Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Two, Part Four

My nine-year-old daughter* and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.

 

*She is in fact now 10. She was 9 when we sat down to review this chapter. One of these days I’ll catch up with myself, although I hope I manage it before she turns 11.

 

(This is a longer post; we were getting close to the end of the chapter and finishing it all in one lot seemed simpler at this point than breaking the narrative yet again.)

At somewhere around this point in the narrative, according to my notes, Katie and I seem to have diverged into a brief aside about what Jesus’s death is meant to be about in Christian narrative; the belief that we’re all sinners who can’t get into Heaven and thus Jesus had to die in payment for our sins. I can’t remember how we got onto this, but remember being interested to see what she’d make of it, as it’s a theology I’ve always found quite horrifying. Katie, as it happened, focused on another detail entirely; she didn’t see why death was necessary according to this theory.

“But wouldn’t it be really, really painful?” she asked me, referring to Jesus’s death. “And wouldn’t the pain be the payment? I mean, supposing you got shot in the face for everyone’s sins – even if you survived it, wouldn’t it be really painful being shot in the face? Wouldn’t that be the payment?”

Good point. I can’t remember how I answered it. Anyway, we got back to the story.

To recap, Jeffries had been steering the cadets through the line of apologetic argument that consists of listing possible explanations for why the disciples went round preaching the resurrection to everyone, finding objections to every explanation other than ‘Jesus really did rise from the dead’, and then declaring that, since that’s the only explanation that we haven’t refuted, it must be the correct one. Katie had neatly spotted the key flaw in this; that miraculous resurrection is unlikely enough that, even if reasons make all the other explanations highly unlikely, we are still not going to be left with a situation where miraculous resurrection becomes the most likely. The cadets/Jeffries had the following list:

  1. Jesus didn’t really die – He fainted, woke up, and walked away.
  2. The disciples were so upset about Jesus dying that they imagined they saw Him alive.
  3. The disciples stole the body of Jesus and lied about the resurrection.
  4. The story of the resurrection was added on many years later as the story of Jesus became a legendary fairy tale.
  5. Jesus rose from the dead.

…and had got as far as refuting point 1, though not to Katie’s satisfaction. On with the story; since only three cadets ever seem to get to say anything in this class, it’s Hannah’s turn to refuting the next point.

Hannah wants to mark off one more: “I don’t think they imagined it either. We read that five hundred people all saw Jesus at the same time and in the same way. They could not all imagine the exact same thing.”

So, hang on; did she and Daniel also read 1 Corinthians? That’s an odd thing for children tasked with researching the resurrection to decide to read; the gospels, yes, but there would be no reason for them to realise that this particular letter had any information in it. Of course, what’s more plausible here is that she and Daniel just read an apologist’s work on the subject. If so, that would also explain both why Daniel’s knowledge of the resurrection evidence seemed to be helpfully structured in the form of a minimal facts list rather than referring to specific gospel references, and also why Hannah erroneously thinks that the report of the appearance to the five hundred has them all seeing Jesus ‘at the same time and in the same way’, which in fact isn’t stated in the appearance report at all.

Jeffries, having apparently not heard of the Fátima miracle, agrees that there is “no such thing as a ‘group dream’ or ‘group hallucination'”. No, but there’s such a thing as religious fervour stirring large groups up into a state of mass hysteria.

Jason speaks up now: “But couldn’t the disciples have lied about it? Or maybe somebody else lied about it years later and added the story of the resurrection to the legend of Jesus?”

“Aha!” declares Jeffries. “That’s where the fourth piece of evidence comes in. The disciples were willing to die for what they claimed about the resurrection. Awfully hard to understand unless they were telling the truth. Who would die for something they know is a lie?”

I initially thought Jason’s question was a response to Hannah’s point about the report of five hundred people seeing Jesus; that he was trying to point out that we don’t know whether five hundred people actually did see Jesus, or whether rumour and exaggeration added this particular claim on to an already-existing resurrection belief some years later. As such, it’s a perfectly valid point, and one that someone should have made, but on rereading it I realised this bit was actually meant to refer to points 3 and 4 on the original list; it seems no-one is going to take any issue with taking the one-off report of five hundred people seeing the risen Jesus at face value. Jeffries also tells us that points 3 and 4 have other problems which they’ll have to talk about later as they’re almost out of time, so I guess we’ll hear more about them in subsequent chapters.

