The Resurrection - Argument from Personal Incredulity or Methodological Naturalism - Licona vs. Dillahunty - Part 1

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The Resurrection - Argument from Personal Incredulity or Methodological Naturalism - Licona vs. Dillahunty - Part 1

March 19, 2025

In this episode, Dr. Licona provides a positive case for the resurrection of Jesus at the 2017 [UN]Apologetic Conference in Austin, Texas. He bases his argument on contentions that 1) empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension and 2) that historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead. Mr. Dillahunty, an atheist activist and former Christian, disagrees, positing that there is not sufficient evidence for this conclusion. Instead, those who believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection are committing the fallacious argument from personal incredulity. This means they take on this belief because they can’t find a better explanation for the historical evidence. Licona responds that Dillahunty is steeped in methodological naturalism, and the debate continues.

Transcript

Welcome to the Risen Jesus Podcast with Dr. Mike Licona. I'm Dr. Kurt Gerris, your host. In today's episode, Dr. Licona, an atheist activist, Matt Dillahunty, debate Jesus's resurrection.

Dillahunty contends that those who believe in the resurrection have no better explanation for the historical evidence used to argue for it, but that it cannot be scientific. In his view, they are committing the fallacy of arguing from personal incredulity. Licona counters and charges his opponent with methodological naturalism.

This is the Risen Jesus Podcast. Thanks for listening. Welcome to the Unapologetic Conference.

We're so glad that you're here. We want to get started right on time because we want to make sure our presenters have as much time as possible. It's a little hot in these two speakers here.

Thank you. I know some people are still in the four-year area and I know space is limited, so please come in and as you come in, scoot towards the middle so that there's plenty of seats on the outside for people as they come in. As we begin, I want to introduce myself.

My name is Layton Flowers. I am the Director of Apologetics for Texas Baptist, and we've partnered with Austin Baptist Church to host a debate between a Christian apologist and a notable atheist. The debate question is this.

Was Jesus raised from the dead? Before we get started, I want to go over some expectations for our time together. First, we are here to explain each other's perspective views. We're here to learn from each other in a respectable manner and listen very carefully and objectively.

I know that sometimes these kinds of discussions can become heated. Sometimes these kinds of discussions can cause emotional outbursts, but that's not what we're here for. We're here to learn from each other.

We're here to be objective to listen carefully to those who disagree with us. We can disagree without being disagreeable, and we request that the audience remain passive observers by refraining from clapping and booing or in any way disturbing the flow of this afternoon's debate. We're going to show the utmost respect for both of our presenters today.

The audience will be given the opportunity to ask questions both during the debate and live after the debate with one of the microphones. You can ask a question during the debate by texting to Texas apologetic. That's the Twitter account at Texas apologetic.

We have over 6,000 potential viewers through the reasonable faith org website on Facebook. Facebook Live is presenting this through William Lane Craig's Facebook page, reasonable faith. We have not only the number of viewers that you have sitting around you, but potentially hundreds of thousands of others.

Then months and years to come, people will continue to watch this debate. I'm quite certain. Not to put any more pressure on you gentlemen, but a lot of people are watching and watching our behavior in this room, in other words, and that reflects on our respective views and our positions.

So I want to introduce to you each of our debaters. First of all, Matt Deljante is an American public speaker and avid gamer, a magician and an internet personality. He was the president of the atheist community of Austin from 2006 to 2013.

He has hosted the Austin-based webcast and cable access television show, the atheist experience since 2005, and formerly hosted the live internet radio show non-profits radio. He's a former southern Baptist for more than 25 years. He is the founder and contributor of the counter apologetics and cyclopedia iron chariots, as well as the atheist debates patreon project.

He is regularly engaged in formal debates. He travels the world speaking to secular organizations, churches, university groups on religion, philosophy, skepticism, atheism, humanism, and magic. Also with us today is Dr. Mike Lacona.

He is a PhD in New Testament studies. He serves as the associate professor in theology at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of numerous books, including those associated with tonight's debate, the resurrection of Jesus and the case for the resurrection of Jesus, and then way too many other publications that I could possibly begin to list.

Mike is a member of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, and the Society of Biblical Literature. He has spoken on more than 50 university campuses, has appeared on dozens of radio and television programs. I know I've told you not to applaud, but I'm going to give you one exception right now as we welcome both Matt Delahonte and Dr. Mike Lacona.

The structure of tonight's debate is pretty simple. Each presenter will have a 25 opening statement and then followed by 12 minutes each for a rebuttal. Then they will question each other each for five minutes twice.

So five minutes and then five and then five and then five, giving plenty of time for back and forth for engagement over the differences of their issues. And of course they will conduct themselves very professionally as we know they will. After that we'll take a short break, and I will ask some questions from those who have sent it through our Twitter feed, as well as an open Mike, time for you to ask your questions.

Now if you're preparing those questions, let me just warn you, you will have only 45 seconds to actually ask the question, and because we want to give everyone a chance, you will not have time for a follow-up question, so prepare with those things in mind. And without any further ado, let's get started with tonight's debate. First will be Dr. Mike Lacona.

Well good afternoon everyone. Do we have a wireless clicker to advance the slides? Do we have a clicker? You're the clicker, or you have one? You are. Oh, okay.

All right. Well, I'm glad to be here in Austin, and thanks for having me. I want to thank Layton Flowers and the BGCT for hosting, putting on this debate, and I want to thank Austin Baptist Church for providing a venue for it.

And Matt and I had probably an hour, maybe even a little bit longer together, and we were talking magic and stuff, so we had a good time together. So this isn't going to be a knock-down drag-out thing, but we'll have some fun. There's going to be some points of shock disagreement, I'm sure, but we'll have fun.

All right. So this evening, or this afternoon, I should say, I'm going to be making two major contentions. Number one, next slide, please.

Number one, empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension. And number two, historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, let me start with that first major contention, that empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension, and I'm going to provide four lines of evidence in support.

The first line of evidence has, first next slide, and then press one more time. Power normal experiences, okay? Press it again. All right, sure, you don't have a clicker for back there.

If you have a wireless clicker, I'd love to have one. All right, so, paranormal experiences, there are things such as, well, let me, you know, demonic experiences or however you may want to call it, but ghosts, something like that, but paranormal experiences. Well, this is a friend of mine, her name is Kim.

I've known her for several years. Kim, her mom, her sister, and several of her family members have dabbled in occultic practices over the years. She's told me about some of the things that she has seen, kind of stuff that makes the hair on the back of your neck would stand up.

Well, Kim told me that about 23 years ago, I think it was, she and three others were working, were playing, ah, thank you so much. Appreciate it. They were playing with a Ouija board in her kitchen, and they were in high school at the time, and so they're playing the Ouija board and there's this metal trash can with a metal lid in the kitchen.

I said, Kim, a metal trash can of lid in your kitchen? She said, well, we lived out in the country, you know? So, yeah, so as they're playing the Ouija board, all of a sudden, they saw the lid, the metal lid on the can just lift up and hover over the can for a moment, and then it launched itself against the wall, hits the wall, goes flat against the wall, and it's as though someone was holding it against the wall, and then it just slid down real slowly down the wall, and then when it hit the ground, it started to spin like a coin. And of course, they're just falling over each other, trying to get out of the room to run out of that room. And I've seen correspondence between her recent correspondence within the last month, where she asked them, hey, do you remember this event? Yeah, and still, 23 years later, it still spooks them to this day.

