Can Psychology Explain Away the Resurrection? A Licona Carrier Debate - Part 2

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Can Psychology Explain Away the Resurrection? A Licona Carrier Debate - Part 2

February 19, 2025

According to Dr. Richard Carrier, Christianity arose among individuals who, due to their schizotypal personalities, believed that their hallucinations of a risen Jesus were reality. In his view, this naturalistic explanation accounts well for the resurrection claims and is like the reported mass hallucinations in cults led by charismatic leaders. In a 2010 debate at Washburn University, Dr. Michael Licona challenged these assertions and presented a case for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection.

Transcript

Welcome to the Risen Jesus with Dr. Mike Licona. In today's episode, we have a fascinating debate between Dr. Licona and Dr. Richard Carrier. Dr. Carrier contends that specific psychological tendencies in Jesus's followers led them to hallucinate about Jesus's coming back to life after his death by crucifixion.

Dr. Licona finds this hypothesis that Jesus has to live in his life. This hypothesis unconvincing and argues that Jesus's resurrection is much more likely to be a historical fact. I do think people should be compelled.

Unfortunately, it is interesting that worldview does impact their glasses we look through. They're shaded. I have them myself.

Everybody has them. And it's not just with religion, its philosophy, its politics. Doing my doctoral work, hoping my eyes on a lot of things.

I was able to watch the presidential debates a year and a half ago for a lot more objectivity. And saying, gosh, both sides you could just see the spins and all of that. Sure, sure.

I didn't see that before. So let me ask two questions related to that. The first, you're talking about bracketing worldview.

But before we get to that, I mean, if we go out, as I've done, I've actually looked at all the evidence, I've looked at the arguments for God. You mentioned, you know, but for the arguments, I wouldn't, you know, I'm an atheist, but for the arguments for God. But I've actually looked at them and I find them fallacious or the premise is inadequately supported.

And if that's what I find, let's say I do go out and check all the evidence. I do my epistemic duty. And I find that naturalism balance is more probable than theism.

I mean, if that's actually a rational correct position, I mean, I don't expect you to agree that it is. But from my perspective, as far as I can tell, no one's actually shown me any evidence or argument to the contrary. In that situation, you would agree then that I should conclude that the historical evidence wouldn't persuade me that Jesus existed.

If the... I mean, do I have to bracket my worldview for the historical evidence to persuade me? That's a good question. I think it's healthy for us to do that. When I was doing the work on the dissertation for my dissertation for the resurrection, it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life to bracket my worldview.

My relationship with God grew extremely cold. It was the most agonizing five years of my life. But because the way I'm wired, I'm a natural doubter.

I doubt everything, not just religion, but I doubt everything. No, I mean, I doubt when I buy a bottle of cologne, I can't even get out of the store without doubting that I got the right thing. Everything, I doubt it.

It's funny. I've been in the same boat myself. A second yesterday.

So it was really agonizing to do that. But I wanted to go through it, and I was willing to... I've done enough work on the resurrection before that I didn't think the other arguments were going to look better. But I had to say to myself, maybe there's not going to be enough evidence here to conclude that Jesus rose as a historical event.

And I just have to leave a question mark, or maybe a naturalistic explanation is going to look better. I'm going to follow the evidence no matter what it cost me, my job, anything. And I'm really glad I did that.

And I think that's a healthy exercise to look at. I agree. I do that myself and have done that throughout my whole life.

I've changed worldviews throughout my life from doing that. Stepping outside and seeing, is my worldview defensible on the facts? And said, no, it's not. And then moved on and decided, well, what is defensible from the facts? So I agree with that point of view.

I don't see what you're seeing, evidently. So I guess my next question would be then, what don't you think I get? What am I not getting? I don't know. I wouldn't want to make that judgment call.

Well, OK. I mean, certainly there might be things you don't know. But I mean, just is there anything that you think, even in a conversation or exchange in opening statements and so forth that I'm getting wrong or that I think I'm missing? I do think that there is.

And it could be because, well, I'm sure you probably agree. It's because of the metaphysical naturalism that you embrace without apology. And I'm not saying you should be apologetic about that.

But you're like, you made a statement that I don't have to prove any particular hypothesis aside that yourself, if you don't believe the resurrection hypothesis, you don't have to prove another hypothesis. So you have to show that there are other possibilities. And I look at that and say, oh, I don't like that methodology.

Because as historians, we don't look for possible alternatives. You have to look for probable alternatives. We're looking for the most probable explanation.

No. Have you done any historical work outside of this particular issue, though? Because in terms of history, I mean, my philosophy of history and historical method, I mean, my dissertation was three and a half times the size of an average one. Probably.

That was pretty as big. I know what you mean. It's a lot of work.

Probably half of that was on the philosophy of history and historical method. Which is especially why I want to read it, so definitely tell me about that. I appreciate that.

So, you know, I studied all these books and journal articles written by professional historians outside of the community of biblical scholars on what they had to say about the philosophy of history, what's historical knowledge and method. I see where you're going, but it's getting off track of what I was talking about. As a historian, my particular field is ancient science, ancient science and technology, and ancient religion, of course, which is why I talk on this issue.

One thing that I've learned, and I studied not just this one issue. I've actually explored lots of things. Like, did the Romans have fog horns? You know, historical problems like that.

Tons of them, lots of different problems like that. And I find most cases and most historians I talk to agree with me, most cases we don't know what happened. I mean, there are many, many cases where we can come up with plausible hypotheses.

I mean, I could tell you why I think it's very likely the Romans had fog horns, but I wouldn't say they did because I'm not absolutely certain that the evidence is ambiguous. So what you're talking about, like, that's exactly what I'm talking about with regard to the resurrection, is when I say I don't have to know what happened, I just have to know there's possibilities. I might not be able to, I could know that it's got to be most likely, most probably one of those, probably, is possibilities, but I don't know which one it is.

I could say the same thing for many other historical events. There's one of the famous cases is Alexander the Great at the Battle of Granicus. There's two completely different accounts.

And ironically, the eyewitness account is the least probable of them. It's the most unbelievable, which puts us in a pickle. We know it has to be one story or the other.

The evidence is kind of equally balanced. We don't know. But no one would come in there and try to harmonize them and say, well, he did both at the same time.

It's impossible or used a miracle or something like that. We would know we could rule out those explanations. We know it has to be one of those two that are on record.

We just don't know what it is. All right. Is it time to pass over soon? No, two minutes.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah. But the point is is I... The point is is I... He died.

There's different accounts on the brain of Rome. So, yeah. You would agree.

I don't need to know what or prove any particular scenario. I just need to prove that there are a number of scenarios that collectively one of them is going to be more likely the case than so. So that is actually the position I was taking.

That makes sense to you? Okay. But then it's something like that. Say, with Alexander the Great or Scipio Africanus, you know, many times, like you say in history, I agree.

You were, you know, how did Carlo Man die? Was he murdered by Charlemagne or did he die of natural causes? We just have to leave question marks, regardless, because the evidence is indeterminate. Yeah. But when I look at something like the resurrection of Jesus, and I see, okay, he dies, certainly dead.

And then afterward, you've got appearances to groups, to individuals, to friend and foe alike. And if you have the inability, as I believe, of naturalistic explanations, I mean, it's like A, B, C, D, and E, contextually and everything, everything points to A, and B, C, D, and E don't work in terms of the general criteria for the best explanation. And we're warranted in saying A occurred.

