Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part Four: Licona Responds and Q&A

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Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part Four: Licona Responds and Q&A

June 18, 2025

Today is the final episode in our four-part series covering the 2014 debate between Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. Evan Fales. In this hour-long episode, Licona spends 15 minutes responding to Fales's presentation from part three, addressing the claims that miracles are metaphysically impossible and arguing that Hume’s criteria for miracle testimony are too strict. Following this segment, the two professors spend 45 minutes answering audience questions.

Transcript

Today on the Risen Jesus podcast, we wrap up the 2014 debate between Dr. Evan Fales and Dr. Michael Licona on the resurrection of Jesus. This final episode in the four-part series includes Licona's response to Fales's presentation and a lengthy question and answer period. Thanks for listening.

All right, well, thank you. And thank you Evan for that paper. And that was wonderful.

And he represented all of my arguments accurately to, you know, as far as I could tell, so I appreciate that. So just as a response for a few minutes here, let's deal with what he said about Hume and my treatment of Hume at first. He said, remember, the Hume's arguments that were presented were number one, well, metaphysically impossible.

I see that wasn't Hume's argument. But Evan's argument. And I see that you kind of softened on that from what I saw in your works.

I thought you said in your works, the OUP book from last year and also the article that you wrote for the forthcoming one seemed to say that you thought they were metaphysically impossible. And in your paper, you said maybe. So have you softened on that? Not much.

I mean, I find those arguments pretty strong. I wasn't when I initially formulated the arguments aware of this work by John Robert Russell, which I have to say might be right. Okay.

If so, that would be very interesting. Okay. But philosophical arguments.

And I'm not naive enough to think that philosophical arguments are apodictic. You know, I could be wrong. Okay.

Okay. So on to David Hume, I talked about his balancing argument, the argument being that natural law informs us that corpses don't come back to life. We see this with an exceptionalist regularity.

And when you weigh that on balance against the evidence that the corpse come back to life, let's say by human testimony, we see that human testimony isn't nearly as reliable. As we see the regularity of natural law obtaining. So I criticize that by saying that Hume was building this foundation used in the wrong parts.

Because we're really not considering here that it's not that natural law tells us what happens to corpses when left to themselves. We all agree that when left to themselves corpses do not come back to life. This is what we see with an exceptionalist regularity.

The issue here is the real question is what happens if is there sufficient evidence to suggest in the case of Jesus that his corpse was not left to itself. That's the real issue here. Well, Evan replied with four criticisms of my response to Hume.

And these, you know, it's fine. He was responding to my arguments within the book rather than the one that I provided here. And that's okay.

That's what he had, you know, time and material to prepare for. I wasn't trying to trick you. It's just that in preparing for this and reading Evan's stuff, it may be rethink some of these things.

And so let me deal with the four things he brought up. He said, Hume, I accused Hume of being too strict in his criteria for miracle testimony. And here's what I say.

And I do think Hume is too strict. He says that a miracle testimony must be attested by a sufficient number of witnesses of unquestioned good sense, education and learning. And of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of doubt.

Moreover, these witnesses are to be of such a high reputation in the eyes of others. They would have much to lose if lying. Finally, he demands that the event be performed publicly in a major part of the world so that its visibility would be unavoidable.

So unless all these criteria are met, we shouldn't believe in the testimony of a miracle. And yes, I do think these are too strict. I do think that they're unreasonable.

We don't have this for any other thing. And when it comes to history, no historian is going to require this kind of criteria. When you say, well, you know, of course, you know, you're talking about someone rising from the dead, we're going to require something like this.

Well, remember, we're not talking about a breaking of a natural law here. I don't agree with Evan's definition of miracle that it is a violation of a defeasible law. I think that the laws describe what goes on when nature is left to itself.

So a miracle, the way I'm defined, is not a violation of a law of nature. It is an occasion when nature is not left to itself. I think that we do want some decent evidence for a miracle, but I do think that Hume's criteria here is too strict.

Second, I said that Hume, I'm trying to read my own handwriting here, that if Hume's argument stands, then we would have to discount a number of natural anomalies that we know to have occurred and even the existence of dinosaurs. Now, I remember in preparing for this dialogue between Evan and I thought, I'm not so sure I still like that argument that I gave. So I'd have to think through it some more.

It certainly wouldn't be one. It's not one of my favorites. So I'll grant you the point there, because I don't know that I like that one anymore.

So you may be right there that I'm mistaken. Let's see. His third one was about our understanding of antecedent probabilities that are antecedent.

You know, I might view antecedent probabilities different than he does and how we're going to calculate this. We may use this differently, but remember what I did say about Hume's argument is I do think he's using the wrong parts and constructing it. So I think he is using his antecedent probability based on what he thinks the laws of nature are, and I just don't define him that way.

So yeah, Evan is correct here that we're going to look at it differently. I just think Hume is wrong with this. I think he's using the wrong parts and building a fallacious argument.

And finally, in reference to Hume, Evan talks about how there's many contenders with the Christian worldview. Now, in one of his writings, I forgot which one it is, but he calls it Demolition Derby. And that if the evidence for miracles in one religion is evidence against the Christian miracles and evidence for the Christian miracles is evidence against those, and so they cancel each other out.

I just don't see the logic behind this, because if we are to apply the same kind of logic, we could apply this to theism and atheism. And say, evidence for atheism is evidence against theism, and evidence for theism is evidence against atheism, and so therefore they cancel each other out. And we'd have to embrace the absurd position that God neither exists nor does not exist, and that doesn't work.

