I was originally going to follow the
last post in my series critiquing J. P. Holding with a post evaluating his use of a book called
Portraits of Paul by Malina and Neyrey, but I've decided it's important to first try to understand what Holding is, in general, arguing. Answer: I'm not totally sure. The general idea is supposed to be that Christianity had a lot of disadvantages and couldn't have succeeded without irrefutable evidence of a real miracle, but it gets rather muddled as he goes on. I suggest readers look at Holding's original piece,
The Impossible Faith, to try to figure it out for themselves. Let me give a run down, though, of the problems:
LogicRichard Carrier, in the opening of his
critique of Holding, noted, "One thing that is missing from Holding's paper is any sort of formal logical or statistical argument." In response to this, Holding said, "The expectation is misplaced to begin with; as a work written for a popular audience, no such "formal logical or statistical argument" is required, and in any event, if the logic is not dressed in tuxedo and tails simply to satisfy Carrier's nascent snobbery, that's just plain too bad for him." What Holding doesn't understand is that when academics lay out the steps of their logic precisely, they aren't just showing off and trying to alienate nonspecialists. They're trying to write in such a way that its easy to specify what is right and wrong about their argument. When an argument is laid out in a careful, logical manner, critics get both the benefit and the challenge of saying exactly where the argument goes wrong. If something is wrong, they can show everyone else this in a very precise and convincing, and if nothing is wrong, they are prevented from throwing around lots of red herrings whose irrelevance is hard to demonstrate due to the lack of clarity in the original argument.
Holding didn't need to lay out his argument with numbered premises, but it would have helped if he had clearly laid out how the argument works. As I'll explain below, different passages in his writing suggest contradictory framings of the argument. Holding would likely argue I'm misreading him, but to avoid such misreadings he needs to clarify what he's trying to say.
StatisticsContinuing from the opening of Carrier's critique:
Despite his rather hyperbolic language, even Holding must admit that the odds of Christianity becoming successful without being true could not be zero even on all of his own assumptions. Human behavior is not that predictable, nor are there any demonstrated historical "laws" that make any conclusion about historical cause-and-effect beyond all probability of error. Rather, Holding can only mean that the probability of Christianity becoming successful, on all of his own assumptions and premises, is so low that we have no rational ground to believe it did--except by some divine aid. In Holding's version of the argument, this fact can only become reasonably probable if we accept as true the premise that the "witness of the resurrection" was (and therefore is) "irrefutable."
Holding's response:
But no: it is not true that even I, as he says, "must admit that the odds of Christianity becoming successful without being true could not be zero even on all of his own assumptions." I admit no such thing and never will. I say indeed: The odds of success, barring the validating evidence of the resurrection, would indeed be, for all intents and purposes, zero.
The "all intents and purposes" clause suggests that Holding does not understand the difference between a very small probability and a probability of zero. This mistake is a common thread that runs through all sorts of bogus claims, which means that it ends up getting pointed out a lot, and ignorance of it is inexcusable.
This example from Michael Shermer jumps immediately to mind; I use it a lot because its at such an elementary level. Another example comes from Carrier himself in his article
Probability of Survival vs. Miracle when he discusses royal flushes. The example is brilliant because it is so tempting to say that 99.9999846% certainty (the odds against any given poker hand being a royal flush) is pretty much the same as 100% certainty, yet it's not. Carrier uses another excellent example in his actual response to Holding:
Many fantastically improbable things happen all the time, simply because so many things happen. For example, "that's about as likely as getting struck by lightning" is often used as a cliche of an event so improbable it never happens, yet over four hundred people are struck by lightning every year in the United States alone. Some people have been struck multiple times.[2] Hence our intuition often fails us when estimating the improbable.
Holding, perhaps unsurprisingly, misses the point entirely:
The appeal of comparison to being struck by lightning is especially ludicrous. Carrier apparently sees no difference between the odds of one particular person being struck by lightning (which is indeed very unlikely) and the odds of anyone at all being struck by lightning (which is not at all improbable), especially "anyone" whose positions put them at high risk for being struck. Given Carrier's robust inability to perform this very basic critical thought process, we justifiably wonder about the validity of his demands for number-crunching.
Carrier's point was, of course, that what's improbable in one case will not be improbable given many chances to happen. Even if the rise of Christianity was improbable in its specific case, that is irrelevant so long as there is nothing improbable in some religious movement, somewhere would luck out in the required manner. This is exactly the sort of precise distinction that Holding refuses to make. To boot, he's once again shown that he has serious reading comprehension issues.*
The Burden of ProofThroughout his response to Carrier, Holding whines that Carrier criticizes him for lacking evidence, yet Carrier lacks evidence for his proposed explanations. What Holding fails to recognize is that it's his argument, he has to show it works, he bears to burden of proof. If there isn't any clear evidence either way on an issue, Holding has failed to establish what he claims to establish, which is the main thing Carrier's critique is designed to show, a point Carrier has already stated explicitly. Since Carrier has already pointed this out, this seems a little repetitious, but Holding's whining is so persistent that I can't help myself.
One reason that Holding bears the burden of proof is that the default assumption should be that Christianity was basically like any other religious movement. Countless small cults have existed throughout world religious history, and I see not the faintest reason to think any of them had superhuman assistance. I assume that Holding would agree, because most Christians in the modern world shy away from attributing other religions to demons. If other religious movements got by without superhuman assistance, we can assume that that's what happened with Christianity. It's Holding's job to show otherwise. It's not the job of Carrier or any other critic to prove the point.
Holding manages to misrepresent Carrier's position on this issue as well:
In the end, Carrier hypocritically admits that "[n]ormally, this is not a barrier to historical inquiry, since we need only ascertain the most probable cause of an event, given all we know." His excuse for pleading an exception here, however, runs back to the same old Skeptical canards and presuppositions about alleged improbability of miracles.
Never in Carrier's critique, or anywhere else in the large sampling of his writings that I have read, does he presuppose or even argue that miracles are impossible. Rather, he claims that based on our empirical knowledge of the world, we should hold miracles to be improbable, and not believe one occurred without very strong evidence. I am tempted to say that Holding must be a liar for implying that Carrier claims more than this, but perhaps he is simply dull-witted.
Confusions in Holding's claimsFinally, let me explain what I said above about the apparent contradictions in Holding's case. In the original essay, he appears to claim that Christianity's handicaps could not have been overcome without evidence of a genuine miracle. Yet in his response to Carrier, he appears to make a weaker claim that Chrianity could not have succeeded without belief in a miracle (and no one denies that it had that), but that it's peculiar situation would have prevented it from claiming one without evidential back-up. The evidence for the second reading:
Carrier's first reply only validates my point: A crucified deity would require a vindication to be worshipped. And here, I do not require that "Inanna was really resurrected" since Inanna's death and revival occurred in the world of the gods -- not in the mundane world of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.
Apparently, Holding conceeds people believed in Inanna's vindication (which negated her shaming) without evidence, but argues Christianity needed evidence because of its situation.
Holding considers it a victory when:
Carrier ends up admitting that yes, "divine backing" was essential to the Christian solution to popular social problems.
Even though Carrier was talking about mere belief in divine backing.
In close he appeals to the critiques of Celsus, who claimed that he kept running into this same wall: Christians would simply exclaim "do not question, just believe!" And perhaps he did -- as he would have, hundreds of years after facts could be checked and the apologetic distance became too inaccessible to be checked in the first place. Origen then is right in a sense in his reply that most people don't even have the time for that (since people worked long hours in antiquity just to get by) -- when the evidence is NOT any longer checkable or accessible (as in Origen's day, and before the benefits of scholarship and leisure time in our modern day) "just believe" (with a form of Pascal's Wager) is the best an Origen could offer most people -- and it was no fault of his own, and had no application for the critical formative years when the evidence was still reasonably accessible.
Holding never suggests that Christianity's disadvantages vanished by the 2nd and 3rd century, when Celsus and Origen wrote, so apparently he only things Christians needed evidence in the early years when it was still available.
[EDIT: One last one, which I hadn't been able to find when I first wrote this post:
Naïve as well is Carrier's retort that "nothing supernatural would be necessary" for Jesus to start and maintain a ministry, since the likes of Zeno and Epicurus did the same - as if either of these made a claim to be the hypostatic incarnation of YHWH, thus intimating an ability to perform the supernatural! Other questions of the same type are equally misguided: "Did Essenes and promoters of the cults of Isis, Mithras, Cybele, all require superhuman powers to win converts?" Yes, in fact, they did - Essenes needed to believe in the power of YHWH; Mithraists needed to believe that their god had supernaturally caused the procession of the equinoxes, and so on. That these matters were inaccessible at the time of conversion only magnifies my point inasmuch as this could hardly be of any option for Christianity in its critical formative years.]
The importance of the distinction between the two readings of Holding's argument will become clear later on, but that will involve taking a careful look at the scholarship, so will be saved for another post.
*Note on adversarial misunderstanding: When I say that Holding is misreading Carrier, I should note, for sake of completeness, that Carrier and Holding have already both made that accusation of each other. That is to a certain extent irrelevant to my criticisms of Holding, though, because the problems I noticed were obvious to me without having to ask Carrier himself what he meant. Also, Carrier's responses to Holding show a willingness to acknowledge Holding's accusations and say that Holding may have simply been unclear. Holding, so far as I have seen, has not reciprocated. In place of suck acknowledgements is Holding's usual stream of tedious insults.