And so I don't think the resurrection is indeterminate. If you've got good evidence and the naturalistic explanations are insufficient, then I think we're warranted in a... You're not going to have a lot of time to answer this one, but you say that the natural hypotheses don't work. Can you give me an example of where you're going to work? Yeah, like the one you've presented this evening, I think, but the schizo-typles, the hallucinations, you got problems because I think the schizo-typal, you know, I have to look some more in it, but again, the literature I've read on by Mayo, the DSM-IV, is a contextually.

Oh, hypothetically. Okay. I'll keep going just to 100.

Okay. Well, I did wanted to focus that though, if you mind. Just briefly, I mean, if, let's say I present you with the scientific literature about schizo-typles congregating into cults, and you agree, oh, okay, so it does happen, then you wouldn't consider that a problem with the naturalistic hypothesis.

Yeah, I would have to look at the schizo-typal thing as a possibility, but it's kind of like with hallucinations, you know, did my friend Pat hallucinate that girl's face, or was it real? If it's viridical, like I believe it is because I know Pat, I know she's a brilliant girl, I mean, and she's not given to this kind of stuff, then I have to say, okay, it's viridical, you know, I can show this, I mean, I can give several cases like this too, and say, okay, that's got my attention. I don't think that that qualifies as a hallucination. So these things happen, viridical apparitions of the dead happen, I can't really explain those, but they happen, so okay, maybe they could be hallucinate, what do we have with the disciples? Well, if it happens in group settings, if it happens to an enemy who would seem unlikely to, I mean, Jesus would have been the last person in the world, he would want to hallucinate, then, you know, I'd have problems with the schizo-typal thing, because although one characteristic might make it, when you put everything together, then it doesn't make sense.

Then it lacks explanatory power, you have to force it to fit. Yeah, I disagree, I don't think you do. Really? But you have the force, so your question is okay.

Okay, well yeah, so, all right, we talked about the spacecraft. Let me just say this thing too, you mentioned no evidence for resurrection on our planet. I'd like to take issue with that as well, it's going to seem a little crazy, and I know I'm going out on a limb on this, and there's a lot of scholars now who will roll their eyes, so be it.

JP Moreland several years ago said that he had visited some countries where he was aware of some testimonies of people who had been raised from the dead by a pastor in like a third world country, and it's kind of like I thought, gosh, and I heard that from anyone else, I'd just kind of say, and just blow it off, but it was JP Moreland, so I kind of cataloged it in my mind. Over the last several years I've developed a very close friendship with a New Testament scholar named Craig Keener. By the way, you'll be interested in this.

He's publishing a book with Hendrickson, a commentary on acts that's more than 7,000 pages. It'd be the largest commentary ever on acts, and this guy consults the classics well over 20,000 times, and he is wider than you and me. But he married a black woman from a Congo, and he's just, I mean, what a great couple.

And they go over there, Craig was an atheist, and he goes over there, he says, Mike, for years, I've been interested in this kind of stuff, and he began documenting some miracles. He's coming out with another book, it'd be like 800 pages in another year or two, on miracles in which he's got many documents. It was eyewitnesses, even some raisings of the dead, and for some he's got medical documentation.

So, when I hear J.P. Moreland, and then Craig Keener, and I know Craig, I don't really know J.P. I've met him just a couple of times. I can't just brush that off. I've got to look and say, maybe it is possible some of the dead are raised today.

I just haven't been aware of these things. Well, I would agree it's possible. It's always possible.

When I always hear that, I say, well, I want to see the evidence. Let's talk about it, because these kinds of claims have been analyzed. We have many cases where people make these claims.

Then, when proper controls are put in place, we find the story dissolves. I mean, we have many cases of this. Now, some cases can't be investigated.

The evidence is gone. There's nothing you can do about that. You can't decide it.

But other cases you can. To me, I find it suspicious that these stories always happen in third world countries. They're always third-second-hand testimonies.

Whereas, they're not happening around here. I mean, it's if the laws of physics operate differently in the Congo than in America. Whereas, we have already your explanation is we actually know that there's a lot of charlatans and a lot of readiness to believe and readiness to distort stories and so forth.

Especially in third world highly religious countries, especially countries that are particularly poverty-stricken or strike-stricken, war-stricken, Congo, for example. But Peter's a careful scholar. He's really checked these things out.

We will have to wait for the research. As I have done with other cases, and this is every time I've done it in the past, it hasn't worked out. The evidence has fallen through in the end and collapses.

So, you know, prior probability based on all the previous cases I've gone across, odds aren't good. But I'm willing to always look at, especially if he claims to have good evidence, I'm definitely willing to look at it. Okay.

Let's talk about Paul for a moment. Here you said that he was having, he went to the Scriptures, determined Jesus rose from the dead and had visions. Did I understand that correctly? Or was it, am I getting that from maybe some of my preparation? What you said in your opening statement? Yeah, could you just say it again so I make sure? Paul, as a skeptic, went to the Old Testament Scriptures, let's say, the Jewish Scriptures.

And Red was convinced that the Messiah would rise from the dead and then he had a vision of Jesus. I would say it's a possibility, but it's not necessarily a theory that I particularly endorse. Okay.

What do you think happened with Paul? Well, I think certainly he knew that people were finding the evidence in the Scriptures. He was persecuting Christians. He must have known the Scripture they were citing, for and the things they were claiming to have seen.

So I think it's more likely in terms of inherent probability based on cognitive dissonance and other possible scenarios that make the most sense based on the most commonly happening things in the world, that he had the vision first. But he already knew some of the supporting Scriptures because as an enemy, you know, from interacting with the church. And then he went and sought more.

Or he went and read them again. He was a non-believer. Then he went and looked at those same Scriptures that he knew about as a believer and saw them differently, for example, after the hallucination of Jesus.

That I think would be the most probable course of events based on the limited data that we have. What do you think happened with the group appearances? Well, I think to take, for example, I suspect that the one Corinthians 15 list in there, I think my position on that is a little complicated. I think verse seven, for example, was interpolated.

And I could talk about why. But one thing I know isn't. Then the apostles.

Yeah, I think that's an ideological addition. It doesn't make a logical sense and I can explain why, but it's not really relevant to the point I'm making now. But Paul only says all at once for the 500 brethren.

He only makes the point of saying that was the only one all at once. So when he says appearance to Peter and then the 12, it's ambiguous as to whether he means the 12 all at the same time or the 12 individually. So it's not very clear cut.

He doesn't say to the 12 all at the same time. Why would he say then to Peter then to 12 since Peter was one of the 12? Well, that's the thing. Why would he say Peter? Why would he say the other 10? Why would he say the 12 when Judas is supposed to not be there, for example? Could have easily been a nickname such as we call the big 10, although these more teams involved.

Yeah, I suspect, well, it's possible. Let's take it that as a possibility, for example, that Peter has the vision. He goes to the 12 gets them in the ecstatic state and they all have this experience together with him leading them into it.

That leads us to the next one, which is the appearance of 500. Now, I think the word for 500 sounds a lot like Pentecost and you know probably my theory about how I think that has been a misspelling that's gone on there. Where I think that versus talking about the Pentecost experience discussed in Acts where you had all the Christians gathered together had an infilling of the spirit and experience of the infilling of the spirit.

