christianity is unique and bring forth our case. And he raised some folks such as Manum Schneerson, who lived from 1902 to 1994, and he used this to kind of support the idea of his model with hallucinations, cognitive cognitive biases and social contagion factors, possibly explaining how people and communities could come to believe that a person like Manum Sen worked miracles and even came back from the dead. But just as a quick aside, this reminded me of when we debriefed another debate you had with Dr. Bart Erman years ago, and he brought up the Bahe tove in his debate or came up in the q and a, and this was another influential religious leader with an interesting name that I hadn’t heard of before, but I take it that James has mentioned of Manum Sen is that these elements of hallucination, cognitive biases and social contagion, they must be in play for these modern miracle claimant situations. And so therefore, they could be used to explain the early Christian claims that Jesus rose from the dead. So what did you think of that element of him bringing up these other specific cases?

JIMMY: Well, so it occurs in a couple of different contexts. First of all, I’ll mention who the Basov was because people may not be familiar. Basov is not his real name. It’s his Appalachian. People call him that today. His actual name was Israel Ben Zer, and he lived back in the 17 hundreds in Europe. He was a Hasidic Jew. He lived in what was then the, I guess, Polish Lithuanian commonwealth. And he was a kabbalistic rabbi who had a reputation as a miracle worker, and he became known. He’s one of several Baals, but so Baal means master, shim means name, and tove means good. So he’s the master of good name, and he’s been very respected. There are lots of miracle claims about him. Someone in a previous debate that Bart had had with Tim McGrew, who’s an evangelical apologist and philosophy professor had raised, well, what would you say about miracle claims by the Basto?

And Tim was coming from a perspective of, well, miracles happen in Christianity, especially in biblical times, but not in other religions. And the same thing has happened with Bill Craig, not about the Basov specifically, but Bill Craig has this common idea that’s particularly common in evangelicalism of like, okay, miracles happen in Christianity, especially in the Bible, but not in other religions. And I wanted to diffuse this because even though James Fotor had written his book responding to Bill Craig, I wanted to put him and the audience on notice. I am not Bill Craig. Don’t expect me to agree with all of his positions. And so I made a point of saying, okay, you’ve got the skeptical viewpoint that says miraculous and paranormal things don’t happen at all. Then you’ve got the evangelical perspective that Bill Craig represents and Tim McGrew that miraculous and paranormal events happen in Christianity, at least in biblical times, but not elsewhere.

And then you’ve got my view, which is the early Christian view, which is paranormal stuff happens, and it happens inside Christianity. It happens outside Christianity. Christianity is not unique in having paranormal stuff happen. Thus, I would not say the evidence for Christianity is unique in that it alone has evidence for paranormal things happening or miraculous things happening. I would say the evidence for Christianity is unique in that it’s the strongest evidence. So when you go back to early Christian apologists, they aren’t saying things like, oh, all those miracles in pagan religions, they’re all fake or they’re all demons. They might say they’re all demons, but they’re not going to say, nothing happens outside of Christianity that is paranormal or supernatural. They’re going to be open to those things. And so if someone, as I pointed out in the debate with Bart Herman, if someone said, well, what about the miracles of the Bhem tove?

I’d say, oh, I’d like to learn more about ’em. Tell me about ’em. I’d want to research ’em and form a conclusion. I’m not going to dismiss ’em automatically. Same thing is going to be true of Manum Sen, who was a Hasidic rabbi in here. He wasn’t born here, but here in the United States in the 20th century, now, there are people who are followers, they’re called messiness. There are people who are followers of Rabbi Schneerson who think one of two things. They think either he didn’t die and they have a saying, Schneerson didn’t die, or they think he’ll be resurrected in the future, but he hadn’t been resurrected yet. There is not, and I’ve looked for it. There is not a movement saying he’s been raised, so he’s not a parallel to Jesus. Even if he were, we’ve got better evidence for Jesus being resurrected than we do for Manum Sen. I don’t care if other people argue their leader was resurrected. I want to know what’s the data for that where James brought him into the discussion, and this was during part of the discussion where James is talking pretty fast. He’s younger and talks pretty fast.

