Review: Hidden In Plain View by Lydia McGrew

This is the same review I left on Amazon.

Hidden In Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts by Lydia McGrew

I really enjoyed this book. I had heard about undesigned coincidences before, and I wondered why, in light of the fact that there were supposedly so many of them, the same ones kept being brought up in talks, blogs, and interviews by various people. Now I understand. It's because there's only a handful of them that actually amount to undesigned coincidences. The rest of them seem to have more to do with the creativity of the author (whether Lydia McGrew, William Paley, or whoever) than with there actually being an undesigned coincidence.

Let me give two examples. One is a compelling undesigned coincidence, and the other doesn't seem so to me. These are right next to each other in the book.

The first is on page 85. In Matthew 10, the twelve apostles are listed in pairs, e.g. Simon and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, etc. Mark 6 says that when Jesus sent the apostles out to preach, he sent them out in pairs. Lydia thinks this is an undesigned coincidence because Mark explains why Matthew lists the apostles in pairs the way he does. If this argument is sound, then supposedly Matthew pairs them up according to who traveled with whom. But this seems like a stretch to me, and I see no reason to think the sending of the twelve in pairs has anything at all to do with why Matthew lists the twelve in pairs. Granted it's possible, but I think you need more than mere possibility to use this as historical evidence of some real event. You'd have to have some good reason to think one thing actually IS the explanation of the other thing before this argument would work.

But suppose I'm wrong, and it does indicate some historical reality. What would that reality be? That Jesus sent the apostles out in two's? Or that the pairings in Matthew correspond to who traveled with whom? I don't see how. Maybe the apostles were paired up for some unknown reason, and if we knew that reason, it would explain both why Matthew would list them in pairs and why Mark would say that Jesus sent them out in pairs. But we can't really know what that historical reality is, so even if this is an undesigned coincidence, we couldn't draw any historical conclusions from it, at least not with any confidence. You can't say that A explains B when there's a possible C that explains both A and B independently of each other, especially when it's far from obvious that A is actually the explanation for B.

The other undesigned coincidence is on page 87. In Matthew 14, Herod hears news about Jesus and tells his servants that he thinks Jesus might be John the Baptist risen from the dead. Then in Luke 8 we find out that one of Jesus' followers is the wife of one of Herod's servants. So that explains how we know what Herod said to his servants. What makes this an undesigned coincidence is the fact that Luke was not trying to explain anything about what was said in Matthew 14, yet it's hard to think of a better explanation of how this information ended up in Matthew. How could anybody have known what Herod said to his servants in private unless his servants relayed it to other followers of Jesus?

That strikes me as being a good example of an undesigned coincidence. Now the question arises whether Lydia's book has more examples like that first one or like the second one. I didn't keep count, but my guess is that it's about 50/50. So I rounded up and gave Lydia 3 stars. Besides, I think it's a very valuable book even if not everything said in it was persuasive. I gave her an extra star because the book is really well written and a pleasure to read.

Lydia said somewhere in the book that we shouldn't expect every example to be compelling. Her hope was that the cumulative effect would present a strong case for the reliability of the gospels and Acts. But I don't think examples like that first one contribute anything to the cumulative case. As William Lane Craig once put it, "Two bad arguments don't make a good argument." With enough creativity, I think somebody could probably come up with all sorts of examples of undesigned coincidences that aren't really there, but the only way they really count in a cumulative case is if we have good reason, and not mere speculation, that one thing explains another thing in an unintended way. We do have that in the second case above, but not in the first case.

Thanks for writing this book, Lydia. Somebody needed to write this book. I hope that through the process of natural selection (or peer review if you prefer), we'll weed out the bad arguments and hone the good ones.

Natural theology, deism, and theism again

In my previous post, I was talking about how the arguments for God from natural theology only rise to the level of deism (or so it is claimed), and do not bring one all the way to theism, much less to any specific God, like YHWH. But this morning, I was thinking about how it would be quite the coincidence if the God of the Abrahamic religion didn't exist and yet these philosophical arguments were sound.

I'm not aware of every creation story there's ever been, but I have read or heard a lot of them. In just about all of them, they presuppose that some things already exist besides the creator. Hardly any of the stories go all the way back to the beginning of everything. They explain how things were made out of previously existing stuff or circumstances. None of the gods in most other religions are anything like the God of the Abrahamic religions in the sense of being this being who stands completely apart from the natural realm and brought it all into being.