Acts claims they saw tongues of fire above their heads, but whatever actually they may have seen, you can have a bunch of people get together and get themselves into a frenzy, speaking in tongues or prophesying or feeling the spirit of God and they can all see something in the sky. But there were appearances that happened. Paul says he gives this chronological list.

He says he appeared to Peter then to the 12, then to more than 500. Then, last of all, he appeared to me as to one in Time with Born. So he's been at that time.

Really? I think the first few happen rather quickly. The first few. He's like a few years out.

But it's then, then, then, then lastly. So it's all chronological. But notice it's received.

Notice it grows. It's Peter by himself, then the 12, where Peter's there. So he's actually influencing him.

So he's actually guiding him. How do you know that? He's anchoring him. We don't know that.

Well, no. But I mean, it's inherently more probable because we know how other cults and visionary cults work. We know, for example, how the shakers work.

There's a lot of the study of the way the shakers actually control the members of their church. It's particularly interesting regarding how the visions ended. Or Paul was assigned off as the last to officially see it.

And I think that was a deliberate political decision. Right. But there were various occasions, like in Acts 10, what's called the Gentile Pentecost with Cornelius.

And times after that, where you had these ecstatic times of speaking in tongues. None of those were regarded as appearances. Oh, sure.

I'm not saying that speaking in tongues was confused as a parent's cause. I mean, getting in that state, though. Well, they saw they saw tongues of fire.

And I think that was originally, I think the original story would have had them seeing some sort of vision of Jesus like Stephen did, for example. Seeing him in the sky or seeing the light that Paul saw or something to that effect, we don't know because Paul doesn't tell us. And we can't really trust Acts reconstruction of events because it has its own particular chemical purpose for it.

But in terms of these appearances, though, there's nothing in the early curriculum that would indicate that when Paul talks about the church of speaking in tongues, he's not saying, and he's chiding them on it being out of control. He's not saying control your appearances of Jesus. Oh, no.

Yes. These are different things. But he does mention, he does mention revelations and visions are happening in the church.

And he prioritize people who have revelations, which is what he calls his vision of Jesus. So it can be revelations of angels or whatever. Revelations take priority in the church.

And then its prophecy comes next, people who prophesy. But these were lead to belief in the bodily raised Jesus. Speaking in tongues, visions, ecstatic experiences, prophecies don't lead to that kind of... Well, originally he was talking about appeared, appeared, appeared.

It's visual stuff, and it led to bodily resurrection beliefs. Belief, certainly. Well, they already had a belief that the resurrection would be bodily.

That was sort of standard within Judaism. So there wouldn't be any other kind of resurrection that they would be attracted to right away. I mean, the first idea.

But the first different beliefs, though. I'm sorry. The word different beliefs.

I mean... Yeah, that's true. They thought the dead were in heaven now, but not in the same kind of bodily senses when the general resurrection would occur. Right, right.

Oh, well, if you... Okay, if you want to talk about that. Is that... So what do we have left? I think this is your last... Our last set of questions. All right, so let's see what's... Let me change track then.

Well, no, before I do that, I'll do one last thing on this point. Just to clarify, I mean, what my theory is, is you look at the list, it's Peter has the experience alone, then he leads the 12 into having the similar experience. Then he or some of they probably led the 500 brethren into a similar experience, and then probably the same thing happened with James and the others, but if you believe that versus authentic, so that you actually have the exact little expected sequence for a new religious cult where you have the leader has the private vision to himself, and then it becomes a contagious hallucination, essentially.

And this is another thing we've studied. The idea of hallucinatory contagion, where a particular leader, charismatic leader anchors people and inspires them and guides them and actually sort of suggests, through the power of suggestion, what they should see and what's expected to see. And they get in these ecstatic prances where they're at a heightened state of altered state of consciousness, and then are prone to actually see this, especially when he's there guiding them through the experience.

And so we know this from other cults, and so when I look at the evidence, my first inclination is to go with what's more frequently established to be the case. Miracles are not that, but this particular sequence of charismatic hallucination is. So that's exactly.

Does that make sense to you as to why I find that more plausible? Well, you know, I know John Pilch wrote on the altered state of consciousness, something that people like Don Cross and some others have appealed to, Peter Crawford, about the ASC's altered state of consciousness. Philip Weeb wrote an article several years ago about ordinary states of consciousness, and he postulated 10 different characteristics of OSC's ordinary state of consciousness. And then he interviewed people who had had ASC's, more than 30 patients who had had them, and he compared their stories with these 10 OSC characteristics.

And what he found was, yeah, these OSC characteristics, qualities of OSC's were usually not present within people having ASC's. And so when a person talked about their experience, the more these 10 qualities for OSC's, the less likelihood that that would have been an ASC. I'm sorry, the less likely what? The less likelihood that it would be an altered state of consciousness, the more characteristics of an ordinary state of consciousness it would have.

So based on that, you know, he looked at it and says, well, what we gained from the resurrection appearances, he saw at least six of the 10 qualities of an OSC available on those and said, well, it's very unlikely that these would be... He must be going from the gospels though, because we don't have those kinds of details from the epistles. Right, well, even with that, then you wouldn't have the... for the ASC's either. Well, I know, but then it would be prior probability wins out, right? What's most inherently most likely? I do think what makes the ASC's improbable is the belief that it would lead to a bodily resurrection, one where the corpse is brought back to life and raised from the death, leaving behind an empty grave wherever that might have been.

So I don't see hallucinations doing that, where people think, oh, I saw him, I saw her, my dead spouse. I guess I don't need to go visit the grave because they're not there any longer. But yet, this seemed to be the uniform belief of the disciples, the early disciples on this.

Well, again, the epistles don't even tell us what they actually did or what they checked or what they thought and assumed and so forth. So it's very vague, we really don't know. So we can't use assumptions regarding what they necessarily would have done when we're not sure.

They could have done a variety of different things. And we do know, for example, that people in religious cults can have hallucinations convincing them of things that they haven't actually independently attested. So they could have a hallucination that convinces them that Jesus has risen and simply assume, you know, if Jesus himself told them he's risen from the dead and now is not in the grave, they would assume he's not in the grave.

And there are a lot of people in these particular religious cults, even today, where if you present them with hardcore definitive evidence against what they believe, they'll deny it. They'll actually come up with excuses explaining it away, conspiracy theories are common. And it's interesting that the Gospel of Matthew gives us an example of exactly that kind of conspiratorial thinking.

The Jews paid the guards to lie. That's exactly the kind of thing. I don't think any of that story is true, but it's a representative of the kind of attitude that you would have.

If someone said, well, no, the body's right there. If there was some way to do that, legal issues would make it problematic. But if they did that, they would deny it was him or they would say that you put the different body there or no, he was buried over here or something like that.

There's lots of ways that someone who's really firmly fanatically convinced of something, they can explain away any contrary evidence. And they might not feel the need to confirm evidence because they're not thinking in terms of the epistemological knowledge and logical rigor that we do today, post-scientific revolution. We have a certain attitude, even common man has a certain attitude towards evidence that wasn't necessarily common in antiquity.

So if the disciples are all believing them, that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead and has transformed physical corpse, you don't think any of them are going to go by to check out to see? I don't know. I think it's possible that none of them would. Yes.