He had reported miracles to which, and James being a materialist would say, and so that illustrates cognitive biases that could be at play in the Schneerson case. So the same biases could be at play in the Jesus case. My response is who says Sen’s miracles are the result of cognitive biases? Why dismiss ’em? God loves everybody. God can use Jewish people to heal others. God can use Christian people to heal others. It doesn’t mean God’s signing off to every single belief the person has. You got lots of people who are, oh, my grandmother has cancer. Please help her. And God’s not going to say, oh, sorry, you disagree with this tertiary point on the hierarchy of truths. No miracle healing for your grandmother. That’s just not how God operates. He loves everybody. Jesus himself acknowledged that there were Jewish exorcists who could drive demons out of people.

Well, that’s a form of healing. Someone’s suffering. You got a demon in ’em. Maybe the demons even causing a physical ailment like epilepsy or deafness or blindness, you get the demon out of them, and you didn’t have to be a Christian. There’s even the famous exorcist, he’s not one of us, and there were other exorcists. Jesus said, well, if I’m doing this by the power of Satan, what about your sons who are doing the same thing so you can have God caring for people and healing people in other religions? I’m not going to dismiss either the miracles reported of the bahe ta or the miracles reported of Manum Sen. I want to see the data.

JOHN: No, that’s a really important point to highlight when we’re doing our apologetics, to not be dismissive when somebody just brings up a miracle that we haven’t heard of. If we’re going to be consistent and faithful to the evidence, then we want to say, well, tell me more about it. Let’s look at it and let’s sift through it, which is a lot of what you do on Jimmy Akin’s mysterious world as well. But let me actually ask you again about the paranormal, because you brought that up in your opening statement that you were representing the early Christian view, which is not a materialist view, it’s not the same view that William Lane Craig was coming from that James Foor was critiquing. And it also didn’t come up a ton in the dialogue, but you alluded to the fact that you’ve done a good amount of research on paranormal events in para parapsychology. So I just wanted to ask you to summarize what is the paranormal and how do you think this evidence or these ideas, this research that you’ve done behind the paranormal, how does that come into play when we’re thinking about the resurrection?

JIMMY: So I guess I’ll start with what the paranormal is. So parra is a Greek preposition that means beyond or alongside normal means normal. What our culture considers normal is what’s normal for these purposes. So something is paranormal. If it is beyond or alongside what our culture considers normal, like having a prophetic dream about the future that would be considered paranormal in our culture, especially with people like James Foor who would say, oh, yeah, I don’t don’t think precognitive dreams can happen. So that’s definitely not normal. On the other hand, there are other cultures which have different standards of normality. If you were, for example, in the ancient Israelite culture and said, I had a prophetic dream, they would say, oh, tell me about it. Because there are prophetic dreams in the Bible. They’re perfectly normal. God can give prophetic dreams. So paranormal is beyond what’s considered normal in our culture. It includes the supernatural. Super is a Latin preposition. It means above natural means natural. And so the supernatural is something that involves things that are above what human nature or physical nature can accomplish now. So the supernatural is a subset of the paranormal. So everything supernatural is paranormal.

This is worth studying because in parapsychology we have actual scientific research that has been done on the paranormal and it points to the insufficiency of a materialistic perspective like the one foor has. So for example, there was a study done, it came out in 2011, it’s called is by a psychologist named Daryl Bim, BEM. I did an episode of Mysterious World on this and he was basically studying subconscious precognition. The idea is that we all have minor precognitive ability that we use to navigate our environment. So for example, and this was actually not one of bims experiments, but it’s good illustration. One of the things you can do is watch people’s level of pupil dilation because you get a camera, you focus it on their eyes. And because our eyes contract, our irises contract when we are exposed to bright light to prevent our retinas from being injured by too much light.