If the typical philosophical arguments for God are sound, then they cohere much more nicely with the God of the Abrahamic religions than they do with just about any other god of any other religion. I say that provisionally because, as I said, I'm not aware of all creation stories.

That, by itself, isn't enough reason to think the God of the Abrahamic religions is one and the same with the God of the philosophers. After all, it's possible there's a deistic God and all religions are made up. But it is good reason to look into the Abrahamic religions, I think.

Consider this, though. The idea of the Abrahamic God was already around before all these philosophical arguments became wide-spread, which means belief in the Abrahamic God did not originate from these arguments. It arose independently of the arguments. That means if those arguments are sound, and the God of the philosophers actually exists, then it would be a huge coincidence if people happened to invent a God that resembles the actual God in so many ways. It seems more likely that the God who exists actually revealed himself to people, and that's how they came up with the Abrahamic God. The Abrahamic God is the God of the philosophers.

Let me see if I can put this another way. According to both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, God created everything that came into being, and that includes everything on earth and everything in the heavens (Genesis 1:1, John 1:3). Colossians 1:16-17 puts it like this: "For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." That sort of absolute exhaustive creation only exists in the Abrahamic religions as far as I know, and that's precisely the same sort of God you get from cosmological and teleological arguments. The God of Abraham is also absolutely sovereign, autonomous, and authoritative (Daniel 4:35, Psalm 135:6), which is what you get from the moral argument. If the God of the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments actually exists, then either he revealed himself to the Hebrews or else they made an extraordinarily lucky guess when they made up YHWH. After all, they didn't come up with YHWH through cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. They either made him up and got lucky, or God made himself known to them.

So I don't think the arguments from natural theology are merely sufficient reason to look into the Abrahamic religions; they are sufficient to strongly suspect that at least one of the Abrahamic religions is true. It's just a matter of which one at that point. It's Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

Deism and philosophical arguments for God

Some people complain that the typical philosophical arguments for God are not sufficient to bring one to theism, but that if they are sound, they only rise to the level of deism. Deism is the view that God created the world but does not intervene in the world. That would mean that any revealed religion, like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, is not true. It could be that under deism, God doesn't intervene because he is unable to, or it could be that God doesn't intervene because he isn't interested. One could hold to either view and still be a deist.

It seems to me that if God created the world, it's unlikely that he'd be unable to interact with it. So any version of the cosmological argument would undermine the claim that God is unable to interact in the world.

The moral argument seems to undermine the claim that God is uninterested in the world. I remember reading somewhere that Benjamin Franklin thought God would judge sinners, but that in the meantime he doesn't intervene in the world. But it seems to me that if God is interested in how we behave, especially in how we treat each other, he would have a motive in intervening in the world. To the degree that our moral obligations are for our own good, they show that God cares about our well-being. If he cares about our well-being, we should expect that he would intervene in some way. At the very least the fact that God would have standards that he expects us to follow, and the fact that he bothered to let us in on it, shows that God is not indifferent about us.

The fact that we know right and wrong shows that God must have intervened in the world in order to impart this knowledge. Humans came into the world fairly recently by cosmological standards. God had to have created us in such a way as to impart this knowledge. The only other possibility is that when he created the world, he set the initial conditions in such a way as to guarantee not only our existence, but that our brains would be hardwired in such a way as to know about his moral standards. Although possible, that seems unlikely to me. I suspect our knowledge of morality, if it reflect God's morality, had to have been imparted to us by a divine intervention in the physical world at some point in the history of the universe.

Of course the argument from evil (or suffering) is invoked to show that God does not care about our well-being. The moral argument answers the problem of evil, though, by showing that God is perfectly good and therefore must have a morally sufficient reason for allowing or causing evil and suffering, whether we know what that reason is or not.¹ So in spite of evil and suffering, there is still reason to expect that God would have a motive to intervene somehow in the world. According to Christianity, he intervenes primarily by saving people from his wrath by providing atonement through the death of Jesus Christ. He also promises that he will intervene by raising the dead, judging sinners, and granting eternal life to the redeemed. But he also answers prayers and rescues people from calamities. Why he rescues one person and allows another to suffer is a mystery.