Even if they did, they might have simply confirmed what they see is not, wouldn't convince them that it was Jesus. They would tell themselves in some way that that's not Jesus' body. He was actually buried over here, that slabs empty.

There's a number of things they could do to convince themselves to confirm what their hallucination told them. But I think also it's entirely possible. And as you well know, one of the things I argue as a possibility is that they actually do think in transformation, with the body stays behind.

You said that's untenable. If you want to argue, that's fine, but let me just give you one quote from your book. Of course, Paul was a skeptic.

He was a very anti-Christian. And so then he converts, believes Jesus was raised bodily. Now in your spiritual body chapter in the empty tomb book, you say, it seems impromptu.

And I quote you, it seems improbable. Paul himself would remain a convert without checking any, italicized any of the evidence. For if we are to suppose this, then we could hold no trust in anything Paul affirms.

So it seems like if Paul believes in bodily resurrection, that would be one of the most important things that he would be doing. He's checking out to see, you know, is there an empty tomb or grave? Well actually, notice that I'm building a dichotomy there. You have two options there.

Either he checked or we can't trust him. I'm not affirming that it's one or the other. I think it's quite possible we can't trust him.

He might have not engaged his epistemic duty, for example. I think it's entirely possible. And if that's the case, we can't use him anymore as to cite him as evidence.

So what I'm talking about in that passage is I'm talking about Christian apologists, like yourself, who argue from his example that therefore we can deduce certain things about that. But it comes to a dichotomy. Either he's an unreliable source entirely, in which case we can't deduce anything from things he's claimed.

Or he's a reliable source. Now if you suppose he's a reliable source, certain things follow and that's what that passage goes into. This is the things that would follow if you start from that perspective.

Which is the case? I'm evenly divided. I think the fact that all of these guys, I mean Paul, leaves a kind of cushy life within the Jewish leadership where he's a rising star. And then he lives a life where he's persecuted frequently and having all these times to run in prison, finally dies as a Christian martyr.

And all these disciples, I wouldn't say that we can know for sure that they all died as martyrs. But I think we can be certain based on the evidence that Peter James and Paul did for sure the evidence would be. And we know from the other sources that these guys were willing to die for their faith.

I think they really believed these things. Yeah, yeah, I don't doubt that. You don't think they were lying? The original Christians know.

Well, I could talk about what possibilities, what would be the case if they were. But I think it's more probable than not. So I wouldn't say it's zero probability that they're lying.

But I think it's more probable than not that they're telling the truth that they actually did see something and they actually did believe it was Jesus. And so that what they were preaching, they actually believed. I think it's more probable than not.

I don't think it's absolutely certain. I mean, there are certain things we know from anthropology where we can actually show that the evidence would look pretty much the same even if they were lying. And I talk about this and not the impossible faith where I actually talk about why someone would lie and go to their death lying for this kind of thing.

And within the anthropological context or the time, that does make sense. But nevertheless, from reading Paul's letters, the way he speaks and the way he talks about having conversations with time and so forth, I think he very definitely believed what he saw. It's possible he was lying, but I think it's more probable than not that he actually believed it.

Okay, each of our debaters now get seven minutes to give a final statement, and then after that we'll move to questions. And first will we talk to look on it. Well, this has been enjoyable.

I really didn't know what to think about the discussion periods like this. I've never done something like that before. I was hesitant, as you know, but I've enjoyed this this evening.

This is a cool format. In this evening's debate, I did construct a case for Jesus Resurrection, a positive historical case using two major building blocks, facts and method. The facts I presented were the appearances, such as the appearances to individuals and to groups, to friends and foe alike.

And then I went to method and I posited four general criteria used by historians for weighing hypotheses for the best explanation, and I demonstrated that the Resurrection Hypothesis meet these four criteria quite well. Now, what I would like to do is to review these criteria, Rick's hypothesis and the Resurrection Hypothesis, according to them. Now, explanatory scope concerns the ability of a hypothesis to account for the known facts.

Rick's concern for predictive power of a hypothesis, I think, falls under this criterion. And he did grant the facts that I presented this evening, predominantly, that these people had experiences. The disciples and at least one foe named Paul, that they had experiences that they believe were the risen Jesus who appeared to them, that these happen in individual and in group settings.

They really, truly believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Now, I posited that it was more than that. It was a bodily Resurrection of his transformed physical corpse.

I know Rick doesn't agree with this, but he didn't dispute this this evening, and so my point remains standing there, undisputed. Now, Rick asserts that the authors of the Gospels, nope, he did not do that. Well, he did.

He said that the authors of the Gospels, well, he just doesn't trust them. And I didn't posit this this evening, and he didn't really press that further. We disagree on this, and it's irrelevant for tonight's debate, so I'm not going to move further with this.

Now, in terms of explanatory scope and the predictive power, if the appearances were hallucinations, as Rick contends, then we wouldn't expect such a large number of the disciples to see Jesus. Professionals in psychology have shown that the largest group to experience hallucinations would be senior adults breathing the loss of their loved ones, and the highest percentage of these are 50%, believe it or not, on an average. But only 14% of these experience visual experiences of their loved ones, 7% of all breathing senior adults, which I think when you compare that with the disciples, 100% would have had to experience them.

I think that such a hypothesis seems very improbable. It's not what we would expect if hallucinations happen. We wouldn't expect group appearances.

We wouldn't expect Paul to hallucinate the last person in the world he wanted to see. As my friend, Olivia McGrew puts it, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, the most likely thing to have occurred is nothing. No one hallucinates.

Paul remains a Jew, and the messianic movement of Christianity falls apart in short time, just like every other failed messianic movement. So, Rick's hypothesis fails in its explanatory scope. Explanatory powers, the ability of a hypothesis to account for the facts without forcing them to fit.

And this is where I think Rick's hypothesis fails the most. He posits the individual hallucinations to all the apostles, far too great a number that can be supported by the professional literature. Multiple group hallucinations, even of one of which would be extremely rare, according to the psychological literature.

In fact, I could show you numerous quotes, in fact, from Elman and Laura E. in their most recent book, published in 2008 by the American Psychological Association, titled Hallucinations, the Science of Idiocentratic Perception. And I emailed Laura E. and he said, and I said, why didn't you include collective hallucinations? He says, we couldn't find anything on them. It's just not in the literature.

Now, schizo-typles, you know, I think that this fails because, while you can note that such hallucinated has to ignore other multiple symptoms that would render such a diagnosis unlikely. In terms of, so I think these show that Rick's hypothesis fails this criterion as well. In terms of being less ad hoc, this concerns the number of non-evidence assumptions involved in a hypothesis, positing Paul's psychological conditions such as guilt and so forth, hurting for the Christians.

There's no, not even so much as a hint of these in Paul's letters, so it's completely ad hoc. And it's psychohistory, which professional historians severely frown upon. Despite the fact that the earliest reports suggest that the appearance has led to the belief of the disciples, Rick has to posit other psychological reasons for doing so such as guilt, scriptures, et cetera.

So I think that there are several non-evidence assumptions in this hypothesis and so that it therefore fails this criterion. What about plausibility? This concerns whether a hypothesis is in accord with other widely accepted facts. And here, again, I believe as appeal to group hallucinations is not in accordance with the widely accepted position in the professional psychological literature.

And neither is psychohistory as a method. It's rejected by basically all professional historians. So it seems to fail every criterion for the best explanation.

