Minimal Facts and intermediate premises
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
Recently at his blog, eminent NT scholar Craig Keener published a post stating that Christians should not "attack" the minimal facts argument for the resurrection. Given that I have written quite a bit on this subject and had a webinar on this subject not long ago (see here, here, and here), it might quite understandably be thought that his post was directed to my views, though he does not say to whom he is responding.
Via personal communication I have now verified that Dr. Keener has not read or listened to my material on the topic of the minimal facts approach and was not intending to respond to my criticisms of the method. He has stated that he had heard that "some" are attacking minimal facts and, although he did not say who these are nor quote anything that they have said, conjectured that perhaps they may be distorting my views. Well, I obviously cannot speak to that, since I don't know who these "some" are or what, precisely, they have said about minimal facts.
However, I want to say for the record here that there is nothing in his post that either represents or responds to my own objections to the minimal facts approach. Therefore, I of course cannot regard myself as bound to agree with the conclusion he states that "Christians should not be attacking minimal facts" if "attack" means "seriously criticize."
Dr. Keener's one-sentence summary of the view to which he is responding is this: "Some Christians do not like the sound of 'minimal facts,' supposing that it means we believe as few facts as possible."
This is by no means a summary of my own objections--not surprisingly, since Dr. Keener does not know what my objections are, not having examined any of my material on the subject.
Again, just for the record, here is a brief statement of my central objection to the minimal facts approach. I set it off to make it easy and quick to read:
The minimal facts apologetic approach has been billed as giving us a solid argument, via inference to the best explanation, for the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. However, since the claim that the disciples experienced "appearances" of Jesus after his death must be construed in a way that is agreed upon by a large majority of scholars across the ideological spectrum, the argument is too weak to deliver. At most, an argument based upon such a non-specific notion of "appearance" experiences provides an argument that something strange happened after Jesus' death that could be worth looking into. If we are not willing to assert that the appearance experiences reported by the disciples were of the detailed, polymodal sort that we find expressly described in the resurrection accounts in the Gospels, the argument is severely weakened, and it is no longer clear that a rational person ought to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead on the basis of this argument.
I will not go on at further length about that right here, since I have already discussed it in more detail elsewhere; see the above links. This of course is a matter of epistemic evaluation of the strength of evidence, which (though I almost hate to mention it) is a matter of my professional specialty. That doesn't, certainly, mean that a non-epistemologist cannot disagree with me. Far from it. But if one does so, he should encounter and grapple in at least some detail with my actual objections and arguments.
I want to mention another point that might be missed by those who read Dr. Keener's post. In my webinar on the subject of minimal facts (see here), I distinguished four different uses of the minimal facts argument: Preliminary minimal facts with clear eyes, preliminary minimal facts with some confusion, naïve minimal facts, and aggressive minimal facts.
The preliminary minimal facts case with clear eyes is a kind of limited prolegomenon. As I suggest in the webinar, this might just cause the skeptic to go, "Huh." I do not condemn this preliminary usage so long as the person making it understands its limitations. This type of distinction should respond to Dr. Keener's injunction that we "should be celebrating that there are some fairly undisputed facts that really invite consideration even from those who do not share all [our] views."
Dr. Keener's post does inspire me to make one further epistemological point. Keener refers repeatedly in his post to the fact that it is common in various disciplines to work from agreed-upon data. For example, he says,
Scholars regularly work from common ground in our discussions. In the academy, there are certain ideas taken for granted, including a measure of scholarly consensus on many issues. Scholars debate with one another precisely because we do not all agree with one another, but we do so on the basis of certain working assumptions.
And of course this is true. Now, I don't want to attribute the concern I am about to spell out directly to Keener, because he does not state it in these terms. But it is plausible to me that someone reading Keener's post might, as a result of such statements, develop a concern about what I have called the maximal data approach to the resurrection. This concern would be something like this: If we do not start with points of contact that a skeptic agrees upon, then how can we avoid being either question-begging or dogmatic? Is Lydia recommending something like presuppositionalism, in which we must simply assume that the Bible is true or even that the biblical accounts are reliable? Again, I am not attributing this to Keener, but it could be a concern that might arise from reading his post.
Anyone who watched my webinar on minimal facts would know that this is by no means what I am recommending. (And anyone who knows what a staunch evidentialist I am also would realize this.) On the contrary, I repeatedly suggested that one state one's case briefly (particularly the premise that the disciples really attested to the experiences recounted in the Gospels) but that one be prepared to defend that premise with further data if challenged.
