I find this completely bizarre.
Jason Thibodeau has a “new” argument against the resurrection over on The Secular Outpost. I say, “new” because even if the argument hasn’t gotten widespread attention before, I cannot possibly imagine that it has not been previously advanced by someone. JT isn’t vouching for this argument per se, but rather he wanted to “present it [there] and solicit the thoughts of the Secular Outpost community”.
What is this grand argument? I copy it verbatim:
(1) God is completely rational.
Thus,
(2) Any action that God performs is undertaken on the basis of some good reason.
(3) There is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus from the dead.
Therefore,
(4) God did not resurrect Jesus from the dead.
Premise (1) follows from the fact that God is perfect and (2) is a consequence of (1). Therefore, the soundness of the argument depends on the truth of (3). We can defend (3) by considering possible reasons that God might have for resurrecting Jesus and rejecting them. It is probably impossible to consider all possible factors that might count in favor of God’s resurrecting Jesus. However, that need not undermine the argument. Suppose we are not certain that there is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus from the dead. We can issue a challenge to any person who believes that God did resurrect Jesus. That challenge would be to provide the good reason for God to resurrect Jesus. In the absence of any such account of God’s reason, we ought to be skeptical that there is such a reason.
One would hope most of my readers would instantly see significant problems with this argument, but since there are only two of you, it looks like our only options are all, half or none. So just in case it’s not “all” I thought I’d just go ahead and say a couple things.
- Are you kidding me? and
- No, seriously. Are you kidding me?
Moving on, the first bit of bizarre here is that the argument is titled “A moral argument against the resurrection”. But where is morality in this argument? Nowhere. Nowhere at all. One really, truly hopes that Thibodeau revised the argument after typing in the title, or swapped out an entirely different argument for this one, because if Thibodeau actually thinks that’s a moral argument I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
But assuming the title is some slip of the brain, I suppose we can start with the premises. They are found in statements 1 & 3. Statement 2 is a derivation of p1. But as the explanatory paragraph tells us, p1 is actually a derivation of a premise not included in the formal argument, “God is perfect.” But how do we know that p1 follows from p0? Is “perfect love” completely rational? What about “perfect hunger”? How many imperfect gods have we examined to infer that the perfect god must be completely rational? How many perfect gods have we examined to test that hypothesis? Really, it’s just silly.
But the real trouble here is in p3 and the explanation of it. Remember:
We can defend (3) by considering possible reasons that God might have for resurrecting Jesus and rejecting them.
Okay, but there’s an infinity of possible reasons, how do we reject them all? I give full credit to the team at the Secular Outpost for their expertise in theopsychology, but this seems a daunting task. But never fear, this argument doesn’t rest or fall on the people making it:
Suppose we are not certain that there is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus from the dead. We can issue a challenge to any person who believes that God did resurrect Jesus. That challenge would be to provide the good reason for God to resurrect Jesus.
See? The right way to employ this argument is to assert that the statement “there is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus” is true and to cling to it unless and until someone proves it false!
Oy, vey.
So this is a bad argument because it quite obviously and openly relies on shifting the burden of proof. Thibodeau has an assertion that he dares his opponents to prove wrong. But if this is a valid tactic, then any random theist who asserts “My god is real, prove me wrong” is engaged in a valid, reasoned enterprise and is justified in believing in whatever god until someone disproves that specific god. Likewise, the statements “bigfoot exists” or “chupacabras ate all my crudités” are true until definitively proven false. Even such ridiculous statements as “Crip Dyke is typing all this up only after changing out of her pajamas” must be taken as true until someone proves them false.
And of course that would be bad and wrong no matter what the context, but in a world where theists are constantly trying to decline the burdens of proof for their own assertions, deploying burden shifting in a proof that the Christian god did not resurrect Jesus is dramatically worse. If we engage in burden shifting, how will we stop theists from doing the same?
In this context, the burden shifting is not merely bad because it’s irrational. it’s bad because we know from history that theists will use burden shifting again and again, and if we treat this argument seriously in any way, we lose the possibility of productive conversations with semi-to-mostly reasonable theists who become convinced that burden shifting is a valid tactic since “both sides do it”.
Ugh. Just ugh. The horribleness of this naked burden-shifting leaves me without even any energy to point out that
In the absence of any such account of God’s reason, we ought to be skeptical that there is such a reason.
is an argument from ignorance.
I guess I’ll have to point that out some other time.
There is no good reason for God to resurrect Jesus from the dead.
What about “so he could torture him some more”?
Whatever God decides to do is good by definition, so that would be good too!
/William Lane Craig
Yes, bizarre. No better than some, and worse than other, theist arguments.
Thanks for “theopsychology”. I’ve come across the phenomenon many times in (mostly informal) arguments against God’s existence, but never put a word to it. It’s invariably annoying.
Who’s the other?
He didn’t want his incarnated form to be dead, so he unzombified himself. Isn’t that good enough?
Well, you can think of the request for a “good” reason as being a request for something thought to be valuable. It ought to be sufficiently reasonable, which is in a meaningful sense better than insufficiently reasonable. This isn’t distinctively moral (yet), but it can turn into that (see below).
The point so far is that it’s not supposed to be assumed that any old reason whatsoever would be satisfactory. “He did it because monkeys don’t fly out of my ass” would not be a reason that qualifies, even if it happens to be true. One is supposed to make a case that this is what God ought to do as a rational being, that he would’ve been wrong somehow (at least in the sense of being irrational) if he had failed to do so.
Normally, Christians would talk about salvation here. There was original sin, and this is why (morally) JC had to come back: so we could be redeemed/saved/etc. So, given this type of response, which sort of looks like it’s about morality (even if it isn’t genuinely, like religious nonsense about morality in general), the counterargument could be to show that this would not be a morally appropriate way for God to act. There are such arguments, which straightforwardly address this point.
But instead of doing anything like that, the argument presented above is just a lot of hot air. Maybe somebody knew there were supposed to be moral reasons for it, that this is supposed to make a significant difference to how we understand and evaluate these Christians’ arguments. But then they promptly forgot what their job was and just typed out some random crap that does nothing. That’s my best guess. They don’t really know why they’re arguing about it … but why should that stop them? Let them have their fun.
*shaking head in disbelief*
That isn’t an argument.
There are many many reasons that Christians offer for why Jesus was resurrected. Sure, you might think that none of the reasons make sense, but the argument needs to explain the details, rather than simply asserting that none of them make sense. As is, the argument skips anything of substance, and leaves me wondering if the author lacks even passing familiarity with Christian beliefs.
I think it is fair to shift the burden of proof to Christians, at least temporarily. As I said, there are many many reasons that Christians offer for why Jesus was resurrected, and if we imagine having a one-on-one with an individual Christian we don’t know what particular reason they would prefer to discuss. The practical way to conduct the argument is to ask the Christian to offer a reason, which we can then focus on. In a blogging context, the blogger should do a basic google search to find the most common reasons offered for the resurrection, and address those, before asking commenters to suggest more reasons.
The argument absolutely should not be framed as a deductive argument. At best, it’s a conversation-starter.
Isn’t he a professor of philosophy?
Well, maybe we can all blame post-modernism and still have some time for a beer.
In the absence of any such account of God’s reason, we ought to be skeptical that there is such a reason.
Doesn’t god move in mysterious ways? ™ That they are mysterious implies that there is a divine intent, i.e.: a reason. It’s just not shared with us lowlies.
I mean, you could certainly argue that “This god person is supposed to be rational, and some of the actions he is credited with (eg. sentencing people to hell for not believing in him) are not the actions of a rational being.”
But resurrecting various people? Even I can think of reasons why that might be reasonable.
Given all the questionable behavior of the Biblical God, does Thibodeau think that the resurrection is the lone straw that breaks the whole story apart? Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen good reasons, from a fictional-writing point of view, why this God character would resurrect the Jesus character at this point in the story. So if he were to throw that argument at me, I’d be tossing it back in his court in short order, even though I don’t believe in the truth of the whole story to begin with.
The best argument for why GtF* resurrected Jesus was so Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis and Dionysus would have a new pal for their gang.
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* god the father of course.