Katie, meanwhile, was busy thinking of other possible explanations the cadets might have missed; Theft And Fraud By Persons Unknown was apparently next on her list, closely followed by Alternative Supernatural. “What if the guy who stole him decided to pretend to be him? To put his clothes on and make wounds in his hands to look like him? For the praise? Because he saw all the praise Jesus was getting and wanted some? Let’s say your best friend dies and you see someone who looks like him. You see some slight differences, but do you think you care? You’d be like ‘You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive!’ And if this reincarnation stuff is true, how do you know ghosts aren’t? He floats up to heaven, he gets absorbed into God – he’s a ghost! Oh, my god, I’m coming up with twenty different explanations!”

I asked her if she wanted to hear my thoughts on what they were saying, and she agreed she did. I explained about the Bible not, in fact, saying that all the five hundred people who were supposed to have seen Jesus saw him ‘in the same way’ – we don’t have any details at all on what they thought they saw. I also explained that I’d read one historian saying that grave robberies were common in those days.

“Well, that makes sense,” Katie said. This is, I pointed out to her, a disturbing thing to hear from your child in response to information about people stealing bodies from graves; to my relief, it turned out that this was because she’d learned about grave robbing when studying Ancient Egypt last year. She agreed that this could account for a missing body. (It wouldn’t on its own account for the claims of resurrection appearances – I still think the most likely explanation is that these started as grief hallucinations and went on to some kind of religious fervour-induced mass hysteria experience – but that’s a bit complicated for a child and, as it was late and Katie wasn’t seeming desperately interested in getting more details, I don’t think I went into that at that point.)

Back to the book; Jason admits that the empty tomb is harder to explain away than he thought, but when Jeffries asks him “Explanation #5, that Jesus rose from the dead, seems to be the simplest explanation, doesn’t it?” Jason replies “Maybe, but I’m still not sure.” Good answer, Jason; this side of the story sounds convincing when it’s all you’ve heard, but it’s a great idea to find out more about the other side of a story before you make your mind up. (Yes, I know my headcanon is that Jason is secretly an evangelical Christian plant placed in the group to steer the conversation to religious issues. If he is a skeptic, though, good on him for not falling for the first superficially convincing argument he hears.) Chapter ends.

Katie, two chapters in, declared herself unimpressed with the arguments so far. “I’ve been able to disarm every single thing they throw at me,” she said, “so, unless they’re stepping up their game… I’m thinking that they’re probably not going to be able to convince me.”

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Two, Part Three

My nine-year-old daughter* and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.

 

*She is in fact now 10. She was 9 when we sat down to review this chapter. One of these days I’ll catch up with myself, although I hope I manage it before she turns 11.

 

When we left our intrepid cadets, they had just been writing a list of possible explanations for the resurrection story. For those who don’t recognise it, Wallace is here using a line of argument used fairly commonly among apologists, which goes like this:

  1. Make out a list of several purported explanations for the resurrection story, including the possibility, merely mentioned as one theory among several at this stage, that the whole thing is true and Jesus really rose from the dead.
  2. Go through each point on the list apart from the ‘Jesus actually rose from the dead’ suggestions and point out all the reasons not to believe it happened.
  3. Conclude that since the only remaining not-disproved explanation is that Jesus did really rise from the dead, this must be the reason, and therefore the resurrection has been proved. QED.

By the way, for anyone interested in an discussion and takedown of the points normally covered in this line of argument I would recommend Richard Carrier’s extremely detailed and comprehensive essay Why I Don’t Buy The Resurrection Story, which goes through the arguments in vastly more detail than I’m going to be able to manage here. Anyway, my last post covered the part that dealt with stage 1 – writing the list of explanations – and the chapter was now moving on to stage 2 of the argument.

I asked Katie what she thought. (As I said before, I wish I’d done that before reading her the list of suggested explanations the book gives; it would have been interesting to hear what a child of this age who wasn’t a fictional mouthpiece for Christian apologetics might come up with of her own accord. As it was, I asked what she thought of the list.)