So the cosmological argument and the moral argument together seem to rule out the two reasons for why, under deism, God doesn't intervene in the world. I don't think this is a definitive proof against deism, but I do think it's a reasonably good reason to doubt deism or to reject the claim that the typical theistic arguments only amount to a deistic God. They don't prove that God intervenes in the world, but they do undermine any reason to think he can't or wouldn't.

NOTES

1. See A quick and dirty response to the problem of evil.

The double edged sword of evangelism from a Calvinist perspective

I've been working on a book for a long time now that's designed to explain, in a sort of autobiographical way, why I think Christianity is true. My hope is that God will use it to draw people to himself, and that it will be instrumental in at least somebody's conversion to Christianity. That's one reason I'm writing it anyway, and it's the only reason that's relevant to this blog post.

Calvinists believe that whether somebody is saved or not is entirely up to God. For a Calvinist who wants to evangelize, this takes a lot of the pressure off because it means that as long as we are faithful in presenting and defending the gospel, we need not wring our hands over whether somebody will be lost because we weren't persuasive enough. It's not really up to us. God will effectively call everybody he intends to save. If people reject our message, it isn't because we have failed as apologists. Our success and failure isn't measured by how many people we succeed in converting. Our success and failure is only measured by whether or not we were obedient and faithful in presenting the gospel. Whether people respond positively to it or not is entirely up to God. And this is supposed to relieve us of performance anxiety.

Recently I was listening to some people who are not Christians, and I realized that their way of thinking was so diametrically opposed to my way of thinking as a Christian, that there was no hope of them ever being receptive to the gospel unless they had a radical change of heart. I wish I could remember the details of what was said. As I was listening to it, I found myself discouraged. That's what gave rise to this post. While I might be comforted in knowing that a person's unresponsiveness to my efforts to persuade them isn't my fault, there's a double edge sword because, on the other hand, it also means that there is no effort I could make that would improve matters. If God does not change a person's heart, there is nothing I can say to them to persuade them. If you love the person you're talking to, this can be really discouraging. It means there's no effort you can make, no matter how hard you try, that will get your loved one to convert. All you can do is pray for them and hope that God grants them grace.

But let me say something else that's related. I'm not sure it follow from the doctrines of Calvinism that how well we do apologetics makes no difference. There are some Calvinists who think that apologetics and even just announcing the gospel without defending it is pointless because if God had already determined who he is going to save and who he isn't, then there's nothing we can do that will make any difference. If God wants to convert Bob, but not Jim, then it doesn't matter what we do or don't say to Bob and Jim. No matter what we do or don't do, Bob will still be saved and Jim won't. So some Calvinists think there's no point in presenting the gospel at all. And among those who think we should present the gospel, merely out of obedience, there's no point in defending the gospel with arguments since arguments don't persuade.

I've always thought this was a mistake because even if God determines everything, there can still be causal chains that are entirely deterministic. Imagine a row of dominoes set up so that if one falls, the next one will inevitably fall. And suppose God determines that the last domino will fall, so he knocks over the first domino to make it happen. Would it make sense to say that the middle domino made no difference? Of course not. The middle domino has everything to do with why the last domino fell. In the same way, as long as God uses means to accomplish his ends, then apologetics can be used as a means for God to draw people to himself. Apologetics are not superfluous in Calvinism.¹

If we grant that apologetics are not superfluous under Calvinism since God uses means to accomplish his will, then there's no reason to think that how well we do apologetics makes no difference. After all, how well we do apologetics may be the means by which God draws people to himself. If effort counts for anything at all, even under theistic determinism, then surely it matters how well we defend the gospel.

Consider any other endeavor we have. If you're a consistent Calvinist, then you must believe that God ordains everything that comes to pass. If you graduated from college with a 4.0 average, it's because God meant for you to do so. It was predetermined from before the foundation of the world. Yet your hard effort had everything to do with your GPA. If you had not tried so hard, you would not have made a 4.0. God predestined you to make a 4.0, and he used your hard work as the means through which he accomplished that end. If effort matters, even though God foreordains everything that comes to pass, then surely the effort we put into defending the gospel matters just as much as the effort we put into making good grades in school. So it ought to matter how well we do apologetics.

Jesus himself seemed to believe that delivery makes a difference. He said on one occasion that he spoke in parables so that some people would not understand him. He said to his disciples, "To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables, so that while seeing, they may see and not perceive, and while hearing, they may hear and not understand, otherwise they might return and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11-12). Doesn't this presuppose that if Jesus spoke plainly that some people would've understood, turned, and been forgiven?