And this is why I believe that strict adherence to control historical method is so important because it reveals the weaknesses in a hypothesis. His hypothesis is very creative. I take my hat off to him for that.

And it sounds plausible at first. That isn't until it's confronted by a brutal gang of facts. Now, what about the resurrection hypothesis? Well, if we expect several appearances, if the resurrection hypothesis is true, then we would expect several appearances.

The explosive growth of the church and the inability of naturalistic hypothesis to account adequately for these facts. And this is exactly what we have. So the resurrection hypothesis couldn't be better in its explanatory scope and power because it doesn't have to force anything either.

There are no non-evidence assumptions in the resurrection hypothesis. I haven't argued for a God raising Jesus from the dead this evening. So I do realize that if Jesus was raised, then the theological implications are quite strong.

But that's the theological implications of the historical conclusion. You shouldn't throw out the theological implications because you don't like the historical evidence leaves. That's allowing, that's not weighing in with the evidence, it's weighing in with one's worldview.

So I don't believe the resurrection hypothesis is at Hoch in terms of plausibility. If it occurs, it was almost a supernatural event. The fact that dead critters that stay dead just shows that people don't rise apart from God.

So I do think that the resurrection hypothesis fulfills at least three of the criteria with flying colors and doesn't fail the fourth. And that's why we should regard it as an event that occurred in history. Thank you.

I'll summarize my case. What I've argued today, and we've had a lot of agreement on some of these things and not on others, but even if miracles occur, they are very unusual. By far, most missing bodies throughout history are not the result of resurrections.

By far, most appearances of gods or dead people are not resurrections either. And that's a fact no one can deny. So from my perspective, Mike has to prove the evidence for his claim about Jesus is exceptional enough to prove that none of the usual things happened in this case.

And I don't think he's met that burden. All he has are the epistles. He doesn't even use the gospels as evidence in this particular case.

The epistles give us no evidence of anything unnatural. The only sources they mention for the claims about Jesus are visions experienced only by people the epistles show we're hallucinating on a regular basis. We have many verses in the epistles confirming that they were like this.

This was the actual personality. Now, that's why I believe Mike is not shown the evidence for this claim about Jesus is exceptional in any way. And why I conclude there was nothing supernatural about the Christian claims about Jesus.

Most probably they believed he was raised because they hallucinated visions of him telling him he was raised, as they believe scripture told them would happen. Now, since the epistles never mention the tomb being empty or any of those other miraculous things that come into the gospels, all we have are the epistles in this particular debate. They're very vague as to what actually happened.

When evidence is very vague, all we can really rely on is what actually happens most often in similar circumstances. The anthropology of religion and psychology establishes that. In contrast, I'm pretty sure a real Jesus resurrected by God who actually cared about us would appear to everyone on earth.

I mean, that point. Even in every generation, he wouldn't appear to just one tiny group in one tiny place 2,000 years ago but that a group of regular hallucinators raised in a culture seeped with teachings of resurrected savior gods, believing the world was soon to end and seeking any way to make the facts fit their belief, finding a message in their holy scriptures about their executed savior, being resurrected and becoming God, that such a group would then hallucinate the resurrection of their executed leader as a confirmation of the coming into the world and the coming resurrection. All of that is perfectly natural.

And like many other strange religions, it requires no other explanation. Now, he mentions that Paul is unique. Well, yes.

He mentions that Paul was an outsider and therefore that contradicts this hypothesis. It doesn't. This hypothesis predicts that outsider conversions would be very, very rare.

They are. Paul is the only one that we know of. We can actually confirm from the epistles.

So he says, we wouldn't expect that. Well, actually, what we would expect is that it would be rare. So the evidence actually confirms my hypothesis rather than the other way around.

In contrast, the hypothesis that Jesus was God or resurrected by God in order to save mankind, what we would sooner expect is that he would appear to everyone not just to his fanatical believers and one guy out on the outside. He says we wouldn't expect such large numbers of hallucinators, but he refers again to modern data. And as I pointed out in our discussion, cultures are radically different.

Modern culture is completely different. The way people acculturate themselves in terms of mental mindset, in terms of treatment of hallucinations and so forth is entirely different. So we can't really compare in those respects unless we look at very similar cultural and social conditions like particular hallucinating charismatic cults like the shakers and cargo cults and similar groups like that.

Again, also having these large groups hallucinating is, he says it wouldn't be expected. Well, that's true. What that means is what it's not expected is it's going to be rare.

And in fact, that confirms the evidence. The evidence actually shows that this kind of cult movement is rare. And that's actually an agreement with my theory rather than a contradiction of it.

He mentions scope. He says we would expect no appearances if Jesus wasn't raised from the dead. That actually, I think he meant explanatory power.

Explanatory power makes the evidence probable. He would say that the evidence would be improbable on the hypothesis that Jesus didn't rise from the dead. But the theories are, you start with the theories in place, for example, that there were hallucinations of resurrection, that there wasn't God raising Jesus.

Those are the two theories you're competing. You're not competing, God doing it, and nothing happening. So I'm not talking about the hypothesis that nothing happened at all.

So that's not the hypothesis I'm testing. I'm testing the hypothesis that they have hallucinations and that certain things happen that led to these beliefs. He's testing the hypothesis that God did all these things.

So again, we're starting with the supposition of a particular hypothesis and then comparing it against the evidence. In that respect, my theories actually explain all the facts, including the fact that the visions occurred only to the fanatical believers within the cult and one lone outsider, that they occurred within a culture where this was actually very common, that it occurred within a group that we can establish is actually has, gets a type of behavior, and actually we're hallucinating on a regular basis, that it happened within a culture that had resurrected God cults all over the place. And then lo and behold, we have another resurrected God cult here.

So all of this explanatory scope actually works. My theory does. My theory isn't any more ad hoc than his.

I mean, I only posit psychological conditions like cognitive dissonance and sickle, skits or type of personality disorder that we actually have established existed. He actually assumes things like God, God's interests, God exists, God has a particular plan. God would only have Jesus appear in certain ways that he wouldn't have him appear to me and so forth.

These are a lot of ad hoc assumptions to make the evidence fit his theory. His theory is actually more ad hoc than mine. And in terms of plausibility, widely accepted facts, my theory is based only on widely accepted facts regarding what the scientific realities are, what the common realities are.

So my theory doesn't actually contradict all those things. Now, I hope I have time to say some things about what's actually gone on. I actually really like this debate.

I love this format actually, it was wonderful. We agree on more than we would think, and I don't think we would know that if we'd done this usual combat of debate where you're just trying to get your rebuttals in on time. I think we got more communication across this time.

We actually made progress in understanding why we believe what we do, why we believe differently, and how to proceed from here. I actually have some ideas now about where to go in terms of thinking, well, if I'm wrong, how would I know what kind of information would I want from him? And I think he might even have some better idea of why I believe what I do. So I think we actually know more about each other in our respective positions than we would have gotten in any other kind of debate.

So I'm really glad we chose this format, and I'm glad we have so many people here. Do I have time or are we done? Okay, excellent. Thank you all for coming.

Thank you all for coming. Thank you. Just for the sake of everyone knowing, I should say, Occam's razor is a principle of logic which says that you should always assume the natural before you assume the supernatural because the supernatural is impossible to prove logically.

