Ehrman vs. Brown in Columbus, OH

Michael Brown and Bart Ehrman debated the problem of evil at the Ohio State University in April of 2010. The audio is available from Brian Auten as an mp3.

One of the best features of this debate is that it is narrowly focused on a particular topic, which prevents a certain degree of vagueness and Gish-galloping.

Brown basically makes the case that suffering is not a problem because any given instance of suffering is instrumental to some greater good, whether that would be human free will, personal repentance, or else some unknown and unknowable divine purpose. He also defends a traditional approach to Christian scripture (e.g. he takes the Book of Job as a single narrative contra the conclusions of textual analyses) and makes the case that human sin is really the ultimate problem on Earth, leading to privation, starvation, and natural disasters and epidemics as well. He makes about as strong a case as possible, given the material that he has to work from.

Ehrman leads with the idea that the Bible is not unified in its treatment of major theological issues, including the problem of evil. He starts with the view found in Amos (and the prophets generally) that collective suffering is the result of a collective failure to follow God's commands, and exposes the collegiate audience to a few choice verses which they probably never endured in their Sunday School lessons. He goes on the outline the view of suffering found in the Book of Job, which is essentially that suffering is a test of character, and that one should never question "acts of God" understood here in the sense the phrase is usually used in insurance policies. He also points out the view of the apocalyptic books that suffering is the direct result of evil spiritual forces acting in the world. He finally makes the point that God sometimes directly intervenes to prevent human suffering, according to the Biblical accounts.

On rebuttal, both speakers go at each other with an unusual degree of unaffected passion, which makes for interesting listening. At times, this part gets painfully personal.

Overall, both speakers to a fine job of making their respective cases, but do not expect an in-depth presentation or rebuttal of the various philsophical theodicies, such as Hick's soul-making theodicy or Plantinga's assertion that it may be logically impossible to actualize a world with moral good but without moral evil. Instead, the speakers focus on real-world problems and scriptural (rather than theological) answers to those problems.

Ehrman vs. Evans in Kansas City, MO

In this debate (video, audio) Bart Ehrman and Craig Evans debated the question "Does the New Testament Misquote Jesus" using a somewhat unusual format by which the interlocutors on both sides are asked to reply to a series of seven distinct and focused questions:

Q1. Are the gospels reliable?
Q2. Do the gospels accurately preserve the teaching of Jesus?
Q3. Do the gospels accurately preserve the activities of Jesus?
Q4. Do the gospels contain eyewitness tradition?
Q5. Do archæologists and historians use the gospels as sources?
Q6. Have the gospels been accurately preserved down through the centuries?
Q7. Do manuscript variants of the gospels effect significant Christian doctrines?

Ehrman repeatedly encourages the audience to go back and reread the gospels, carefully and in parallel, comparing the passages describing a particular story (e.g. the empty tomb narrative) across all of the available sources. He also poses a number of interesting questions for personal study, such as: If Jesus went around openly claiming to be God incarnate (as in the gospel of John) then why did the authors of the synoptics miss this important theological detail, and why was he never stoned for blasphemy? Ehrman points our various other significant discrepancies in the gospel narratives, e.g. Jesus was silent throughout the passion narrative in gMark (up until the outburst on the cross) but he behaved very differently throughout the same events as depicted in gLuke and gJohn.

Evans, for his part, essentially maintains that the gospels are essentially accurate histories, citing various Christian biblical scholars for support. He also makes a couple interesting arguments from the internal evidence of the gospels relative to the live issues in the church around the close of the first century.

I would have preferred a bit more direct cross-examination between the speakers, but the question by question format has its virtues, for example, it was refeshing that the speakers stayed closely on topic. This was overall a scholarly and polite debate, and both men fairly effectively made the strongest points available to their side. I heartily commend this one for your viewing/listening pleasure.

Ehrman vs. D’Souza at UNC

I purchased this debate so that you will never have to do so. Seriously, don't bother, there are far better debates available entirely for free online, many of which include video.

Ehman does a fine job of unpacking the problem of suffering, just as he has done in plenty of other debates. D'Souza, to his credit, dose a fine job of muddling the issues by bringing in a few facially plausible analogies to childrearing and parenting, along with the bizarre idea that a decent respect for human free will obliges one to stand back and allow rapists and murderers to act as they will. He makes it sound better than that, of course.

The rebuttal period was lamentably short, such that no one really digs into the problems of whether the free-will defense is soundly grounded upon facts about the world, although Ehrman runs a clever rebuttal based on the putative nature of the Christian afterlife. Moreover, the soul-building theodicy is put forth but never really examined. There just wasn't enough time to do so.

Overall, both speakers do a decent job, given severe time constraints, but they never really get beyond the first level arguments and hinting at a few possible theodicies. Best take a pass on this one and find another one of Ehrman's several debates on this topic.

Ehrman vs. Licona in Matthews, NC

Bart Ehrman and Mike Licona, both prominent Biblical scholars and historians, debated the resurrection of Jesus at Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina (video, audio). As in their first debate, evangelical scholar Mike Licona has home field advantage and a very friendly crowd.

After a surprising amount of autobiography, Licona leads with three allegedly well-established facts from Biblical scholarship:

1. Jesus was crucified and died


2. Some disciples claimed to have seen Jesus afterward


3. Paul also claimed to have seen Jesus afterward

He goes on to claim that the best way to explain these facts is to conclude that the gospels are reliable in their claims of a literal bodily resurrection. His argument is that if you accept the New Testament accounts on these key details, you should go on to accept the gospels at face value, no matter how mythical the accounts might seem, because there is no point in ruling anything out as inherently unlikely, however miraculous it might be. Essentially, it is as if he lifted a resurrection-shaped hole out of the gospel accounts, and went on to note how perfectly he could plug that hole by reinserting the resurrection into the accounts from whence it was lifted. Of course, he manages to make it sound a good deal more reasonable than that, by going on at some length about historical methodology.

Ehrman's opening is a fairly strong condensation of his general case against the reliability of the gospels as historical sources, in which He uses the phrase "it depends on which gospel you read" at least two dozen times in reply to various historical questions he poses. He also provides a different account of historical methodology than that given by Licona. Ehrman seems to think that ancient written accounts are never going to be strong enough evidence to demonstrate the truth of a miraculous claim, given the very low apriori probability of such claims relative to other possibilities, e.g. mythmaking, hallucinations, dreams, visions, false memories.

On rebuttal, both speakers do a fine job of addressing their opponent's case head-on, which is surprisingly rare in these kinds of debates. I found Ehrman's rebuttal more effective, but then it seems to me that he had most of the relevant facts on his side. No doubt the audience saw it in a different light.

It should be noted that a major point of difference between the speakers lies in their treatment of probability, and neither one provides a full enough account of what probability theory really does in order to dispel his opponent's intuitions about how probability works. They would do well to go back to fundamentals on this issue. Mike even seems to posit that the relevant probability is the likelihood that an event takes place given that the most powerful being in the universe wants it to happen, which I'm pretty sure is a theological premise neither covered in his original three points nor established by independent argument.

Overall, though, this debate featured strong openings and vigorous give and take between two of the top scholars in the relevant field. Definitely worth seeing.

Ehrman vs. Swinburne (radio)

I would never say that there exists a particularly rational counterargument to the evidential argument from evil, but Swinburne's attempts here are as good as they come.  This radio segment is worthwhile if only because you don't often hear sophisticated argument about the problem of evil on the radio.

Ehrman vs. Licona in Kansas City, MO

Interestingly, this debate took place at my own non-alma-mater, the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.  I still get their newsletter from time to time.

Licona is seriously losing his voice (alas!) and this becomes downright hilarious around 14 minutes into the film when he attempts an homage to commercial audio fine print.  He tries to make the case that an historical analysis may demonstrate the truth of the resurrection to a reasonable certainty, by applying his own set of criteria to a set of “generally accepted facts” which fairly resemble the minimal facts of Dr. Gary Habermas.  He also includes a few cute pictures of children’s cartoon animals, and at least one animated express train.

Ehrman, for his part, walks back the congregation on their assumptions about the nature and origin of scripture, giving an account of how the gospels came about several decades after the life of Christ as the result of a multinational and multilingual process of passing around the basic Christian kerygma and myth until it finally ripened into a more-or-less biographical form, penned down by anonymous authors several steps removed from the historical Jesus of Nazareth.  I got the sense that the pastor sitting behind Professor Ehrman was distinctly nervous for his flock by this point in the presentation, and this made it all the more entertaining to watch.

Except for Licona’s fading voice and ridiculous visual aids, this was overall one of the best head-to-heads on the issues surrounding the resurrection of Jesus.  Both sides gave just about the best case that you can hope to get, and both presenters were evidently quite comfortable with the material and with their presentation thereof.  Definitely worth watching.

Overall rating: 4.5 stars

[2008-02-28]

 

 

 

Ehrman vs. Craig in Worcester, MA

William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman debated the question "Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus" at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts (mp3, transcript). This debate featured a fair bit of poisoning the well and a few genetic fallacies (from both sides) but we'll overlook that for the moment.

Craig made his usual argument, firstly, to the establishment of the following four historical facts:

1. Jesus' burial


2. His empty tomb


3. Post-mortem appearances


4. Disciples' belief in resurrection.

From there, Craig goes on to argue that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation for these four facts.

Ehrman attempts to refute this argument by showing that any of these facts might easily have had a perfectly natural explanation. The third point, for example, might be explained by enthusiastic religious visions or by the possibility that grief stricken followers may have mistaken someone else for their beloved rabbi, cruelly taken from them. Interestingly, both of these hypotheses enjoy some support in the Christian Scriptures, the former in the writings of Paul (who claimed to have personal visions of Jesus and who counseled his parishioners in the proper methods of receiving divine revelation while in communal meetings) and the latter in a handful of gospel pericopes in which Jesus' forlorn disciples do not recognize him at first but later come to believe they had seen him.

For the empty tomb, Ehrman comes up with an off-the-cuff scenario which is too good to pass up:

Jesus gets buried by Joseph of Arimathea. Two of Jesus' family members are upset that an unknown Jewish leader has buried the body. In the dead of night, these two family members raid the tomb, taking the body off to bury it for themselves. But Roman soldiers on the lookout see them carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets, they confront them, and they kill them on the spot. They throw all three bodies into a common burial plot, where within three days these bodies are decomposed beyond recognition.

This seems perfectly plausible to me, although we do not have any evidence one way or the other. Once an empty tomb is actually found, it is only a matter of time until the resurrection rumors and claims of personal revelation start flying around the community of those who once followed Jesus and considered him to be the Messiah promised of God.

Ehrman comes up with a few other naturalistic scenarios, few of which Craig even seriously considers even for a moment. When he does do so, however, he does so badly. Here is an example:

Well, look at these other hypotheses. Perhaps, for example, family members of Jesus stole the body. Isn't that more probable?" I don't think so. Notice there's no motive in that case for stealing the body; the family members of Jesus didn't believe in him during his lifetime. Nobody else other than Joseph and his servants and the women disciples even knew where the body had been interred. The time was insufficient for such a conspiracy to be hatched and launched between Friday night and Sunday morning. Also the grave clothes in the tomb disprove the hypothesis of tomb robbery; nobody would undress the body before taking it away.

Here, Craig assumes facts quite apart from those which he established earlier as part of a widespread scholarly consensus, such as the grave clothes in the tomb. Earlier in this same debate, Craig maintained that "the presence of inconsistencies in a later, less reliable source does nothing to undermine the credibility of an earlier, more credible source" but fails to note that the earlier more credible source in this case is that of Mark, which makes no mention whatsoever of grave clothes lying in the tomb! He also seems

Possibly the most unique part of this debate was an admirable but quixotic attempt at Bayesian maths by Dr. Craig. He gets the basic idea right, but mischaracterizes how the formulae ought should apply to his own position as well as that of his opponent. I'm boring myself just recounting this part, so I'll move on.

I'd give each debater 4.5 stars on substance, with -0.5 for snarkiness and circumstantial ad hom. Overall, this was a four-star debate.