Jesus showed that evidence matters, too. He said, "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had been performed in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes"(Luke 10:13). Tyre and Sidon would have repented if Jesus had shown them the same miracles that he showed Chorizin and Bethsaida. Yet he didn't. So here's an example of where evidence would have made a difference in somebody's conversion.

If effort makes a difference, then we do have something to be anxious about--whether we presented the gospel clearly, whether we defended it well, etc. If it's possible for Jesus' lack of clarity to explain why some people didn't repent and be forgiven, then it's also possible that our poor arguments or poor presentation is the explanation for why some people don't repent and receive forgiveness. That does put some of the onus on us, even if God determines who he will save and who he won't. We are his instruments. But I do still think it puts us in a better position than a non-Calvinist as far as fretting over our own efforts.

NOTES

1. See also Calvinism and evangelism and Does Calvinism render apologetics superfluous?.

An argument for strong atheism

I came up with an argument for strong atheism today that attempts to avoid the genetic fallacy even while arguing from the origin of belief in God. It's also a kind of argument from silence (or lack of evidence) that avoids committing the fallacy of argument from silence (or lack of evidence).

1. Belief in God originated either from evidence for God or from imagination.
2. Belief in God did not originate from evidence.
3. Therefore, belief in God originated from imagination.
4. If belief in God originated from imagination, it would be an enormous coincidence if he also happened to exist in reality.
5. It is more reasonable to believe in the non-existence of God than to believe in enormous coincidences.
6. Whatever is most reasonable to believe is most likely to be true.
7. Therefore, the non-existence of God is most likely to be true.

I'm sure the fourth and fifth premises could be cleaned up, but you get the idea. If you're an apologist, then you're most likely to attack the second premise. But you could also attack the first premise on the basis that there's a third possibility--that belief in God is "properly basic" or that it's a priori or something along those lines. Maybe belief in God is hardwired, and we have a natural inclination to believe in God. Maybe God himself zapped us with belief.

Of course a person could turn around and say that if God were known in this third way, then God's existence would be self-evident. Our natural internal awareness of God could, itself, be considered a kind of evidence for God. But then we'd just be quibbling over the definition of "evidence," and if we accepted that natural awareness is a kind of evidence, then we'd be back to attacking the second premise.

One could also raise a presuppositional argument for the existence of God. But I think such an argument would reveal that presuppositionalism isn't that different than evidentialism. If you claimed that God must exist in order to even make coherent sense out of the argument, or that you must presuppose the existence of God before being able to argue coherently, then you're essentially using logic and coherence as evidence for the existence of God.

One might also say that people believe in God because somebody told them stories when they were kids. But I don't see why that couldn't be considered a kind of evidence. We could quibble over whether it was good evidence or not, but if a kid looks up to and trusts their parents, then their parents' word on something serves as a persuasive reason to think it's true. So it's a kind of evidence.

Appeal to parents would be irrelevant to the first premise, though. It might explain the origin of some individual's belief in God today, but it wouldn't explain the origin of belief in God altogether. That is unless the parent made it up and didn't just take their own parents' word for it. Then we'd be back to imagination.

But if we're talking about the absolute origin of belief in God, and not the origin of some individual's belief in God today, then it would be hard to defend that second premise. One might defend the second premise on the basis that all the arguments for God fail. But it would be hard to prove that God never explicitly revealed himself to somebody in the past who then passed on the account, and you'd need to rule that out before you could make a good argument for the second premise. It seems like the best you could do in favor of the second premise is to make an argument from silence. While you might be able to argue that there currently is no evidence for God, you would be hard pressed to argue that there has never been any evidence for God available to anybody, anywhere, at any time.

I think the real reason a lot of people believe there is no evidence for God is not simply that they're unaware of any evidence for God but because they are presupposing the non-existence of God. If God doesn't exist, then we shouldn't expect there to be any evidence for him. So if you don't believe in God, it stands to reason that you're going to doubt there is any evidence for God until you see it for yourself. Of course you couldn't use the non-existence of God to prop up the second premise because that would make the whole argument circular.