So how do you reconcile that with fact that throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be not magic? Well, I don't know that you'd say that every mystery that has ever been solved has been shown to be not supernatural or anything like that, because I don't think we all agree on the conclusions of some of those. But to make sure you don't use or you use the least number of non-evidence assumptions, and I do believe the resurrection hypothesis uses no non-evidence assumptions, whereas Rick's hypothesis uses several of them. So if we apply Occam's razor, I think resurrection wins.

Just to the right. Well, I'd appreciate a little help with the methodology that was posited at the beginning. It seems to me that the plausibility plank there, it kind of boils down to that, because we're talking about a proposition that is at best highly, highly implausible.

I guess I'm curious, we talked about plausibility meaning a proposition that's in agreement with a widely accepted fact. And I'd like your perspective on what exactly that means. In this context, the fact seems to me in order to make the proposition plausible has to do with God being involved in the resurrection.

So first of all, we have those four elements. Are they all to be treated with equal weight? We sort of walked through them as though we were checking off boxes to kind of earn a merit badge here, but it seems to me that the plausibility plank is the most important one. So I'd appreciate your perspective.

I'm struggling to articulate it, but how do we deal with the plausibility, which seems to me to be the key here? All right, it is okay. Yeah, I'll give you my answer to that. I mean, I think if you ask Mike that question, he'll give you a different answer.

That particular method is the McCulloch criteria for argument to the best explanation. Actually, the logical foundation for that is base theorem. Mike actually criticized base theorem, but I can actually show a demonstration that the argument to the best explanation that he presented is actually validated by base theorem, and so base theorem actually correctly analyzes that.

What's called plausibility is actually in base theorem called trier probability, and it's the way you determine prior probability correctly in base theorem is exactly what the plausibility criterion is. So you're right, the plausibility criterion actually carries a lot of weight exactly as he said, because the prior probability that you put into the equation in base theorem has a huge effect on the outcome. And that's exactly reflecting the fact that the plausibility criterion on the argument to the best explanation is so important.

If you have an explanation that uses only established facts, that explanation has a great deal more explanatory power in respect to that because of that very reason, whereas if you have to assume space aliens did it, for example, to pick something that's neither of us agree with, that's not, the established fact aliens aren't doing that sort of thing, that's not an established fact. So automatically, just from that one criterion that hypothesis is already tanked, which is why you would need in terms of base theorem, that means the probability is very, very low. So you'd need really, really good evidence to confirm it, and we talked about that, and it's possible to have that really, really good evidence.

I just don't think we have it in this case. So does that answer your question regarding that? Yep. I'm going to keep this.

Go ahead. In seconds in here. The thing with base theorem, it's so difficult to agree upon the prior probability.

What reference class you use, and if one should be used, and something like that, and we're all going to disagree on the prior probability of things, and that's why historians typically don't use it because you can't come on agreement. Some of these, as I would argue, the prior probabilities are inscrutable, and so that's why I think we should bracket that the prior probability, in most cases, and like with the resurrection, and you deal with the likelihoods, and that's where I think resurrection comes out better. Let's go to this slide.

Dr. Lucona, I was wondering your thoughts on, since there are some supernatural phenomena in the world, in your worldview, how do we go about approaching claims that, or how do we disprove claims that are supernatural claims that aren't true? What criteria can we use, for example, to say whether or not Joseph Smith really found those plates that had word on them? Like, can you go? Fair question. I think we would do that just like we would do any other natural claim. You just look at the evidence for them.

When we look at the evidence for Joseph Smith and the plates, eight of the 11 witnesses who said they saw these things later on recanted and left the Mormon Church, we don't find that with disciples to our knowledge. And the only report we have of what they saw was they saw it in visions. They literally said it was visions.

There weren't physical plates that they touched, which would seem to play more into hallucinations or something like that. So I would look at the natural, see if there are natural explanations. If there are plausible ones, then I would rule those out.

And in some cases, just like with any natural account, I'd have to say, well, we just have to leave a question mark. We just don't have enough evidence one way or the other. Thanks.

My question relates to the facts in the scripture. In light of the ancient culture at this event, the resurrection of Jesus took place in where women were viewed as a lot less equal, not as equal as men. Why would the apostle record in the gospels that two women were the first to see the empty tomb and saw an angel.

And then a little bit later, were the first to actually see Jesus and talk with Jesus if it really didn't happen that way. Yeah. We didn't actually, I probably would have talked about this in this debate if we'd gone more into the gospels, but we didn't.

That was kind of Mike's agreement, I guess. He chose to focus on the epistles, which is fine. You'll be a very different debate.

We could probably do a whole other debate on this than just the gospel evidence alone. With regarding to that, women not being equal wouldn't make a difference for that. What the argument usually is, which I think you're trying to articulate, is that women's testimony wasn't trusted and therefore you wouldn't make up a story where women are supposedly the witnesses to it.

And there are many Christian apologists who've actually made this argument. I actually refute it in my book, Not the Impossible Faith. I have a whole chapter on it explaining why that's not the case.

Women's testimony was trusted and it was even regarded as equal to a man's, both in courts of law and historians relied on women's testimony. Why Mark puts women there, I think, is with regard to what you were talking about, about the equality, the fact that women were considered lesser people, lesser disciples, lesser honored, in a sense. So in terms of the disciples, the followers of Jesus, the men were in the forefront, the women were the least of them, in a sense.

Mark is an entire gospel. The way he designs the entire gospel is to essentially preach the gospel by constructing his stories and the parables to bring that message that the least shall be first. I mean, it's all throughout the whole thing, the parables of Jesus.

There are a lot of other reversals of expectation that where Mark has people trying to glorify themselves and then actually it's the least that replaced them in the function. One of the examples is Simon Peter glorifies himself. He wants to, or Jesus tells Simon Peter, you must take up my cross and follow, and Peter assures he will.

But then there's a different Simon. Simon of Cyrene is the one, a stranger, that someone who is clearly of lower honor in terms of the movement is the one who actually picks up the cross and carries. That's called literary irony, and it's very common device in literature of the ancient world.

The same thing happens with the women. The women are the least of the disciples. So the least were the first.

That's exactly the kind of literary irony that Mark would use to convey the gospel. So he would want to depict women being the first to have these experiences, because that's the whole point of the gospel in a sense. Let's go this way.

Hang on, I want to ask 15 seconds. According to Talalon's, the lexicon of Jewish names in late antiquity, she says that Simon was the most popular Jewish name in, mail name in antiquity by a long shot. And so for Simon, to Simon, Simon Peter, Simon of Cyrene, it doesn't seem like there's necessarily a causal connection.

And Simon of Cyrene, even though he carried the cross of Jesus all the way, he wasn't crucified. Simon Peter later was, according to the tradition. So I don't see where there's this irony involved.

I disagree. But anyway, you can read about that in my book. Or you can learn all about that.

Go ahead. I'm sorry I'm on this side, but my questions for both of you. So I guess this is fine.

And I've got kind of three or four points. And my first one is more of a criticism. So you'll have to excuse me.

Let's ask you a question, please, who have others you need to ask them to? As far as when you're rebutting Mr. Carrier, it would be helpful when you're saying that there are other theories involved, if you would state them specifically because even when you're going back with them, they're not supporting your argument. And there's just a period of time when you were saying that there were several theories, but they were not stated to support your argument. And my question was, what are your comments on specific sites like the Dome of the Rock where it has significance for Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, but the significance for each of them is different.