So, there's stuff like this that strongly suggests that there is a supernatural dimension in reality, and of course, there are tons of stories like this. I could give you some of my own that I've experienced. Near-death experiences, okay? These are experiences where a person is either clinically dead or near-death, and they have an out-of-body experience normally.

They come out of the body, and they go places or see things. They learn certain things that turn out to be an accurate information they could not have otherwise known. Now, there are tens of thousands of these near-death experiences, tens of thousands, and almost all of them cannot be confirmed.

It's not to say they're false. They just can't be confirmed. And occasionally you'll find somewhere.

They're fraudulent. They lied about it. Okay? But there are about 300 cases, according to my friend and a mentor of my Gary Habermas who has studied near-death experiences for 45 years, and he is on the editorial board for the Journal of Near-Death Studies.

This deserves about 300 for which there is corroboration for what happened. There's a book that came out last year that's got about 200 of these. It's called The Self Does Not Die, and written by and contributed by various near-death experience, NDE experts.

And in this, they said the one criterion that had to be fulfilled to pass to have the story in this book is there had to be corroboration from at least one external source to corroborate what the NDE or had seen and experienced. In other words, what they had learned. So about 200 of these.

All right, so that's pretty cool. It seems to suggest that there is an afterlife of some sort and a spiritual dimension. The third would be apparitions.

Now, an apparition, broadly speaking, is a spirit being. It's the appearance of a spirit being. It could be in space time.

It might be, you know, like a vision outside of space time. It could be something you could touch or it could be a theory like a ghost that you could put your and you couldn't touch. Your hand would go through it.

Now, there are a number of these reports like this out here. Dale Allison, one of the top New Testament scholars in the world. He teaches at Princeton.

He's by no means an evangelical Christian scholar, and he has experienced some of these in the apparitions, he says, have imparted information to him that turned out to be inaccurate. He wasn't seeking it. It's just when he had the apparition appeared to him, it frightened him.

I want to tell you a specific story I know of, and this comes from my friend Pat Ferguson. She and her husband, Doug, we've known them for decades. They live in Virginia Beach.

We met them when we lived in Virginia Beach. And Pat, when she was a junior in high school, she was awakened early one Sunday morning. And it was dark in the inner bedroom.

And then she closed her eyes in which she opened them. That about three feet from her was the illuminated face of a friend. She had not seen for several years.

She thought this is weird. It's kind of freaky. About three feet in front of me illuminated in the dark just this face looking at me.

She closed her eyes in which she opened her eyes again. That face was still there, but right to the side and behind it was now the face of which she interpreted the face. She would be Satan or a demon.

It was red. It was a wicked smile. And now it really frightened her.

She thought she was dreaming or hallucinating. She closed her eyes, pinched herself, still there when she opened it. Closed her eyes, pinched herself, biting her tongue, opened her eyes.

It's still there. Now she's really terrified. She closes her eyes, does the last thing she knows to do.

She prays to the Lord's Prayer. When she opens her eyes, both faces are gone. She looks over the clock.

It's 2.30 in the morning. That's Sunday morning. Sunday comes and goes.

Monday comes. She wakes up Monday morning, comes downstairs. Her mom's fixing breakfast.

Her dad's reading the newspaper at the table. When he sees Pat, he puts the newspaper down, turns it around, pushes it towards her, points to a picture on there. You can see on the right it says, Pat, wasn't this a friend of yours that you hung out with a few years ago? She said, yeah, why? He said, well, Saturday night she was at a Logitz and Messina concert in Norfolk at the scope.

That's the big, like arena there. After the concert, her and a bunch of friends went up to the top row and they were just hanging out and she was leaning against a curtain. She thought there was a wall behind it.

Well, there was no wall. When she leaned back, she fell down 20 feet, hit concrete. They took her to the hospital and she died at 2.30. What I'm saying here is there seems to be a spiritual dimension.

The reality is a little more complex than atheism would claim. And then fourth, you've got extreme answered prayer. Now look, anybody in here is a Christian.

You know that we pray. You could probably make a list of some answered prayers. I prayed before I flew down here from Atlanta yesterday.

God, get me there safely. Well, the fact that I arrived in Austin safely, was that an answered prayer? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know.

Maybe the plane was going to have some problems and it didn't after all. I don't know. That's what we might call a Class B answered prayer.

It may or may not be. We just don't know. And let's face it, most of our answered prayers are Class B. But if you've been a Christian for any lengthy period of time, I've been a Christian for 45 years.

I'm 55. I became a Christian and I was 10. And I know you think, wow, he's 55.

Some of you are thinking that right now, right? You know, I was at a university about two years ago and this guy, well, student came up to me after my lecture and he said, you're 55. I said, yeah. He said, wow, you look so young on stage.

You close up. You see the crows, eyes and stuff. And he said, oh, yeah, he's 55.

So it's like one guy said, so how old are you? I was a 47 birthday. I said, well, I'm 47. He said, wow, you don't look it.

I said, well, thanks. He said, you're used to. So anyway, most of our prayers, sometimes there are Class A answered prayers.

These are like extreme answered prayers, radically answered prayer. There's just too much there to think of them as just being coincidence. I could probably name about a handful of those that I've experienced over my 45 years of being Christian.

Let me give you one, though, and it's not for me. And there's a reason I'm going to give this for someone else. It's from an atheist, someone who is today an atheist.

Someone who is an atheist today, but when this happened was a Christian. He told me we were going in an email exchange. This was, I don't know, less than 10 years ago.

And he said, yeah, resurrection. Yeah, I still don't buy it. I said, well, you know, there's miracles.

There's answered prayers. Yeah, I've been there, done that. You see, I used to be a Christian.

And my dad was a deacon in a church, and we went to church, and we had this all night prayer meeting. It was a small church, but we really needed money. And we had this all night prayer meeting.

Well, now I'm going to pick up with the email and quote him verbatim. One time my church desperately needed $7,641 in order to keep going. After an all night prayer meeting, my dad went to pick up the mail, and then it was a check for exactly $7,641 from someone who didn't even know the church needed the money.

But it heard one of the pastors speak a few years ago. My dad contacted the giver, and she said that after she'd heard the pastor speak, she felt God wanted her to put some cash in an annuity and give it to our church. The process took several years, and just days before she decided to close the account and send the accrued money to the church.

And it happened to be the exact amount that was needed right after an all night prayer meeting. Now, this is an atheist telling me this, and a few lines later he writes this. Huh? Whoa.

All right, so we got to start all over again. Well, thank you, and it's really great to be with you guys this afternoon. All right, here's what he said.

I looked as hard as I could, but finally I realized I had no good reasons to think God existed. Right after he told me about this answered prayer. So there are these extreme answered prayers.

I could give you a number of examples from my own life as well as those whom I've heard from others. Again, these would be class A answered prayers that would strongly suggest there's a supernatural component to reality. So you look at these individually, these four different lines of evidence, and there's pretty strong evidence.