So I don't see these as really undermining the case against miracles, or my refutations of his two arguments that miracles are metaphysically impossible and the balancing argument. I think these arguments that I provided still stand. Now, what about these mythical genre that we're talking about? Evan says, Mike says the historical bedrock is what to be explained when we do historical investigation, and he says, no, he doesn't want to do it this way.

We've got to consider the genre of the literature itself and take the literature as a whole. So I would like to do that for a moment. I don't think that you certainly have to take the genre into consideration.

That is a first step. No question about it. I don't want to go to Revelation, the last book in the Bible, and interpret that naively in a historical sense, as perhaps Leahy Jenkins did in the Left Behind series, as though this is referring literally to things in a rapture and all this kind of stuff.

We've got to consider the genre. And my insisting on doing this is what has gotten me into trouble with people like Norman Geisler and Almolar Ultra Conservatives who said, no, it's all got to be taken literally in a sense. And in fact, Geisler told a friend of mine, when his started controversy broke out, he went to Geisler and he said, no, don't tell me.

I mean, the seven headed great red dragon in Revelation 12 whose tale is going to sweep the stars of the universe down to the earth. You don't really think that's a real cosmic space monster floating out there in a cosmos, do you? And he said, well, yes, I do. Whoa.

Yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of what we're looking at here. And no, I'm not an ultra-literalist like that.

I agree with that. And we have to look at genre. It's extremely important.

And the Gospels, the majority of New Testament critics today regard the Gospels as ancient biographies, Greco-Roman biography. You say, well, why not Jewish biographies? Well, for some unknown reason, we don't know why. But the Jewish, they weren't writing.

The Jews weren't writing biographies of their sages in that day. So, if they were going to write biographies of Jesus, Greco-Roman biography was the only game in town. And so we have to understand what they're meaning by this and the flexibility.

And this is something I've been studying for the last six years with some just really fruitful results. If you're interested in some of these, and this explains a lot of the differences in the Gospels, I encourage you to go to my website, risenjesus.com. Go under the resources section, the videos, and look for my lecture on why there are differences in the Gospels. I talk about Greco-Roman biography and the use of these, and explains a lot of the biographical devices that the Gospel authors used.

Now, in terms of specifics here, Evan provides four. One, he says, are we looking at literal or figurative readings? And he appeals to Matthew's raised saints in Matthew 27, 52, 53. It is a strange passage where it talks about that when Jesus dies, there had been darkness.

There was an earthquake, the temple veil split from top to bottom. Dead saints were raised. And after Jesus' resurrection, they came out of their tombs and walked into Jerusalem.

So I won't repeat the difficulties in this. It's not mentioned by anyone else in the New Testament. It's barely mentioned by the early church fathers.

And even so, a lot of those, it's very difficult to understand how they really interpreted it. Evan says that I should look at this and see that it is heavily influenced by Hellenistic sources. Well, I do appeal to a number of the Hellenistic sources that we can see this going on.

We can see it happening with the death of Julius Caesar. We can see it happening all around. But it also occurred in the Jewish sources.

We see it happening in Josephus in reference to the destruction of the temple. We see it happening in Acts chapter 2 at Pentecost when Peter goes back and refers to Joel chapter 2. When the young men will have visions, old men will have dreams. The sun will go dark.

The stars will fall out of the sky. Moon turn into blood, things like that. And he seems to, and whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

And he seems to suggest that these things have happened in their presence. So this apocalyptic, special effects is something that was there in both Jewish and in Hellenistic culture. So I do see this as figurative that this happened quite occasionally in the ancient writings.

Is this what's going on with Matthew? In my book I was inclined to think so. Right now I'm probably slightly inclined, maybe not quite as convinced as before. I've looked into a little bit more.

But I do, I'm inclined to still think of this as apocalyptic edition that's in there. So not legend, not myth, but as a literary device, much like maybe historian would today say, 9-11 was an earthshaking event. We don't really mean that in a literal sense.

Or if grandma knew what would Katie, that Katie got pregnant at 15, she'd roll over in her grave. Well, we don't really think that. You know, the Muslim terrorists, Hell will freeze over before the Muslim terrorists throw down their arms.

You know, we don't mean that in a literal sense. So Evan does ask a very pertinent question, a great question. How do we draw the line between Matthew's raised saints not being taken in a literal sense, being taken in a kind of literary figurative sense, and Jesus' resurrection? Well, I think that we can make that case that Matthew's raised saints were to be taken in this way.

We can show you multiple examples in the literature, Hellenistic and Jewish literature, where precisely this kind of device is used. It's precisely when Virgil talks about the death of Julius Caesar that he mentions things like darkness and eclipse of the sun, a comet that Mount Edna erupted, that the stream stopped flowing, that cattle, black intestines were seen outside of cattle, that pale phantoms were seen walking around at sunset. We do see this.

We see that Cassius Dial reports that when I think it was the upper Claudius went into Egypt, same kind of stuff happening. The gates of the temple of Jupiter opened on their own when they took many people to open. There was an eclipse of the sun, there was a comet, a woman was seen walking around with snakes in her hair, that ghosts were seen walking around.

So we can show this in the literature. But when it comes to Jesus and his resurrection, we can see that the earliest Christians meant for us to understand this as a literal historical event. There is none of this kind of literary stuff going on.