So our irises shrink when we’re exposed to bright light and they dilate or expand in low light. Okay? So you sit someone down in front of a computer screen, you program the computer to randomly using a true random number generator, flash the entire screen white periodically, and you sit someone down in front of it, you watch what their pupil does and it turns out you get evidence of people’s eyes dilating like a third or not dilating, contracting a third of a second before the random flash, before the machine has even decided it’s going to flash because that all happens on the microsecond scale. And so it appears their body is sensing what’s about to happen. And so this is a form of precognition. It’s sometimes called pret, but that’s what Darryl Bim was studying in feel in the future. And he did eight different tests on computers.

He designed them so that he had a package that anybody can download this and run it in their lab. And he found better than six sigma results that subconscious precognition exists. And there were people who said, well, we need replication. And he’s like, great, I’ve got this package anybody can download. So within a couple of years, 90 different researchers had done this and the results held up. So we actually have pretty robust evidence that some form of precognition exists. We also have pretty robust evidence that some form of telepathy exists and that some form of clairvoyance exists and that some form of psychokinesis or mind over matter exists.

And there’s no way to explain those on a materialist worldview. They go beyond what our currently known physics would predict. Now that’s not to say they contradict what we know now, but they would at least indicate our current physical models are incomplete. And it’s hard to see how you could explain these on purely naturalistic terms. Then you look at survival studies, which is the other major element of parapsychology, and we have experiences before, during and after clinical death. These are known as deathbed visions, near death experiences, and after death communications where people appear to be having conscious experiences even though they don’t have a body in a deathbed vision, you have departed relatives show up to usher you into the afterlife or angels in a near death experience. You have the same thing as well as your own experience of my heart has stopped and yet I’m looking at them working on my body.

And then in after death communications, which are astonishingly common, like 50% of the population has these, you have your departed loved one who doesn’t have a body showing up. Now here’s the thing, many of these experiences contain what’s known as vertical information. Vertical information is information that is so specific you can’t guess it. So it goes beyond random chance and you didn’t know it before the experience and it turned out to be true. So it was true information you didn’t know about and could not be naturally predicted. Examples are things like, oh, I’m having a deathbed vision and here’s my father and what is my sister Vita doing in my deathbed vision? Vita is alive as far as I know. And then it turns out, no Vita died three weeks ago and we’ve been keeping this information from you. Or I was, this is another famous example.

I was outside of my body. My heart stopped. I saw them working on me, I started looking around the hospital. I saw a men’s blue tennis shoe with the lace wrapped around it on the ledge outside the window of an upper floor. Can you go find it? And so the hospital worker goes, they start looking on the ledges around the upper floors. There is a men’s blue tennis shoe with a lace wrapped around it on the ledge outside the window. This person saw this while they were clinically dead when their brain was not getting oxygen. And so they should have no brain activity whatsoever. And this vertical information shows up in all three types of experiences in deathbed visions, near death experiences, and after death communications. So when you look at the evidence that we have, it presents a portrait of the world that is just not explained by the kind of materialism that my opponent James was advocating. And thus we need to be open to these additional possibilities including things like miraculous healings and resurrections, which are just an extreme form of miraculous healing.

JOHN: Alright, I think that’s really helpful to have you go into that a little bit further than you had time for in the debate. And it gives another avenue. I would say this Jimmy too, to

JIMMY: Part of what I would’ve gone into in the debate. I said at various points, happy to talk more about this if you want. They just didn’t ask me about that.

JOHN: Right. But I like it because I feel like at some point in our case, we’re always trying to crack into the materialism or naturalism, and a lot of times that’s done in traditional apologetics through bringing up things like ethical grounding or talking about the mind and the immateriality of the intellect as things that aren’t explained very well on a materialist or naturalistic framework. And what you are arguing here is that we can really add the whole field of paranormal and parapsychology in these studies as avenues to crack into that skeptical materialist framework which will broadly support our case or at least show that we need to be open to things like miracles and resurrection. So I think that’s very helpful. We’ve gone for about an hour and 15 minutes here, Jimmy, and this has been a helpful debrief to go further into some of the points raised during the debate or even things that didn’t necessarily come up in specificity that I think you’ve added to the exchange. But I wanted to ask you, is there anything else on your mind from this debate or from this exchange that you wanted to highlight and touch on in this debrief?