But you combine them, that's a case that's virtually impregnable. So my first major contention stands. Empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension.

And this is important because if there is a supernatural dimension, it gives plausibility to the resurrection. This leads us then to my second major contention, and that is that historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead. And here I'm going to make this so simple.

I'm going to try to make this so simple that even a Southern Baptist can understand. Just teasing. I worked for the North American Mission Board six years.

I am entitled to make that kind of a joke. All right, let's talk facts and method. Let's start with the facts.

We're going to start, and I'm going to do it as a historian, what I would call relevant historical bedrock. Now, a mentor of mine named Gary Habermas calls this the minimal facts. But in history, we call it historical bedrock.

And the reason being is these are facts that are so strongly evidence that they have persuaded the overwhelming majority, almost a universal consensus of scholars to agree with them, including atheist agnostic and Jewish scholars. So you can't really say it's because of a bias or something. And there are some facts that I think are strongly evidence, but, and I think they're conclusive.

But the majority of scholars don't grant them. And so it's like, well, that's not historical bedrock. And what historical bedrock is you use that to build the foundation of a hypothesis.

And if a hypothesis cannot account for even those facts, these minimal effects, well then that hypothesis would need to be either adjusted or abandoned. And if you get some ties in different hypotheses that would account for these, then you add other facts on top of that that you can assess with your hypothesis. Paul is our best source for the resurrection.

I believe the gospels are historically reliable sources for Jesus. But Paul is our best source. And in fact, Bart Erman, a leading New Testament scholar, an atheist New Testament scholar, and I, we had a written debate last year on are the gospels historically reliable accounts of Jesus.

If you're interested in that, go to my website. You can access it for free. It's risenjesus.com forward slash gospels.

risenjesus.com forward slash gospels. But I'm not going to be arguing for the gospels right now because I've got, I'm limited in time. So I'm going to go with what historians regard as the very finest evidence for the resurrection.

And that's Paul. He's our ace. And the reason he's good is because Paul we know was a skeptic.

He was a non-believer. He didn't like the Christians. He believed it was God's will to destroy the movement that Jesus had started.

And so he goes out and he was arresting Christians, sending them to prison, consenting to their executions. And then he became one when he had an experience he believed was the risen Jesus appearing to him. And that experience radically transformed his life from being a persecutor of the church to one of its most able defenders.

Paul then went from persecutor to persecuted, being thrown into prison, being whipped, being beaten, being stoned. And then eventually he was martyred outside of Rome by being beheaded. Okay.

So Paul knew the Jerusalem apostles as well. And Paul claims to be an eyewitness to the risen Jesus. His writings predate any of the gospels.

In fact, it's probably the earliest in the New Testament literature. Paul, three years after his conversion, says in Galatians chapter 1, he went up to Jerusalem and he met with Peter the lead apostle for 15 days. And asked him, he got a history of Jesus and what he had said and did.

And because he went into the whole nine yards from someone who had actually been with Jesus. And he also met with James, the brother of Jesus at that time. Then in Galatians chapter 2 Paul says that 14 years later he goes up to Jerusalem and he meets with the pillars of the church.

And he names them Peter, James and John. And he says the reason being is he wanted to run the gospel message. I want you to remember that.

The gospel message. He wanted to run the gospel message he had been preaching past them to ensure he was preaching the same thing they were preaching. And he said they affirmed that he was preaching the same thing they were preaching.

They extended the right hand to fellowship to him. In other words, fist bump Paul. Good job.

Keep up the good work, brother. So according to Paul, they certified he's teaching the same thing they're teaching. Now as historians, we can look and say, well, how do we know that Paul was telling the truth? Maybe he was just making up that story to give himself authority that he really didn't have.

So as historians, we look for corroborating data and we have that. You see, there's a guy named Clement of Rome and he was known to have been a disciple of the apostle Peter. And he is writing after Paul's death.

And he calls Paul the blessed Paul and in fact in another passage of his letter to the church at Corinth, he places Paul on par with his mentor Peter. And then there's another guy named Polykarp. Now anybody, anybody pregnant in here right now? Anybody? No? Oh, over there.

You know if it's a boy or a girl? Girl, too bad. Oh, I don't mean it that way. I don't mean it that way.

The joke doesn't work as well, but that's what I mean. See if it's a boy, I'd be suggesting a name like Polykarp. Keep that in mind.

It's a cool name, don't you think? So maybe you can, now you don't like that name. So Polykarp was a disciple of the apostle John. And Polykarp wrote in his letter to the church at Philippi that Paul accurately and reliably taught the message of truth.

And in the same letter, he quotes from Paul's letters twice and refers to them as part of the sacred scriptures. These aren't the kinds of things you say about Paul if he was teaching heresy different from what Peter and John had been teaching. Precisely the kind of things you expect if Paul was telling the truth that they had certified, that the apostles had certified, he's preaching what they're preaching.

Look, I've got more evidence I could share, but I don't have the time. That should suffice though to show that when we are hearing Paul on the gospel message, we are likewise hearing the voice of the Jerusalem apostles. Now wouldn't it be awesome if we had some sort of document that said, that lost letter of Paul and said, Hey, I want to remind you the gospel message I preached.

That'd be awesome. Well, we have such a document. It's not lost.

We've had it for a long time. It's 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And Paul says, I want to remind you the gospel message that I preached to you.

And then in the next few verses, he's going to give us an outline of that gospel message. This is certifiably the authentic voice of the Jerusalem apostles and what they were preaching about Jesus. And the outline goes, I delivered to you what I also received.

These are two technical terms for the imparting of oral tradition. And Paul says that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared. So you've got Jesus death, burial, resurrection and appearances.

I want to show you what this looks like in Greek. And the reason being, as you can see, what's called parallelism, long short, long short, that was to assist in memory. There's other keys in this passage that will show us that it is an oral tradition that is being preserved here.

By an eyewitness. And then Paul gets into the different appearances. He lists six, to Peter, to the 12, to more than 500, to James, to all of the apostles.

And then he adds his own name saying, last of all, Jesus appeared to me. So Paul gets this from Peter and James, right? So he's getting this from eyewitnesses, he's got himself, a third eyewitness. And then you've got to the 12 to more than 500 to all the apostles, three group appearances.

And the reason the group of appearances is important is because modern psychology informs us that hallucinations, group hallucinations are extremely rare, if not impossible. And the reason being is because a hallucination is a private occurrence and the mind of an individual has no external reference. It's like a dream.

And I can't wake up my wife in the middle of the night and say, honey, I'm having this dream, I'm in Maui. I'm there with Gary and Sabrina Hamrick, they're here. Can't do that, right? You can't do that with hallucinations either because they're just in the mind of an individual.

And there's three of them here. So whatever's going on, either these guys were lying or they were having some kind of experience that was not a hallucination. Now, what do we do? Paul's great because hostile to time of his conversion, he's an early source, he claims to be an eyewitness, he knew Jesus' disciples, and we can certify he's preaching the same message they're preaching.

So our historical bedrock that we get from this, again, this is virtually undisputed in the world of scholarship, no matter if you're an atheist, agnostic, Jewish, or Christian scholar. A number of Jesus' disciples believed the risen Jesus appeared to them. These experiences occurred in individual and in group settings.