But the site is universal in those religions. In terms of your first thing, I'm not really sure what you mean by that. So I'm not sure what you mean by all these different, I didn't support different hypotheses.

In terms of the Dome of the Rock, I guess I would ask you what's the significance of your question related to tonight's debate. As far as using it for or against as a piece of evidence, I guess just what is your idea? Because my feeling is that Mr. Carrier is having a naturalistic point of view probably holds that kind of evidence in the same regard that you would as being, yes, a valid piece of evidence, but I guess my question is what is your point of view, Mr. Carrier, versus your point of view, as to how that can be such a significant place in multiple religions, if things like Ascension of Muhammad and the other events that took place there would possibly not have happened. If they could have been like mass group hallucinations or things of that nature or things that became to be common belief that maybe we're not witnessed by a mass amount of people.

Does that make sense? If I understand you correctly, you're asking what would be the naturalistic explanation for why so many religions revere the Dome of the Rock? Correct. Well, the answer to that is pretty straightforward geopolitics essentially, that's been the nexus, the center point of a lot of contention regarding where the holy site is, where the sacred places are. I mean Islam actually derives from Judaism.

It's in Judaism and Christianity. It's actually, they revere the book. It's actually part of their religion.

So it's essentially, it has relation to Christianity and Judaism the same way Christianity does to Judaism. So they're all offshoots of ultimately the same religious tradition, so they all revere the same history, in a sense, in the same geopolitical realities, the same geography. So now Islam, of course, has actually become more spread out.

It actually has Mecca, for example, with it, so they have their own focus and so forth. Christians have the Vatican. But you can explain those things by looking at just the basic course of history, the natural cause of events that have occurred.

There's no real need for a supernatural explanation. Let's go over here. Dr. Kerry, my question is a two part one for you.

On the night that our Lord was betrayed, he and his twelve disciples shared the Passover supper in the upper room, and then later adjourned to the Garden of Gessetomi, where they were confronted by Judas Iscariot, the temple guards, and many armed Roman soldiers, overwhelming numbers. And the apostles' response to that was to run, and for several days they hid behind locked doors and feared for the lives. Would you consider that a rational response by the apostles in that circumstance? Possibly.

I mean, I don't know, for example, I don't know what the actual course of events were, what was actually going on. I don't actually trust that account of what was happening. One interesting thing I would recommend reading is Dennis McDonald's Homer, the epics of Homer in the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel of Mark, where he actually points out a lot of things where the behavior of the, if you just look at the Gospel of Mark, the behavior of the disciples is not rational way that humans would normally behave.

There's actually, he demonstrates several cases of where they demonstrate abject stupidity that you or I, or just any average person, would not have done. And they do a lot of things, a lot of the things are deliberately crafted to look cowardly or foolish or unintelligent or unperceptive, not getting things and so forth. And he analyzes this showing that this, there are a lot of kids.

Well, I don't think adults are kids. Even in the ancient world, adult people were not like children. And he analyzes this showing in the Homeric epics, for example, that Odysseus' crew is also depicted this way.

And it's actually, it's a common trope to depict particular groups of people as dollars and cowards and so forth for dramatic purposes. And he analyzes what that means in terms of what Mark was trying to say. So if you're interested in looking at a different perspective of a different explanation for why that story would be constructed that way, I would recommend reading Dennis McDonald's book.

Even if you don't agree with everything he argues in there, you'll find a lot of interesting things that might open your mind to different possibilities. Okay, well, we'll go on to the second part. We're going to keep moving because we're going to try to get as many questions from different people as possible.

A lot of people, yeah. Yeah, someone just thoughts about in the gospel of Mark, being the oldest and I would argue probably the most reliable gospel, why the resurrection isn't Mark's extensively addressed, given the evidence that Mark knew Paul and knew what I believe was a creed that he was reciting in 1 Corinthians. And isn't it more plausible and feasible to believe that there were just two schools of thoughts about Jesus, one being a rabbi and a teacher and the other school of thought being a rising savior.

And because exclusively probably because of Paul, the rising savior school of thought simply just won out. That's a fair question. Thanks for asking that.

I don't think it's plausible though because like no less than nine times in Mark's gospel, Jesus predicts his death and subsequent resurrection. In 1428, one of the last ones, chapter 1428, he says, you know, when, after I've got when I have risen from the dead, I will go ahead of you into Galilee and there you'll see me. And then after he's risen from the dead in chapter 16, verse 7, the angel tells the women, go ahead, Jesus has risen from the dead, he's not here, but go tell the disciples in Peter that he has gone ahead of you into Galilee and there you will see him just as he told you.

So we've got all these predictions in Mark about Jesus going to be raised from the dead. And all of a sudden, at verse 8, it cuts off abruptly. And I'm one who does not believe that verses 9 through 20 are part of the original Mark.

Now, most scholars believe that Mark ended at 16, 8. The question is, was it intentional? And a growing number of very prominent scholars, influential scholars, well respected ones, are embracing the position that it was not Mark's intended ending, that either Mark's original ending was lost or he was unable to complete it. So, no, I don't see anything in Mark that would seem to indicate that he held to a different type of resurrection precisely because of all the resurrection predictions throughout his gospel. I'd like my 15th.

Sure, go ahead. Yeah, I agree, actually, I have no doubt. I mean, as a historian and a literary scholar of the gospels in the Bible, there's no doubt that Mark is composing a story about the resurrection of Jesus.

I don't think that's disputable. You presented some of the evidence. There's actually more, even if you could point out that that was actually the point of Mark's story.

From my perspective, that doesn't necessarily mean that Mark is telling a true story, that he's composing a story about the resurrection of Jesus. It doesn't mean he's using sources or getting it right. And he brought up the point about the ending of Mark.

It is possible. There are a lot of intriguing theories about the possible lost endings to Mark. But there are also intriguing literary theories about the intentional ending of Mark, which wasn't meant to, if he intentionally ended at 16, 8, that doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't believe there were visions or whatever.

It's just that they weren't a necessary component of the story he wanted to tell, because he mentions the visions. He says they're going to occur so that he knew those stories existed or could be explored later or earlier, whatever. It's not an essential part of the gospel he was writing, not part of the story he told.

So there's different ways to interpret it. Scholars are divided on this issue, and the evidence can go either way. It supports a lot of different possibilities.

Let's go over here. Yes. You mentioned that if Jesus had risen, he could prove himself by appearing to you.

And my question is why you think that he should do that or why he would do that? Well, I can give several reasons why. I'll just pick one of many. I mean, if he cares about me, let's put it this way.

If I were in his position, and I knew, for example, that you could have eternal life and a great, wonderful place to live better than this place and live forever, and all you had to do was come to understand a certain perspective on the world or come to understand a certain moral worldview or something like that. There's just something you had to understand, some knowledge you needed. And I had unlimited resources and divine powers that could appear anywhere or do anything.

I would appear to every one of you and give you the information you needed and help you guide you to see and understand it yourself. I wouldn't need to force you to it. I would explain to you why you should listen to this or thing.

I'd give you an opportunity. You could reject me. You could say, no, I don't want to listen to your evidence.

No, I don't want to follow your advice or whatever. But I would give you the opportunity. I would appear, present the evidence for you so that you would know.