What is needed here is the concept of an intermediate premise. An intermediate premise for some contentful conclusion is not absolutely foundational, at the level of, "I seem to be appeared to redly." In most cases it isn't even what one might think of as "really close" to the foundations. Perhaps such a "close" proposition for most real-world arguments would be something like, "The external world exists" or "Human beings exist." For most historical arguments we can assume a lot of completely accepted background knowledge that doesn't need to be defended. But we have to spell out premises at various intermediate levels supporting the conclusion we want our opponent to draw--in this case, that Jesus rose from the dead.
As I pointed out in the webinar, the minimal facts case is also making use of intermediate premises--the minimal facts themselves. For example, the proposition that the tomb was empty is something that the minimal facts (or "core facts") apologist is prepared to defend if it is challenged and for which he usually gives some other argument--such as multiple attestation, for example. It is not something he merely asserts dogmatically, nor does he claim that it is the rock bottom of his argument.
My suggested intermediate premises are things like, "The disciples claimed that they had experiences in which the risen Jesus ate with them and was tangible." And that, too, will often have to be argued for when challenged.
The difference is that the minimal facts theorist prefers that even his intermediate premises be fairly uncontroversial in a scholarly sense. Therefore, one of the things he can say when supporting his premises is that they are accepted by a large majority of scholars.
I simply am suggesting that we need to be willing to do without that particular argument from scholarly consensus for some of our most crucial intermediate premises.
But by no means does that mean that I am enjoining dogmatism about them. Rather, one will back up to other facts that are neutral, such as the fact that the documents exist, that they say such-and-such, that they fit together in certain ways, that they have this or that feature. One will then attempt to argue that these other facts about the documents support an intermediate premise that the resurrection accounts actually give us reliably what the putative witnesses claimed happened to them. That in turn supports the claim that the disciples said that they experienced detailed, polymodal, group conversations with Jesus. That in turn supports the conclusion that the resurrection occurred. In other words, one will do explanatory and argumentative work to get from more basic agreed-upon facts about the contents of the documents (and external evidence, and so forth) to the intermediate premise about the claims of the disciples that one wants to use prominently in one's argument. It is precisely this sort of work that the minimal facts argument promised to absolve us from, but doing that work (with all the wonderful resources of the maximal data available to us) is not remotely like foot-stomping or just assuming that the Bible is true.
So, in empirical arguments, I applaud the injunction to use data that are neutral on the point at issue between myself and my opponent--in that sense, data that my opponent at least should grant if he is reasonable. But by no means does this mean that we must use premises at every level that are agreed upon by a "consensus of scholarship" in a given field. The consensus of scholarship might be so far wrong that, if we limit ourselves to what it will grant for our intermediate premises, we will simply have an argument that is too weak to support the conclusion we think is true and, ultimately, well-supported.
An analogy may help somewhat here. Suppose that there is some event that an historian thinks occurred in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Suppose that the evidence for this event consists chiefly of some letters, purporting to be written by several of Lincoln's close friends, that refer to the event. Suppose that, for some reason, the authenticity of these letters is controversial within the circles of Lincoln scholarship. The scholar who wishes to defend the event then has the job of arguing from various internal marks of authenticity, from external evidence, and the like that the letters are indeed written by people "in the know" about Lincoln's doings, that they are solid primary source documents, and that therefore the event occurred. The relevant intermediate premises concern the provenance, authorship, etc., of the letters. Since the letters are disputed, and since there isn't enough other intermediate evidence that is undisputed to support the occurrence of the event, he doesn't have the luxury of using only intermediate premises that are granted by the consensus of scholarship. But that doesn't mean that he will be doing anything dogmatic, "presuppositional," or illicit. He simply has to back up farther to other information about (say) the content of the documents, the shape of the handwriting, and other points at that level, to find the common ground that should be granted to him by reasonable opponents who dispute the provenance of the documents.
Once again, I am not attributing the question I have raised here to Keener, but his post seems a good opportunity to address it given the reasonable point that scholars work from common ground in making their arguments.
If you are interested in these issues and wonder if I am doing something illicit in "attacking the minimal facts argument," I suggest that you dig into these matters and see what I have to say. Meanwhile, I hope that this summary and follow-up are helpful in their own way.
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