And third, the skeptic Paul became a Christian when he had an experience. He believed was the risen Jesus appearing to him. And I will tell you virtually 99% of scholars grant these today.

I'm not suggesting we should believe it because scholars do what I'm saying. When you have a heterogeneous consensus, nearly universal consensus of scholars, there's got to be good stuff here. So what do we do with method? Well, the mechanism that historians use to determine what's probable, every discipline has something different, what historians use, historical method, arguments of inference to the best explanation.

And we use four important criteria in assessing hypotheses in this manner. The first one is explanatory scope. This is the ability of a hypothesis to account for the maximum number of facts.

So a hypothesis that can account for three facts is superior to one that can only account for one or two. Explanatory power is the ability of a hypothesis to account for these facts without forcing them to fit without excessive ambiguity or place a different set of different ways. If a hypothesis is true, we expect certain things.

And to the degree we get these, that hypothesis is said to have explanatory power. So let's say we've got a guy who's been imprisoned for 20 years overseas. He comes to the United States, his brother greets him at the airport.

And he says, bro, you're not going to believe this. But last year the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. He says, yeah, I don't believe it.

What kind of evidence do you have? Well, what do you want? Well, if the Cubs won, we would expect a celebratory parade, right? Yeah, so he shows them some evidence for that parade. That shows that the hypothesis has explanatory power. Less ad hoc.

Number three, ad hoc is a term meaning for this. You don't want a hypothesis where there's a lot of conjecture, contrivance involved. You don't want that.

Something where there's a lot of non-evidence assumptions. It's like undetectable gremlins from Saturn are responsible for all the unexplained phenomenon on Earth is entirely ad hoc. The hypothesis that at least ad hoc is to be preferred.

And finally, plausibility. This is the degree to which a hypothesis is compatible with our background knowledge. And so the hypothesis that a three-year-old girl bench press 300 pounds is implausible based on our background knowledge of what humans are capable of doing under their own power.

So let's assess two hypotheses this way. The hallucination hypothesis, which is the most popular among scholars, it has good explanatory scope. It can account for our three facts.

It does not have good explanatory power because if it were true, we would not expect an appearance to Paul because he's not grieving. We wouldn't expect the group hallucinations, of course. It passes the less ad hoc criterion.

It's not very ad hoc. Plausibility? No, because of the group hallucinations. Again, these are extremely rare, if not impossible.

And there are not one, two, but three of these things involved. Resurrection hypothesis, I think it passes all four, especially when we've got evidence for a supernatural component to reality. You might argue that resurrections are background knowledge shows that they don't occur.

Well, it shows that they don't occur by natural causes. So for example, we could say this three-year-old girl, if I said this three-year-old girl bench press 300 pounds, we'd say implausible. But what if we had this muscle man, a bodybuilder, who's got his hands on the barbell and he lifts it and assists her? Well, then all bets are off.

That's a game changer, right? And the plausibility of her doing it on her own, it's off the table. The same thing with raising from the dead by natural causes are implausible. But if God exists and wants to raise Jesus, all bets are off.

That's a game changer. And so the plausibility criterion is a little different there. So we can see resurrection hypothesis is quite good.

Bottom line, my two major contentions. Empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension. And historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead.

Thank you. Now Matt De La Hunté will have 25 minutes for his opening statement. I think that wasn't going to work.

How's everybody doing? First of all, I want to thank awesome Baptist Church and Texas apologetics for inviting me out here to do this. I do a lot of debates. And one of the things that I repeatedly said, because I'm constantly talking to primarily atheist and skeptic groups, is I love you guys and I would love to talk to you, but I'd really rather talk to a room full of theists because perhaps they might benefit more than the people who already agree with me.

So I'm happy that in this room, myself and my wife are the only atheists, assuming you don't count the people who don't believe but are coming to church in order to make their family happily. And any of you who are secretly in the clergy project, which if you're not familiar with it, it's a bunch of pastors who've lost their belief and have an online forum where they can discuss the difficulties of this. And it's a big deal.

We've got a good mix of stuff here, and I wanted to start by saying if you came to a debate expecting might to say, yes, Jesus rose from the dead and then me to get up and say, no, he didn't. You're at the wrong debate. My issue or my position is not, I can confirm that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

It's that I am in fact unconvinced and for many of the reasons that Michael alluded to while he was talking. I'm here to try to give an understanding of how someone goes from 25 plus years as a Southern Baptist. Okay.

Backslidden for a number of those years for sure. But how you get from that to being a non-believer. And so that hopefully, and I'm not, you guys might not change your mind.

I might not convince anybody to give up Jesus and come to drinking with the skeptics or whatever we're doing this week. The point is, I've heard a lot of things about atheists while I was at the conference. Not all of them are really accurate and perhaps because it's theists talking to other theists about atheists.

But also there's some terrible atheists. I acknowledge that. And maybe, just maybe, you'll find that I wore pink so I would be not particularly as imposing and threatening.

I was going to come out and tear up. So maybe you'll find an atheist who at least can give a defense for why they don't believe in a way that you can understand and hopefully prompt some thought. I'm not going to get fancy, but there's one concept that I want to talk about at the beginning, which is the concept of the null hypothesis.

And in inferential statistics, this is basically how we establish what the default position for any question should be. The null hypothesis cannot be proved as a matter of practicality. It's the thing that you assume to be true because it can't be confirmed.

And then you demonstrate that your idea is superior or correct by actually showing that the null hypothesis is false. Innocent until proven guilty. Proving your innocence is potentially impossible in most situations.

So we begin with that presumption, and so you have to actually demonstrate guilt. Courts don't require a proof of guilt and a proof of innocence. That would be a mess.

No hypothesis. Smoking doesn't cause cancer. Basically, whenever you set up a null hypothesis, you're saying this thing really has nothing to do with this other thing.

And then as soon as somebody demonstrates that they do, you throw the null hypothesis out and you accept the new offering. No hypothesis. There's no one alive today who was alive during the War of 1812.

Now, this one may get people into trouble, especially if you have a Bible that says people live for more than 900 years, perhaps there could be somebody if that's what you begin with is accepting. But that actually has to be demonstrated not just assumed. And when it applies to inferential statistics, one could consider it the foundation for how to properly apply the burden of proof.

And when I say properly, all I'm saying is what I've said on a t-shirt for many years, I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. You have to have both components of that because if you only want to believe as many true things as possible, you believe everything. And if you don't want to believe, or you want to believe as few false things, you believe nothing.

You need both of that. Basically, I want my internal model of reality to match the real world as best it can. In the past, I've talked about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes.

I'm not a fan. I think I'm not all that impressed. If you get to set up all the facts and set up the mystery and then give your hero the secret information and a brilliance beyond anybody that we've ever... Hey, no hypothesis.

Nobody's as smart as Holmes. But he was also friends with Houdini, and when Houdini would do things, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought he was performing supernatural effects. When Houdini would escape from ropes, the ropes would still be tied, and he'd say, I, Houdini, dematerializes and goes through the ropes.