JIMMY: There is. So in the debate I presented what I initially thought was going to be a point of common ground between me and James because I always try to start with common ground. It’s stuff we don’t have to fight about and it’s a goodwill gesture shows I’m a debate partner in good faith and stuff like that. But I pointed out that when you have something you can’t estimate, the probability of what you have to do in determining did it happen or not, is look at the alternatives and see how well do they work. So if I want to investigate something that is an unknown that I can’t because it’s an unknown, I can’t estimate its probability and it’s a unique event, it’s not something I can just replicate because then I could get the statistics I need to be able to predict it. What you got to do is look at the alternatives, and this is what police do when they look at crimes. They say, well, okay, here’s a scenario. What are the alternative scenarios? Do they have problems? And then they use a process of elimination to, okay, if the other scenarios have problems, it points to this person being guilty. Similarly in, well after I articulated this principle, James said, I think you’re principal’s totally unworkable.

JOHN: Yeah, actually I wrote it down. He said,

JIMMY: Totally flawed and completely untenable, hyperbole much. But this is a common principle that is used in all kinds of fields, including science. Like for example, you periodically hear about reported detections of Biosignatures like on Venus or Mars or elsewhere. And so what happens when they report, okay, we found something that could indicate life. How do they investigate that? We don’t know how common life is off earth because we’ve only ever confirmed it here. So what they do with each reported detection of a bio signature is they look closer and they say, well, what are the alternatives that could explain this? Or can we find confirmation from another source? And so it’s like, here’s this rock from Mars, it’s got shapes in it that look biological or here’s this chemical signature from the atmosphere of Venus. It is something that’s on earth is only known to be produced by life.

So what are the alternatives and how can we rank those? And they try to establish, can we explain this anomaly that would be unknown by some known mechanism instead? So I was simply applying a commonly used technique that I think you have to use whenever you’re dealing with something that’s unknown that you can’t establish a native probability for. It’s like if you say, I’m going to roll a dye and it’s a 23, what were the odds of that? Well, I don’t know unless I know how many sides are on the die. So I’d have to look at other things to try to figure out whether your claim is true.

And what James was trying to do was say, well, we need to compare the likelihood of a resurrection to the likelihood of my model, James’s model. And he’s a naturalist. So if you’re not using the process of elimination technique that I was advocating to put numbers on the alternatives, or at least talk about problems with the alternatives and see which ones work and which don’t, then your gut feel as a materialist is going to tell you anything is more probable than a resurrection if you’re operating from that closed worldview. And that’s why I made a point of this is not my worldview and this is why we need to use this alternative procedure. Otherwise we’re just going to be projecting our gut feels on each other, which sounds pretty gross actually.

JOHN: That would be gross if it involved our actual guts coming out. So Jimmy Akin, thank you so much for that. This has been a really helpful debrief for me who listened to the debate and I encourage listeners to listen to it. It’s a substantive and respectful exchange on these ideas about the resurrection. Why don’t you give us just a quick bottom line of how do you feel now that the debate it was a couple months ago, what’s in your mind as you think back to it and had to summarize how it went and let listeners know where can they go to find out more of your great content regarding Christian apologetics?

JIMMY: Okay. Well, so I thought it was a productive exchange. I never claimed to win debates. I always leave that to others to make their own assessments, but I thought it went well. When it comes to learning more about apologetics, well, I work for Catholic Answers that’s catholic.com. I have a lot of activity on my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/jimmy Akin. And if you’re interested in the resurrection and evidence for Jesus, I have a book that’s just about to come out. It’s coming out this spring. It’s called Evidence for Christ. And it goes through, here are all these different Jewish ideas about the Messiah. Here’s where they come from. Here’s how we can categorize them. Here’s what Jesus fulfilled. Here’s the evidence for his resurrection. So if that’s a subject you’re interested in, check out Evidence for Christ by Jimmy Akin.

JOHN: Excellent. Well, I very much look forward to that title coming out myself, Jimmy Akin, thanks again for joining us today on the Classical Theism Podcast. It’s been a blast. My pleasure.

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And, that’s the debrief on my recent debate with James Fodor.

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