Paul is saying, if Jesus was not raised, we're not going to be raised. If we're not going to be raised, the Christian life is not worth living. But Christ was raised, therefore we are going to be raised, therefore the Christian life is worth living.

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. And this was the uniform testimony of the earliest Christians. And they defended the historicity of the resurrection event and of Jesus' death and his miracles, his resurrection.

And they said they weren't telling myths, cleverly devised myths. These were things they said they were eyewitnesses to. So this is entirely different genre and claims that you have with the resurrection and with Jesus than you have with Matthew's raised saints.

There is no defense of Matthew's raised saints elsewhere in the New Testament or in the early church writings. We could properly open it up to you. I realize we have more to say.

No problem. Hopefully questions will be asked. What kind of question would you like to be asked about? Why don't you ask me about Barabbas, or the sign of Jonah? I'll make a list here.

If any of you have a question about Barabbas, I would like to start. All right. So I guess I was wondering if a story being mythical and it being literally true are somehow exclusive.

So why couldn't someone say, yeah, the story is definitely like mythical in some ways. But then possibly it could be true. And I didn't take you as saying like Evan as it definitely wasn't true just that.

There's this better mythical reading that fully explains things. Yeah, so that's certainly something we need to think about. And I've heard this objection, right? So okay, so maybe you're right about the mythical dimensions of this.

But that doesn't show it didn't happen. And you're right, at least theoretically it doesn't show that. But what is true is, well, two things.

I want to say one is that history, at least ordinary history, doesn't happen with these sorts of structures in it. Again, just going to assert that. You're not going to get them.

You know the women being placed exactly where they need to be placed and all that. So I think where you want to go is to say that somehow or other God choreographed all of this. All right, I'll say fine.

So you've got a hypothesis now. I've got a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that some very intelligent people who had a serious message to convey were able to, you know, use this symbol system in quite powerful ways.

You need a God who says, okay, so I want this guy, Barabbas, you know, to be there and yada yada, right? So I've got to look around in ancient Judea for Mr. and Mrs. Barabbas. Hopefully you can find them. Make sure that they have a kid at the right time.

Make sure that he gets the name Yeshua. Make sure that this kid grows up and gets in trouble with the law and gets arrested by the Roman authorities at the right time and happens to be in the, you know, in the clinker there and happens to be the one that gets grabbed by the guards. And you can take all that in board.

All I'm going to say to you is your probabilities go down and my probabilities stay way up here. So divine micromanaging is something you have to call it accept. Thanks.

I wish all the Christians I knew read the Bible as deeply as you've been reading. All right, so a few questions, but I'm going to limit it to this. Namely, give you the invitation.

Talk about sinogenes and Barabbas. But also I wanted to say that I think you made a missed up there in your response to Evan about the demolition derby, but because it seems to me the standard move when, so for example, I've seen Paul Draper make this move and say, okay, there's considerations for atheism considerations for atheism. And what that means is you're left with agnosticism and it's not like a contradictory position or anything like that.

I mean, that's how lots of people who would be inclined to be atheists do argue for a kind of principle of agnosticism. So I don't think you're applied to Evan on that point works. Let me answer that.

And you can follow up on this, but I don't think my answer was offline with that because if miracle claims and other religions are evidence for miracles and other religions is evidence against the miracle claims of Christianity. And miracles, the evidence for the miracles of Christianity is evidence against miracles and they cancel each other out. The evidence for one cancels out evidence for the other.

Then that would mean that evidence for theism cancels out atheism. It would mean that evidence for atheism cancels out theism. And therefore, you're not left with agnosticism.

You're left nowhere because you can't be a theist. You have to say theism isn't true. And you have to say atheism isn't true.

Because you're saying the claims of the Christian miracles isn't true and the claims of the miracles and the other religions isn't true. Unless you're just going to say, well, then these are evidence, the evidences themselves are cancelled out and were left in a neutral position with these. Then I guess you could say you're left with an agnosticism.

Maybe one distinction that would be helpful here would be between rebutting and undercutting defeaters. So with an undercutting defeater, this would be like you have a belief that the object is red, but then you notice that the light shining on it is red or whatnot. So the counseling out could be like the removal of positive grounds or sufficient positive grounds for either hypothesis rather than gaining positive evidence that both are false.

Which seems to be what you might be thinking right now. But I'm also interested in hearing what you had to say about the sign of Jonah and Travis. Well, I guess I would also say too then, when we are left with that and the canceling out and things, then you would look at, I think the way out of this, the solution is to acknowledge that not all miracle claims are equal in their evidence.

There's some miracle claims that have a lot better evidence for them. And when you look at the miracle claims for Jesus performing miracles, it's a lot better than what you have for like Apollonius of Tiana. In terms of Barabbas, Barabbas was someone who was arrested for murder in the insurrection.

Now, at the beginning of the second century, there was a guy named Simon Bencosima and they nicknamed him Bar Kokba, the son of the star, because he was a messianic figure. So how could it be possible here that when it comes to Barabbas, son of the father, that this was a nickname given? Jesus, as Evan mentioned, was a very popular name. It was one of the seven most popular male Jewish names in late antiquity in Jesus' day.

In fact, you'll find that there's only like a dozen names and almost everybody was named those. In fact, one of every four women in that day in Palestine was named Mary. So you're going to find this stuff.