He immediately left to a supernatural explanation for something which, as a magician, I can share you, is not, well, I wasn't there, so maybe Houdini did have supernatural powers, but there's no way for me to confirm that. And as James or Andy would say, if that's the way he's doing it, he's doing it the hard way. He also bought into the Coddingly Fairies, which, if you look at those pictures now to modern audiences, the pictures of the Coddingly Fairies are just obvious.

And you would call them Photoshop, except that you acknowledge that Photoshop didn't actually exist then. But Doyle's problem is a version of a fallacy called the argument from personal incredulity. Basically, I can't think of a better explanation, therefore this one prevails.

That is fallacious. That is not what leads you to a correct conclusion. His problem was a mixture of a failure of imagination, about reaching conclusions with insufficient information, and a seemingly crippling fear of not knowing something, admitting that I don't know what the explanation is.

That is something we all struggle with. It's incredibly frustrating to say, this happened or if this has supposedly happened, what's the explanation for it? Because we have taught people that if you say, I don't know, then you're foolish or ignorant or stupid. Sometimes I don't know is the right answer.

Sometimes I don't know is the only answer that you can give and still remain reasonable. And there's a quote from Doyle that demonstrates just how troubled he was by this when he says, any truth is better than indefinite doubt. I have a lot of problems with that.

First of all, any truth? There's truth. There's not any truth. You don't get a personal truth.

You just make stuff up. But it demonstrates his frustration with doubt. Now, when we're trying to test for whether or not a hypothesis is correct, especially if we're appealing to the supernatural, my view, because I don't accept that anything supernatural is in fact real or that there has been any confirmation or demonstration that the supernatural is real.

When we test for it, the first problem is, supernatural is poorly defined. What does it mean? Not natural. Okay, you've told me what it isn't.

You haven't told me what it is. The supernatural can't seemingly be tested for, which is why we hear about, well, you know, the evidence of reality seems to suggest that there is a supernatural realm. Please, can we define a supernatural realm so we can figure out whether or not this is actually true? Because what I find happens many times is people have an experience or an account of an experience and they say, wow, we don't know of any natural explanation for this or I'm unconvinced by proposed natural explanations.

Therefore, I am justified in claiming that it's supernatural. That is the Doyle fallacy. That is the argument from personal incredulity.

That is a fallacious argument. So if they demonstrate, for example, the James Randi Educational Foundation for years had a million dollar prize to anybody who'd demonstrate that they could perform something that was supernatural or paranormal. And you've got psychics and dowsers and all sorts of things.

And what they would do is the person who had a claim would specifically describe what they could do and then they would work to devise a test methodology that the person who had the supposed power would agree to and the people who were testing for it would agree to. And then they would go out and they would do what was called a preliminary test. Hey, you think that you can find water with a couple of little sticks? I thought I could do this once.

You think you can find water with a couple of sticks just walking around out there? Boom, we can test that. So we'll devise a test and we'll do the preliminary test. And if you pass the preliminary test, we will have a second test because you've demonstrated that there's a there or there in your claim.

And we'll have a second test and if you pass that test, you will get the million dollar prize. Nobody even passed a preliminary test. They would get psychics up on stage who were utterly convinced that they could do what they said they would do and you would get all kinds of excuses.

Well, you know, James Randy is a psychic who's interfering with me and blocking my powers for the day or the stars aren't aligned right or anything else. And then they would go right on believing because it's easy to become convinced of something and harder to become convinced that you're wrong because nobody likes to find out you're wrong. This is something else I'd like to see has changed about society.

As someone who's changed my mind on a number of things, I'm happy to be shown that I'm wrong because as soon as you find out you're wrong, you don't have to be wrong anymore. You can move on to something that you're probably more correct about, even if it means not having a position on something. So if somebody had passed a preliminary test and then gone on to the final test to demonstrate that they could do this and they won the million dollar prize, what would we then know? Would we know that the supernatural is real? The best that the Randy Education Foundation could ever demonstrate if somebody had done it is, hey, this person can't apparently do what they said they can do.

They can grab a couple sticks and go out and find water. The next question is, how does that work? What is the explanation for why they can find water? We don't solve that just by testing. We have to be able to investigate it.

And as far as we can tell and science would acknowledge, we are barred from investigating anything beyond the natural world. If there is a God and it manifests in reality, that may in fact be detectable. In fact, I would argue that if your God doesn't manifest in reality in some detectable way, you cannot have a justification for believing.

And most of us, when I was a believer and many of you sitting here, tend to talk about a God that it does manifest in some detectable way. Otherwise, we're little God detectors who are detecting the undetectable. I mean, there's a contradiction there.

When it comes to the resurrection, Josh McDowell, a Christian apologist, an author of evidence of demands of verdict, I'm sure many of you are familiar with him, wrote this, quote, after more than 700 hours of studying this subject, I've come to the conclusion that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is either one of the most wicked, vicious, heartless hoaxes ever foisted on the minds of human beings, or it is the most remarkable fact of history. Josh, I think, has fallen both into Doyle's fallacy and in establishing a false dichotomy. The idea that it's either an intentional hoax or it's true does not exhaust all the possible explanations.

That perhaps there was some dishonesty involved. Perhaps there were flawed human thoughts about what happens. When we talk about, hey, I saw something that to me appeared to be a ghost, and we conclude then, therefore, it must be a ghost, and that lets us believe that there's a spiritual realm and people live on after death.

What we've done is we've taken an experience and provided an explanation for it without providing any evidence for that explanation. It just seems like it couldn't be anything other than this. And I find that to be monumentally arrogant.

That we think that we have enough information to reach a conclusion when I would argue that the evidence says we don't actually have enough information to reach inclusion. If you want to claim you had an experience, I'm happy accepting that you say that you are telling me what your honest representation of that is. But that doesn't mean that I agree with your conclusion about this.

If I did, and I were to use this and be intellectually honest and apply it universally, I would have to believe every religious claim, or nearly every religious claim, every supernatural claim, or nearly every supernatural claim, because I can't investigate any of those any more than I can investigate whether or not you saw your deceased grandmother any more than I can investigate, whether or not there's a gentleman who has lived off nothing but sunlight for years. As a matter of practicality, we can test that, and it fails, by the way, or we can't confirm that they're doing that. The living off sunlight.

But the only reason we can't test it is because if we let this guy try to do what he says he can do, we're convinced he would die. It would be cruel of us to try to test that. It's like when the James R. Andy Educational Foundation got people saying, oh, I can defy gravity.

I can walk off a building and fly. We're not going to test that. We're not going to encourage people who would appear to be putting themselves in harm's way based on the null hypothesis that people cannot fly.

So it's not just two possibilities. Not just either this is a hoax or it's real. It is, here's a story.

Here's a collection of facts. Here's a collection of assertions. What conclusion can we reach from it? Hey, there's an empty tomb.

Okay? I wasn't there. I don't have the ability to investigate it, but I'm fine with the idea that at some point or another there's an empty tomb. What is the best explanation for that? Oh, well, God raised Jesus from the dead.

Hang on. How did you get to that as the most plausible explanation? Because the supernatural has no explanatory power. We explain things or we gain an understanding of the unknown by appealing to the known.

If you try to solve a mystery by appealing to a bigger mystery, you have solved nothing. Saying God did it is identical to saying it's magic. There's no content there that explains how it actually happened or how you know it happened.

