This is part 7 of my “Think! Of God and Government” debate series with Christian author Andrew Murtagh. Read my latest post and Andrew’s reply.
Hello Andrew,
Well, I’m back! Since we’ve gone several rounds on the historical existence of Jesus already, I don’t want to prolong this, but I do have a few brief closing remarks. First, on Josephus and the Testimonium Flavianum:
Mainstream scholarship doesn’t postulate the entire Josephus passage is a forgery. Rather, they accuse Christians of “sprucing it up”. On Josephus, even without the accused Christian additions, “Josephus obviously thought well of Jesus.
Yes, that’s what makes the whole passage more likely to be a forgery. As a faithful Jew writing under Roman patronage, Josephus had two very strong reasons to denounce anyone who founded a new religion which could be seen as a threat to the established order: because it would clash with his own orthodox beliefs, and because his masters would have imprisoned him or worse if he didn’t.
Josephus’ other writings bear this out. When he mentions other would-be messiahs such as Judas of Galilee or Theudas the magician, he unambiguously condemns them as frauds, deceivers and false prophets. If Josephus had genuinely written about Jesus, he’d likewise have had no choice but to denounce him, not to speak well of him. (You said it yourself: Jesus’ ministry as described in the gospels would be scandalous and blasphemous to any member of the powers that be!)
With that, record keeping in ancient times was very poor. For three Roman historians and one Jewish historian to mention Jesus decades after his crucifixion – is very impressive evidence.
As I said previously, it’s true that the ancient world didn’t have newspapers, birth certificates or Social Security numbers. Even if Jesus had been a historical individual, there wouldn’t be very much evidence for his life. But that doesn’t mean we’re obligated to lower our standards of proof! Rather, it means that any hypothesis about what happened in ancient history needs to be correspondingly more tentative, and our conclusions more provisional.
That’s why we should be suspicious of the too-easy avowals of certainty by some of the historians you quote. When they say that no serious scholar would ever entertain a mythical-Jesus theory, you can tell they’re going well beyond what the facts support. I agree with Bart Ehrman about many issues, but on this issue he lashes out with a disproportionate degree of anger and defensiveness (something that’s plainly visible, even in the excerpt you quoted), which I think goes to show that he’s being driven by an emotional attachment more than by cool-headed consideration of the evidence.
If you call that dropping the sticks and putting the gloves up, so be it. ๐
Your point on mathematical elegance and precision – are you a mathematical realist? I assume you are but I’ll let you provide comment. Is mathematics discovered or invented? How do we explain the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics?
To be honest, I don’t know if I’m a mathematical realist or not. I think both alternatives could lead to confusion. Saying that mathematics is “discovered” implies some kind of Platonic realm that stands above the material objects mathematics is used to describe, which I don’t believe. But “invented” also strikes me as the wrong word, since it implies that making 1 plus 1 equal 2 was just an arbitrary choice that someone made.
The best alternative, I think, is to say that mathematics is a language. Language was created by human beings to describe the real patterns we observe in the world around us. Mathematics serves the same purpose, just in a more formal and precise way than spoken-word languages. It’s not surprising that we can mathematically model a particle collision, just as it’s not surprising that we can use words to describe what a sunset looks like, because that’s why those languages were created.
As far as the “unreasonable” effectiveness of mathematics, I agree that mathematics is effective, but I don’t know if it’s unreasonably so. Scientists, especially physicists, sometimes speak of some ineffable quality of beauty or elegance in their equations that often corresponds to empirical truth. And it’s remarkable that elementary particles and other natural phenomena so precisely follow simple mathematical laws. (How do they know? Why can’t some rebellious electron obey e=mc3 instead?)
On the other hand, we’re discovering many complex phenomena for which mathematics doesn’t seem especially well-suited; where mathematical solutions, if they exist at all, are far beyond the ability of any ordinary person and can only be approximated by supercomputers. I’m thinking of chaotic, nonlinear systems like the weather, where even the tiniest variation in initial conditions grows hugely over time. Even some “pure” mathematical problems seem resistant to simple solutions, like the four-color map theorem or the densest way to stack spheres, both of which were only proved by hundreds of pages of exhaustive computer-assisted analysis.
Mine is the position that God’s love and beauty are immeasurable – the necessary being of which all contingent things depend. To use your words, “a being that reflects the terrifying vastness, the fantastic and unearthly beauty, and the mathematical precision and elegance of the cosmos in which we find ourselves.” Far from anthropomorphic, this being is the independent source and grounding of all truth – from mathematics to morality.
I think you overlooked an important bit there. The universe is beautiful and elegant, it’s true. But loving, or moral? Not a chance. On the contrary, it’s a terrifyingly violent and chaotic place.
At the center of our galaxy there’s a black hole with the mass of a billion suns, a bottomless chasm in the fabric of reality that shreds and swallows whole stars. The explosive death of massive stars seeds the cosmos with the elements of new life, but any living planet that happened to be nearby would be scoured clean by radiation. Our planet bears the scars of countless cosmic impacts, some of them vast enough to nearly eradicate life.
A little closer down to Earth, there’s plenty of beautiful, elegant evil for us to train our gazes on. Charles Darwin famously wrote about the Ichneumonidae, a family of wasps that hunt caterpillars. When an ichneumonid wasp finds its prey, it delivers a precise sting, calibrated to paralyze but not kill the caterpillar, so that the wasp can drag it back to its burrow. There it lays its eggs, using the caterpillar’s living body as a larder so that, when the larvae hatch, they can devour it alive. Some species put even more gruesome twists on this strategy: we recently discovered one dubbed the bone-house wasp, which lays its eggs in nests bricked up by walls of dead ants.
I feel a shudder when I contemplate the evil elegance of adaptations like this. Of course, from my perspective, I’m anthropomorphizing. I think that these species arise from the churn of evolution, and evolution is a merciless process, one that rewards survival and reproduction, not necessarily compassion. (Compassion can arise, in intelligent and social species like our own, where mutual cooperation is an aid to survival – but evolution can also reward strategies that, from our perspective, are horrific cruelty.)
But if you believe in a creator who takes an active role in creation, then you must believe that, in some sense, God approves of things like this. Strictly speaking, that doesn’t tell us anything about whether such a god exists. But it does tell us a whole lot about whether that being would be a good source of morals; and Christianity, of course, has always insisted as an integral part of its definition that God is absolutely good.
What do you think about this? How do you reconcile belief in a moral creator with the chaotic and unjust universe we live in?