And so you have like Jesus, son of Joseph, or Jesus, son of, you know, so forth. So I mean, even within the twelve disciples, you got two Simons and two Judases. So to find the name Jesus was very common.

You could have a guy named Jesus who was involved in the insurrection and was a messianic figure, and so they named him son of the father, Barabbah. That's definitely a possibility. In terms of this Yom Kapoor, I've heard this from Richard Carrier before, and it just amazes me because Yom Kapoor, you've got these two goats, and one is led outside the city and led free, whereas the other is slaughtered in the city.

And that's where Yom Kapoor comes in, and all the symbolism behind it. But in the case of Barabbas, he was released inside the city. Jesus is marched outside and slaughtered.

So if you're going to take this as Yom Kapoor, you've screwed up all the details in it. You lose all the symbolism because everything's in reverse there. It loses its symbolic significance.

In terms of the sign of Jonah, three days and three nights, I discuss this in my book and I show how what we are looking at here is a temporal figure of speech. It's in the book of Esther, where Esther tells others, her uncle said, hey, go and tell the people to fast and pray for three days and three nights and after that I will go in to the king and petition him. And it says, so they did as they, as she commanded it, and on the third day, she went into the king.

Well, that's, you know, so it seemed like a temporal figure speech. I think what really gives it away is Matthew, because Matthew is the only one that has the sign of Jonah being three days and three nights. Well, later on in Matthew, after Jesus has risen from the dead in Matthew 28, the Jewish leaders come to Pilate and they say, we remember when that siever was alive.

The siever was alive. He said that he would be raised after three days. So give us a guard until the third day.

So it's not three days, three nights at that point. Just give us a guard until the third day. Well, that means they're going to pull the guard away at the very time they need that guard most because Jesus is going to be raised afterward.

They wanted it so the disciples wouldn't steal his body. So this seems pretty clear to me that we're looking at a temporal figure speech just like saying, hey, wait a minute. That'll just take a second.

No, that'll take forever. You know, that's a temporal figure speech. And even in the Akkadian medical literature, the three day motif was used to simply mean a short period of time.

One other thing I would point out is the one and a half day that Evan referred to. That is the woman who's in 19 Jesus two days prior to Passover, but it probably wasn't right there in the morning or whatever. So you could get the one and a half days, as he suggests.

The problem is that John has it as six days. I think John changes the day for a reason. And you have Luke who, if he's reporting the same event, he displaces it and puts it in an entirely different context.

So they don't see this kind of significance there. They use it for different literary reasons. And then again, we've got Paul who writes decades before the Gospels are written.

And he mentions the resurrection as a real event that occurred in history and that the truth of Christianity is based on it. So I don't think the Gospels are doing this, but that's something Evan's going to have to take in. How do you explain Paul? That's going to be really difficult for him.

I think I can. I think I have, actually, in the book. Okay.

Let's hear it. But there's a whole lot of stuff here. Do I get the... Let me just... I mean, there's a ton of stuff.

My worry is about the fact that Jesus gets sacrificed outside the city. And Barabbas gets released inside the city. And that's interesting and significant.

Joachim Jeremiah's points out that early Christians, I'm not sure exactly how early. Take the Jewish lore, according to which the Axis Mundi that goes from the heavens down into Sheol and runs right through the temple, the middle of the temple, the altar there. And they move it to Golgotha.

You have a new Jerusalem that's outside the old Jerusalem. And I take the release of Barabbas to the mob, in fact, to have the following symbolic significance. These people who were citizens or are citizens of the old Jerusalem aren't going to be citizens anymore.

They're the wilderness now. So precisely the symbolism that is quite intentional, I think, and says something that coheres with the rest of the story that I want to tell about what's going on symbolically here. So I'm happy to take that on board.

The question of whether Paul means the resurrection literally or not, there's a lot more than I can say here about that. But I'll say just one thing that ought to give one a little bit of pause. Well, two things.

One is, of course, Paul thinks that it is of ultimate existential importance to Christians, whether Jesus was raised from the dead. Of course he thinks that. The question is what does he think that means? And he does say, right in the middle of 1 Corinthians 15, it's around verse 30, I think.

I die every day. I die every day. Did he mean that literally? We're not.

And if not, what did he mean by it? What's we thinking about? Well, in the three days and three nights, this, again, is a long discussion, okay? Yeah, but I guess I'll say this. So remember that his opponents have asked him for a sign. He says, this is it.

This is the sign. I find it hard to imagine that he's going to be sloppy. And it is the one place where the chronology is exact, three days and three nights.

I don't think that's a throwaway line. If you read the book of Jonah, surely there it means three days and three nights. It's not just a figure of speech.

And he makes explicit reference to the sign of Jonah. I find it contextually odd to suppose that Jesus was just being sort of off the cuff with respect to the temporal markers that he is offering his opponents. He surely wants them to be able, when the time comes, to recognize his prophecy as one that was clearly true.

So can I push back on that a little bit? Sure. Like Paul, when he says I died daily, you know, he's, I think that he is saying there that he's facing death daily because he's being persecuted left and right. Because he dies.

Right. And obviously he's not meaning that in a literal sense, right? I agree. So, but he does talk all over in his writings about being persecuted and being whipped and prismant.

You know, at the point of death and left for dead when he was stone at Listra. Not every day. Not every day, but I mean, I told you a million times not to exaggerate, you know, every day.