And simply saying, well, we can't come up with a better natural explanation. May mean that we just don't have enough information to reach a conclusion. And as we sit here saying, okay, I'm unconvinced.

That's by the way, the way I'd better describe an atheist. An atheist and somebody says, oh, there's no God. Although some of them do that, I keep trying to tell them the correct position is I am not convinced that there is a God.

I often get asked what would change your mind. I don't know. I don't have to know.

If there is a God, that God should know exactly what would change my mind. It should be capable of doing it. And the fact that this hasn't happened means that either that God doesn't exist or doesn't want me to know exists yet.

Not my problem. So the first Corinthians 15 and 14 where Paul talks about, and if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. There's a lot more in that passage from first Corinthians that I find kind of telling.

If somebody said, came to you and said, last night, I saw something strange in the sky that appeared to be moving in ways that I can't explain given my current understanding of potential explanations, would you say, oh, that's an alien spacecraft? I hope not. Although the history channel seems to think that's a plausible way to... I saw something. Okay, fine.

I'm perfectly happy accepting that you are convinced that you saw something that you can't explain. Awesome. I'm willing to take you at your word.

When somebody comes to you and says, last night I saw a spaceship from another solar system, and that's the entirety of their claim, I am not willing to accept them at their word. I want to know how they reached that particular conclusion. What is it that you saw and how did you get there? And if they say, last night it was abducted by aliens from another world.

They looked like this. They acted like that. They opened up my skull and resealed it in a completely undetectable fashion and a planet attracting device that is also undetectable.

Now I really don't believe them. But I'm willing to be convinced. All you have to do is provide the actual evidence for it, and it's unfortunate that there are probably many true things that for whatever reason you're never going to be able to demonstrate.

This is how we end up with innocent people on death row. That's awful. As much as it might be an unfortunate fact about reality.

There's never a different way to try to prove or demonstrate whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. There's a purely theological tack which is, you know, hey, just take it on faith or, you know, trust God, the Holy Spirit will reveal it to you. Now that's cool except that David Hume pointed out that revelation is necessarily first person and to everybody else.

It's hearsay which means whatever God's revealed to you may in fact be the case, but it does mean no good because I have no way of confirming that God revealed this to you at all. There are philosophical arguments and any philosophical argument would need to have a metaphysical supernatural foundation which I think is probably why we saw, hey, reality points to the supernatural and the evidence points to the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead as the core argument this evening which I'll get to more in the rebuttal. When William Lane Craig has debated the resurrection, he acknowledges that he presupposes a foundational premise that a God exists, specifically a God that is capable and desirous of resurrection to someone.

This is a necessary component because you have to have this belief in order to even attempt to claim that raising from the dead is a plausible explanation to the facts surrounding an empty tomb. If you don't believe that there is a God, if you don't believe that people can be raised from the dead, it cannot be a plausible explanation. And so you have to begin with this foundation which is why there are so many debates that are, hey, does God exist? Let's just talk about that over and over and over again.

It's not a trivial point because if we debate the resurrection as we go right now, the people who don't believe that a God exists are never going to be convinced that it's a plausible explanation or not rationally convinced. You have to start with that foundation. I don't see how a scientific argument is possible because we don't have the ability to investigate, we don't have time machines, we don't have like Jesus' DNA which would be really interesting to go back and see if we can find scraps of this.

We can't investigate from a purely scientific method which is why we rely on historical methods. This is the most common modern defense. It's a good portion of what Mike was addressing this afternoon.

The problem here is that history cannot confirm the supernatural. Science can't confirm the supernatural. We have no way to investigate it.

We are barred from investigating things that are not natural. We can certainly investigate claims that are attributed to the supernatural. Hey, I can tell you this, but we can't develop a causal connection to that until we understand what the supernatural is and not just what it isn't.

From a historical perspective, Bartarman has pointed out that by definition and miracle, a supernatural explanation has to be the least probable explanation because we take all the things that we could say, oh, it's bizarre, you know, how could you possibly think that these people got together and created this fiction and all this other stuff? That just seems so incredibly improbable, okay? How probable or improbable is the supernatural and how did you come to that determination? Because if all you're going to do is say, hey, there's a lot of people who have had a lot of experiences that we can't explain, therefore, this suggests there's something supernatural, I absolutely deny that. What's suggested is that there might be an explanation or many different explanations for what they experienced. I'm not saying the supernatural isn't real, and I'm not saying that the supernatural isn't an explanation for these things.

I'm saying there's been no demonstration of that, and arguing that our inability to come up with a natural explanation somehow makes the supernatural more believable is an argument that I absolutely reject. I find it absolutely bizarre. And this is coming from somebody who used to accept the supernatural.

The idea that there's an explanation that explains the number of facts is an important one. And as we heard a little bit about the minimal facts approach, I will address that more in the rebuttal period. But there are more problems with the historical method.

And that's this. We have a number of different books that tell us the story of Jesus. There's the Gospels, and Paul references it, and it tells us this story.

That's awesome. Hey, it survived. It survived, in fact, because people believed it.

People became convinced. But the fact that somebody has become convinced of something doesn't mean that they were justified in becoming convinced. And if the argument is, you should be convinced because this other person is convinced, that is also fallacious.

This question of whether or not Jesus rose from the dead has to be the single most important fact within Christianity. I agree with Paul. I agree with my apologies, friends.

Has to be the most important thing. Why is it even a subject for potential debate? And why is it that we cannot, if the supernatural is an explanation, why didn't God make it so that you could actually confirm the supernatural? If this is the most important fact, why do we end up with over a thousand denominations of Christians who disagree on every single point of doctrine you can imagine, including whether or not Jesus was even real at some point, which by the way, I'm not a mythicist, not advocating for that. Why isn't this the most obvious, clear, non-debatable fact in existence, if it's the most important one? How is it that there could be a God who could have important information to convey to you and utterly and repeatedly fail? God is not the author of Confusion.

Well, then I'd argue that God is not the author of the Bible, because there's a lot of confusion that's been sown from that. Well, that's our fault. That's our fault.

We are fallen beings who cannot possibly understand. Yes, that may be your argument for this, but isn't that also God's responsibility? Oh, well, he gave us free will. Okay, well, we're not going to do a free will debate here tonight.

But in the end, if there's a God who created everything and he had options about what kind of universe he could create, and he knew what was going to happen at the end of these, which is what you would need in order to be able to make predictions and prophecies and say, hey, you know, I'm coming back and this is going to happen and this is going to happen, you need to have some control over this. If there was a God who created the universe, had decisions about what kind of universe he wanted to make, and created this one specifically, then didn't God specifically choose a universe in which I would lose my faith and become an atheist? Didn't God choose the universe in which we don't have access to confirm rationally, reasonably, the supernatural? Didn't God pick the universe where the single most important facet of his message is not clearly evidenced? I don't know. Historians want the best sources.

There's a number of problems we could address as to whether or not, you know, do we have any eyewitness accounts? Not really, but eyewitness accounts aren't particularly reliable anyway, and I can take you and introduce you to people who claim that they've been abducted by aliens, and they will tell similar stories. You see them all over the History Channel, which is poorly named, by the way. They will tell you their stories, and they are all convinced of this.

I don't believe them. I believe that they've had some experience or trying to convey experience. I don't believe their explanation for that experience.

Does their story become more believable 2,000 years later, with no further updates, and when we're farther removed from our ability to investigate their claims? Do all those Elvis sightings turn into a religion at some point? I'm not arguing that, oh, it's all a hoax or an invented fiction. I'm simply saying, this is important, and it doesn't seem to be safeguarded. It doesn't seem to be reasonable.

I have no good foundation upon which to conclude that the supernatural exists. So when somebody says, did Jesus rise from the dead? My answer is, I don't know. I do not believe that that happened because there's insufficient evidence to support that particular conclusion.

I'm happy to be convinced, but I'm not going to be convinced by fallacies. I'm not going to be convinced by appeals to the Bible until you demonstrate the reliability of it. I'm not going to be convinced by appeals to the supernatural until you demonstrate that the supernatural is there.

I'm not sitting here saying, no, no, no, I won't believe in God. I'm an atheist because I took that passage from 1st Peter 3.15 seriously, and I wanted to be able to give a reason for my faith, and I can't. So I gave it up.

Thanks. At this time, Dr. Lacona will have 12 minutes for rebuttal. Well, thank you, Matt.

In my opening statement, you recall that I made two major contentions. Number one, empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension. And number two, historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead.

I'd like now to review those two major contentions in light of what Matt just argued. Let's begin with my first major contention that empirical data strongly suggests that reality has a supernatural dimension. And here, I provided four lines of evidence in support of that contention.

I argued for paranormal phenomena, well-evidenced near-death experiences, for radical operations, an extreme answered prayer. What Matt argued, he came back and he said, well, you can't test those. They've got to be scientifically there for test.

Well, the science disciplines have different methods. There is no single scientific method. A geologist has a different kind of method than, say, a chemist or an astronomer.

And there are certain, not all, science has a scientific method where you can test something or you can repeat this in a lab. For example, geology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, archaeology, all of these sciences. You can't test these things.

You can't do controlled and repeatable experiments in these. So it's like Matt wants a kind of gadget with a battery in it where if it's a miracle, you point at it and push a button and a green light flashes. That's the wrong kind of test that you're looking for.

It's like taking your laptop and put it in an MRI hoping that it will diagnose why it's running slowly. It doesn't work. Second, I did provide these for evidences, and Matt just really didn't address these.

They virtually went dropped. He just said, well, you can't verify. Well, some of them, you can verify.

Like I mentioned with the approximately 300 well-evonenced near-death experiences, 200 alone are in that book. Where in order to be included in that book by these scientists, it had to have at least one external source who could corroborate the occurrence of the event. Not that this person thought they experienced it, but that when this person said, hey, I met so-and-so and they told me this, they could, well, I wish I could give the exam.

There's so many examples. I just don't have the time. Well, I'll give one real quick if I can.

There's this one example where this mother was dying. She was in the hospital ready to die, and she wanted to see, or actually she didn't want to see her son. She was estranged from him.

He had caused him great financial trouble. He wanted to see her. She refused.

The daughter was with her mom in the hospital. The son was in a bar across from the hospital crying at the bar when all of a sudden his mom came walking in. She was dressed.

She came in the bar. She saw him. She started walking toward him.

He stood up. He said, Mom, what are you doing here? He starts walking and some people got in the way and she was gone. Well, a few moments later, her mom in the hospital woke up and she told her daughter, I just had a weird dream.

I dreamt that I was in a bar and I saw my son crying at the bar and he started walking to me and then I woke up. And the doctors, a doctor who was there who had been tending was able to verify this with the son. That's what he saw independently and then verify it with the daughter and then mom died that night.

So you see these kinds of things. That's the kind of stories that we find two to three hundred of these which so they are verified. Second, Matt goes by methodological naturalism to say that science we are bound or barred, I should say, from investigating the supernatural.

That's bunk. We are not barred. Now, a lot of scientists tie their hands behind their back.

That's called methodological naturalism where they're not allowed to consider the supernatural. But let me tell you, methodological naturalism simply stated is a safe space for skeptical scholars and scientists where they can hide from serious consideration from solutions that involve supernatural or God. You know, those trigger words for them because it makes them uncomfortable.

That's what methodological naturalism is and it fails and here's why. Let's suppose that astronomers have been watching a comet for years and all of a sudden they do some calculations. They say this comet is going to slam into the moon surface tomorrow.

And so the next day you have the Hubble Space Telescope and all these planetariums that are zoomed in on the lunar surface and they watch boom as the impact happens. And as the lunar dust settles there's a message embedded on the lunar surface that says God exists and it's in Greek and Hebrew. Well, according to methodological naturalism a scientist couldn't even affirm that the event had occurred.

It would certainly be a supernatural event and because of that they couldn't even affirm that the event had occurred. Well, of course you could affirm the event occurred. Maybe you can't confirm as a scientist that God is the one behind it but you could say this miraculous event occurred and leave the calls undetermined.

That's why methodological naturalism fails. It actually in the end it could actually serve to be a science stopper. He said you can't test whether you saw your dead grandmother.

Well, I gave an example of that near-death experience where in some cases you actually can. He says Ermin comes up the definition of miracles the least probable explanation. Ermin is just simply wrong here.

Listen to my doctoral research I found 23 definitions for miracle. In fact two of them are Ermin's different ones that he gives. If miracles are the least probable explanation really? Well, so what if I were beheaded here on stage by some terrorists and they fled leaving my headless corpse here on the stage? And then you all leave the auditorium an hour later you're outside of the auditorium and you're talking to the police and media.

And I come walking out of the auditorium head attached smiling scars on my neck. I said I've been heaven and God brought me back in order to verify the truth of Jesus gospel message. And by the way Matt while I was up there I talked to this relative years that died 10 years ago.

And they shared with me a private conversation that only you and that relative had I could not have possibly known. So is a miracle the least probable explanation? And since historians must choose the most probable we'd have to say anything even group hallucination is more probable? No, that's methodological naturalism. That's the safe space for skeptics.

Okay, so then he talks about he said look if someone said that they had saw a spaceship would we believe them? Should we believe them? Well we could say yes he says that they had the experience but we couldn't confirm their interpretation. Well, I agree with that. I agree with that entirely.

But then what we would look at we'd say well were there group appearances? That they all saw this spaceship? Were there descriptions that they think they were seeing the same thing? Are there things like that there's no possible way given our technology that anything on earth could have produced this? We got to look at some we put everything together and we consider the plausibility and all this kind of stuff and you compare hypotheses. That's what you got to do and you do it on a case by case basis. He said what about Elvis sightings? Well, you can come up with numerous naturalistic explanations for that.

Check out his grave. You could verify whether he's alive that way. There's certainly Elvis impersonators.

There are people who look like Elvis. There are people who lie about these things. Any of these would seem to be more probable explanations when you compare hypotheses using these four criteria that I mentioned.

So you just subjected the various hypotheses to strictly controlled historical method. There are ways of determining these things. He says Paul, the disciples convinced doesn't mean that we should be convinced.

