William Lane Craig ducks the debate
Craig-Carrier debate
William Lane Craig ducked out of defending the reliability of the Gospels in a debate with a professional historian.
Instead, he is going to defend the resurrection, but ducked out of showing that the Gospel accounts of the resurrection are reliable.
William Lane Craig ducked out of defending the reliability of the Gospels in a debate with a professional historian.
Instead, he is going to defend the resurrection, but ducked out of showing that the Gospel accounts of the resurrection are reliable.
posted by Steven Carr at 2:22 AM
11 Comments:
Craig always and has only debated the Resurrection of Jesus. If anything, Carrier "ducked" the Resurrection debate by bringing up some useless and rather trivial topic to debate.
So whether or not the Gospel stories of the resurrection are reliable is 'useless' and 'trivial'?
I guess defenders of Craig really don't care how absurd their position is.
Craig's position reminds me of the article he wrote when he used the Gospel of Peter as evidence for the resurrection, when he slags it off at other times.
Craig will say anything....
Craig even claims the Gospel of Peter is 'independent testimony' to the burial of Jesus, even though he slags it off elsewhere as an example of legendary accounts.
I guess Craig doesn't care about whether or not something is reliable. He only cares about whether or not he can use it for apologetics.
Craig even claims the Gospel of Peter is 'independent testimony' to the burial of Jesus, even though he slags it off elsewhere as an example of legendary accounts.
I guess Craig doesn't care about whether or not something is reliable. He only cares about whether or not he can use it for apologetics.
The agreed topic will work better, I think; it's more focused. A debate on general reliability would be all over the place.
Steven Carr says:
"So whether or not the Gospel stories of the resurrection are reliable is 'useless' and 'trivial'?"
Yes, it is trivial to the Resurrection argument. The only reason you and other skeptics want to debate it is because you can actually make a better case against it than you can against the Resurrection.
And for your information I don't even believe in inerrancy, so don't bother going into it. I defend Craig on his points concerning the Resurrection and other fundamentals of Christianity, not on his position on inerrancy.
Steven Carr says:
"Craig's position reminds me of the article he wrote when he used the Gospel of Peter as evidence for the resurrection, when he slags it off at other times."
He uses it BECAUSE IT IS EVIDENCE for certain parts of the Resurrection argument, daaaaaaa. What other times does he slag it off? The evidence that we can use from that Gospel is the evidence that attests to the other Gospels. All else is pretty much seen as largely derivative and legendary by most scholars. Get a clue Steven
Craig uses the Gospel of Peter as evidence for certain parts of the resurrection?
Craig really doesn't care about scholarship , does he?
May as well use the National Enquirer as evidence about UFO's.
No wonder Craig refused point blank to discuss whether or not the Gospels were reliable sources of information and could be relied upon when they talk about the disciples going to Galilee, when another Gospel has their Lord and Saviour command them to stay in Jerusalem.
Andrew wrote: "Craig always and has only debated the Resurrection of Jesus."
Really? Are we talking about the same Craig here, that is, William Lane Craig? Here is a list of some of his debates from Craig's own "office" site at "Leadership U":
Debates of William Lane Craig
Note that quite a few of them are on topics other than the resurrection, such as the existence of "God", can a "loving god" send people to hell?, and does morality have a supernatural basis. It seems that Craig is willing to debate things other than just the resurrection.
Regards,
Dawson
One can discern why Craig thinks that the GENERAL reliability of the Gospel is not important/relevant when one analyses the historicity or non-historicity of Jesus' bodily resurrection from the following response by Craig (to Carrier's remarks on Carrier's blog on this issue) below. Quoting Craig:
"Were my reasons for preferring the topic of the resurrection over the topic of the historical reliability of the Gospels illogical? I think not. With regard to (i), when Richard says, "defending the resurrection requires establishing a number of premises, including the reliability of the Gospel accounts," he needs to add, "with respect to specific events" (unless, as he notes, one plans to make a case for Jesus' resurrection without appeal to the Gospels, as my doctoral mentor Wolfhart Pannenberg in fact does1). If you're going to appeal to the Gospels in making your case, then obviously you need to show that the Gospels are reliable with respect to the specific events you are claiming to be historical. But a case for the historicity of the specific events underlying the inference to Jesus' resurrection doesn't depend on establishing the general historical reliability of the Gospels. This truth underlies the historical-critical method. The task of the critical historian is to sift the wheat from the chaff in order to discover the kernels of historical truth contained in a document.
Richard knows this. He writes, "There is no ancient history that is entirely accurate and without lies, distortions, or errors. Every qualified historian today agrees with that. It is a universal principle accepted throughout the professional community that no ancient work is infallible" ("Was Christianity Too Improbable to Be False?"). Unfortunately, too many Christians and "infidels" alike are under the misimpression that demonstrating an error in the Gospels invalidates their entire testimony, which is absurd. As Richard points out, even the best of ancient historians, such as Tacitus, Polybius, and Arrian, convey false information, and even the work of historians like Herodotus and Seutonius, who don't measure up the high standards of these authors, still provides valuable historical information with respect to specific events.
An illustration with respect to Jesus is the apocryphal Gospels. These generally unreliable documents embody lots of fanciful legends and fabrications. Nonetheless, they also contain historical nuggets, e.g., that Jesus of Nazareth died of Roman crucifixion. In his less radical days (before he came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth never existed), Richard wrote with respect to the Gospels: "Few doubt that Jesus and certain other characters and cultural, geographic, and other details of these texts form a genuine 'historical core' worth mining for data. This is generally not in question" ("William Craig, Herodotus, and Myth Formation"). Indeed, even today Richard would presumably agree with this statement—he just now finds himself among those few extremists. The existence of that historical core does not depend upon the general reliability of the Gospels.
In fact, when you think about it, it is viciously circular and therefore illogical to require establishing a document's general reliability in order to establish its reliability with respect to some specific event. For how else could one demonstrate a document's general reliability except by demonstrating its reliability on a good number of specific events? Suppose we were to discover some ancient historical document previously unknown, and we want to know if it is reliable in the events it reports. In order to establish its general historical reliability we'd have to show that it is reliable on the various specifics that it reports. Requiring that we first establish its general reliability would land us in a "Which came first? The chicken or the egg?" scenario. Clearly, the specifics come first, from which general reliability is inferred.
So when Richard warns, "if the Gospels are not generally reliable, then everything they say is under a pall of suspicion, which entails we can't trust what they say about their most contentious claims, and the resurrection is exactly such," there are a number of confusions here.
First, to say that a case for Jesus' resurrection does not depend on first establishing the general reliability of the Gospels is not to say that the Gospels are, in fact, generally unreliable! That is an obvious non sequitur. It's just to say that one needn't establish a document's general reliability before establishing that that document reliably records some specific event.
Second, even the general unreliability of a document doesn't entail that we can't trust what it says about some specific event, unless by "trust" Richard is implying some sort of criterionless acceptance of the document's assertions. That sort of trust is not at issue here. New Testament historians have developed quite a number of so-called criteria of authenticity for discerning the historical about Jesus, such as multiple attestation, dissimilarity to Christian teaching, linguistic Semitisms, traces of Palestinian milieu, retention of embarrassing material, coherence with other authentic material, and so forth.2 These criteria do not presuppose the general reliability of the Gospels. Rather they focus on a particular event or saying of Jesus and provide evidence for thinking that specific element of Jesus' life to be historical, regardless of the general reliability of the document in which the particular saying or event is reported. These same criteria are thus applicable to reports of Jesus found in the apocryphal Gospels, or rabbinical writings, or even the Qur'an. Of course, if the Gospels can be shown to be generally reliable documents, so much the better! But the criteria do not depend on any such presupposition. Richard might defend his above statement by emphasizing the word "contentious." But then his statement becomes trivial: obviously, historically speaking, we can't trust assertions in a generally unreliable document if they fail the criteria. The question is, do specific assertions meet the criteria?
Take, for example, the crucifixion of Jesus. Wholly apart from the general historical reliability of the Gospels, this specific fact about Jesus of Nazareth is recognized as so firmly established as to be indisputable. Indeed, the eminent historical Jesus scholar John Meier regards it as so certain that it becomes itself one of the criteria of authenticity for judging the historicity of other events of Jesus' life. Meier's confidence in the historicity of Jesus' crucifixion has nothing to do with general historical reliability of the Gospels. Rather he explains,
For two obvious reasons practically no one would deny the fact that Jesus was executed by crucifixion: (1) This central event is reported or alluded to not only by the vast majority of New Testament authors but also by Josephus and Tacitus . . . . (2) Such an embarrassing event created a major obstacle to converting Jews and Gentiles alike. . . that the church struggled to overcome. . . .3
The first point is an application of the criterion of multiple attestation and the second of the criterion of embarrassment. It's clear that Meier does not accept the crucifixion because the Gospels have been shown to generally historically reliable. Anybody who thinks that New Testament historians presuppose the general reliability of the Gospels only reveals his naivete about how New Testament criticism operates.
Third, Richard misleads when he says that the resurrection is one of those contentious events. For, as I have emphasized (see Question of the Week # 98), the facts underlying the inference to Jesus' resurrection, such as the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances, are not contentious but belong to the historical core recognized by the wide majority of New Testament historians today. I realize that this is hard for those of you in the "infidel" crowd to fathom, but it's true. It is you who are swimming against the current of scholarship; I am comfortably within the mainstream. Whether one is then willing to affirm Jesus' resurrection as the best explanation of the facts is apt to depend more on one's openness to a supernaturalist worldview than on historical considerations.
As for point (ii), a discussion of the reliability of the Gospels in general rather than of some specific events recorded in them is obviously broader in scope. Why should we get bogged down in a debate over the historicity of the birth narratives or the date of the Last Supper and so on, when nothing about Jesus' resurrection hangs on the reliability of those reports? As a topic for debate, the general reliability of the Gospels would be so broad as to be unmanageable. Imagine having to discuss the general reliability of not just one Gospel, or even of the Synoptics, but of all four! It's far better to focus on the historical reliability of the Gospels with respect to certain specific events relative to Jesus' resurrection."
SO Craig would be perfectly happy if I wrote a report of his debate that was generally unreliable, and he would use my generally unreliable report of his debate?
He would tell all his Christian friends to use generally unreliable reports of his debates to establish the facts of what happened?
And Craig's approach to the Gospels is that he sifts the wheat from the chaff?
While in reality, William Lane Craig has signed a statement committing himself to inerrancy?
CRAIG
For, as I have emphasized (see Question of the Week # 98), the facts underlying the inference to Jesus' resurrection, such as the empty tomb and post-mortem appearances, are not contentious but belong to the historical core recognized by the wide majority of New Testament historians today.
CARR
So Craig produces no evidence for this empty tomb and no evidence as to the nature of these appearances....
All he does is argue by authority, and mislead the public about what New Testament scholars think is reliable in the Gospels and what is not.....
Where's the beef?
Where is the evidence for this Barrabas?
Where is one person who named himself as having seen Joseph of Arimathea or named himself as having met a named person who had seen Joseph of Arimathea?
Where is one person who named himself as having seen Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Joanna, Salome, Simon of Cyrene, Lazarus, Nicodemus, Bartimaeus or named himself as having met a named person who had seen Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Joanna, Salome, Simon of Cyrene, Lazarus, Nicodemus, Bartimaeus?
Where's the beef?
If the Book of Mormon was attested to by people that nobody reported themselves as ever seeing, would Craig even bother to listen to claims that nobody needs to worry whether or not the Book of Mormon is generally reliable?
Craig would literally laugh himself silly at such a thought...
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