We use exaggerations like that all the time. I think we see this Jesus using it. You know, if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.

Unless you hate your father, mother, brother, sister. You know, you can't be my disciple. Sometimes.

I think that's exaggeration. I do. I think it's hyperbolic language.

Matthew redacks Jesus saying that. Jesus has reported a saying that in Matthew, Mark and Luke. But Matthew redacks it where he says, unless you love me more than father, mother, brother, sister, life itself, you cannot be my disciple.

Matthew redacks Jesus saying several times he does it with divorce, puts the exclusion clause for immorality. You're right that in Jonah it does seem to be a literal three days and three nights. But a lot of times with prophecy they would interpret prophecy and apply it in a different sense.

So, for example, when Paul and Peter, they will say that Jesus' resurrection was a fulfillment of Psalm 27. You are my son. Today I have begotten you.

Well, in Psalm 27 that's referring to David, I have chosen you and installed you as king at this point, given birth to you as king, but in the sense of applying to resurrection of Jesus. It's not saying that he created Jesus. It's because you are my son.

I have given life to you via your resurrection. So the New Testament authors did this frequently where they would take an Old Testament text and they would apply it to Jesus, but they would apply it to him in a different sense than was meant in the Old Testament. And it could be that maybe Luke provides with the sign of Jonah, he says, no sign will be given to this generation except the sign of Jonah and doesn't even list the three days, three nights.

It could be that Matthew is just redacting Jesus saying there and adding the three days, three nights to mean a short period of time because he knew the three day thing was there. I'll be raised on the third day. So he could have been doing it for that reason.

I don't see that that means myth. There's a large methodological issue here, which again, I wish we had time to discuss and we don't. What do we want to say about the differences between the gospels? Let me just say this much, that I don't hold Luke responsible for what Matthew said or vice versa.

Each of these guys I think is trying to forge a highly integrated, very carefully narrated story. They are telling, they are trying to convey essentially the same message, but with important differences in the messages as well. They don't fully agree with one another, I think in the underlying message either.

And so I think we have to take that into account. With respect to Matthew 10, 36, Jesus says, do not think that I have come to bring peace. I come to bring not peace but the sword to set father against son and mother against daughter and then there's daughter in law and son in law.

That's not Irene language, no way. And in fact, it's been a perennial thorn in the side of Christians, right? I've got to certainly have a story to tell about why that's there and it's quite on a purpose and it is not Irene and it plays a critical role in the message, I think. And it's there in one form or another, not just in Luke 14 and Matthew 10, but in about a dozen different passages spread out across all of the hospitals.

I just had a question, Evan, about your argument for the metaphysical impossibility of miracles. So if I understand it, sort of the core premise was that if there were a miracle, that would mean that there would be a violation of Newton's third law. And so I guess I don't understand how it's supposed to go from there because it looks like you can only infer the metaphysical impossibility of miracles from there if we have reason to think that it's metaphysically impossible, that there'd be violations of Newton's third law.

Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, I take it.

The standard view in philosophy of science is that even the fundamental laws of nature are, well, nomologically necessary, metaphysically contingent, and there are people who think otherwise. But it seems it has the mark of metaphysical contingency. We can conceive of it being, having exceptions, and so on.

You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I need an extra premise, which I think is true, but let me just say parenthetically that Mike suggested that my view is that a miracle is a violation of a defeasible law.

No, the whole point is that if law is defeasible, it can be defeated without being violated. Right? So, I mean, that's, that's a, I'm afraid, a misunderstanding of defeasibility. But I do think, and again, this is metaphysics, right? So clearly it could be wrong.

I do think, and this is critical to the claim, that laws of nature are metaphysical, are grounded in metaphysically necessary second order relations between universities. That, that's my view. And I am taking on board that, you know, I've got to defend that.

There may be other views, according to it, actually there are some other views, according to which laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. If, if there is a weaker necessity than that, some people think, nomological necessities somehow weaker, I've seen sort of strange views there. I don't know what I would want to say about whether God can override nomological necessity.

I think, and I think the is sort of thing, that God can't do what's metaphysically impossible. You pay a big price if you, you don't buy that, right? You're dead right. And I'd like to ask you something.

So you're saying you could be wrong, right? We know that miracles are either metaphysically possible or they're metaphysically impossible. And so you're saying you think they're metaphysically impossible, but you could be wrong. So, all right, I presented three extraordinary answers to prayer.

Let's just take that last one of the atheists who told the story about the annuity to the exact dollar that came the exact day of the all night prayer meeting. And so, it seems to me that you get enough of these things, you'd say, all right, I got these two views, this is the one I hold, but I could be wrong, experience over here does seem to refute this. So I should go with this one to say that they are metaphysically possible.

So how do you explain those three extraordinary answers to prayer I mentioned earlier? Okay, so I'm going to give you an answer you don't like, you won't like. But first I want to say quantity doesn't trot Trump quality. That's by his own admission the problem with at least almost all of the miracle reports that Keener relates in his book he says, as he must, that these have not really been properly investigated.

And we just have an extraordinary track record of what look like awfully clear cases of miracles which when they aren't carefully investigated, the stories fall apart. It's true, by the way, also of out of body experiences where people claim to be able to travel around and do quite simple controlled experiments to see whether they can really see things that they wouldn't be able to see if they weren't able to leave their bodies. You know what, it turns out they can't see those things, very simple experiments.