I agree. That's why we use strictly controlled historical method. You formulate hypotheses based on the known data and you weigh those hypotheses to see which one is the most probable.

And when you do that I only did it with hallucination. But when you do it with all the other naturalistic hypotheses you find out resurrection comes out on top every time. He says the supernatural has no explanatory power.

I'm not sure what he meant by that, but he says you. Then he goes on explain, he says, well, look, you can't just say that because you can't come up with another explanation that that means you should go with God. In other words, a God of the gaps explanation.

Hey, I agree with that entirely. But when you look at the evidence you pull the historical bedrock together, you formulate your hypotheses, you subject them to strictly controlled historical method. You weigh those.

And if the event comes out and the method points to the event actually occurring, then you try to investigate the cause. Now, if we look at something like the resurrection, we say there's just no possible way. Given our current understanding of science and the laws of nature, we know that that could not happen by natural causes.

At that point based on our understanding of natural law, we are right to infer a supernatural cause. Especially when you have Jesus claiming that he's God's uniquely divine son and predicts his resurrection from the dead. We are well within our epistemic rights to say this is probably what happened, that Jesus rose and it was because God raised him from the dead.

I can't as a historian verify that it was God, but I certainly could say as a historian, it appears that God was probably the best candidate for the event. He says that I would have to assume that God exists and wanted to raise Jesus. No, I wouldn't.

Nowhere in my argument that I assume that God existed or wanted to raise Jesus. Like I said, you look at the data, you let the data speak for themselves apart from presuppositions. I mean, that's what a good historian is going to do.

It's going to allow the data to challenge our presuppositions, to challenge our current worldview. The danger in not doing that is very clear. Bad philosophy corrupts good history.

And so we have to allow the data to challenge our presuppositions. He says, well, people don't think God exists, we'll reject this. So I understand that, but again, you've got to allow the data to challenge our presuppositions.

He says, well, finally, he says, well, why is this not the most clear fact? Why isn't this the most clear thing, the resurrection of Jesus? Why is there confusion in the Bible? This is God's responsibility one could say, well, I guess you could say that. Or you could say, as he suggested, we are human, we are flawed, we are fallible. And of course we're going to interpret things differently.

Even within theological things, God even allowed Paul and James to disagree on certain things as we find in the New Testament. So I mean, I can look and say, well, we're flawed human beings. And apparently, God is okay with us having free wills and disagreeing with one another at times.

But these all agreed on the essentials of the faith. And I think that that is what's important. And in Acts 1727, it says, God wants us to grope for him.

Like a blind person looking for someone to anchor to. He wants us to seek after him. And so our questions, these disputes that come up, cause us to dig deeply.

Those of us who are interested in knowing the truth. So and again, my two major contentions that I give, they still stand. Empirical data strongly suggests that reality includes a supernatural dimension.

And the historical data strongly suggests that Jesus rose from the dead. Thank you. Matt, Bill Hante would now give his 12-minute rebuttal.

So there's something in the base that I wish would stop happening. And I'm not picking on you, but you did it and somebody else says it. Person one talks, then person two talks.

Then person one gets back up and says, Matt didn't address what I said. Well, that's what I'm doing now. This is the rebuttal period.

So you can't criticize somebody's opening remarks for not addressing everything that was in your opening. So we have the stories about near-death experiences. Emphasis, of course, being on near-death and not death experiences.

We also have accounts of people who have gone on to an afterlife and come back with stories that we've later found are fraudulent. They've acknowledged that they're fraudulent. So in a world where two people can both say, I've had an experience where I've died and gone to the other side and told, how do you tell which one's correct? How do you tell if either of them are correct? Methodological naturalism is the foundation of science.

It's not a safe space for skeptics. It is a recognition from philosophy of science that until we actually have the ability to investigate and confirm that the supernatural exists, we don't get to appeal to it. It doesn't bar us from testing claims that are attributed to the supernatural.

No scientist, if that comet hit and spelled out something, no scientist on the grounds of methodological naturalism or any other scientific model would be prohibited from a testing that the event occurred. It would just be in a position of we don't know how or why this occurred, because we don't have a model that we can use to apply to this. We have no explanation.

And the idea that, as you heard him say a minute ago, based on our current understanding, we could be justified and appealing to the supernatural. Well, that's the problem. We think we have an amazingly good understanding and that we are the smartest and wisest that have ever lived on this planet.

We're doing good. We've got incredible technology. And this poisons our mind to think that I have enough information that I can exclude natural explanations and just go charging towards the supernatural, even though I can't actually demonstrate the supernatural.

That is what science is trying to prevent. Spectral evidence. I'm not looking for a dial or a meter.

I'm not talking about being able to put the supernatural in a beaker. And I think geologists and others would be shocked to learn that they don't have testable disciplines, when in fact that's what they do. As in biology, when we make, you can make predictions about what you will discover from the past in the rock.

And those predictive models are what allow us to do things. Science, maybe I am arguing for scientists. Some people would actually say that.

I'm not claiming that it is the only path. Just that science is the most consistently reliable pathway that has demonstrated its efficacy for an accurate understanding of the world. If there are 10 people who come up and tell you I've had a supernatural experience, exactly what test would you propose, don't have to be in a beaker.

What investigation techniques would you use to figure out which, if any, of them were correct? This is the reason that there are so many different denominations. This is the reason why there are so many different religions, because we are all incredibly sure that the conclusion we've reached is right. I'm so smart, I couldn't be fooled.

This is what magicians and con artists exploit on a regular basis. Near-death experiences have been tested. There's a number of different ways that you can try to confirm that somebody is actually like floating out of their body.

They've put in the operating rooms, they'll put messages up there to see if anybody can actually see and report. Nobody's ever been able to actually accurately report this. There are a bunch of certainly weird stories, but we haven't, nobody's essentially passed the preliminary type of test that I talked about before.

Apparitions and ghosts, how do you tell which of those are real? Certainly some of them aren't real. Certainly some people are mistaken or hallucinating or lying. How did you rule out all of these natural explanations? Oh, it's just really improbable that there would be a group hallucination.

Well, there are plenty of people who sit outside of Area 51 who seem to be sharing a group hallucination about an alien abduction or alien spacecraft. It's rare, I agree. It is bizarre and almost unimaginable, but that doesn't make it impossible.

That makes it highly improbable. How probable is the supernatural and how did you come to that conclusion? In the cases of extreme answered prayer, if he had his head chopped off and came back out to talk to me later, that would be pretty compelling that would lead me towards those possibilities, only in the sense that, you know what? I don't have an explanation for how that happened. I'd love to find out.

We don't have examples like that. Extreme answered prayer. Somebody got some funds.

Well, I invite you to go to whydoesn't Godhealamputees.com. We have con artists trying to demonstrate that, oh, I can grow your leg longer and all this other stuff. These are evangelists, by the way. I doubt that you would actually be supportive of faith healers who are using simple con tricks of leg lengthening to convince people.

They're atrocious. They're getting them to throw away. Throw away your medications.

Jesus will heal you. They're killing people. They're people really dying.

Irrespective of whether there's a God, irrespective of whether or not God can heal, suggesting that people should throw out their meds and just let Jesus heal it, should be criminal. But granted, they're free to do that. 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.

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