And I think compassion compels me to do that. It would compel me to do that. No, if Jesus is compassionate, if he's even as compassionate as me, presumably he's more compassionate than I am according to Christian in theory, then he would do that even more than I would.

So that's the reason why I would expect him to appear to me. I guess I'd answer that and say, well, God is, if he exists, then he's God. And he can do what he wants.

He's not some sort of a circus animal who can be goaded or encouraged to do tricks. Neither am I. And so your life's not over. Hopefully you've got many decades left to live.

And maybe there will be some things in the future that lead you to him. Yeah. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I would much rather be doing his work in all those years.

So if God has work for me to do, if he wants to make use of my skills and abilities and my knowledge and so forth, he should appear, basically. Let's go over here and give another one in there. I would like to know if there's any non-Christian and contemporary evidence that Paul actually was a persecutor of Christians when he was still called Saul of Tarsus.

Not that I know of. You know, you've got Paul's own eyewitness testimony on this. You have what very well-made be some oral tradition in Galatians 1 verse 23 where Paul says, they hadn't seen me there.

They'd only heard that he who persecuted the church now proclaims the faith he once sought to destroy. It seems like that's some oral tradition about Paul that had been going around. And then Luke, you know, I do believe that Luke was affiliated in a traveling companion with Paul.

But we don't know his travels beforehand, you know, any kind of relationship that the traveling relationship that he would have had with Paul, so where he might have gotten information may or may not be a separate source. I mean, it'd be really cool if the Jewish document turned up and said, hey, this is a letter from the high priest to the synagogues and Damascus saying, look out for this guy Paul. You know, he was one of us, but for some reason, his midlife crisis or something has gone off the deep end, and now he's become one of the bad guys, and that'd be kind of neat to have something like that, but we don't have that, unfortunately.

Well, no, I essentially agree. I disagree with some of his premises, but I essentially agree with his conclusion. I think the testimony that we have directly from Paul, I think is sufficient to believe more probably than not that he was a prosecutor, the church before his conversion.

Okay. Due to the time, we'll take one final question from this side, and then Craig will be back to us. I saw the size of, oh.

Oh, this addressed to Dr. Carrier. Did I get your name, Mike? Yes, Carrier. Yeah.

I want to say both of you conducted yourselves very well tonight and pushed your arguments together very well. Thank you. I want to ask you, am I wrong to assume, Dr. Carrier, that you really don't trust the gospels? I'm sorry, am I wrong to assume that you don't trust the gospels? I don't trust them as historical sources, yeah.

Oh, would you mind explaining why you don't do that? Oh, well, I could have done 10 minutes on that earlier in the opening if we'd gotten into that. There are a number of reasons, I mean, to make the answers simpler. I mean, one of the reasons I've written so much is that I get the same question over and over and so I write an essay and then I just point people to that to save me time.

So I've actually written quite a lot on that. Not the Impossible Faith is a book I'm selling today that has some of the evidence discussing exactly that in detail in terms of the methodology the gospels use, in terms of the content in the gospels. So that would provide answers to your question.

And I have work online, you go to Richard Carrier.info, that also covers some of these issues. And if you email me questions, I eventually will answer. It could take months and months and months because my email gets backlogged and so be patient, but you can always ask me questions as well.

What's the name one thing? I'm sorry? Just name one thing right now. Oh, one thing? One reason why you don't trust the names one. Well, actually, well, for example, the darkness that Mark puts in there, Mark has, the sun gets blotted out.

We can actually confirm from external sources that that didn't happen. I've talked about the Barabas narrative is actually clearly mythical and eight historical because the construction of it is historically implausible. A really good example is the comparison.

If you look at Mark's empty tomb story and look at Matthew's version of the empty tomb story, Matthew's inserted characters and events and phenomena there that are completely absent from Mark's story. And in any other field of history, when we see a reduction of a document like that, we conclude that the redacted document that embellishes is false. We don't actually assume that somehow Mark missed all of those facts.

So if you look at those two stories, you can see how they're telling them. How Matthew is completely embellished and added to it. And I talked about this in the empty tomb.

There's a chapter on the plausibility of theft. And there's a whole section in there about how Matthew has actually taken Daniel in the lion's den and crafted his version of the empty tomb story to sort of make Jesus' escape from the empty tomb similar to Daniel in the lion's den. And when you look at those kinds of things, these aren't the kinds of things that historians would write in antiquity.

These are the way you write myths and ancient history. It's not the way you write histories. And that's just an example.

I mean, I could point out a lot of the contradictions between the various gospels and so forth that essentially confirm that they're making stuff up. And there's countless examples. And of course, they actually prove them to you.

I'd have to spend more time. I mean, I can just summarize a few of them, but actually convince you of it. You need to actually read something more longer than can be done in this particular venue.

I guess I just have one thing to mention. Let me tell you some books. Read Gospel Fictions by Randall Helms.

I highly recommend that. Read Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman. Highly, those two books are essential reading.

For Acts, Richard Pervo's Mystery of Acts. Those three books alone, I think, will give you a perspective on what the common views among biblical scholars are on why we don't trust the gospels implicitly. The first book that he recommended by Randall Helms, Randall Helms is a retired English professor from Arizona State.

He's not a biblical scholar. He's actually a, he is a biblical literature professor. Professor of biblical literature.

Of English though. The English Bible. Yeah, but he does very well in the ancient language.

If you've read the book, he knows his stuff. I have read the book. Looked at it.

I would disagree with a lot of what he would say. It's worth reading though. I suggest you read it and see.

Read yourself. Make sure you read the reviews as well. Sure.

Always a good idea for any book. Do you have anything else? Yeah, I guess when you look at the genre of ancient gospels, probably the best book out on that right now is Richard Burch's What Are The Gospels, and he talks about this. And it does talk about how even within antiquity, biographers had some literary freedoms.

And even if they did embellish at times, it didn't mean that the story was wrong. This would have been something they could have done in terms, and even things like contradictions in the peripheral details. I do believe that most of the differences in the gospels can be reconciled.

Many of them rather easily, some not so easily. But even if you did have a few contradictions that remained, it doesn't discount or discredit the core account. The Titanic, when it sank, there were survivors that said that it broke in two prior to sinking.

Others said, no, it went down in tech. Well, the most terrifying, frightful night of your life you're watching, loved ones, friends, people you've just met, died before your very eyes, you're fighting for your life. And there's this big thing called a ship right in front of you.

How could you make a mistake and say it broke in two and others say it didn't? I don't know how you messed that up, but they did. But that doesn't mean that you conclude that the Titanic didn't sink. It just means that there are some peripheral details.

You have to leave a question, Mark. Yeah. As Craig comes back up here to the microphone, could we just thank Dr. Lacon and Dr. Carrey again? I'm really interested in that.

Yeah, that's fine. I'm glad you're here, Nick, with this format. Again, thank you so much for being a part of this with us.

The question tonight that Jesus rise from the dead is part of our series. That we're continuing here at Washburn, which is what's the question? Where we will each semester explore some of the foundational ideas of reality and faith. Next semester, we will be dealing with the question where did we come from, and we will be discussing evolution and design with, again, scholars coming in, one of which is Dr. William Dimmsky.

So, again, Dr. Lacona, Dr. Carrier, thank you so much. Thank you. 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 RisenJesus Podcast, a ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona.