Appendix: Bayes's Theorem and the Resurrection . . . . .
There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. By Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. 256 pages. $24.95.
When preeminent philosophical atheist Antony Flew announced in 2004 that he had come to believe in God's existence and was probably best considered a Deist, the reaction from both believers and skeptics was "off the chart." Few religious stories had this sort of appeal and impact, across the spectrum, both popular as well as theoretical. No recent change of mind has received this much attention. Flew responded by protesting that his story really did not deserve this much interest. But as he explained repeatedly, he simply had to go where the evidence led.
SOME BACKGROUND
It was this last sentence, repeated often in interviews, that really interested me. Having known Tony well over twenty years, I had heard him repeat many things like it, as well as other comments that might be termed "open minded." He had insisted that he was open to God's existence, to special revelation, to miracles, to an afterlife or to David Hume being in error on this or that particular point. To be truthful, I tended to set aside his comments, thinking that, while they were made honestly, perhaps Tony still was not as open as he had thought.
Then very early in 2003 Tony indicated to me that he was considering theism, backing off a few weeks later and saying he remained an atheist with "big questions." One year later, in January 2004, Tony told me he had indeed become a theist, just as quickly adding, however, that he was "not the revelatory kind" of believer. That was when I heard him say for the first time that he was just following where the evidence led. Then I remembered all the earlier occasions when he had insisted that he was not objecting to God or the supernatural realm on a priori grounds. I was amazed. Tony was indeed willing to consider the evidence.
There was an immediate outcry from many in the skeptical community. Perhaps Tony Flew was simply too old or had not kept up on the relevant literature. The presumption seemed to be that, if he had been doing so, then he would not have experienced such a change of mind. One joke quipped that, at his advanced age, maybe he was just hedging his bets in favor of an afterlife.
One persistent rumor was that Tony Flew really did not believe in God after all. Or perhaps he had already recanted his mistake. Paul Kurtz's foreword to the republication of Flew's classic volume God and Philosophy identified me as "an evangelical Christian philosopher at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University," noting my interview with Flew and my "interpretation" that Tony now believed in God.37 Kurtz seemed to think that perhaps the question still remained as to whether Flew believed in God. After explaining that Flew's "final introduction" to the reissued volume had undergone the process of four drafts, Kurtz concluded that readers should "decide whether or not he has abandoned his earlier views."38
In his introduction to this same text, Flew both raised at least a half-dozen new issues since his book had first appeared in 1966 and mentioned questions about each of these subjects. Included were discussions on contemporary cosmology, fine-tuning arguments, some thoughts regarding Darwin's work, reflections on Aristotle's view of God as well as Richard Swinburne's many volumes on God and Christian theism. Hints of theism were interspersed alongside some tough questions.39
Of course, book text must be completed well before the actual date of publication. But several news articles had appeared first, telling the story of what Flew referred to as his "conversion."40 Early in 2005, my lengthy interview with Flew was published in Philosophia Christi.4' Another excellent interview was conducted by Jim Beverly, in which Flew also evaluated the influence of several major Christian philosophers.42
In many of these venues, Flew explained in his own words that he was chiefly persuaded to abandon atheism because of Aristotle's writings about God and due to a number of arguments that are often associated with Intelligent Design. But his brand of theism-or better yet, Deism43-was not a variety that admitted special revelation, including either miracles or an afterlife. While he acknowledged most of the traditional attributes for God, he stopped short of affirming any divine involvement with humans.
Along the way, Flew made several very positive comments about Christianity, and about Jesus, in particular. Jesus was a first-rate moral philosopher, as well as a preeminent charismatic personality, while Paul had a brilliant philosophical mind. While rejecting mir acles, Flew held that the resurrection is the best-attested miracle claim in history.44
It is against this background that we turn to the latest chapter in the ongoing account of Antony Flew's pilgrimage from ardent atheism to Deism. Further clarifying his religious views, especially for those who might have thought that the initial report was too hasty, or suspected incorrect reporting, or later backtracking on Flew's part, the former atheistic philosopher has now elucidated his position. In a new book, Flew chronicles the entire story of his professional career, from atheism to Deism, including more specific reasons for his change. Along the way, several new aspects have been added.
ANTONY FLEW'S INFLUENCE
Signifying his change of view, the cover of Flew's new book cleverly reads, "There Is No God," but the word No is scribbled out and the word A is handwritten above it. Flew terms this work his "last will and testament," noting that the subtitle "was not my own invention."45 The contents are nothing short of a treasure trove of details from Flew's life, including his family, education, publications and interactions with many now world-famous philosophers, not to mention the long-awaited reasons for his becoming a Deist.
The volume begins with a preface written by Roy Varghese'41 followed by an introduction by Flew. Part one, "My Denial of the Divine," contains three chapters on Flew's previous atheism.
The book opens with a reverberating bang. Varghese's eighteenpage preface sets the tone for much of the remainder of the text. He begins with the breaking news in late 2004 of Antony Flew's newly announced belief in God. Varghese then notes that the response to the Associated Press story from Flew's fellow atheists verged on hysteria.... "Inane insults and juvenile caricatures were common in the freethinking blogosphere. The same people who complained about the Inquisition and witches being burned at the stake were now enjoying a little heresy hunting of their own. The advocates of tolerance were not themselves very tolerant. And, apparently, religious zealots don't have a monopoly on dogmatism, incivility, fanaticism, and paranoia."47
This last comment serves as an entree to two of the more interesting arguments in the book. Considering Flew's impact in the history of modern atheism, Varghese argues initially that "within the last hundred years, no mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew's fifty years of antitheological writings."49 He then considers the contributions to atheism produced by well-known philosophers such as A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger. Varghese finds that none of these scholars "took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs"so
But Flew's writings, such as "Theology and Falsification" ("the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century"52), God and Philosophy, The Presumption of Atheism and other publications, set the philosophical tone of atheism for a generation of scholars. Along with Flew's many other books and essays, one could hardly get through a contemporary philosophy class, especially in philosophy of religion, without being at least introduced to his theses.
In an article in 2000, Flew explained that his purpose in first reading the paper at a meeting of C. S. Lewis's Socratic Club was that "I wanted to set these discussions off onto new and hopefully more fruitful lines."" In another interview that I did with Tony in Oxford in 2005, he attested that he saw his essay as slamming the door on positivism at the Socratic Club. He attests that his essay "was intended to simply refute the positivistic stance against reli gious utterances. It succeeded in that, but then its influence spread outside of Oxford."56
Flew then begins the remainder of the book with an introduction. Referring to his "conversion" from atheism to Deism, he begins by affirming clearly that "I now believe there is a God!"58 As for those detractors who blamed this on Flew's "advanced age" and spoke of a sort of "deathbed conversion," Flew reiterates what he has said all along: he still rejects the afterlife and is not placing any "Pascalian bets."59
THE MAKING OF AN ATHEIST
Part one ("My Denial of the Divine") consists of three chapters, intriguingly titled, "The Creation of an Atheist," "Where the Evidence Leads" and "Atheism Calmly Considered." This material is simply a delightful read, consisting of many autobiographical details regard ing Flew's career and research, along with many enjoyable as well as amusing anecdotes.
In chapter one, Flew reviews his childhood and early life. This includes detailed references to his father: an Oxford University graduate with two years of study at Marburg University in Germany, who had become a Methodist minister very much interested in evangelism, as well as a professor of New Testament at a theological college in Cambridge. It was from his father that Tony learned, at an early age, the value of good research and of checking relevant sources before drawing conclusions.
Flew even stated in some of his atheist publications that he was never satisfied with the way he had become an atheist-here described as a process that was accomplished "much too quickly, much too easily, and for what later seemed to me the wrong reasons." Incredibly, he now reflects on his early theism that changed to atheism: "for nearly seventy years thereafter I never found grounds sufficient to warrant any fundamental Nonetheless, it was an aspect of the problem of evil that affected Tony's conversion to atheism. During family travels to Germany, he witnessed firsthand some of the horrors of Nazi society and learned to detest "the twin evils of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism."62
Chapter one also includes accounts of Flew's basically private education at a boarding school, along with his years at Oxford University, interspersed with military service during World War II, as well as his "locking horns with C. S. Lewis" at Socratic Club meetings. He was present at the famous debate between Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe in February 1948. Flew also met his wife, Annis, at Oxford. For all those (including myself) who have wondered through the years about Tony's incredible notions of ethical responsibility, he states that while he had left his father's faith, he retained his early ethics, reflected in his treatment of Annis before their marriage.63
In chapter two, "Where the Evidence Leads," Flew reflects on his early tenure as "a hotly-energetic left-wing socialist,"64 and narrates his early philosophical interests: parapsychology, Darwinian social ethics and the notion of evolutionary progress, problems with idealism, and analytic philosophy. More details on the Socratic Club introduce some of the philosophical reactions to Flew's "Theology and Falsification," along with his writing of his epic God and Philosophy, his "systematic argument for atheism."65 Flew discusses reactions from Richard Swinburne, J. L. Mackie and Frederick Copleston. His conclusion today, as Tony has told me on several occasions, is that God and Philosophy is "a historical relic," due to changes in his thinking that arose from the response of others to his writing. These changes are set forth in this volume.
Flew also discusses in chapter two his well-known volumes The Presumption of Atheism and Hume's Philosophy of Belief. Philosophical reactions are recounted from Anthony Kenny, Kai Nielsen, Ralph Mclnerny and especially Alvin Plantinga, whose thoughts Flew calls, "By far, the headiest challenge to the argument" of the former volume.66 The chapter concludes with Flew's changes of mind regarding some of Hume's ideas, plus his holding and then abandoning compatibilism.67
Ending his section on his atheism, Flew's third chapter is "Atheism Calmly Considered." Here he notes a number of his debates and dialogues over the years, both public and written, with Thomas Warren, William Lane Craig, Terry Miethe, Richard Swinburne, Richard Dawkins and myself. He also mentions two conferences. The first ("The Shootout at the O.K. Corral") in Dallas in 1985 featured four prominent atheistic philosophers, playfully called "gunslingers" (Flew, Paul Kurtz, Wallace Matson and Kai Nielson), dueling with four equally prominent theistic philosophers (Alvin Plantinga, Ralph Mclnerny, George Mavrodes and William Alston). The second conference at New York University in 2004 notably included Scottish philosopher John Haldane and Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder. Here Flew stunned the participants by announcing that he had come to believe in God.68
THERE IS A GOD
The second half of the book consists of the long-awaited reasons for Flew's conversion to Deism, titled "My Discovery of the Divine." It includes seven chapters on Flew's religious pilgrimage, along with the nature of the universe and life. Two appendices complete the volume.
Thus, if scientists want to get into the fray, they "will have to stand on their own two philosophical feet."70 Similarly, "a scientist who speaks as a philosopher will have to furnish a philosophical case. As Albert Einstein himself said, `The man of science is a poor philosopher."'71 Flew ends the chapter by pointing out that it is Aristotle who most exemplifies his search: "I was persuaded above all by the philosopher David Conway's argument for God's existence" drawn from "the God of Aristotle."72
The fifth chapter, "Who Wrote the Laws of Nature?" discusses the views of many major scientists, including Einstein and Hawking, along with philosophers like Swinburne and Plantinga, to argue that there is a connection between the laws of nature and the "Mind of God."73 Flew thinks that this is still a philosophical discussion. As Paul Davies asserted in his Templeton address, "science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview," because "even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us."74 The existence of these laws must be explained. Flew concludes that many contemporary thinkers "propound a vision of reality that emerges from the conceptual heart of modern science and imposes itself on the rational mind. It is a vision that I personally find compelling and irrefutable."75
Chapter six, "Did the Universe Know We Were Coming?" discusses fine-tuning arguments and the multiverse option as another angle on the laws of nature. Among the opponents of the multiverse option, Flew lists Davies, Swinburne and himself, in part because it simply extends the questions of life and nature's laws.76 Regardless, Flew concludes, "So multiverse or not, we still have to come to terms with the origins of the laws of nature. And the only viable explanation here is the divine
Chapter seven, "How Did Life Go Live?" continues what Flew in sists is a philosophical rather than a scientific discussion of items that are relevant to God's existence. He discusses at least three chief issues: how there can be fully materialistic explanations for the emergence of life, the problem of reproduction at the very beginning and DNA. Although science has not concluded its treatment of these matters either, they are answering questions that are different from the philosophical issues that Flew is addressing.78 Flew concludes by agreeing with George Wald that "the only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such `end-directed, self replicating' life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind."79
In the title of chapter eight, Flew asks, "Did Something Come from Nothing?" In spite of our twenty years of friendship, I was still not prepared to see Tony developing and defending a cosmological argument for God's existence. In an essay published back in 1994, he had raised questions about David Hume's philosophy and its inability to explain causation or the laws of Then, works by philosophers David Conway and Richard Swinburne convinced him that Hume could be answered on the cosmological argument as well. Buoyed by these refutations of Hume, Flew was now free to explore the relation between a cosmological argument for God's existence and recent discussions regarding the beginning of the universe. Flew concludes that "Richard Swinburne's cosmological argument provides a very promising explanation, probably the finally right one.""
In chapter nine, "Finding Space for God," Flew begins with his longtime objection to God, that a concept of "an incorporeal omnipresent Spirit" is incoherent-something analogous to talking about a "person without a body."82 But through the 1980s and 1990s, theistic philosophers in the analytic tradition enjoyed a renaissance. Two of these, Thomas Tracy and Brian Leftow (who succeeded Swinburne at Oxford), answered Flew's questions. Flew now concedes that the concept of an omnipresent Spirit outside space and time is not intrinsically incoherent.83
Further, `As I have said more than once, no other religion enjoys anything like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. If you're wanting omnipotence to set up a religion, it seems to me that this is the one to beat!"86 He ends the chapter a few sentences later: "Some claim to have made contact with this Mind. I have not-yet. But who knows what could happen next? Some day I might hear a Voice that says, `Can you hear me now?"'87
Two appendices close the book. The first is an evaluation of the "New Atheism" of writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. The author of the first appendix, Roy Varghese, argues that "five phenomena are evident in our immediate experience that can only be explained in terms of the existence of God."88 These five are rationality, life, consciousness, conceptual thought and the human self, each of which he discusses. Varghese concludes that by arguing from "everyday experience" we are able to "become immediately aware that the world of living, conscious, thinking beings has to originate in a living Source, a Mind."a9
The second appendix is an essay on the self-revelation of God, written by New Testament theologian N. T. Wright, with brief responses by Flew. Wright argues very succinctly that Jesus existed, was God incarnate and rose from the dead.90 Flew precedes this treatment by commenting that though he does not believe the miracle of the resurrection, it "is more impressive than any by the religious competition.""' Flew's final reflection on Wright's material is that it is an impressive argument-"absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful." In the end, Flew remains open to divine revelation, since omnipotence could act in such a manner.92
COMMENTS
As I have indicated, Flew's new book is a delightful read. This especially applies to the many autobiographical details. The intersection of his life with some of the best-known philosophers in the previous half-century was nothing short of exhilarating.
It will be no surprise to anyone who has followed my published debates or dialogues with Tony that the clarification found in this volume was more than welcome. For one thing, many of his comments here were also made in our published dialogue in Philosophia Christi. Most of all, this book should clear up the rumors as to the nature of Tony's "conversion." He indeed believes in God, and while from the beginning rejecting special revelation along with any religious affiliation, his view of God's nature is otherwise quite robust. Indeed, his Deism includes most of the classical theological attributes. Further, Flew is clear several times that he is open to special revelation. As he told me just recently, he "won't shut the door" to the possibility of such revelation or even to hearing a word from the Deity.93
Of course, I predict that various skeptics will still have profound problems with the book's content. They will not be satisfied with its proclamations. I can only imagine the nature of the complaints. If I am right about this, it may even confirm further Varghese's charge of the vociferous nature of this community's response to the original announcement. If Varghese is also correct that Flew had produced the most vigorous defense of philosophical atheism in the last century, a guess is that some skeptics are still stung by the loss of their most prominent philosophical supporter.
I would like to have seen further clarification on a few issues in the book. For instance, it would have been very helpful if Tony had explained the precise sense in which he thought that "Theology and Falsification" was an attempt to curtail the growth of positivism. That has remained unclear to me. I too was taught that the article was a defense of an analytic position that only softened the force of the positivistic challenge.
Another potential question surrounds Tony's excellent distinction between giving philosophical as opposed to scientific reasons for his belief in God. However, a discussion or chart that maps out the differences between the two methodological stances would have been very helpful. Philosophers are used to these distinctions. But I am sure that others will think that Tony is still providing two sorts of arguments for God: Aristotle plus scientific arguments like Intelligent Design scenarios.
As Tony has said several times in recent years, he remains open to the possibility of special revelation, miracles like Jesus' resurrection, and the afterlife. In this volume he also continues to be very compli mentary toward these options. I cannot pursue further this topic here. While he mentioned evil and suffering, I did wonder about Tony's juxtaposition of choosing either Aristotle's Deism or the freewill defense, which he thinks "depends on the prior acceptance of a framework of divine revelation."94 It seems to me that the free-will defense neither asks nor requires any such revelatory commitment. So I think that it could be pursued by a Deist too. If so, that is one more potential defeater to the evil and suffering issue. I will leave it here for now.
Flew and Habermas have now debated three times. This third debate was likely their last. With all three of their dialogues now in print, it's a good time to step back and provide a bit of analysis and perspective. The last couple of decades have seen a resurgence of interest in historical and evidential arguments for the truth of Christianity. Even Reformed epistemologist Alvin Plantinga, usually pessimistic in his assessments of such arguments, has acknowledged that scholars like F. F. Bruce, William Lane Craig, Stephen T. Davis, Gary Habermas and N. T. Wright have "produced serious and sometimes impressive historical arguments." Despite some of his former criticisms of evidentialism, he's made it clear it wasn't his intention to "denigrate their excellent work, or suggest that it isn't worthy of serious
So in this chapter I propose we quickly review the evidence on which Habermas bases his argument, review criticisms of it, then assess those objections. Then we can move to the inference Habermas makes and criticisms of it, and then look at various philosophical questions the debate has raised. Finally, we will return to Flew and discuss not only where he is now in his fascinating intellectual journey but where he may be headed next.
THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
Habermas is wont to say that if biblical inerrancy is true, his case for resurrection will go through. That is obvious. More interestingly, he contends that it will also go through if biblical inerrancy is false. Habermas doesn't construct his case on subjective feelings, private conviction, personal faith, religious dogma or even any particular claim about the authority of the Bible. He builds his argument on evidence-"minimal facts" as he puts it-accepted as fact by the vast majority of critical scholars, irrespective of where they come down on the theological spectrum, from archconservative to ultraliberal or anywhere in between. He doesn't cherry pick scholars on the basis of personal preferences, but gleans the best historical research and nearly unanimous scholarly judgments established by early, multiple and eyewitness accounts. Compelling and corroborating historically grounded reasons from a variety of angles confirm each piece of the foundation on which he builds. When a piece of evidence is very controversial, like Mark 16:9-20, which isn't in the two earliest manuscripts, he simply does not include it in his case.
The resurrection conclusion Habermas wants to defend is that Jesus, having been dead, became alive again. Expressed like this, note the way it's a rather standard-sounding, empirically testable claim. That it implies an ambitious claim philosophically or metaphysically doesn't detract from the fact that the claim is, in one sense, an historical one that is testable like any other. The uniqueness and philosophical implications of the claim will be taken up later, but Habermas would prefer to keep the historical debate, initially at least, confined to the claim that Jesus was alive (subsequent to death by crucifixion). There are advantages to doing this, as we will see, but it puts more of an evidential onus on the additional inferences required to arrive at the full range of Christian theological teaching. It also invites the criticism that it underplays the miraculous nature of the claim, but we will put off a discussion of this until later, including the powerful rejoinder that it better enables the historian as historian to assess it.
The number of "minimal facts" is arguably arbitrary, but Habermas often adduces these twelve, as listed earlier:
1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. He was buried.
3. The death of Jesus caused the disciples to despair and lose hope, believing that his life was ended.
4. Although not as widely accepted, many scholars hold that the tomb in which Jesus was buried was discovered to be empty just a few days later.
5. The disciples had experiences they believed were the literal appearances of the risen Jesus.
6. The disciples were transformed from doubters who were afraid to identify themselves with Jesus to bold proclaimers of his death and resurrection.
7. This message was the center of preaching in the early church.
8. This message was especially proclaimed in Jerusalem, where Jesus died and was buried shortly before.
9. As a result of this teaching, the church was born and grew.
10. Sunday became the primary day of worship.
11. James, who had been a skeptic, was converted to the faith when he also believed that he had seen the resurrected Jesus.
Habermas's procedure here echoes that of other scholars. William Lane Craig typically constructs his historical case for the resurrection on four facts: Jesus' burial, the discovery of his empty tomb, his postmortem appearances and the origin of the disciples' belief in his resurrection. Other scholars, from N. T. Wright to Robert Funk to E. P. Sanders to Luke Timothy Johnson to Geza Vermes, start with lists of their own. It's a common method because the historical evidence for such a set of groundwork facts is very strong. Habermas also offers a "core-facts" case that's more minimalist and doesn't require the use of the Gospels but is still arguably adequate for certain purposes. It contains just four to seven facts, none of which is disputed by many scholars: Jesus' death by crucifixion, the subsequent experiences that the disciples were convinced were literal appearances of the risen Jesus, the corresponding transformation of these men and Paul's conversion experience after what he believed to be an appearance of the risen Jesus.
We won't reiterate in detail all the various evidences for each fact Habermas cites, but evidence is a vital part of his case. My philosopher friends often tend to be the most skeptical of the resurrection argument, sometimes even before hearing the evidence on which it's based. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that this argument is rooted in history. It has an obstinate concreteness to it that abstract arguments from natural theology don't have. Philosophers tend to prefer abstract evidence, for some reason, and I mention this because I'm one of them. But Christianity is historically rooted, and its truth is wholly dependent on the fact that a literal bodily resurrection really happened. So if we're going to consider the evidence for Christianity, there's simply no way around this, and thinkers whose affinity for the abstract disinclines them from such historical arguments from the start need to recognize this personal preference for what it is. There are indeed hugely important philosophical questions that the argument raises, but a vital aspect of the case is historical, and judgments about it should be evidential in nature, not preformed philosophical judgments or dogmatic pronouncements that serve as an excuse from considering the evidence closely.
None of the facts Habermas adduces would deductively prove theism or Christianity to be true. Nor does accepting them require one to be sympathetic to Christianity or theism. The minimal facts are garden-variety historical claims. Unless any skepticism about them is grounded in evidence, it lacks credibility and doesn't advance the discussion. Substantial evidence supports each of the minimal facts. Merely scoffing at the evidence, writing it off as unknowable, casting doubt because, after all, that was a long time ago, pointing to lack of complete consensus among scholars, referring vaguely to a fuzzy epistemic situation surrounding such alleged facts or merely asserting that the evidence is deficient-none of these approaches carries the weight of rational conviction. And none serves as a substitute for honest examination of the actual evidence.
Skeptics remain, though, and raise various concerns, some of which we've seen in this debate between Flew and Habermas. So let's take a look at three kinds of concerns often raised, and offer a quick assessment of each. The three concerns are biblical and historical questions, certain undercutting defeaters and an analogical rebuttal. We'll consider each in turn.
Biblical and historical objections. There are three types of these: textual, temporal and contextual. Textual concerns pertain to the differing accounts of the resurrection events we find in various sources. Flew makes much of the differences between Paul's account and those of the Gospels. Bart Ehrman makes much of the disparities between the Gospels themselves.4 Gerd Ludemann casts doubt on the Gospel accounts because of their inconsistencies with the Gnostic Gospels.
Temporal concerns include uncertainty regarding something as basic as the birth of Jesus, the gap of time that elapses between the events in question and a written account of them and later accre tions sometimes thought to have been added to augment the original documents.
Contextual concerns include the observation that resurrection stories were common among the mystery religions in that day and cultural milieu. Consequently, some claim it's not surprising that one more resurrection story would take hold and generate a following. The stronger the case for the resurrection, moreover, the harder it is to make sense of the relatively few initial followers of Christianity. Why weren't there more converts and more skeptics convinced? And isn't it likely that, in the transition from the Aramaic-speaking, Jerusalemcentered, Semitic context of the earliest Christians to the Greek speaking, broader Hellenistic context of the New Testament several decades later, various legends would have grown and stories stretched in an effort to proliferate the faith and attract new converts?
Response to biblical and historical objections. Let's say a word about each of these, in reverse order. As to the suggestion that Christian resurrection stories merely echo the dying-rising god legends predating Christianity, from the Egyptian Osiris myth to the Norse Balder myth, a few points are in order. First, there are several reasons to think the Christian resurrection story didn't derive from earlier resurrection myths, not least because scholars now realize that there was very little influence from the mystery religions in first-century Palestine. There are also a number of obvious dissimilarities, such as this one: the gods in the mystery religions weren't historical persons, unlike Jesus. Most importantly, the Christian narrative is attributable to eyewitness accounts, clearly not the result of a borrowed legendary tradition. That there were these traditional myths predating Christianity scattered throughout the world vexed C. S. Lewis prior to his conversion, until he realized, with the help of J. R. R. Tolkien, that Christianity could be the "true myth." Here's how he put it in "Myth Became Fact":
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.
As to the number of converts and the question of why there weren't more of them if the resurrection really happened, the fact is that we're not told how many converts there were-though in Acts 2-3 a couple of large numbers are cited. But since we don't know the precise figures, this is an argument from silence, an argument predicated on what we don't know. Habermas contends that we should base our arguments here on what evidence we do have, not on evidence we don't have.
In terms of the cultural transition from the resurrection events to the New Testament, here are a few points: One of the most important ways of establishing many of the minimal facts is 1 Corinthians 15:3 and following, in which Paul, very early on (A.D. 55 to 57), refers to the material he had received from others and passed on to others. The consensus among scholars is that Paul received this material from Peter and James on his first trip to Jerusalem. It predates Paul and is in the form of an early creed, evidence for which are the technical rabbinic words for passing on tradition, the stylized content, the proper names of Cephas (Peter's name in Aramaic, a reason to think the creed had an Aramaic origin) and James, and the nonPauline locutions.
Paul had gone to Jerusalem to confirm that the message he himself had been proclaiming was the same message proclaimed there. Paul, whom Flew describes as having a first-rate philosophical mind, received this material, which confirms Jesus' appearances to various eyewitnesses, directly from some of those eyewitnesses. At the very least, he was able to confirm the appearances with eyewitnesses, which is exactly what we're told he did. Now here is the most interesting part of all, and this is unprecedented in the ancient world, where sources a couple hundred years after an event are often the best we have: Paul received this creed about three to eight years after the death of Jesus. The creed had been formulated before that, and the facts on which it was based yet earlier, which puts this report about the death and resurrection appearances of Jesus in the immediate aftermath of the events in question. For the historian, this sort of evidence is nothing less than golden.
What we too easily can underestimate today is the power of the oral tradition in that culture to keep the core message clear and on track. There are indeed some differences between that culture and ours, but this difference-the ability of that culture's oral traditions to keep the core message of the resurrection account straight until the written record was created-serves to strengthen the case that the message wasn't compromised or corrupted, especially since it was a message promulgated from the earliest days of the church, starting in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection. The early, multiple and eyewitness accounts form a constellation of corroborating evidence that helps answer the temporal concerns mentioned before.
Another difference between first-century Palestinian culture and ours helps answer one of the textual concerns expressed earlier. Recall that Ehrman noted how reading the Gospels horizontally raises a slew of problems about the accuracy of the biblical record. At least part of the answer to him is that, as New Testament scholar David Bauer puts it,
Readers today naturally wish to ask if this freedom that the ancient writers felt in conforming historical details to their intended narratives might have applied to events themselves, like the resurrection. But this overlooks the fact that none of the superficial, apparent discrepancies across the Gospels does anything to detract from the clear consensus on the central fact of the resurrection itself. The details are clearly peripheral to the central story. Failure to see that isn't tough-minded skepticism, but bad historiography.
Turning to the alleged differences between Paul's vision of Jesus and that of the disciples, I won't reiterate the compelling case Haber mas makes in this debate debunking those. When we consider the Gnostic Gospels, however, it's worth noting that some, like Gerd Ludemann, think it instructive that there are various and relevant dissimilarities between the biblical accounts of the death and resurrection and those of the Gnostic Gospel accounts, differences that cast doubt on the biblical record. Robert Gundry's reply to Ludemann on this point is worth repeating and is more than an adequate reply:
Undercutting defeaters objection. These are among the questions that David Hume famously raised in his writings about miracles. They don't directly demonstrate that the resurrection didn't happen, but rather that we have reasons for doubting some of the most important pieces of evidence that it did.
For example, take the people on whose testimony we're relying. We can, but need not, impugn their character by suggesting that at least some among them were lying; Flew is always careful to avoid doing this. Nonetheless, intellectual honesty demands certain recog nitions, such as that these people lived in a very different time and place, where plausibility structures quite different from our own reigned. They may or may not have been "barbarous," to use Hume's term, but they were for the most part illiterate and uneducated, credulous and gullible, and filled with an intense need to hope for a better day of deliverance and salvation. Many of them were prone to ecstatic utterances, demon possessions were everyday realities, and claims to have witnessed divine visitations or miraculous occurrences undoubtedly carried with them a certain subcultural cachet. These people may well have been sincere, but may have been sincerely mistaken. What we know about religious psychology and superstition casts legitimate doubt over these stories. The possibility of honest error shows that the Lord, Liar, Lunatic hypotheses can too easily fail to exhaust alternatives.
Response to undercutting defeaters. Those on whose witness we're relying could have been sincere, but still wrong, even if not culpably so. Weren't the preponderance of those who claimed to see Jesus uneducated, ignorant, primitive, credulous people subject to radical confusion?
Put this starkly, one obvious reply is that this seems to overstate the case quite a bit, smacking of what C. S. Lewis once called chronological snobbery. Surely they weren't credulous about everything; they knew what death meant and that, say, people who were dead didn't get back up and start walking around. And they knew that someone slumped in the low position on the cross for a long time and no longer breathing meant death. Paul was clearly not an uneducated individual. He was highly trained, and Flew has repeatedly stressed that his was a top-notch philosophical mind. Numerous reports suggest that the disciples tended to be altogether skeptical when first hearing the news of Jesus' resurrection. In Paul's case, along with James's, we have complete skeptics, to whom something then happened to convince them that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead.
Analogical rebuttal objection. Miraculous accounts are ubiquitous across various religions around the world and throughout history. The vast majority of these alleged miracles are handily dismissed with the greatest of ease. Isn't it likely that the New Testament accounts of miracles are just as worthy of rejection? Are we to believe that, after the resurrection of Jesus, darkness covered the earth and earthquakes shook the world? Similar suspicions pervade most of our minds-and rightly so, many claim-when we hear other allegedly miraculous accounts like Muhammad's ascending to heaven on a horse, supposedly witnessed by five hundred, Joseph Smith's angelic visitation or visitations by Mary.
Response to analogical objection. Even though Habermas's initial resurrection conclusion is meant to be expressed in as nonmiraculous terms as possible, let's go ahead and discuss the analogical objection that keys in on this aspect of his eventual case. Since we typically consider ourselves entirely justified to be quite skeptical about miracle claims, why not so in this case too? If we're to believe that Jesus appeared to five hundred, why not believe, as legend has it, that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a white horse and was witnessed by hundreds as well? If we're to believe that Jesus appeared to the disciples, why not believe that Mary appeared to people at Fatima or Medjugorje? If we're instead going to remain skeptical about the latter cases, why not the former as well?
This is a fair question, but it seems to admit of a clear answer. Not every miracle claim is equal in evidential support. A prior decision to remain skeptical about all miracle claims, no matter what and come what may, because we're justifiably skeptical about some or most miracle reports, results in a refusal to consider the evidence. But as Habermas said in his first debate with Flew, scoffing at evidence is not the same as refuting it.
The story about Muhammad's ascension was a legend that grew up around him centuries afterward; there's simply no comparison in evidential support between that account and what evidence suggests followers of Jesus believed in the immediate aftermath of the resur rection. The vast majority of pilgrims to Fatima or Medjugorje see nothing, and those who do are likely to be witnessing an optical illusion of sorts (not a group hallucination) in light of the absence of objective corroboration.
The multiple, eyewitness and early reports of the resurrection of Jesus put this alleged miracle into an entirely different category. What seems irrefutable is that a great many people were completely convinced they had seen the risen Jesus. This doesn't prove a thing yet, granted, but the fact that their sincerity is well nigh beyond reproach-sincerity that led many of them to die for this beliefradically distinguishes their credibility from, say, that of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, as William Lane Craig explains:
Biblical reports of earthquakes and darkness after the death of Jesus do admittedly seem farfetched, which reminds us that, in general, an attitude of skepticism is a good thing. But three points are in order. First, we should direct our skepticism not just toward miracle reports, but also toward an attitude that's categorically dismissive of miracles even when the evidence for them is strong. Second, there is, interestingly, some extrabiblical evidence to suggest that some such strange events were real. Thallus mentioned them in A.D. 52, for example. But third, and most importantly, nothing for present purposes-none of Habermas's minimal facts-rides on those earthquakes or that darkness being actual or on any particular analysis of that smattering of verses.
Conclusion. The early, independent and eyewitness testimony; the power of the oral tradition in that culture to preserve the core message of the resurrection event; the unprecedented number of corroborating documents that have enabled us to weed out the accretions and know with practical certainty what the original biblical record said about core doctrine and history-all of these pieces of evidence cast serious doubt on the skeptical challenges posed against the evidence on which Habermas constructs his case for the resurrection. Rather than weakening our confidence in the minimal facts, the questions should serve to bolster it. More could be said by way of defending these facts, but for now let's leave this question behind, tentatively proceeding on the assumption that we can assume these facts have been adequately established.
Nothing yet follows by way of theistic or miraculous conclusions. All we've done so far is look at the evidence and the historical case for it. As far as establishing these facts of history, Habermas's case is strong, built on solid principles of historical research. For example, take his first three core facts: Jesus' death by crucifixion, the subsequent experiences that the disciples were convinced of literal appearances of the risen Jesus and the corresponding transformation of these men. Considered respectively, it's no wonder that even Jesus Seminar cofounder John Dominic Crossan called the first fact the best established fact in ancient history; or that the similarly liberal biblical scholar Gerd Ludemann says, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ"9; or that Luke Timothy Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, muses, "Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was.""
We ought to feel the force of this evidence. Take, for example, the willingness of the witnesses to the resurrection to die for their convictions. We are all familiar with plenty of zealous supporters of various causes, religious or political, willing to die for their beliefs. But this doesn't begin to approach what we have with the early followers of Jesus. They were willing to die over an empirical claim, having insisted that they had seen Jesus alive after he had died by brutal execution. They pointed to many infallible proofs and were willing to endure martyrdom over their eyewitness testimony. No cavalier mention of other proponents of worldviews or politics passionately but abstractly believed begins to compare with the power of this testimony. Affirming that the disciples were sincere in their belief requires no epistemic charity; the evidence for it is so overwhelming that to deny it is rationally indefensible.
Legitimate skeptical challenges are important to consider. We can hardly know without investigation whether the evidence is there or not. The challenges, however, fail to cast serious doubt on it. The operative question is whether this evidence is adequate to allow us rightly to infer the historicity of the resurrection. It's to this vitally important question we now turn.
THE RESURRECTION INFERENCE
Again, then, the inference that Habermas wishes to make is that the resurrection happened: Jesus had been dead, and later he was alive. If Jesus was dead by Friday afternoon and the next week was seen walking around then the resurrection happened. Whether he was raised by God or not, or raised with a body that was indestructible or not, are different matters. For now Habermas sets them aside, as he also holds in abeyance further theological implications of the resurrection bearing on the overall truth of Christianity. The first question to answer is whether we can historically establish good reason to believe that Jesus came back to life.
Habermas often characterizes the nature of his inference as inductive, but he's also liable to explicate it in abductive terms, so that's what I'll do here. Abduction, or an "inference to the best explanation," is a common inference pattern found in fields of inquiry ranging from philosophy to science to history. Abductive inferences have a particular structure to them, which goes as follows: We come across some state of affairs or data in need of explanation. In this case the data will be Habermas's dozen minimal facts, all of which must be explained, not just some. We then compile a list of explanation candidates from which we will eventually choose. The five criteria by which we select the best explanation from among this pool are these: (a) explanatory power, (b) explanatory scope, (c) plausibility, (d) degree of "ad hoc-ness" and (e) conformity with other beliefs. The more explanatory power and scope and the more plausibility and conformity with other beliefs an explanation has, the better it is. The less ad hoc (adjusted, contrived, artificial) the explanation, the better as well. The trick is to subject all explanation options to these tests in order to pick the one that's the best-and therefore most likely true-explanation.
In the history of literature on the resurrection-from Albert Schweitzer to N. T. Wright to James Dunn to David Strauss to Wolfhart Pannenberg to Hans von Campenhausen to Rudolf Bultmann-a half-dozen explanation candidates have come to the fore in various formulations and combinations. They are (1) swoon theory, (2) fraud or stolen body theory, (3) hallucinations, (4) objective visions, (5) legend or myth theory, and (6) resurrection. So what we now need to do is apply the criteria for abduction to these explanation candidates to see which among them best explains the minimal facts.
With the possible exception of objective visions, and obviously the resurrection, all of these explanations are naturalistic. It's reasonable to give serious consideration first to naturalistic theories, if for no other reason than because miracles are by definition relatively rare. They are the exception, not the rule. Miracles, even if they're possible, shouldn't be our first guess. On this I agree with many of my secular friends; there's nothing wrong, and a lot right, with healthy skepticism. The abductive case to be made is only as strong as its weakest part. So let's look at the first five explanations and see how they fare, and we will keep this brief since this is largely a reiteration of key themes from the debate.
The swoon theory says Jesus didn't really die, but merely swooned, fainted, then came to, perhaps in the tomb, and walked away. When Flew in this last debate asked about evidence for an inhabited tomb, he was intimating that Jesus may not have died after all, despite evidence he was crucified. This is why Habermas spent time dwelling on the medical evidence of death. David Strauss is generally considered to have dispatched swoon theory long ago by the historical case against it." The conviction of the disciples that they witnessed a gloriously resurrected Jesus, rather than a bleeding, horribly wounded man, makes it little wonder that the swoon theory was nearly universally abandoned long ago by all critical scholars in this area. The theory is weak both in terms of explanatory scope and power and in its implausibility in the light of what we know about crucifixions.
The fraud or stolen body theory says that the disciples lied and took the body themselves or it was stolen by others. Had the disciples done it, though, we would be hard pressed to explain their devotion to the cause and willingness to die, often quite horribly, for what they knew was a lie. The theory would thus be conspicuously lacking in explanatory power. Had others done it, what accounts for the appearances, and why wouldn't they produce the body to refute the resurrection? This theory lacks explanatory scope.
Hallucinations of various sorts have been proposed to explain resurrection appearances, from grief-related hallucinations to guiltinduced hallucinations to conversion disorders. In all three debates between Flew and Habermas, Flew has expressed some openness to this idea as the likely explanation of resurrection appearances. Hallucinations lack explanatory scope, however, because they offer no explanation of the empty tomb. Nor do they explain why the disciples specifically believed in resurrection rather than in a vision of some sort. Hallucinations also lack explanatory power and plausibility because the appearances happened to believers and unbelievers (Paul and James), individuals and groups. Hallucinations don't happen in groups, moreover, despite claims to the contrary because of alleged visitations by Mary at, say, Fatima: the vast majority of people there don't claim to see anything. This was not the case with the resurrection appearances of Jesus. And Paul's case certainly didn't fit the profile of anything like a conversion disorder.
An objective vision is different from a hallucination. For in the former there's something objectively there, unlike hallucinations. According to this theory, what the disciples claimed to have seen after Jesus' crucifixion was not his resurrected body but something else, such as an astral projection. Yet most naturalists would consider an astral projection to be no less inherently miraculous than a resurrection, and that the disciples were convinced it was more than an objective vision also weakens the objective vision theory. Therefore this theory lacks explanatory power because it is unable to account for the disciples' conviction regarding bodily resurrection and because it does not account for the empty tomb. And, frankly, because the theory requires an event no less miraculous than the resurrection, why bother with it?
The legend theory assumes that the "myth" of the resurrection grew over time. This theory lacks explanatory scope because of the empty tomb and lacks plausibility and explanatory power because the claims didn't get bigger as time went on. The resurrection creed in 1 Corin thians 15 was formalized a mere two years, at most, after the event, as we've seen. The evidence that the very earliest Christians claimed the resurrection actually happened is extremely strong.
With such challenges facing typical naturalistic attempts to explain the full set of minimal facts, the next approach is an understandable one: Let's try combining aspects of the theories to enhance their explanatory scope, power and the like. In general, though, such attempts become even more implausible, multiplying the improbabilities involved. Let's take Ehrman's attempt, for example. He says he could provide dozens of alternative scenarios for the various facts in need of explanation, all of them improbable but still more probable than the resurrection. Here's one:
Now, Ehrman admits this is a highly unlikely scenario, but he thinks it has the virtue of explaining the relevant facts without recourse to divine intervention. And he's right, of course, that such a scenario, even if improbable, is possible. In fact, it's a worthwhile exercise to try this yourself, to attempt to generate a purely natural istic explanation for all the relevant facts. Invariably the explanation will become highly ad hoc and extremely unlikely, altogether ill equipped to handle all the relevant facts. In Ehrman's scenario, for example, family members who didn't believe in Jesus' divinity during his lifetime would have to find the motive to do this; there would have to have been sufficient time for such a conspiracy to hatch between Friday and Sunday; reports of grave clothes in the tomb would have to be wrong; the Roman guards would have kept mum despite all the subsequent efforts to find out what happened to the body of Jesus; and there's no explanation provided at all of the appearances of Jesus.
Let's suppose this scenario: Joseph of Arimathea took the body of Jesus and first hired helpers to lift it onto a cart to remove to another location. A man is cleaning up the tomb when the women arrive and informs them that Jesus was "lifted up" and taken elsewhere. According to Mark, the women did not know what happened. Startled, afraid, trembling, they say nothing to anyone. But shortly afterward, rumors of the empty tomb are transformed into Jesus being "lifted up," raised from the dead by God. Given the power of belief, the rumors spread and claims of sightings of Jesus multiply. Perhaps a few isolated hallucinations add fuel to the rumors; other appearances involve a confusion of identity; others are exaggerations.
Is this a better explanation than the resurrection? No one scenario really is a good explanation, many would suggest. This scenario is certainly possible, but consider again the confluence of events that would have needed to transpire: there would have had to be major confusion and practically collective amnesia as to where Jesus was buried; Joseph would have had to leave town; Paul would have had to experience an auditory and visual hallucination along with suffering, as Habermas points out, something of a messiah complex; James would have needed to misidentify his own brother; and not a hint of this story would have leaked to confirm suspicions that the resurrection didn't happen. The improbabilities involved multiply to render the scenario extremely implausible. And this seems to be the fate of all the various naturalistic accounts. The one really compelling feature they have is that they don't require the positing of a resurrection, and we'll return to this point in the next section.
For now, though, consider the resurrection as a potential explanation. The facts on which virtually all critical scholars are agreed are neatly explained, every one of them. Jesus really died and was buried, causing the disciples to despair and lose hope. Then something sufficiently monumental happened, as it must have, to transform them into bold proclaimers of his resurrection. This message became their central affirmation, proclaimed in the very city in which Jesus had been shortly before killed. Their enemies can't disprove the resurrection, and many people claim to have seen the risen Jesus-even Jesus' own brother, changing him from skeptic to church leader. The church grows, Sunday becomes the new day of worship, and a few years later, Paul too claims to see the post-ascension risen Jesus, eventually going to Jerusalem and meeting with earlier eyewitnesses and confirming that the message he and they were preaching was the same.
It isn't just that the resurrection happens to be the only theory left. Its explanatory scope and power are impeccable because it explains the empty tomb, Jesus' widespread appearances, the conversions of James and Paul, and the disciples' sincere belief in a glorious resurrection rather than a vision of or a resuscitated Jesus. It's plausible because it is consistent with death by crucifixion and early, eyewitness and multiple reports. It doesn't fall prey to ad hoc combinations of unlikelihoods to achieve explanatory scope, power and plausibility. And it's consistent with other evidence of God's existence, which we will discuss closer to the end of this discussion.
On this basis, the claim is that the resurrection is the best explanation for the minimal facts. Both the failure of the naturalistic explanations and the positive reasons to believe in the resurrection render belief in the historicity of the resurrection altogether rational, any elements of ad hoc-ness notwithstanding.
But not so fast. Because critics at this point have a number of points they would like to make. So let's see what they are, for they will enable us to zero in on several important philosophical aspects of this discussion too easily neglected.
SOME SKEPTICAL CHALLENGES
We will treat about seven potential replies by a skeptic at this point. They are not without merit by any stretch of the imagination. It's here, I suggest, rather than at the level of the historical evidence, that atheists have a firmer footing to resist the resurrection argument.
To understand these objections, it's useful to bear in mind the structure of the argument under consideration. It begins with Habermas's minimal facts, historically established. From these we infer, using the criteria of abduction, the best explanation to be the resurrection, which is thought to be better at accounting for the minimal facts than each of the naturalistic explanations on offer. We then infer that the resurrection is the true explanation on the basis of its being the best explanation. So we conclude that the resurrection happened, then we reasonably infer, with a bit of additional argumentation, that Christianity is true.
Note that there are (at least) three inferences involved here: from the minimal facts to the resurrection as the best explanation; from the resurrection being the best explanation to its being the (likely) true explanation; and from the fact of the resurrection to the truth of Christianity. The following objections are liable to deal with any of them, even though we haven't elaborated on the third, in part due to space constraints and in part because it's likely the least controversial.
The seven objections are the a priori dismissal objection, an overriding objection, a probability objection, a margin of victory objection, the Elvis objection, the promissory note objection, and the underdetermination objection. Let's look at each one, starting with the first.
It should be obvious that Habermas would reply that his initial resurrection conclusion doesn't assume it's a miracle, but Ehrman's reply could be recast as saying no conclusion this odd-a man coming back to life-should be allowed among the pool of candidates. The same could be said for each reference to miracles in subsequent objections as well.
Readers acquainted with philosophy should recognize that Ehrman's historical a priori move here is highly reminiscent of David Hume's argument against rational belief in miracles. Since miracles, Hume argued, are by their nature so exceedingly unlikely, naturalistic explanations will always trump them, rendering belief in miracles, especially on the basis of the testimony of others, always irrational. You may recall that Habermas accuses Flew of endorsing such an a priori rejection of the miraculous in the debate, and this issue has occurred in each of their debates. But in fact Flew at least denies that his is a categorical rejection of the miraculous. In principle, some kind of evidence would be enough. This means that Flew doesn't exactly fall into this first category, but rather the next, which we're calling an overriding objection, and to which we now turn.
This objection doesn't categorically preclude either the metaphysical possibility of miracles or the rational belief in their occurrence, but nonetheless poses a strong enough resistance to rational belief in their occurrence that it can resemble an a priori rejection of their possibility. Barring a miracle beyond all rational doubt, skepticism trumps. It isn't that resurrection doesn't belong in the pool of potential explanation candidates. But because miracles are what they are-events impossible without divine intervention-the evidence for them must be simply overwhelming. Appeals to the miraculous are prima facie implausible in the extreme, so all that is needed to avoid such appeals is a naturalistic explanation that's possible. The naturalistic explanation needn't be plausible, but merely possible.
Recall how Flew and Habermas tend to come to a fork in the road on this issue. Flew suggests possible naturalistic accounts, even if exceedingly unlikely, and thinks that's sufficient. Habermas insists that Flew needs more than remote possibilities, but rather something plausible. This is a crucial divide on this issue, and I think it makes perfect sense if Flew's basic objection is this quasi-Humean, a priori dismissal of the miraculous that is practically categorical if not altogether so. Naturalistic explanations, however remote, are thought to be enough for Flew because miracles are, almost by definition, remoter still.
A third type of response by the skeptic is the probability objection. This objection is similar to Alvin Plantinga's critique of Swinburne's argument for theism. In Plantinga's view, Swinburne's arguments for theism and Christianity fall prey to the problem of "diminishing probabilities." Similarly, Swinburne's case for the resurrection involves a series of interlocking reasons. Even if we generously assign a greater than 50-percent probability to each reason, the probability of the ultimate conclusion, the historical reality of the resurrection, is less than 0.5 due to the multiplication of or diminishing probabilities. Recall how in the discussion the moderator once asked if the debate almost boiled down to a comparison of unlikelihoods and improbabilities. Habermas agreed it involved an issue of probabilities versus improbabilities.
But if so, unless the case can be made that the resurrection is more likely than not-that is, that its probability is greater than 0.5-then there may be reason to doubt it even if it's the best explanation on offer. So this is a new objection. Here the idea seems to be this: even supposing that we include resurrection in the pool of explanation candidates and even if we concede that resurrection might be the best explanation on offer, we still may have reason to retain skepticism. Unless the resurrection can be shown to be more likely than not, which requires more than showing that it's the best explanation, an atheist can perhaps remain within his or her epistemic rights in suspending judgment on the matter rather than affirming its historicity. In short, we are not justified in inferring that the resurrection is probably true merely because we have shown it is the best explanation of the facts.
Perhaps this example will help. Suppose there's a vat of 500 PingPong balls, 249 of which have the number I written on them. The rest are roughly evenly divided; some have 2 written on them, some 3, some 4 and some 5. If I were to reach into the vat and select one Ping-Pong ball randomly and had to place a bet on which number was written on it, it would be very rational to bet on 1. That number is about four times more likely than any other. But it's a different question if I'm asked how confident I can be that I'll select a ball with I on it, because in fact it's more likely than not that I won't. Of the balls, 251 have a different number from that. Yes, 1 beats 2, and I beats 3, and so on, just as resurrection might beat swoon theory, and resurrection might beat legend. But this doesn't mean that resurrection is more likely true than false any more than selecting a ball with a I is more likely than selecting a ball with a different number. And unless more work is done than an abductive case that resurrection wins-unless it can be shown that resurrection is not just the best explanation but more likely true than false-a skeptic can claim, with some legitimacy, to have reason to remain a skeptic. The inference from best explanation to true explanation is open to question.
The last several objections countenance the possibility that resurrection might constitute the best explanation because of radical limitations besetting the particular naturalistic explanations so far proposed or some combination of them. But the Elvis objection takes a different approach. It denies that resurrection is the best explanation-without bothering to provide a naturalistic alternative. Consider this analogy: Plenty of folks claim to have seen Elvis Presley after his reported death. Suppose we get permission to dig up his grave and discover, as some claim would be the case, the casket is empty. We would therefore have a missing body and alleged appearances, but who among us but a credulous few would consider this to be ample reason to entertain serious doubts about his death? A resurrected or never-dead Elvis would strike us as an epistemically crummy explanation for this information, despite our inability to provide a suitable naturalistic explanation beyond guesswork. The Elvis scenario thus denies that rejecting resurrection as the best explanation requires a better naturalistic explanation to serve in its stead.
Related to this objection is the promissory note objection, which puts confidence in a naturalistic worldview and the success of science at finding nontheistic explanations of mysterious phenomena, warranting trust that eventually a naturalistic answer will emerge. Although no naturalistic explanation suffices for now to account for Habermas's minimal facts, eventually science will provide the explanation sought for. Habermas might suggest that in the meantime we should deal with what facts we have and not refrain from following the evidence where it leads, but skeptics remind him that nonnaturalistic explanations have often been provided for phenomena that later get accounted for in perfectly naturalistic terms. Isn't that excellent inductive reason to assume that something similar will happen here? Habermas's confidence in theistic explanations can be matched by atheists whose principled confidence in naturalistic explanations is just as high.
One last objection to be mentioned here, without any pretense of an exhaustive list, is the underdetermination objection. Flew flirts with this objection from time to time, and it basically goes like this: When it comes to what happened in first-century Palestine, we just don't know enough to figure it out. Theists aren't stupid for thinking that a resurrection happened there, and they're not without their reasons for thinking this, but skeptics are entirely right to raise questions about whether the information we have-even granting all of Habermas's minimal facts-is enough to figure it out. The evidence, though interesting, leaves room for legitimate doubt. We may never know what happened there two thousand years ago. Key records that could have helped may have been irretrievably lost during the Siege of Jerusalem. We can't know a priori that there's always adequate historical basis on which to infer just what happened; in fact, we know this isn't the case. Even if we know a fair bit about the events surrounding the alleged resurrection and appearances, there's no guarantee it is adequate basis to infer what transpired.
So where are we? On the basis of the historical facts of which we can be reasonably sure, we advanced Habermas's abductive case for the resurrection, which we then subjected to various skeptical critiques. The argument and these criticisms have broached several important philosophical questions that need to be addressed more carefully if we're going to assess the quality of the resurrection argument, and so that's what I propose we now do.
TEN PHILOSOPHICAL CONCERNS
We are now going to zero in on ten philosophical questions that lurk in the background of this discussion, each making its presence felt at various turns. These are important and controversial aspects of the debate, but too often they go without explicit recognition. So this section should help give them the attention they deserve. The issues to be discussed are methodological naturalism, scientism, the adequacy of naturalism, Hume (on miracles), criteria for miracles and a "god of the gaps" charge, dwindling probabilities, falsifiability, the Elvis analogy, probability versus possibility, and persuadability.
Methodological naturalism. The basic idea behind methodological naturalism is that naturalistic explanations always deserve to be privileged over supernaturalistic ones. This is the sort of philosophical commitment often residing at the base of Flew's resistance to claims smacking of the miraculous. Ehrman's historical variant of it is close to the same idea. What's most important to stress about this methodology is that it is indeed more of a philosophical commitment than a contribution either of science or of history. It's a method by which to uncover naturalistic explanations, and so far as methods go, it's a good place to begin. Where the resurrection is concerned, naturalistic explanations should be explored, and if there's an adequate naturalistic explanation, then it deserves primacy. We all should have a healthy skepticism about alleged miraculous claims. The issue at some point becomes, however, whether supernaturalistic explanations are even in principle allowable. If the answer is no, then the method has potentially been accorded a kind of metaphysical priority that it doesn't rightly deserve, unless of course there's indeed good reason to assume that naturalism is the true worldview.
Scientism. Contrary to the claims of some, science has yet to show that the physical world is all there is. In their 2000 debate on the Inspiration Network, Flew was asked to provide a brief summary of his case for philosophical naturalism. His response was telling: "Well, I don't think it is something that really needs to have a case for it. This is the history of science and the achievement of science. I don't need to produce some argument to show that a great deal has been discovered about the world."" Flew is a brilliant philosopher, but clearly at this juncture he wasn't at his best. The inference from "science has taught us about the physical world" to "the physical world is all there is" constitutes a logical leap of indefensible proportions. Yet at this point, unlike more recently, Flew seemed held in the sway of this charming notion of science as having helped establish naturalism.
The idea, though mistaken, is understandable. Science has indeed taught us much about the physical world, and unexplained phenomena attributed to divine agency have often later been explained in naturalistic terms (which, for the record, doesn't preclude divine agency). But we need to be careful not to cross a line here. Science sets out to confine its examination to the physical world, and so it directs its attention to the empirical world. It's tempting, but nonetheless confused, on this basis to infer that the physical world is all that exists, since that's all that science sees. Crossing that line is a philosophical step, not a scientific one, and it effects the transition from science to scientism. Bertrand Russell's famous lines about all the noonday brightness of human genius doomed to extinction being a nearly certain deliverance of science is a paradigmatic example of such scientism. As is Rudolf Bultmann's famous refrain:
Undoubtedly, modern thinkers, often nonphilosophers like the liberal theologian Bultmann here or the New Testament scholar Ehrman, are overly beholden to indecisive arguments against metaphysics or the miraculous advanced by the likes of Kant and Hume when they try to use science or history as justification for philosophical naturalism.
Adequacy of naturalism. The presumed adequacy of naturalism is a huge driving force in the minds of those rigidly skeptical of all miracle claims. It's not necessarily an irrational position to hold; there are very intelligent atheists out there whose secular presuppositions radically differ from my own, but who strike me as fair-minded and intellectually honest. If they hold what they sincerely consider to be very principled reasons for supreme confidence in naturalism to provide all the explanations we need, it's, well, natural for them to put up great resistance against miraculous claims, or even claims likely to point in that direction.
To my thinking, naturalism encounters some severe difficulties. It's challenged in explaining seemingly answered prayers and documented cases of evidentially significant near-death experiences. It fares poorly in accounting for qualia, consciousness, the emergence of life and the start of the universe. It lacks resources in accounting for human reason itself-if we're complicated organic machines whose every choice is caused by antecedent conditions and the physical laws of the world. I think naturalism is especially vulnerable when it comes to accounting for such realities as moral regret, moral obligations, moral rights and moral freedom, all of which make considerably more sense from a theistic viewpoint. Naturalism doesn't deserve the sort of unbridled allegiance and undying devotion that some would give it, and it certainly doesn't qualify to be what sets the terms for surrender in this debate.
Suffice it to say that one's prior confidence level in naturalism will greatly shape one's view of the strength of the inference involved in the resurrection argument. Despite my disagreement with atheists, I've acknowledged that their worldview can be a rational one, so I'm willing to concede that the resurrection argument, in and of itself, need not be rationally constraining on them, given their prior convictions that invariably help shape their overall perspective on and appraisal of this argument taken in isolation. However, there can also be an uncritical commitment to naturalism, exhibiting a lack of epistemic humility as well as a dogmatic atheism closed to considering new evidence. Confidence in naturalism should be tempered with the honest recognition that every worldview has its problems, intractable or not, and though naturalism challenges resurrection, so too resurrection challenges naturalism. That rational rejection of the resurrection may be possible doesn't mean that every rejection of it is rational. Nor does it remotely imply that, for certain theists and atheists alike, the case for the resurrection isn't strong and isn't remarkable evidence for the truth of Christianity.
Hume on miracles. David Hume's famous argument against miracles is a notorious reason why many naturalists persist in remaining skeptical even about the most evidentially promising of miracle claims, even though Hume's essay has been severely criticized by many philosophers in recent years. Flew is a perfect example here of someone who's a Hume scholar and who, despite his admission that the resurrection is the strongest miracle claim out there, remains uncon vinced. Earlier, looking at the evidence, we considered Hume's undercutting defeaters: considerations that undermine the credibility of those professing to be witnesses of miracles. More relevant to the inferential aspect of the argument, Hume's overriding considerations have already been discussed: it's never or at least very rarely rational to believe in a miracle, because a miracle is so intrinsically unlikely and, in virtue of violating a law of nature, practically impossible. Other explanations, however farfetched or implausible, will always be more likely. Flew himself has admitted that this argument against miracles needs qualifying, and I won't reiterate his caveats here, but I'll briefly mention five objections to Hume (and Flew's amended Hume) that Habermas has raised:
1. Most Humean-styled philosophical objections to miracles are attempts to mount up the data against miracles in an a priori manner (that is, before or in spite of the factual evidence), so that no facts could actually establish their occurrence.
2. These philosophical objections are also mistaken in not allowing for the real possibility of external intervention in nature.
3. These philosophical objections generally treat the laws of nature in an almost Newtonian sense as the final word on what may occur. This overlooks newer views of the laws of nature as statistical generalizations and as consistent with quite odd and unexpected occurrences.
4. Strict empiricism ignores both the empirical (even repeatable) evidence for miracles and the fact that the strict forms of verificational standards are themselves nonverifiable.
Again, many take Hume's critique of miracles from his influential essay "Of Miracles" as decisive reason to reject miracle claims a priori. Recent critiques of Hume, such as John Earman's Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles, have clearly demonstrated that Hume's objections to the miraculous are not only far from decisive, but, indeed, fatally flawed. Hume failed to distinguish, for example, between the intrinsic probability of something like the resurrection, which may well be very low, and the probability of the resurrection in the light of the evidence we have for it, the improbability of having that evidence if the resurrection didn't happen and the low probabilities of naturalistic alternatives, which collectively could render the probability of the resurrection considerably higher than judgments of its intrinsic probability that fail to take such considerations into account. All of this means that merely invoking the name of Hume to discount miracles fails to do anywhere near as much work as some think.
Again, an atheist must have reasons for thinking that theism is untenable or evidentially suspect in the extreme in order for his or her resistance to the miraculous to be principled; but assuming this is the case, clearly these criteria aren't as helpful in persuading the atheist that the resurrection happened as in convincing the theist that a miracle indeed occurred. This is to some degree unavoidable; the worldview assumptions we bring to our analyses shape our perspectives, and rational people can disagree. Even if the resurrection argument might provide to atheists some evidence for theism and Christianity, perhaps even enough to make their decision to convert epistemically permissible, I suspect that by itself it rarely rationally constrains them to believe.
Dwindling probabilities. Earlier I mentioned that Alvin Plantinga offers a critique of a version of Swinburne's historical and evidentialist argument for theism, a critique that can also be thought to apply to a case for the resurrection. Several points need addressing here. In Philosophia Christi, Timothy McGrew and later he and Lydia McGrew wrote some critical analyses of Plantinga's arguments that seems effectively to rebut them.19 The discussion culminated in Plantinga seeming to back off some of his earlier antievidentialism and acknowledge that some historical arguments for tenets of the Christian faith are quite impressive, Habermas's among them. McGrew effectively demonstrated that Swinburne's historical argument for Christian theism, appropriately nuanced, can evade the dwindling probabilities objection. Evidence for the resurrection itself counts as part of the total evidence for theism. As the McGrews put it,
They also point out how it's strange that Plantinga critiques Swinburne by resorting to successive multiplications in the Theorem of Total Probability when Swinburne is the foremost living exponent of the use of Bayes's theorem in the philosophy of religion.21 The only clear-eyed approach to the question of assessing theism and the case for the resurrection, two mutually relevant propositions, is to examine in as much detail as possible the evidence pertinent, directly or indirectly, to each of them, the McGrews insist. There's no substitute, in other words, for examining the evidence itself, rather than deciding beforehand what we think of the evidence based on questionable probability assignments.
Of course, a tricky aspect about examining the evidence is that the reasons for overly rosy or unduly pessimistic probability assignments may be skewing one's objective assessment of the quality of the evidence in question. Using Bayes's theorem, for example, an atheist is likely to end up thinking the resurrection less likely than not, and many theists, lacking the same a priori confidence in naturalism and an automatic rejection of anything smacking of the miraculous, would be hard-pressed to think the resurrection less likely than not.22 And similar honest biases will be reflected in their assessment of the quality of the evidential case Habermas would construct.
Incidentally, recall the earlier example of how 1 beats 2 and beats 3 and beats 4, but without being more likely than not. One conclusion to draw from that illustration is that, even if the resurrection provides the better explanation than any naturalistic hypothesis on offer, we can rationally refrain from believing it for its intrinsic unlikelihood. But another possibility to consider is the exact opposite conclusion: that it's rational to choose I shows, by parity of reasoning, it may be rational to believe in the resurrection even if it cannot be shown to be more likely than not, much less that its probability considerably beats both 50 percent and the competition, so long as it better explains the relevant phenomena than its rivals. The fact that the explanatory values of logically incompatible alternative naturalistic hypotheses can't be combined into a single explanatory value of its own surpassing that of resurrection bolsters this case. And if so, this would show that probability calculations may well be far less important than the force of Habermas's abductive inference. And again, this would drive us to consider the actual historical case to be made and not just to dismiss it ahead of time by a priori and perhaps altogether uninformed, presumptuous or inscrutable probability assignments.z4
Falsifiability. Flew is the very philosopher who conceived the principle of falsifiabililty. He saw his initial 1950 essay on this, "Theology and Falsification," earlier read at a Socratic Club meeting run by C. S. Lewis at Oxford University, as an effort to argue both for atheism and against logical positivism. He didn't intend the piece to pose a test that a claim must pass to be meaningful, but merely a test that a claim must pass to be reasonable. If nothing even in principle can show a claim to be false, it doesn't pass the test of falsifiability and is worthy of rejection on this basis. It may still be coherent, but it's not rational to believe.
Not surprisingly, then, given what borders Flew's a priori resistance to the miraculous, Habermas challenges him on the question of falsifiability. Is Flew's conviction that the resurrection didn't happen a falsifiable belief? More generally, is his aversion to miracles falsifi able? Could anything in principle change his mind? This is where Flew ostensibly distinguishes his opposition to the miraculous from a purely a priori rejection of the miraculous by some. No, he claims that, at least in theory, something sufficiently dramatic could convince him that a miracle took place. If God, for example, were to speak all the world over in a loud, booming voice, that might do it, he's suggested. Habermas presses him on this issue, and at moments Flew's words sound awfully like an a priori resistance come what may, his protestations that his views are falsifiable notwithstanding.
Interestingly, three points from the writings of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal ought to be mentioned here, because the discussion until now has raised three related epistemic challenges to the resurrection inference, to which Pascal offers resources for responding. Recall the atheist who might wish to suggest that, unless the resurrection can be shown to be more likely than not, the most reasonable response would be to suspend judgment. Pascal might suggest that what such a person needs to remember is that suspending judgment on this vital matter is not maintaining neutrality, nor is it the equivalent of staying at home rather than frequenting the betting track, but rather a decision with big implications. It is his bet. Relatedly, the sheer size of the claim of the resurrection argument requires commensurately big evidence. True enough. But Pascal would also remind us that the size of the claim is also the reason why so much is at stake here. It's not a truth we want to miss out on because of an excessively narrow evidentialism so concerned to avoid error that it precludes our coming to know truths that may well be there to be known, truths that couldn't be more existentially central to the enduring questions about the human condition and the nature of reality.
William James once said the strict secularists and naturalists, the zealous knights of Ockham's razor, feared superstition, while he himself feared desiccation, an emaciated worldview stripped bare of its most interesting and important features and reduced to a drab physicalist picture alone. Pascal shared such a concern. And as to why the evidence isn't yet more compelling than it is, nor the inference yet not stronger, Pascal would remind us that God may have reasons for retaining a measure of hiddenness, so that he doesn't merely inundate us with his light of revelation, thus coercing our will. Rather he offers just enough light for us to respond to it with intellectual integrity, both with our minds and with our hearts and wills. After all, doesn't it make sense that God's about more than just testing how good we are at assessing evidence? His separation of the wheat from the chaff likely has relatively little to do with that.
Elvis analogy. Recall the Elvis analogy that calls into question the duty of naturalists to provide a workable naturalistic alternative to the resurrection. The body is missing, suppose, and various reasonable people claim to have seen Elvis alive. Either Elvis has risen from the dead or never died in the first place. We can't explain the missing body and the alleged appearances, yet we consider ourselves justified to refrain from positing a theistic explanation or any supernatural one. Doesn't this show that Habermas's demand that Flew provide a naturalistic explanation of the resurrection is misguided?
No, for there are numerous relevant and powerful disanalogies between the Jesus case and the Elvis case. The sightings of Elvis aren't widespread. If, moreover, the body of Elvis was never buried in the first place, as some suggest, there's not as much evidence of his death as in the case of Jesus. Elvis didn't predict his own death, and his death didn't take place in the rich theological context that Jesus' death did, making sense of the event and imbuing it with a sort of moral and spiritual significance entirely lacking in the case of Elvis. Nor do Elvis-is-alive claimants seriously risk martyrdom for their attestations.
What the Elvis case shows, quite simply, is that the principle needs tweaking that says we must always know the naturalistic explanation of an event before we're justified to reject a miracle claim. That principle admits of exceptions, as in the Elvis case. But the disanalogies between the Elvis and Jesus cases are huge, rendering considerably more pressing the responsibility to come up with a better naturalistic account than what's been provided so far. That some actually think the Elvis case serves to suggest anything else relevant to this discussion frankly serves as powerful evidence that they are inclined to trivialize the resurrection argument in a way that simply isn't justified. When the evidence is clearly best explained by a resurrection and the naturalistic hypotheses on offer are patently weak, as in the Jesus case but not the Elvis case, inferences to resurrection are justified.
Probability versus possibility. Flew and Habermas consistently uphold a different evidential standard. When it comes to the rival naturalistic hypotheses, Flew time and again wishes to maintain that mere possibilities, however remote, are enough. Habermas presses him on the issue by insisting that this isn't so, that genuinely plausible naturalistic accounts are required. This is a crucial fork in the road that recurs time and again. I don't pretend to adjudicate it, but simply to point it out and to suggest that the reason for it is simple. They're approaching this from two rather different worldviews. As a committed atheist (as of this debate) who treads the verge of an a priori rejection of all miraculous claims, Flew thinks the possibilities are enough, because no matter how improbable they are, they're more probable than Jesus coming back to life. Habermas is a principled theist with legitimate reservations about Humean-styled objections to miracles and numerous reasons to reject the adequacy of naturalism with its promissory notes of eventual explanations for every last phenomenon. He thinks, and properly so, that more than bare naturalistic possibilities are necessary to answer his abductive argument and subsequent case for Christianity. It may not be impossible, but the rigorous effort to show which of these competing sets of presuppositions is the more philosophically defensible is a huge challenge. I have my own convictions on the matter; readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions. I'd contend, though, that this is one of the deeper underlying debates at play here, and dis putes about the resurrection argument are just specific instances of this more general disagreement.
Persuadability. This brings us to an important point about debates of this nature, debates that are really quite important and valuable. They nonetheless have their limits. They are effective at unearthing some of the deeper disagreements involved, which aren't likely to be resolved easily or quickly. This is why folks rarely change their mind after hearing just one debate. If you bring prior assumptions to a debate, those assumptions shape how you hear and assess the arguments. This is as true on the one side of the debate as on the other. Over time our minds may change, but rarely on the spot.
Again, in the face of the challenges that the resurrection argument has to overcome, I'd personally be rather surprised if it in isolation would be enough to persuade a committed, intelligent, principled atheist to change his or her mind. Moreover, I think potentially an atheist would be within his or her epistemic rights to retain some obstinacy on the matter. The resurrection argument, in my estimation, is a powerful one, but works best as part of a broader cumulative case for theism generally and Christianity particularly. Consequently, it is much more likely, and understandably so, to persuade one who's already a theist than the stalwart, smart atheist, even if the argument provides substantial evidence to the atheist that indeed God exists and a miracle took place in first-century Palestine.
And now that our sketch of the relevant underlying philosophical issues involved in this debate is done, we're ready to return the discussion back to Antony Flew, as averse as he may be to our doing so, for much of what we've said here bears relevance to his ongoing journey. He remains an enigmatic and fascinating figure whose story is altogether compelling. Since there have been significant developments in his intellectual pilgrimage since this last debate, evidence of which sprang up in its immediate aftermath, it's time to assess both where he is now and where he may be headed.
WHERE FLEW IS
Not long after their third debate, Flew told Habermas he was considering theism, and a year to the month after the Cal Poly debate, Flew told Habermas that indeed he had become a theist. He now believed in God. Did that mean that Flew had become a Christian? No. Like C. S. Lewis, he had merely become a theist (a Deist, in Flew's case). In Lewis's case, of course, he would eventually become a Christian. Whether or not Flew does remains to be seen.
What changed his mind? What convinced Flew that God indeed exists? Habermas interviewed him about it, and that exchange was eventually published in Philosophia Christi and reprinted here in this book. Not long after that, Flew, with Roy Abraham Varghese, wrote There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.25 Habermas's review essay of that book has been reprinted here as well, but let's quickly review some of the main reasons behind this dramatic shift in Flew's thinking. Then, in the final portion of this chapter, we'll connect the discussion back up with the argument for the resurrection and consider how this could or perhaps should change matters.
Flew is a brilliant philosopher, but it bears repeating that his conversion to theism is no sure evidence that theism is true. Flew himself writes that "a person can be persuaded by an abominable argument and remain unconvinced by one that ought to be accepted."26 Great philosophers can make mistakes, and even if Flew himself has followed the evidence where he honestly thinks it leads, that doesn't show that theism is true. All we can do, epistemically, is our best, and though Flew's story is dramatic, there have been theists who've renounced their faith, too, for what they thought were intellectually principled reasons. This isn't a matter of trying desperately to enlist a big name to the theistic cause, despite the fact that Flew writes that his now-deceased Oxford-trained, Wesleyan Methodist minister father would be "hugely delighted by my present view on the existence of a God-not least because he would consider this a great help to the cause of the Christian church."27
Nonetheless, it's interesting to note why Flew thought that indeed the evidence leads to theism, especially at a time when a breed of "new atheists" has emerged-from Christopher Hitchens to Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris-who repeatedly insist that to embrace religion is the very paradigm of irrationality. In this connection, it's interesting to see that Flew allowed Varghese to write an appendix to their book in which Varghese took on such atheists, who now stand in rather stark contrast to Flew. Rather than demonizing religious adherents or casting them as intellectually challenged, Flew has spent time debating and dialoguing with the best and brightest of Christian philosophers, from Habermas to Alvin Plantinga to Richard Swinburne to William Lane Craig to Brian Leftow. Rhetorically flashy indictments of the stupidity of theists hold little sway for Flew, as he's intentionally spent time with some of its brightest representatives rather than remaining content to issue broad-brush stereotypes based on its dimmest.
What has transpired in Flew's intellectual journey of late is that he has felt the force of general revelation. He insists that he remains unpersuaded by special revelation; the resurrection, and so Christianity, therefore, is still unconvincing to him. But the case for God from general revelation, he thinks, is strong. He's not convinced that there's any life after death, so he wishes to put to rest conjectures that his age has provided the incentive for this transformation. He affirms that the book written with the help of Varghese expresses his own views, despite his advanced years, so criticisms in some quarters of his mental decline seem rather unfair, though, in truth, Flew himself once intimated as much about A. J. Ayer after his famous "near-death experience" and Ayer's theistic interpretation of it-an experience that still didn't convince Ayer to reject his atheism.
Flew cites Kant's famous identification of the three great questions of philosophy: God, freedom and immortality. Flew has definitely moved on two of the three. Earlier in his career he embraced a compatibilist view of free will, the sort of freedom consistent with our being determined to act in just the way we do at each moment of our lives-and a view of freedom that precludes our ability to do otherwise. Long prior to his conversion to theism, Flew had changed his mind on the tenability of compatibilism, now sounding much like Roderick Chisholm on the matter, a good indicator that he retains a flexibility in his philosophical convictions. Flew says that this incompatibilist "conversion" is at least as significant as his theistic turn. So far he has yet to budge on the immortality issue, the third of Kant's big three philosophical questions.
Among Flew's convictions that bolstered his atheism through the years was his belief that the Bible taught strict predestination, that an omnipotent God could have made everyone freely choose the good and that the universe could be eternal, to name a few. One by one these convictions were undermined, as Flew chronicles in There Is a God. And then, in 2004, in a conference in New York, around the time of hearing physicist Gerry Schroeder's convincing argument against the "monkey theorem"-the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet-Flew announced his acceptance of a God, to the surprise of many.
The picture of the world that has emerged from modern science has spotlighted three dimensions of nature that Flew thinks point to God. We will mention them here without reiterating his elaborations. The fact that nature obeys laws, the fact that intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings arose from nature, and the very existence of nature itself, along with a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments, convinced Flew. He emphasizes that when he asks philosophical questions of this scientific picture and draws philosophical conclusions, he's thinking like a philosopher. He need not be a scientist to learn something philosophically interesting from it, and indeed being a scientist does not necessarily enable someone to think philosophically about science. He quotes Einstein here, in fact: "The man of science is a poor philosopher."30
The God to which the evidence pointed was the God of Aristotle. Flew admits to being most influenced by David Conway's argument for God's existence, and Conway argues, interestingly, that the God of Aristotle bears a striking resemblance to the God of the JudeoChristian tradition. Flew notes this, without disagreeing, though he goes on to stress that his own journey has not led him to the God of any particular religion. Again, his pilgrimage is the result of natural theology alone, and whereas he's changed his mind on certain versions of the cosmological and teleological arguments, in light of the scientific evidence, the moral argument has yet to impress him. This is why Flew at this point is most inclined to dub himself a Deist.
Again, what convinced Flew from the realm of science was not science itself, but philosophy. He came to see the most relevant issues involved as philosophical ones, not merely scientific. From big bang cosmology to indications of a fine-tuned universe to the physical constants, he began to see the explanatory efficacy of a divine, creative intelligence. Coupled with the ground-breaking work on theism among analytic philosophers like Thomas Tracy and Brian Leftow, Flew's intellectual pilgrimage to theism seemed justified.
He still feels the force of the problem of evil, but it doesn't stand in the way of his theism because of his deistic conception of God. Although he thinks of God as self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent and omniscient, he also thinks of God as essentially impersonal and not particularly morally significant. An Aristotelian God wouldn't intervene in the world to do away with evil, so the presence of evil doesn't serve as evidence against such a God. A good God probably would intervene more, unless perhaps if the free-will defense goes through, but he suggests that such a defense depends on "the prior acceptance of a framework of divine revelation, the idea that God has revealed himself." On whether God has revealed himself in history, Flew remains open to the possibility, but so far he is unconvinced. And as far as the resurrection goes, it's perhaps significant that he asked New Testament scholar N. T. Wright to write an appendix on the very subject. Flew writes in the final chapter, `As I have said more than once, no other religion enjoys anything like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. If you're wanting omnipotence to set up a religion, it seems to me that this is the one to beat!""
So let's conclude our treatment by discussing the case for the resurrection in light of Flew's conversion.
WHY FLEW SHOULD BECOME A CHRISTIAN
My section title is meant to be a bit provocative, but only in a semiserious way. Who knows what will happen next in Flew's pilgrimage? He might trip at King's Cross Station and end up at Hogwarts for all I know. But his is certainly an interesting story, and we're naturally curious how it will play out. So allow me to tie several threads of our discussion together and, most importantly, bring to bear the relevance of Flew's conversion to theism on our discussion of the resurrection. Although I will offer some reasons that Flew's conversion to Christianity wouldn't be surprising, I fancy myself neither a detective nor a prognosticator, and wherever he comes down on these issues, we all need to respect his intellectual freedom.
The resurrection is clearly on Flew's mind. As mentioned earlier, in his latest book he invited Wright to lay out some key findings of his (Wright's) latest eight-hundred-page tome on the resurrection. Flew says that Wright's argument and Varghese's appendix on the new atheists are both examples of reasoning that led him to change his mind about God's existence. He also says, interestingly, that they give readers some "insight into the direction of my continuing journey." He also hopes that they, along with his reflections on why theism is philosophically preferable, constitute "an organic whole that provides a powerful new vision of the philosophy of religion."33 Perhaps Flew's impact on the world of religious philosophy has only just begun.
Flew retains skepticism toward the resurrection, despite the fact that he believes "the resurrection is more impressive than any by the religious competition." Much of his critique tends to dwell on historical matters: lack of contemporary evidence, reliability of group appearances, little physical detail of the resurrection and so on. Despite this, he admits to being more open now to at least certain claims of divine revelation or intervention. "In point of fact," he writes, "I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honored and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation is true."34 Besides historical concerns, Flew also still thinks "the occurrence of miracles cannot be known from historical evidence, and this discredits the claim that the resurrection can be known as a fact of history."35 So despite a degree of openness to Christianity, he isn't quite convinced.
Wright's case, which has several interesting features, won't be repeated here, largely because it's more heavily geared toward answering various historical concerns and questions. And based on what we've seen so far in our study, it seems to me that that debate has largely been won by the likes of Wright and Habermas. If I were to suggest a strategy to my atheist friends who want to resist the resurrection, I would counsel them to focus their case somewhere other than the historical evidence. Those who tangle with Habermas and company on such issues must swim hard upstream. The historical evidence on which the resurrection inference is based is substantial. The remaining debate is inferential, whether or not the inference to the resurrection is a good one. Just as Flew sees aspects of modern science and infers that something substantively philosophical can be said, Habermas's historical case is a fascinating one, and we can learn from it, but how much we can learn raises philosophical questions that have to be answered so the force of the historical case can be fully felt.
Let's return to the issue of Habermas's metaphysically thin resurrection conclusion-by which I don't mean the evidence is thin, but the claim unambitious, stripped of as much of its miraculous content as possible-the claim merely that Jesus, having been dead, was later alive. Even if atheists accept the historical facts on which Habermas bases his case, many of them will likely resist his conclusion. The inference won't convince. Now, in one sense this point is obvious and trivial. Atheists aren't theists; they see things differently and, unless they are willing to stop being atheists, they won't accept theistic conclusions. But is their resistance necessarily irrational? Is the only reason for their resistance psychological? I tend to think they are not necessarily being irrational and that there may be more to their resistance than simply something psychological. For the claim that Jesus was alive, after having been dead, is no garden-variety historical claim. It likely involves a miracle and thus entails the falsity of naturalism. That's a lot to swallow for a principled atheist!
Incidentally, Habermas's modus operandi here might be thought to allay Flew's concern that we can't know from historical evidence that a miracle occurred. For Habermas doesn't wish to argue initially for a miracle, but simply that Jesus was alive, whether or not that was a miracle. It's a smart strategy, but Jesus being alive after being dead most likely involves a miracle claim, and assessment of miracle claims involves more than the resources of history. It involves philosophical judgments about possibility and impossibility, plausibility and implausibility, probabilities and improbabilities, considerations about what constitutes best explanations, and the like. Evidence for Jesus being alive after having been dead needs to be better than evidence for garden-variety historical events that don't pose so deep a challenge to a naturalistic worldview. Without it, naturalists, or even certain theists, seem potentially within their epistemic rights to refrain from inferring the resurrection as the best explanation of Habermas's historical facts.
Interestingly, we do seem to have considerably better evidence for the resurrection than for many historical claims we take for granted as fact-Caesar crossing the Rubicon, for example. So we both need and have better evidence for the resurrection, but the question remains, do we have as much and as good evidence as we need? And that seems to invite a philosophical question, not merely an historical one. So there's a sense in which I agree with Flew here (and Haberman, for slightly different reasons, would too): history alone perhaps can't establish miracle claims. This is why Habermas gives additional evidence on which to base the inference from resurrection to miracle. Flew seems to think more evidence is needed than we have, but what I rather suspect is that his resistance is at root more philosophical than historical. When he was an atheist and committed naturalist, this made more sense. His background assumptions would strongly disincline him to believe anything supernatural was going on, his failure to provide better naturalistic alternatives notwithstanding. His naturalism understandably fueled background assumptions about the likelihood of naturalistic explanation and the unlikelihood of a miracle event, rendering his practical a priori resistance to the resurrection sacrosanct.
It was in response to the entrenched naturalism of certain of Habermas's interlocutors that a few years ago he began to build an evidential case of near-death experiences to erode such confidence in naturalism. This very effort by Habermas shows that he sees that the case for the resurrection is made stronger when it's combined with other considerations, like arguments against naturalism. He admits the resurrection argument ideally goes hand in hand with classical arguments for God's existence from natural theology as well. For theists are much less likely to construct an a priori or practical a priori wall of resistance to the miraculous.
But there's the rub with Flew. He's no atheist anymore. His a priori resistance to the resurrection should radically weaken. In fact, he would admit as much to Habermas in their various debates: that if he were a theist the case for the resurrection would become much stronger for him. But he became a theist while still resisting the resurrection and a conversion to Christianity. For someone who has thought this much about the resurrection argument, who has admitted its force and strength, and who is now a theist, this borders on the surprising. His conversion to Christianity would be much less surprising, I contend.
I am not going to make that argument. For present purposes I'm happy to assume such folks are being as honest as they can be, and they just happen to see things differently. But now take a theist instead. The theist, unless the theism in question demands it, can't in intellectual honesty assign a low probability to the likelihood of the resurrection on the basis of his or her background assumptions. Unless a low probability is assigned to theism in general, an assignment of low probability to the resurrection is altogether presumptuous, even if there aren't any particular grounds for assigning it a high antecedent probability. Similarly, in light of the spectacular failures of naturalistic hypotheses in accounting for the full set of Habermas's minimal facts, a theist can't in good conscience assign a very high probability to the best naturalistic hypothesis to account for such facts. A theist, in other words, applying Bayes's theorem, will be very hard-pressed to think the resurrection is less likely than not. That result, conjoined with a decisive abductive case for the resurrection, makes it considerably harder for the theist rationally to resist the resurrection hypothesis than for the atheist. Even more so for theists like Flew who admit the power of natural theology. The atheist may not be irrational to resist the resurrection if the case for it is considered in isolation, but such a theist may well be. A Deist perhaps not; but resurrection challenges Deism no less than Deism challenges resurrection.
Flew repeatedly emphasized in debates with Habermas that the resurrection case is stronger for the theist, and now he's a theist. He admitted that the resurrection argument would be stronger when combined with aspects of natural theology, and now he's been convinced by natural theology that God exists, but still he resists. Why?
I don't presume to know, but I would like to offer a few possibilities. Recall that Flew has found convincing certain cosmological and teleological arguments for God's existence, after previously resisting them and finding them wanting. But he retains his skepticism when it comes to the moral argument. In various places he offers a few reasons for this. An Aristotelian God is more easily reconcilable with the suffering in the world, for a deistic God wouldn't feel any moral need to intervene. A free-will defense, which he seems drawn to, nonetheless is troubling for him because he thinks it depends on specific revelation in which he can't believe. He resists C. S. Lewis's moral argument on the basis that aspects of the world are hard to make sense of if God is perfectly good. And he often seems to equate a classical monotheistic and Christian conception of God with a predestinationist God who inexplicably relegates some to an eternal hell for lives they couldn't have avoided. In fact, he accuses Lewis, as John Beversluis does, of opting for an Ockhamistic voluntarism37 later in life, after having championed a moral argument for God's existence earlier. Besides which, if morality were to depend on God, God would be its justification, Flew says, which would lead to, at most, prudential reasons to be moral, based on the prospects of punishment for failure to comply.
Thus construed, his resistance to the moral argument makes good sense. Until he thinks of God as personal and moral, rather than merely intellectual and impersonal, his resistance to special revelation will probably remain intact. He will continue to be convinced by teleological and cosmological arguments, but not the moral one; and he will continue to have changed his mind about God and compatibilism, but not the afterlife. His resistance to the resurrection will continue holding sway.
For such reasons, I contend his real resistance to the resurrection is philosophical, and the best answer is philosophical. Conducting the discussion at this level may get him over this preliminary hump and enable him to feel the historical force of Habermas's inference. This may be an example where natural theology can come to the assistance of the resurrection argument, and their resultant cumulative force can exceed that of either argument taken in isolation. So what might be said to address this cluster of moral concerns Flew entertains?
Recall that Flew suggested that a free-will defense to the problem of evil presupposes special revelation. In Habermas's review essay of Flew's book, he understandably raises a question about this, making the point that a Deist could believe in free will, but I'm going to make a different point. If we as human beings are genuinely free, able to do otherwise and the like, this is very difficult to reconcile with a naturalistic picture, for reasons obvious enough there's no need to repeat them here. Such freedom would enable us to be morally significant agents. Now Flew seems to think the evidence for our possessing such agency is strong, so let's suppose he embraces such a notion that we have such freedom, and especially such moral freedom. He's also a strong believer that some things are morally right and some morally wrong, that moral duties exist in a strongly prescriptively binding sense. A rough-and-ready version of the moral argument asks us to consider such possibilities, then: moral obligations, moral rights, moral freedom, moral regret. How can we make genuine sense of any of these realities in a world in which all that we are, ultimately, is a collocation of atoms fortuitously arranged? Flew has felt the evidential force of the laws of nature, the existence of something rather than nothing, human consciousness, the efficacy of reason and the emergence of life as evidence for a divine Mind. Why not the existence of the moral law as well?
The reason there may be resistance is that yielding to the force of this argument points to a God who's good and loving, no mere impersonal clockmaker. And it brings front and center again the problem of evil. Now regarding this admittedly difficult issue a few words are in order. In principle this could indeed be a deal breaker for theism. If the sufferings in the world were enough or bad enough, we would likely be rational to infer that a good God doesn't exist. Incidentally Lewis never denied this inference. This is why I think Flew commits the same mistake Beversluis does in characterizing the later Lewis as an Ockhamist. I've made that case elsewhere and won't repeat it here.3' Suffice it to say, suggesting that we don't live in a world where the suffering, as horrible as it is, is bad enough that a perfectly good God wouldn't necessarily prevent it is not to say that anything goes and no amount of suffering would be to much. It's just to say we have yet to reach that point. So denying the intractability of the problem of evil as things currently stand doesn't necessarily implicate one in embracing a faith that's nonfalsifiable.
Flew is concerned with the equation of goodness and being, originally deriving from the teachings of Plato. For one like Gottfried Leibniz, Flew says, used this equation to derive a system of ethics on theistic foundations that's irremediably arbitrary where things not at all recognizably good are to be called good anyway. This is the notorious challenge of voluntarism that issues from the Euthyphro dilemma. But it's interesting to note that Flew neglects the possibility that's played the considerably bigger role in the history of Christian thought based on the equation of, or at least close ontological connection between, being and goodness: a theistic natural law, where morality, though dependent on God, as the moral argument would suggest, is nonetheless far from arbitrary. To the contrary, its stability is rooted in God's unchanging and perfect character. For that matter, sophisticated versions of divine command theory in recent years, like that of Robert Adams, also nicely avoid the worst problems associated with voluntarism.39 Adams and most recent theistic ethicists, especially since Locke, have focused on the ontological grounding of moral facts in God, not the motivational and prudential incentive for morality provided by divine threats. That Flew would feel the mental freedom to infer to God as the best explanation of nomological laws would make his arguing by parity of reasoning for something similar for moral laws not surprising, especially if sophisticated and palatable options to his various Euthyphroinspired concerns are available.40
Proponents of the problem of evil have been steadily argued backward over the last few decades in the professional literature. Their challenge is to argue not just that there are, in principle, sufferings irreconcilable with a perfectly good God, which is surely true, but that this world features just such sufferings. The sufferings we find in this world are often horrible, but the case has yet to be made that they represent just those sufferings precluded by a perfect God. Take for example a horribly abused child who dies. If God conferred on us free will, his doing so introduced the possibility of such suffering. As tragic as it is, its possibility is hard to avoid in a world in which we're genuinely free. The world is surely worse for that suffering, but arguably overall better for our all having such freedom, with which we can do both good and evil.
This is nothing original, but my point is that the free-will defense gets us quite a bit down the road in explaining suffering in the world. By parity of reasoning, a similar argument applies to the operation of physical laws in the world. Occasional miraculous interventions are fine, but if God were to intervene every time a horrific suffering was about to happen, why would he have created a world with such freedom and stable laws in the first place? Interventions would become ubiquitous, rendering the whole venture pointless. For those who take evil seriously, here's a compelling consideration: without free will, there is no real moral evil done by the hand of men. We would be inflicting suffering, but there would be no moral quality to our actions. Surely Flew is one who believes in moral evil, so he seems committed to moral freedom. By his own admission, this seems to make belief in special revelation inviting. I might interpret why this way: his commitment to moral facts and freedoms should soften him up to the moral argument for God's existence, which should lead to a rejection of Deism and to a personal God, but then the last point of philosophical resistance to the resurrection argument should be gone.
The most intractable aspect of the problem of evil that Flew seems to struggle with, and understandably so, is hell, especially if the Calvinists are right and the non-elect are doomed to go there for lives they couldn't have avoided and because of a choice of God's sovereignty alone. In the middle debate with Habermas, Flew seems to say that he thinks biblical teaching is clear that the Calvinists are exegetically right. More recently he seems to admit that there are viable Arminian interpretations of the relevant passages. Interestingly enough, Flew and I were both raised in Wesleyan Methodist homes, but I've never thought the Calvinist readings of Scripture are compelling. It's not an issue of according human freedom an exalted place, at least for one like Arminius, but understanding that God, being perfectly good, is not the author of sin, which he surely seems to be if he strictly predestines all that occurs. I know my Calvinist friends disagree with me, but on this issue I stand shoulder to shoulder with Flew. God's love must be recognizable or the claim that God is good dies the death of a thousand qualifications. And so I'd simply encourage Flew to know that there's ample justification to give an Arminian reading to the Bible, one consonant with a God of perfect and recognizable love and goodness who offers salvation to everyone through Christ. The sovereignty of God, whatever else it may mean, is the sovereignty of that sort of God. In this sense, Flew's struggle to understand not just whether God exists, but who God is, indeed raises a vital issue. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the clearest picture we have of who God is and what he's like.
So really what we have here is a cluster of related issues: God's goodness, the problem of evil, hell, human freedom. It seems circular to suggest that Flew believe the moral argument on the basis of human freedom if he thinks commitment to the latter requires special revelation. But I think he's right to see how closely connected these issues are, and I would encourage him to subject the whole package here to critical scrutiny to see its philosophical power and workability. Flew can get around notions of a capricious God, an arbitrary torture-chamber hell and preprogrammed human beings by acknowledging how much better a biblical conception of God makes good moral sense, offers salvation to all and is personal and recognizably, indeed maximally, loving to all. Flew has the option to say, like Lewis, that God reserves hell only for those who with eyes wide open obstinately refuse God's grace to the end. By way of a note of interest, Conway's conception of Aristotle's God that Flew liked so much included among the listed attributes "perfect goodness."42 Might Flew already be a hair's breadth from Christianity?
And though the problem of evil serves as evidence against theism and Christianity, it's a case that has yet to go through, especially not if the resurrection is true. If Jesus is God the Son and indeed didn't just die, but was raised from the dead, then the full range of theological significance to that event, which I've not even begun to mention here but Habermas has elaborated on to a great can show that in Jesus and his resurrection there's hope-and evidence-that evil has been overcome.44