So, so I'm suspicious, I'm not close minded about this, but I am suspicious. And so the mere fact that there are lots of these stories, that's not news. The question is, in what case, in what cases do we have the right kind of carefully controlled conditions under which we can determine what happened? The part of my answer you're not going to be happy with is, I'm going to not give you explanations for your stories.

I have students that come to me on occasion with stuff like that and say, what do you think about this? I don't know. I wasn't there. Right? I mean, how can I possibly claim to know, because there are a zillion ways that the thing might be fleshed out.

In your book, you said, the kind of evidence that you would need would be something like, if the stars had this formation of many, many, and that- Many, many, take all the parts? Yeah, and had it in there, and then they flashed on and off, and then this happened several nights in a row, well then you would really consider things. I wouldn't consider things, I'd become a these, just like that. So the story is, you know, it's a starry night.

I liked looking at the stars. I actually do get weird feelings about how big that all is. And before my very eyes, they rearrange themselves into many, many, many, take all the parts and go, oh my God, you know, what? And then they do it in different languages, right, different Chinese language and all that, different nights.

I mean, the first thing I'm going to think is, what did my kids put in my dinner, right? But then, after a sleepless night, I run out to the local newsstand, and there's the New York Times with screaming headlines, right, and astrophysicists are in a complete uproar. Well, that does it for me. Why? Because you think miracles are metaphysically impossible, and on balance, these natural laws would say that that can't happen, and that would go against testimony.

And you can have hallucination, so- I told you, I think it's likely that they're metaphysically impossible, I could be wrong. This would be damn good evidence that I was wrong. But Keener's stories are not.

Well, Keener, though, he says the reason why a lot of his stories aren't investigated like he would like to is, you know, like the case of the child who was bitten by the snake and died, stopped breathing for about six hours, and then upon prayer, boom, the kid comes back to life, because you couldn't have an EKG set up to the kid to measure- It's not their fault. It isn't their fault, it's just that the fact of the matter is, we don't have the right kind of controls. What's good is David? Sorry.

I'm probably just not understanding what the objection is. Maybe I'm misunderstanding his objection or argument, and I'm answering something that he's not arguing. Okay, well, maybe I misunderstood you.

Are you saying that the demolition argument doesn't work because if evidence or meets side cancels each other's out, then you have a contradiction of truth value. Is that what you're saying? The two things can't be true, atheism and theism at the same time when the evidence contradicts and they cancel each other out, that's what you end up with? What I mean is if we're going to say that evidence for one cancels out the other, and evidence for that other cancels out, if evidence for A cancels out B, and evidence for B cancels out A, then you have to reject both. Maybe that's not what you're arguing, and maybe you're arguing that it just eliminates the evidence.

But even in that sense, it would be you just have to consider the quality of the evidence because not all evidence is created equal. The evidence for some things are far better than they are for others. In the book, I mean, so there are a couple things.

One is one task that Hume undertakes in part two of miracles maybe doesn't succeed, but he tries to give us reasons for thinking that to a very significant extent, the quality of the evidence is going to be roughly the same across all of these cultures. Because what accounts for the evidence is certain very general features of the way people behave and the things they say. Now, I mean, I don't think he's fully successful in clinching the argument there.

There could certainly be differences in the quality of the evidence. That's true. The general form of the argument, I try to lay out in some detail in my chapter on miracles and it's roughly the idea is this, that there are a lot of different religions and they may overlap in their doctrinal commitments, but they often conflict.

And if you have miracles stories that are at home in these different religions and the some doctrine A, right, and you've got a religion over here with a doctrine that's not A, and it's got a pile of miracles in support of not A. Then the fact that the two doctrines are in conflict and the fact that these miracles are evidence for this and those miracles are evidence for that entails, this is Hume's claim, that you have conflicting evidences. In effect, you've got evidence for A and you've got evidence for not A. And at least to the extent that the miracle stories are roughly on a par in terms of the grounds we have for believing them, you get a kind of cancellation effect. Hume says you have to subtract one from the other.

And the fact that we have not just two opposing religions, but tons of opposing religions means that nobody gets a very big part of the probability space as a result of that. The upshot is you should be agnostic. So that makes two assumptions though it seems.

The evidence is awash. So it makes the assumption that all the miracle claims are of equal evidence. No, I didn't make this.

No, you didn't do it. But I'm saying the way you posited the argument of Hume doing it there, that would assume that they're all of equal evidence and quality. And it also would assume that they're connected to that particular event.

So let's just take Islam and Christianity. So Christianity says you have Jesus claiming to be the divine Son of God and Islam says no, he's not. Christianity has the miracle of the resurrection to support it.

And you can kind of tie that to Jesus claims. I mean he's making these claims and they challenge him and he says I'll give you one sign my resurrection. So if he rises from the dead, if he claimed to be divine we should probably believe him.

So Islam says Jesus is not divine. And what miracle do they have for that the miracle of the Quran? And the Quran says well just try to create a surah like it you'll find that you can't. So I think you can create a surah like one in the Quran very easily.

Even something better than what we find in the Quran. So the quality of the evidence we have for the resurrection of Jesus is far superior to what we have for the evidence for Islam. Yeah.

Oh I think human is committed to is that you have to subtract the one from the other. They might or might not be equal. If they're equal then you get zero.

