Bart Ehrman on *The Colbert Report*

I still plan to read Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which I have heard good things about. I also have read criticisms of the book, and I’ve seen where people use his findings within an orthodox Christian framework (e.g., John Behr’s The Way to Nicaea). I am not as interested in his more popular stuff, which seems to dilute whatever good arguments he might have into bad arguments.

My estimation of Ehrman’s logical skills has been reduced by his appearance on “The Colbert Report” a few weeks ago. Here is the clip.

 
The only argument that Ehrman gave (the lack of arguments had more to do with the nature of Colbert’s show than with Ehrman himself) seemed to be about the difference representations of the crucifixion narratives in Mark and Luke. Ehrman claimed that these were “conflicting” since the Gospel of Mark displayed Jesus as being in agony and confused about why he was being crucified, and the Gospel of Luke portrayed Jesus as caring more about the women watching the crucifixion. Ehrman said that Jesus didn’t “seem” to be in agony in Luke.

First, Luke’s gospel does not discuss Jesus’ agony, which is not the same as displaying the person as not being in agony. Concluding the latter takes a little more work than that. (Similarly, if I tell you a story about myself but don’t include any details about what clothes I am wearing, it would be ridiculous to assume I was naked during the story.) Sometimes you’ll hear a woman talking about giving birth, but she’ll be talking about the way her husband acted or her joy at finally having the baby. The woman won’t mention the pain. Surely it would be foolish to assume that, therefore, the birth was painless.

Second, the mere fact that Jesus was being crucified would have indicated to the readers of Luke that Jesus was in pain. To support the assertion that the Gospel of Luke implies Jesus was not in agony because it doesn’t mention it, one would need to show that Luke would have displayed Jesus in agony if he thought Jesus had been in agony. Granted I haven’t read Ehrman’s book, but there does seem to be much evidence in the text to demonstrate one way or the other. (Of course, this involves exegesis more than textual criticism; the latter is Ehrman’s field, and he hasn’t any claims to expertise in the former. So there are other authorities I’ll trust about this.)

Third, and this is what Colbert tried to get at towards the end, differing accounts are not necessarily contradictory accounts. Logically, there is no contradiction between “On the cross, Jesus was in pain” (Mark’s message and confused about the reason he was being killed) and “On the cross, Jesus cared about the women watching him.”

Anyway, I’m sure Ehrman’s critiques are more substantive in the book. I just thought I’d comment on the video.

Ben Witheringon has posted a lengthy review of Ehrman’s latest book, Jesus, Interrupted. Here is the first of several posts that constitute the review.

Blog Update

I think I’m going to rewrite some old posts for further clarity. Many posts were written hastily (my Government and Slavery posts and my David Hume posts are the ones that stand in the fore of my mind), and I’d like to clarify some of my points.

I have decided that, when I update them, I will repost them so that they show as new posts. I haven’t decided if I’m going to delete the older posts or just leave them for posterity. I’ll probably just leave them on the off chance that someone has linked to them on the website (I know that several of my posts have been linked to, but not all of them). So, be looking for old posts rewritten.

Barry Stroud’s “The Problem of the External World”

[Originally published as ch. 1 in The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism]

In this chapter, Stroud examines the Cartesian argument for skepticism about the external world. Reflecting on our knowledge is a common, everyday task, e.g. when we examine if what we know about the common cold can be true. Descartes did this common, everyday task, except he did so over all his knowledge. He did this by finding a common source to most of his beliefs: the senses. He found the best possible case that one could be in to get knowledge through the senses: sitting in front of his fire, paper in hand. If this case is truly representative of how we get knowledge (or, more accurately, how we think we get knowledge) of the external world, then Descartes’ findings about this case will be representative of sense-knowledge. He found that he couldn’t distinguish reality from dreaming, and you don’t *know* things on account of your dreams; so he couldn’t *know* that he was sitting by the fire. 

Descartes assumes: (1) you can’t know something on account of your dreams; (2) to know X through your senses, you’d have to know you weren’t dreaming when you thought you were learning X through your senses; and (3) you can’t distinguish dreaming from being awake.

The first assumption is widely regarded as correct; the way we use “know” in everyday life excludes us from knowing something on account of our dreams. The second assumption is more difficult to discuss. To know X, we don’t have to know the truth of every proposition that must be true if X is true; if this was true, we’d have to know an indeterminate number of propositions. But we do have to know the falsity of some things that contradict what we know, and we have to know the falsity of things that undermine our evidence for believing what we believe. But it’s not clear how much we have to know in order to know X. Descartes idea that we have to know we aren’t dreaming to know X has been intuitively forceful throughout history, however, so it’s at least plausible. Thirdly, if you accept that you must know that you aren’t dreaming to know anything, then you can never have knowledge of anything. Because, how can you know the evidence/information you use as the basis of your belief that you aren’t dreaming is reliable, if you can’t *know* anything unless you know you aren’t dreaming? This quickly turns into an infinite regress, because to use evidence to prove the reliability of the evidence you are using to prove you aren’t dreaming would mean that you’d have to know that this secondary information is reliable. And if you aren’t certain about the evidence/information you use to prove you aren’t dreaming, how can you be certain you aren’t dreaming?

So, prima facie, Descartes’ arguments are compelling. We are left behind a veil that separates us from reality. We have lost knowledge of chairs, tables, rocks, etc. We’ve even lost knowledge that other people exist. We can’t dismiss Descartes’ conclusion on the basis that it is some kind of philosophical knowledge, not the normal knowledge people care about, because Descartes reflected upon knowledge in the manner that people reflect upon knowledge everyday.

5 KEY POINTS

1. Dreaming and knowing aren’t incompatible; you can know X to be true, and dream X, but by dreaming you don’t *thereby* know X.
2. It’s not the fact that you are dreaming that keeps you from having knowledge, it’s merely the fact that you *might* be dreaming and you don’t *know* you aren’t.
3. Descartes assumes that anything that can occur in real life can occur in your dreams.
4. To establish that he’s not dreaming he would need something more than just experience or information alone that shows he’s not dreaming, he would also need to know that these experiences or that that information is reliable.
5. “A possible deficiency in the basis of my belief can interfere with my knowledge without itself rendering false the very thing I believe.” 

Is Merlyn the Magician a Libertarian?

I came across this passage from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and I thought you might find it interesting.

Merlyn was still explaining. 

“When I was a young man,” he said, “there was a general idea that it was wrong to fight in wars of any sort. Quite a lot of people in those days declared they would never fight for anything whatever.”

“Perhaps they were right,” said the King.

“No. There is one fairly good reason for fighting–and that is, if the other man starts it. You see wars are a wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them.”

“But both sides always say that the other side started them.”

“Of course they do, and it is a good thing that it should be so. At least, it shows that both sides are conscious, inside themselves, that the wicked thing about a war is its beginning.”

“But the reasons,” protested Arthur. “If one side was starving the other by some means or other–some peaceful, economic means which were not actually warlike–then the starving side might have to fight its way out–if you see what I mean?”

“I see what you mean,” said the magician, “but you are wrong. There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever the wrong which your nation might be doing to mine–short of war–my nation would be in the wrong if it started a war so as to redress it. A murderer, for instance, is not allowed to plead that his victim was rich and oppressing him–so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force.”

(part 2, chapter 4)

The bolded line is interesting to me because Merlyn seems to hold governments to the same standards of justice and morality as individuals. That is a central idea of libertarianism.

And if Merlyn is libertarian, is there any doubt that we’re right?

Pondering an Argument from Two Years Ago…

In reading a book unrelated to the philosophy of religion — perhaps it is wrong to say it is unrelated, but, at most, it is distantly related — I recalled an argument by a physics major in my Philosophy of Religion course. I took the course two years ago, so it is odd that the argument surfaced again. In fact, the argument is not a great argument, but for some reason it caught my attention then and resurfaced now.

The physics major, whose name I do not recall, was the typical annoying science major. Everyone is aware of the type I am referring to: they are know-it-alls, argumentative, and decidedly close-minded towards contributions from other fields. As you could imagine, he constantly referred to scientific truths whose truths he apparently regarded as undeniably true, and then asserted that this “truth” told us something about religion, specifically, that God does not exist.

The argument that I happened to remember a moment ago was that, since quantum physics tells us that there is a chance, albeit a small chance, that his hand could pass through the surface of the desk he was sitting at, the world exhibited a lack of design; therefore, since the world lacks design, there was not a Designer.

Yet, this argument is a poor one for other reasons besides the following, it is a poor argument because it his example, i.e. the hand going through the desk, does not prove a lack of design. Like the absolute skeptics about the external world who still look both ways when crossing the street, I’m sure this physics major had no reservations about putting his hand on the desk, sitting in a chair, walking up a flight of stair, or any other menial tasks which would prove doubtful, if not dangerous, if what he claims is true.

“I have no reservations about doing those task,” he might reply, “because the probability is so small that it is negligible. I have no need to worry about them.” Yet, it is precisely this that I am wanting to make manifest. The situation of one solid passing through another, though possible, is so far removed from being probable that we can neglect it; in fact, no one knows if it has ever happened or if it ever will happen. So, the fact that we can continue are lives ignorant of this small possibility could be viewed as an example of design.

God’s design in the world would be apparent in how well it worked, and the physic major’s counterargument does not affect the fact that the world works well and displays design.