And now that I think about it, there's a fourth possibility besides evidence, imagination, and being hardwired for belief in God. There's also the possibility that somebody came to believe in God through a faulty line of reasoning. Maybe they considered thunder to be evidence for God when it really wasn't. In that case, there person isn't just making up God. They really believe in God for what appears to them to be a good reason. But can you really say their belief in God wasn't based on evidence? I mean maybe thunder wasn't actually evidence for God, but it served as evidence for the person who took it to be evidence.

Can science or history prove a miracle?

There are some people who say that science cannot be invoked to prove a miracle because science only studies what is natural, and miracles, if they occur, are supernatural. But I dunno.

Science can be used to verify that somebody is alive. Science can also be used to verify that somebody is dead. And science can be used to verify that dead people don't rise from the dead by any known natural processes as long as they've been dead for a certain amount of time. So if science can be used to show that somebody was alive, then dead for two days, then alive again, can't we infer that a miracle happened?

Maybe you could say that the inference to miracle isn't a scientific explanation even though the inference was made on the basis of scientific premises. If all one means when they say that science can't prove a miracle is that the inference to a miracle isn't a scientific inference, then who cares? We're just quibbling now over what kind of argument we're making, not whether it's a sound argument or not. Whether it's a scientific argument or a philosophical argument, or whatever, the important thing is whether or not the argument is sound.

If you're a scientist publishing a paper for a professional journal about the strange case of some guy who was alive, then dead, then alive again, maybe you'd be forbidden by the conventions of scientific publications from saying that a miracle occurred, but it seems to me that as a rational human being, you're well within your rights in drawing the conclusion that it was a miracle. It's doesn't need to be a scientific claim in order to be a true claim.

According to Bart Ehrman, the resurrection of Jesus can't be an historical claim, either, but he seems to base this merely on the conventions of historical methods. It has nothing to do with whether or not the resurrection actually happened or whether there are good reasons to think the resurrection happened. So one could agree, merely by convention, not to call it an historical claim, and still maintain that it's true and that there are good reasons to think it's true. It doesn't matter whether the inference is labeled an historical inference or not. All that matters is whether it's a sound inference.

I'm curious what you think about something. Consider this claim: George Armstrong Custer died at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Is that a scientific claim, or is it an historical claim? Or is it both? If it's not scientific, is it any less true? Suppose a bunch of historians got together and agreed that any such claims cannot be considered historical claims since historians lack the expertise to declare biological organisms to be dead. Let's suppose this became the convention, and because of it, nobody could publish in professional historical journals that individuals died on the battle field. Would their having made this agreement change whether we had good reasons to think inviduals did die on the battle field? Surely not!

Is it good to be open-minded?

It seems like everybody thinks of themselves or wants others to think of them as being open-minded. But what does that mean? Roughly, it seems to mean that you're willing to consider views other than your own, or you grant a sort of prima facie validity to views you haven't yet accepted.

All of us hold a whole slew of beliefs. Some of the beliefs we hold for good reasons and others we hold because we absorbed it unconsciously from our environment, and we haven't even thought about it critically enough to know if we hold it for good reasons or not. Some beliefs we hold very strongly, and some we hold lightly. We are more sure about some things than we are about others.

David Hume once said that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. I think that's a good maxim. The better the evidence is for some belief, the more confidence you should have that it's true.

With these things being the case, it would seem like we should be more open-minded about some things than about others. If you're absolutely certain that something is true, it would be irrational to be open-minded about its negation.

So it doesn't make sense to say that you are anybody is "open-minded" in a peanut butter kind of way. People are relatively open-minded and closed-minded to various ideas to varying degrees.

Logic alone doesn't tell us much

Sometimes, when you ask a person why they believe something, they'll respond with "logic." This is an evasive response. The only way logic could lead you to a belief is by the rules of inductive and/or deductive inference. But all these rules tell you is the form of the reasoning. They don't tell you anything about the content.

Take modus tollens for example.

If P, then Q
Not Q
Therefore; not P.

By itself, this rule of logic doesn't tell you anything. Or take the transitive property.

P is bigger than Q.
Q is bigger than R.
Therefore, P is bigger than R.

This doesn't tell you anything about whether Jim is taller than Bob. Before logic can tell you anything, you need some premises. You need to have some content in your P's and Q's. Logic alone doesn't tell you much of anything, so when a person says that "logic" is the reason they believe something, they haven't really explained why they believe it. They're just being evasive.

An explanation of why you believe something should be a combination of logic and premises, and when a person asks you why you believe something, they want to know about those premises, not just that you used logic.