If they're not then somebody wins. But they win by less than they otherwise would have won. Yeah you know so you know you have two prophets one says a the other says b both of them are alleged to perform miracles.

And if the miracle stories are sort of equally well supported and the miracles are just as great miracles. And you know in the Bible you have people competing to see who can do the best miracle Moses versus the pharaohs guys. You know pharaohs guys do pretty well by the way.

I think I think you are worried about that right. The only thing they can't do is make the gnats. Oh yeah thanks.

So Evan I'm just kind of curious on as I call your your hermeneutical methodology. And so it seems though you know you're interpreting the resurrection and the resurrection narratives in this figurative sense. But it also seems that though it's in the majority of Christians today at least in my seeming seemed to interpret these literally.

And in fact it seems though just kind of my read of church history that the majority interpretation of these narratives have been a literal interpretation. And that these interpretations even go back pretty early on like in the apostolic period. Epistock fathers early patristics and what have you.

It was kind of wondering at what point you think like when and why did the interpretation so dramatically shift from the original figurative interpretation to more like a literal interpretation of resurrection. Right right. Clearly a question I have to worry about.

And also equally clearly a question I couldn't hope to give a real answer to without having a mastery. Not only can't help me a first century Judean history but the entire history of western civilization. So I'm going to sort of beg off and offer it to you as a research project.

But I'll say I'll say a couple of things. I'm very interested. Tim Paul knows this.

I'm very interested in the early fathers especially the anti-nician patristics. You know I think there's huge debates about stuff that really puzzles us the trinity and the two natures of Christ and so on. That ontology stuff I was telling about I think I can make perfectly good sense out of those doctrines.

But it's an interesting historical question whether the early church fathers were using that kind of conceptual framework in thinking about these things. I'd love to know but it required me to spend some serious time reading the patristics. There are Richard Carrier has mentioned this to me.

Certainly passages you can find in the early church fathers that are awfully hard to read as anything but assuming a literal death in resurrection. This bothers me. This is counter-evidence to my view.

You either have to say that this was sort of an exoteric doctrine something that was put out there for people who wouldn't really be in the know for which there is some evidence. Or that people started taking this stuff. Some people anyway started taking this stuff.

Barely literally barely early on. You know there's debates about what happens if a cannibal eats your body after you die and you know and then they convert to Christianity and they're going to yeah so I mean that's hard to make sense of unless there's either a specific dialectical political context which I suspect there was by the way. I mean I think there is some evidence for that.

They're trying to answer pagan arguments of a certain kind. Or you have to worry about your question. As for the general question though which is a deeply important question of when did the the general shift occur which would have moved from a really political understanding of this stuff to what is our more modern Christian typical view.

I do have a few things to say about that. I don't think it's by the time of Eusebius who thought clearly enough that Constantine was the parousia. He says so practically.

But not long after that with Augustine you get the city of God and that is I think a quite conscious deliberate effort to get a divorce going for political reasons at the time. Rome was clearly thought of as the eternal city. It's clear that Christians thought that and now Rome has been sacked by the Visigoths and the pagans were making sport of the Christian claim that once the eternal empire had been created it would be there forever.

And Augustine needs to do something to defend Christianity against that challenge. That's only one of a series of really fundamental watershed moments I think that have moved the narrative away from what it originally meant. The problem I see with that is Paul.

Paul is our earliest source. Paul is preaching what the Jerusalem apostles are preaching and Paul is teaching that the resurrection actually occurred and the truth of Christianity and our eternal life our afterlife is contingent on whether he actually rose from the dead. So Augustine's late.

We go back you can't get earlier than Paul and yet his view on the resurrection is an actual historical event. That's your reading of Paul. How else do you read? Not my reading.

How do you read him differently? Well as you know Richard Carrier doesn't think that he's talking about a a mortal healing being. Okay and Carrier's got to give you a shout. He's got four exegesis there and I mentioned it in the book and say you.

Well so does Dan Wallace. He said if Carrier had been in his Greek class he would have failed him. I can't read Greek right I warned you guys that I'm not a scholar.

But I can tell a story about Paul that doesn't require me to suppose that he thought that this was history. That is to say I can give you reasons on the basis of what little historical evidence we have for thinking that Paul was situated in such a way that he found this kind of language to be a powerful way to communicate a message that was an important powerful message. We're going to go a little bit over our time so we can make a couple more questions.

And I've got Steve, Lorraine, Josh and Mike. I think we'll get Steve and Lorraine and maybe Josh. But by the way just one other thing about the Carrier thing.

Carrier doesn't say that Paul didn't think that Jesus actually rose if I remember correctly. Carrier just disputes on 1 Corinthians 15 when it says it is sown a physical body. It's raised a spiritual body.

It's sown and you know corrupt all it's raised incorruptible. He's not seeing continuity between those. He thinks it's a totally there's no continuity between what's sown and what's raised.

And what I criticize Carrier on is he's got his Greek wrong there because there is continuity. The Greek shows continuity. But I don't think Carrier so we Carrier and I may disagree.

I like Rick. I just think he's his Greek's wrong here but we disagree on what Paul was saying in terms of the continuity of Jesus resurrection body with his earthly body. But you have to correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't think Rick would say Paul is not saying that Jesus wasn't really raised that it wasn't a real event. Yes he would say that. But I mean you may be right.