“I think the possibilities are,” Katie told me, “1. that they imagined him alive – but, since he apparently touched them, that doesn’t make sense unless they were all crazy people on drugs or something. So, I think the most likely thing is that he just fainted. I mean, why do you die on the cross anyway? Do you just die from having nails through your hands?”

I briefly explained the causes. “So… blood loss and lack of oxygen. Wouldn’t that cause someone to faint?” Katie mused. “And when you faint, you look a bit dead and a bit asleep.”

Which, I suppose, does at least answer my longstanding inner question of ‘Swoon Theory? Who the hell believes in Swoon Theory anyway these days?’, which is what I always think when I read these arguments. My nine-year-old daughter under the influence of a Christian apologetics book that was meant to have the reverse effect on her, that’s who. (Seriously, though… could I just point out that every time I remember ever reading this argument, the List Of Possible Explanations has included, and nearly always started with, Swoon Theory – and yet, in years and years of checking every counter-apologetics work I could find in any of the major or minor libraries I frequented during this time, which included a lot of libraries, I can’t remember ever seeing a single counter-apologist actually put this forward as an explanation. So, strawman much?)

Anyway, back to the story, which is now in the second stage of the argument; offering refutations for all the non-‘rose-from-dead’ explanations. Daniel votes against Swoon Theory. For purposes of narrative convenience, he apparently knows the facts that Wallace needs someone to put forward in order to refute this one; he tells the others that crucifixion was a ‘long, terrible way to die’ and that Roman soldiers were experts in checking that their victims were really dead, so he sees no chance that Jesus could have survived this process and done so undetected. (The narrative does not go into how a nineish-year-old happened to know so much about crucifixion).

Katie was unswayed by this argument. “Uh-uh,” she told me firmly. “You know about this stuff. Do you think there’s any chance he could live?”

Despite not actually being a proponent of Swoon Theory myself (personally, I go for Hallucination with a heavy coating of Legend, but that’s a post for another day), I had to answer ‘Yes’ to this one. Fluke survivals of significant trauma happen (especially when you consider that Jesus’s crucifixion seems to have been considerably shorter than the usual). And, while I’ve no doubt the Roman soldiers were good by the standards of their time at checking for signs of life, that’s still relative; ‘the standards of their time’ would have been less rigorous than the standards now. Undetected survival of a crucifixion would have been massively rare, but… any chance? I had to say yes.

“So there you go,” Katie agreed. “There’s a chance he could live. A doctor says that, and you’re very wise.” (Can I just add: Hooray! After all these years, finally one of my children thinks I’m actually wise!)

“And besides,” Katie mused, her thoughts off and running, “these people think he’s magical, so couldn’t we stretch the truth a tiny bit? And the Roman soldiers – maybe there are a group of them who feel bad for this guy, and they’re the ones who check whether he’s really dead. And they say “OK, let’s set him free” because they don’t want him to die. And maybe they’re the ones who open up his tomb.”

I was proud of her for thinking of possible explanations, but an apologist could probably pick half-a-dozen holes in that one, and I didn’t want to leave her with conclusions formed on shaky arguments. “Hang on. That explanation sounds like it’s getting complicated…”

“Still,” Katie declared, homing in on the main weakness of this particular line of apologetic argument more accurately at nine than I’d previously managed at twice that age, “we’re not looking for the simplest explanation. We’re looking for the most likely to be correct. So that one,” she waved vaguely at my computer to indicate the ‘Jesus rose from the dead’ explanation, “is the most simple… do you think it’s the most likely? Have you ever seen someone die and then been like oh, hey, how’re you doing?” She spread her hands in invitation of a non-existent refutation. “I don’t think so. And since you’re a doctor and you know about this stuff, then… cross that one off the list, ‘cos it’s impossible!”

And that, of course, is the biggest flaw of this particular line of apologetic argument. No matter how much apologists might argue that miracles/the supernatural are theoretically possible, the fact remains that, in practice, they have a probability effectively indistinguishable from zero. Over and over and over again, claims of miracles have been investigated and found not to stand up to investigation, Even where problems with the other explanations that we can think of make them unlikely, that isn’t going to make ‘It was a miracle’ the likeliest option.

In the previous chapter, Wallace/Jeffries tried to pre-emptively circumvent this problem by arguing that a God who could create the universe could also do miracles, and therefore we shouldn’t rule that possibility out. The problem with that, though, is that there is a vast chasm between “It is theoretically not impossible that this could have been done by a divine being” and “The likelihood of this having being done by a divine being is high enough that we should consider that as the default explanation if others are ruled out”. We can’t theoretically rule out miracles, in the same way as we can’t theoretically rule out alien visitations or fairy magic; but, in practice, they don’t stand up as a default explanation for the unexplained. If that wasn’t the case, after all, Wallace’s own job as a cold-case detective wouldn’t exist; in any case where other obvious explanations for a murder were ruled out, this same logic would lead us to the conclusion that the victim had actually been miraculously smote dead by God.

As one of my commenters aptly put it a few posts back: ‘Kaas’ Law: “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains may be more improbable than that you made an error in one of your impossibility proofs.”’

Cold Case Christianity For Kids, mother and daughter team review – Chapter Two, Part Two

My nine-year-old daughter* and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.

 

*She is in fact now 10. She was 9 when we sat down to review this chapter. One of these days I’ll catch up with myself, although I hope I manage it before she turns 11.

 

 

 

Chapter Two: Learn How to Infer: Learn How Detectives Find the Truth

Aaaaaaaand time for Bible class again, cadets and readers!

Jeffries asks who investigated Jesus ‘and the claim that He died and then returned to life’ (so at least now he’s referring to it as a claim, which is an improvement – at the end of the last chapter, he was referring to the resurrection without any acknowledgement of the possibility that it might not have actually happened). Hannah and Daniel say that they did. Hannah says that they ‘read that part in our Bibles’ and found out that there are four books in the Bible called Gospels that describe what Jesus did.

Jeffries replies that the Gospels were written by ‘men who knew Jesus, or were friends of those who did’ and thus contain eyewitness testimony, which is a very important form of evidence. Jason promptly asks how we know that these are ‘real eyewitness testimonies instead of legends or myths or something?’ Yay, Jason! Exactly the question to be asking here! To which Jeffries’ answer is:

“Great question as usual. We’ll take a whole session to talk about that – but not today. We’re going to start with the evidence we have and see if it holds up on its own. If it does, then we will check and see if we can trust the testimonies.”

So, hang on… what? Surely the evidence they’re looking at is the testimonies. How the hell can they see if those hold up as evidence before knowing whether they can be trusted in the first place? Surely that’s backwards?

(I do note that Jeffries now doesn’t even seem to be pretending that this supposed police cadet class has been organised as anything other than an evangelical Bible class. ‘We’ll take a whole session to talk about that’, but no sign of him having planned any actual police-related activities for the sessions?)

So, Daniel is asked to make out the list of evidence he found out about the resurrection of Jesus. To which the normal response, I’d have thought – bearing in mind this is a child who’s supposedly read the resurrection accounts for the first time – would at best be a slightly confused list of semi-remembered appearance reports (“Well, Matthew said this, and then Mark said this… wait, was it the other way round?”) Since Wallace’s main aim is apologetics rather than realism, we instead get what seems to be a simplified version of Habermas’ minimal facts approach:

  1. Jesus died on a cross and was buried.
  2. Jesus’s tomb was found empty. His body could not be found.
  3. Jesus’s disciples said they saw Jesus – alive (resurrected).

Anyway, Jeffries adds one item:

4. Jesus’s disciples were so committed to their testimony that they were willing to die for it. They never changed their story.

No queries this time from Jason as to how we know this; maybe he’s got the message that questions like that are just going to be brushed aside with a ‘great question, but we’ll put it on a ‘Deal With At Unspecified Later Time’ mental list and just proceed as though we can assume this point is true’.

But… that said, I am actually going to give Jeffries at least the first part of this point. While the actual martyrdom stories of the disciples are based on pretty shaky evidence, the fact does remain that, in Rome at that time, being a Messianic claimant or a follower of a Messianic claimant could be seen as insurrection against Rome. After all, the Messiah was meant to be a Jewish king who would rule over an emancipated Jewish people whose enemies had been roundly defeated and kicked out – fighting talk, as far as the Romans were concerned. Going round publicly preaching that you followed a Messianic claimant who had already been tried and executed for sedition against the Romans? In that time and place, that was a pretty good way to get yourself into nasty trouble with the law and, yes, potentially executed. The fact that the disciples were willing to do this meant that, whether or not they actually did end up dying for their testimony, they were clearly willing to – either that, or they had so much faith in the rightness of their cause that they believed God would protect them. Either way, one point I do agree with was that the disciples themselves weren’t lying; whatever had convinced them, they genuinely believed that Jesus either had risen or would rise.

Back to the list. Time for the cadets to make a list of possible explanations for the evidence, which is written by Jason in consultation with the others. I missed an opportunity at this point, and regret it; I wish I’d asked Katie for her thoughts on possible explanations before giving her the ones the cadets came up with, as it would have been interesting to see what, if anything, she thought of. Anyway, the cadets came up with – surprise, surprise – pretty much the list that Christian apologists usually come up with at this point so that they can debunk it, although it’s been appropriately simplified for the target age group:

  1. Jesus didn’t really die – He fainted, woke up, and walked away.
  2. The disciples were so upset about Jesus dying that they imagined they saw Him alive.
  3. The disciples stole the body of Jesus and lied about the resurrection.
  4. The story of the resurrection was added on many years later as the story of Jesus became a legendary fairy tale.

“With a capital H for some not-good reason,” Katie commented, indicating the ‘He’ and ‘Him’.

Good catch, daughter mine. Why would a skeptic non-Christian character be capitalising Jesus’s pronouns?

Well, yes, obviously the answer is that Wallace forgot this list was being written by a skeptic non-Christian character and wrote the pronouns the way he himself normally would. But I amused myself by coming up with an in-story reason; namely, that Jason is a plant. He’s secretly an evangelical Christian from Jeffries’ church and Jeffries has asked him to attend the course and pretend to be a skeptic so that he can steer the whole course into becoming an evangelising group. Think about it; although this supposed police academy course has in actual fact effectively been an evangelising Christian course from the minute Jeffries had an opening to steer it onto that track, it was Jason (by bringing up the subject of his churchgoing neighbours) who gave him that opening in the first place. If Jason hadn’t happened to ask that question, what on earth would Jeffries have actually taught them for the course, since he seems to have no actual police-related experiences prepared for them at all? If Jason’s a plant, then that wouldn’t be a concern; Jeffries would have been able to plan all this. I’m onto you, Jeffries and Jason.

Anyway, that’s the list Jason comes up with. Whereupon Jeffries adds ‘5. Jesus rose from the dead.’ because they ‘need to be fair and include every possible explanation’. Hoooooold on a second. Just a few pages back, Jeffries was telling us:

“…We’re trying to separate what’s most reasonable from all the stuff that’s just possible….Remember, many explanations may be possible, but not every explanation is reasonable. For example, it’s possible that little ‘tool-shed gremlins’ crafted the board to make it look old, but that’s not reasonable.”

So what happened to all that “it’s possible but it’s not reasonable” stuff, Jeffries? His/Wallace’s Christian faith happened, is what happened. Sorry, Jeffries/Wallace, but if you get to be skeptical about theoretical tool-shed gremlins, why don’t non-believers get to be skeptical about people rising from the dead?

(To be fair, I suppose one could reasonably argue that nobody is seriously putting forward the existence of skateboard-aging toolshed gremlins as a claim or as an explanation for anything, whereas there were at least many of Jesus’s followers who genuinely believed him to have risen from the dead. Trouble is, that isn’t actually much of a criterion for moving something from the ‘not reasonable’ to the ‘reasonable’ category of explanation. Many people genuinely believe in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena; do we have to include those as possible explanations for unexplained occurrences in order to be fair?)

This seems to be plenty for one post, and it’s about time I posted this instalment anyway. Discussion of the cadets’, Katie’s, and my reaction to the list will therefore be left to a subsequent post. <chirpy Stampycat tone> Byeeeee!

Nephew

Sorry – I meant to post the obvious needed follow-up to my last post on the same day, but held off to check I had the middle name spelling correct and then completely forgot to hit ‘Post’.

My sister gave birth to my third nephew, Abraham Wolf Levine, on the 17th of December. Mother, child, father, and both older brothers doing well. Hello and welcome, Abe! My sister and her family were thrilled to have one more for the Christmas celebrations this year.