Well no you have to be right there because Carrier denies that Jesus even existed. So of course he would have to be saying that Paul doesn't really mean that. But the dispute you were having with Carrier I think Carrier was trying to discuss what Paul meant by his talk about the general resurrection.

Not not Jesus as resurrection specifically. Those are details maybe we don't need to worry about right now but I'll be glad to talk further about it. Evan as you know in the Bible there are a lot of prayers both in the Old Testament and the New Testament and a lot of them are public prayers like with Josiah and Solomon and so forth.

And I think it's easy to take those public prayers and to sort of leverage those into your human hermeneutic that claims that these prayers were made were really ways of supporting a certain polis or commonwealth or or culture or something. I wonder if it bothers you that there are also private prayers where it's a lot harder to leverage those into your hermeneutic. I just don't see it.

You bet it bothers me. Because it's the way that a polis or commonwealth or anything like that or a political entity is a person so it couldn't answer a private prayer. Okay.

Yeah and so I mean there are a lot of things here. I mean it's one thing if the story says that somebody said a private prayer because of course now the story is public right. It's also true I think and has always been recognized as true by people that the interior stuff the private stuff is an important part of one's formation as a good citizen.

So I mean I'm not sure that this is right right but I mean there are a number of interesting possibilities here but you're right absolutely I worry about that. So I guess I had just a comment and then a question a clarification question. So when we're dealing with interpreting a text we've got issues at the interface of semantics and pragmatics and so a lot of difficulties arise there with the fact that or due to the fact that much of what we communicate even when we're speaking literally goes beyond it maybe even conflicts a lot of times with the semantic content of our words.

So my son falls and scrapes his knee and I say to him you're not going to die right. I'm not it's not really a metaphor I'm speaking literally but I if you just looked at the semantic content of what I said it looks like you know somebody could take that out of context and say oh she just declared her son immortal. Well no that's not really what I meant.

What I meant is well you're not going to die from that but it's sort of incomplete and so I think when we're looking at a text that's as old as you know the New Testament it's to me not at all implausible that a lot of the words that Jesus speaks can't just be taken purely at face value like even when he's speaking literally there's going to be a lot of interpretation that goes into it and that there how to interpret that properly you have to know the intention to speak or you have to know a lot about the context you have to have a lot of background knowledge and so I just think to me then it seems really relevant how the earliest people who were reading and interpreting the text interpreted it and seeing what they said about it because they're the people who are closest to the context and have as much of the relevant background knowledge as they would need and so like I think that should weigh heavily like if the early fathers have a certain interpretation I think that should weigh more heavily than you know how we interpret it later or if we try to interpret things out of context without looking at the tradition of interpretation I think you know we're going to be in trouble because of how much those pragmatic factors yeah I actually I don't disagree with anything that you said I mean I don't think mere proximity is a guarantee right partly because even people are very close to the events have access to grind of one kind or another or can have blinders on of one kind or another so it's it's not a guarantee but I mean that's why you know if I if I had another 50 years to live I'd be burying myself in the patristics and I really do want to you know find out what those guys did have to say and I do know that UCBS seems to have and exactly the sort of view I think somebody ought to have if they read the scriptures the way I read them but I know not anywhere near enough to you know to say very much more than that but the other thing is though that when you read these texts I think you do have to read holistically and contextually I suppose everybody agrees with that right you want to know what's there beyond the the words on the page you really have to have a general theory of how everything hangs together here I'm sorry well I was going to let Josh okay Josh is that oh no no sorry I just wanted to ask about the the point you brought up about before Christ rose and appeared to many that I wasn't sure exactly what the problem with that was is the problem just that that's really weird or like it seemed at one point you mentioned that there was a problem that that was a resurrection that occurred before Jesus's resurrection was that the problem that there was a resurrection of that before because then I was gonna say what about like the resurrection of Lazarus or the widow son who was raised yeah well I mean it's not clear from the text whether the resurrection of the saints is to be assimilated to the Lazarus kind of case and you know they're gonna live for a while and then die again right or whether it's to be assimilated to the Jesus kind of case I'm inclined to think the latter but the text doesn't give us enough really as far as I can tell to go on there and it matters which it is I was being half ingest but not entirely ingest in the suggestion that the reason that it says that they rose when Jesus died but they didn't actually get out of the tombs before he was resurrected maybe connected to the first Corinthians 1523 passage that's a speculation but maybe not a crazy speculation about you know why it's that way but but I I think and might think that it would be really weird to think that this was a literal historical report of something that happened and Josephus is completely silent about it it would have been banner headlines in the Jerusalem daily news the next day I mean you know and then there's no further mention of them even in Matthew at all nothing yeah the problem you do have is if they are raised in a resurrection body then that does contradict Paul in 1st Corinthians 1520 who says Christ is the first fruits meaning the first to be raised with the resurrection body so then that does leave you Matthew is writing after Paul of course so so that does leave you if Matthew is not contradicting Paul then they're raised in a Lazarus type body but now they're raised at Jesus' death they don't come out of their tombs until Easter morning so they haven't eaten for at least 40 hours they're homeless they need food they need shelter twice as close thanks for joining us today if you'd like to learn more about the work and ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona visit RisenJesus.com where you can find authentic answers to genuine questions about the reliability of the gospels and the resurrection of Jesus be sure to subscribe to this podcast visit Dr. Lacona's youtube channel or consider becoming a monthly supporter this has been the Risen Jesus podcast a ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona.