Lisa Miller voluntarily returns to the U.S.!

 STOP PRESS: Literally just a couple of hours after posting the post below, I checked a different blog that seems "plugged in" to the Mennonite community. Lisa Miller has surrendered herself to U.S. authorities and has been sent to Miami to be quarantined and to await trial for "kidnapping" her own daughter! Isabella was issued a temporary U.S. visa. I don't know if she is returning to the U.S. yet, though she is now eighteen years of age and free from the threat of being made to have a relationship with Janet Jenkins. I think based on the wording that she has returned.

I'm not sure this was a good idea on Lisa's part. I hope that Isabella has a support network here in the U.S. to come to, since she will no longer have her mother. 18-year-old girls need their mothers, too! And no doubt they are very close after all of these years. I think that Lisa must have felt it was her duty to return to the U.S. and stand trial after what the men who helped her have endured--to stand with them. Here and here are posts about this.

I wonder if Isabella can be forced to testify against her mother.

Philip Zodhiates is still in prison

[See update in the next post.]

I have been wanting to say something about Philip Zodhiates for some time, because he is still in federal prison, a true prisoner of conscience, and because I now have more readers of my work who are probably completely unaware of the case. People are often shocked when I describe it.

Check out the tag, here, for more posts. But briefly, here is a summary:

More than eighteen years ago, Lisa Miller entered into a civil union with Janet Jenkins in Vermont. (Please remember this story next time someone advocates civil unions as not as "bad" from a conservative p.o.v. as gay "marriage." They're legally identical.)

During this civil union, Miller conceived and bore a child by using a sperm donor. The little girl, Isabella, was only eighteen months old when Miller left the relationship and formally broke it up legally. Miller converted to Christianity, left the homosexual lifestyle behind her, and fled to Virginia to keep her child away from Jenkins, who represented all that she had repented of and was now leaving behind. Jenkins, let us bear in mind, is not in any way related to Isabella and has not lived with her since she was eighteen months old.

Vermont courts, to whom the custody decision was ultimately given, treated the unrelated lesbian Jenkins as Isabella's "other mother" and insisted on unsupervised visitation, even though Jenkins was, from Isabella's perspective, a stranger. Isabella made some of these visits but was so upset by them (and alleged that Jenkins had bathed with her naked) that Miller refused to allow any more such visits with Jenkins, who had neither any natural claim on Isabella whatsoever nor any relationship with her. Miller became so concerned by Isabella's statements and by her bizarre behaviors at such a young age (including the sudden onset of open masturbation and saying she wanted to kill herself) that she eventually refused to allow unsupervised visits. The Vermont judge and Jenkins refused to compromise (e.g., to limit Jenkins only to supervised, non-overnight visits). Miller exhausted all her legal options. Eventually the judge was poised to order full custoy to Jenkins to punish Miller for denying Jenkins unsupervised "parental" visits (even though she was not in any sense at all the child's parent).

At that point, Miller fled the country with her little girl. (My understanding is that at the time of her flight she still had official legal custody of Isabella.) She apparently fled successfully to Nicaragua. In doing so she had help to drive across state lines from Philip Zodhiates and help with arranging her flight from Mennonite Pastor Kenneth Miller (no relation). Mennonite missionary Timothy Miller (also no relation) helped her in Nicaragua.

Many years have passed now. Isabella has recently turned eighteen, wherever she is. Lisa is still technically a fugitive from "justice." You see, the U.S. federal government declared this an international kidnapping, and it set out to punish Lisa and everyone who had helped her.

Kenneth Miller has served a several-year federal prison sentence. Philip Zodhiates is currently serving a three-year prison sentence. Timothy Miller was extradited from Nicaragua (even though Nicaragua technically has no extradition agreement with the U.S.) and before being shipped back was literally kept in a Nicaraguan dungeon in very rough conditions. He has since had his sentence commuted to probation but must stay in the U.S. and as far as I know is still in that situation.

Nor will these men's ordeal be over after they are done serving prison time. Not only is Zodhiates at least (and possibly Kenneth Miller?) many thousands of dollars in debt for legal fees, but Janet Jenkins, like some bizarre Inspector Javert, is attempting to ruin them yet furtehr and anyone who was Lisa's lawyer back at the time via a civil lawsuit for depriving her of Isabella's company. That lawsuit is moving at the speed of molasses, which I suppose is a good thing in a way, but it is supposed to gear back up this spring some time.

Zodhiates sought a compassionate release as a non-violent prisoner during Covid (that did happen for various people even in federal prison), but since "international kidnapping" is deemed a violent crime by definition, he was denied. Naturally, when The Orange One was issuing pardons and clemencies all over the place in his last days, these folks were not among those pardoned. This could also have been done earlier in his term. In fairness, it's possible that no one had his ear to bring the cases before him.

Philip Zodhiates keeps his spirits up via his faith in God. He and all of these men, to my mind, exemplify to an astonishing extent the injunction to be "blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom you shine as lights in the world" (Philippians 2:15).

Zodhiates has a prison blog that is mostly musings about Scripture and faith. It's found here. For a long time it wasn't being updated, even though (via an e-mail list) I knew that he was writing entries. I made some inquiries, and since then a few of his entries since August, 2020, have been posted. Here is the crowdfunding site for him. Here was Pastor Ken Miller's blog during his imprisonment, which has stopped being updated since he was released. I find that one is likely to get e-mail updates if one joins the crowdfunding effort for Zodhiates.

It is interesting to me that things are getting so much worse now in America, in terms of censorship. (Focus on the Family was just bumped from Twitter for saying that a man cannot turn into a woman. Hate speech, y'know.) And yet this case goes back ten years!

I find that many people are shocked to learn that men have served and one is still serving time in federal prison for the "crime" of helping an ex-lesbian who repented escape with her daughter so that her young daughter would not be turned over to her former lesbian lover. The case is not much talked about or known, even among those who continue to be conservative or remotely sane on these issues.

I am grateful that it seems that these men have been protected physically in prison. Pray for Philip Zodhiates and also for the others who will be targeted by the civil lawsuit. Also, pray that Zodhiates will be able to find new lawyers. His previous lawyers were apparently offended when he made an appeal for his sentence to be vacated on the grounds that his lawyers refused at his trial to bring up the concerns that he had about sexual abuse which were a part of his motivation for driving Lisa to New York as part of her escape. So now he needs new lawyers, not to mention needing money to hire them. I have a feeling he's going to find a lot of his fellow Christians shockingly weak-willed when he gets out of prison, having been through the fire and having been involved in prison ministry from the inside.

Mourning and misdirected anger

There is a real problem with people's grief being swept up into anger that confuses natural evil into moral evil. There is no gross recklessness involved per se if someone dies of a community-spread respiratory virus. And it is a very, very bad thing when we normalize anger about that so as to turn the duty to care, touch, connect, and live normal life into a duty not to do these things, because so-and-so (my friend, my loved one, my mentor) died of a virus. It must be said: That is a tragedy, not a moral evil.

In contrast, if your friend, family member, loved one was locked away from human contact and only allowed to have his loved ones hold his hand for a few minutes at the end of his life, while dressed up looking like aliens, due to specific, draconian rules passed by specific, named, horribly misguided (if well-intentioned) people in power who wouldn't listen to the counter-arguments, that is something that it is legitimate to be angry about. These stories are happening all around us, every day. See here for example.

If I die of a community-spread virus when I'm elderly, and if you admire me or love me, you'd better not use my death to foment anger because someone was in contact with me, or went about his normal life without wearing a mask, or touched something, or talked to me or to other people, as if these perfectly good activities are actually bad activities and supposedly caused me to die.

 
Instead, try to make sure that I in my old age and all of the elderly people you know have smiling, kind faces around them, human touch, and normal, frequent, in-person contact with those they love and who love them. You have my permission to be angry if I've been locked up and denied that, which as things are looking now is terrifyingly probable for all of us. But not if I've been given human love and contact, not if other people have lived their lives, and I have died as a result of living life myself or as a result of others' living life.

Everyone dies of living life, life is not without risk, and life is good.

An irony concerning the minimal facts approach

For some time I've been writing and speaking about the problems with a certain minimalistic approach to arguing for Christianity that has become popular in evangelical circles in the last several decades. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) Sometimes it goes by the name of the "minimal facts" approach. But not always. The apologetics giant William Lane Craig refers to the facts in question as "core facts" rather than "minimal facts" and includes the empty tomb among them, whereas the father of the minimal facts approach, Gary Habermas, does not include the empty tomb among his set of minimal facts. But as I have pointed out, the difference there is far more terminological than substantive, since in both cases the core fact or minimal fact that the disciples had appearance experiences is kept vague in order to be able to rope in a lot of scholars and say that they accept it. This causes a lot of epistemic trouble when one tries to argue for the physical resurrection of Jesus, since it's precisely the physical details that give us reason to think that Jesus was physically raised. It shouldn't need saying, but the reason Christians think he was physically raised is because we think he appeared physically to his disciples. (Obviously.) The mainstream scholar Wolfhart Pannenberg, who thought the resurrection accounts in the Gospels were heavily embellished, apparently thought that Jesus' body really disappeared and that in that sense he was "physically raised," but that he went immediately to heaven and that the appearances to the disciples were visions sent by God to the disciples and bore little resemblance to the appearances recounted in the Gospels. I'd say that at that point the meaning of "physically raised" has been changed almost beyond recognition and also that the epistemic support for believing in anything objective at all is gravely undermined.

This point was brought home to me recently by watching a series of video discussions between Michael Licona and Dale Allison. (Videos here, here, here, and here.) Allison is a little hard to characterize. He speaks of himself as a Christian (PCUSA), and Licona calls him a "fellow believer." He talks in the interviews about his prayer practices, which involve a yoga mat and icons. He's obviously a theist of some sort. That much I think can be said definitely. But Allison is and always has been profoundly ambivalent about the physical resurrection of Jesus and treats it very much as up in the air, and he obviously thinks it quite plausible that the resurrection narratives in the Gospels are highly embellished and that the details of those narratives, such as Jesus' eating with his disciples, were added for apologetic purposes. Licona is a strong advocate of the minimal approach and tries to do everything "through Paul," and in the interaction with Allison, it cuts no ice. Mind you, Allison is a naturally somewhat skeptical fellow. As he rather charmingly explains, there are four of him inwardly. They all get along with one another, though they disagree. What is interesting to notice is that none of these four "Dale Allisons" believes that robust, orthodox Christianity, including fully physical appearances, is historically justified by the objective evidence. So it is entirely plausible as a sociological and psychological matter that a discussion with someone who takes a more maximal approach to the resurrection would also cut no ice with Allison. But I consider Licona's attempts to counter him, most of them going "through Paul" (e.g., trying to treat Paul as our main or or even only eyewitness of the resurrection whose account has come down to us) to be objectively far weaker than the available arguments really are and hence consider it somewhat understandable that Allison bats them aside.

In reflecting on their interaction, I thought of an irony concerning the minimalist approach and the way that it bills itself, and I posted this on Facebook.

It is especially ironic that advocates of the minimal facts approach to defending Jesus' resurrection argue that they are appealing only to premises granted by a skeptical audience. Often this is portrayed as especially successful, because it appeals to common ground. I have argued in my "Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data" webinar that this gravely weakens the case by watering down the notion of Jesus' "appearances" to something that a wide variety of scholars will accept.

But there is a more specific irony, which must be followed carefully to understand it: Due to the watering down of the "appearances," the physicality of Jesus' resurrection is cast into doubt, because the minimalist is not willing to argue that the highly physical details in the Gospel narratives (such as Jesus' eating) are really what the witnesses claimed. After all, the minimalist knows that that is not granted by a majority of scholars. How, then, to argue for the physical resurrection?

Generally the minimalist will at that point spend a fair bit of time arguing indirectly that the disciples believed the resurrection was physical. Per the minimalist's preference, this often goes "through" Paul. (There is a huge preference for doing everything "with" or "through" Paul.) E.g. Paul probably believed the resurrection was physical. Paul said that his gospel that he was preaching was approved by the other apostles. Therefore, the other apostles probably believed that the resurrection was physical. Or: The Gospel of Luke portrays the resurrection as physical. Luke was a companion of Paul and spoke to other apostles. Therefore, the apostles probably believed that the resurrection was physical. Note: This means that even if Luke invented the physical details in his narrative, this somehow doesn't matter because he invented them in order to convey what the apostles believed!

The minimalist will then try to insist that the apostles wouldn't have believed the resurrection was physical if they didn't have good evidence thereof. So, therefore, they probably had good evidence thereof. Again, this argument is supposed to circumvent concerns about the Gospels' embellishment. The idea, then, is to argue that even if those particular details were invented, something else was probably what they experienced that made them rational in believing in a physical resurrection!

So this round-the-barn approach eschews an attempt to defend the proposition that the only actual accounts we have tell us what the original witnesses claimed! It then attempts to bolster the now-weak argument for the physical resurrection by pouring energy into arguing that they probably believed it and that something-or-other convincing had to be what they experienced or they wouldn't have believed it.

Would that proposition be granted by the skeptic? Obviously not! Any skeptic or even ambivalent scholar (such as Dale Allison) is going to reject the proposition, "If the disciples believed that Jesus was physically raised, they were rational in doing so." Of course not! Such a person will point to various apparitions and visionary experiences as an analogy to the resurrection experiences (both Allison and Bart Ehrman expressly do this) and will then say that people believe a lot of things and that the apostles appear to have believed in a physical resurrection of Jesus for some other reason--e.g., because they were conditioned to so by their Jewish background, etc.

The point I am making is that at this incredibly crucial juncture the minimalist is forced to abandon his much-touted method of relying only on premises "granted by a majority of scholars" or even granted by a specific skeptical interlocutor. So even the supposed rhetorical and strategic advantage is suddenly lost.

But in that case, why not take a forward position sooner, make an actually stronger argument, and argue that the Gospels are reliable and that we have good reason to believe that the Gospel resurrection accounts tell us what the original witnesses actually claimed?

Here comes an interesting question: How many minimalists think you can do that? To what extent has the decades-long reliance on this supposed "mere strategy" given rise to a genuine loss of nerve, to an apologetics community full of people who don't think that they can argue that way, who don't think that the evidence actually supports that premise? Unfortunately, I fear that this is too true, and that this isn't really *just* a "strategy." (Indeed, I have provided quotations in the webinar that indicate as much.) That would mean that we are forced to argue in this roundabout fashion and only take a stand at the point of insisting that the disciples' belief must have been rational. But in that case, you might as well admit that that is what you're doing very openly. Just say it: "No, this isn't really a strategy that relies only on premises that the skeptic will grant. But I don't think the robust reliability of the Gospels and the unembellished nature of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection is defensible, so, I'm sorry, but this is the best we can do."

Isn't it a great thing that we have a better way?

In a comment to the Facebook post I was asked if a minimalist approach to arguing for the resurrection is/was just an excuse to bring higher criticism into evangelicalism. As I point out in my response, giving a bit of sociological history, the reality is more complicated than that. Here is what I said (very lightly edited):

I don't think it was intended to be that initially. I truly think that initially, e.g., as formulated by Dr. Gary Habermas, the minimal facts approach was meant to be a strategy for jumping off from what Habermas found to be an encouraging softening of the liberal scholarly stance, in order to to press for more. The idea was that perhaps after, say, the 1970s, the liberal scholars were admitting enough that we could grab that and use it as a set of premises and actually argue for the resurrection as an explanatory inference just from those premises. This was seen as a big advantage, a convenience, and also excellent for the popular use of debates to answer skeptics, because saying, "This is granted by so many liberal scholars" was seen as a knock-down debate tactic.

Unfortunately, a lot of things then happened. For one thing, Habermas did not consult enough epistemologists about the way he was writing and the rationale for his approach, and he confused epistemology with sociology. One finds this in several of his statements of the minimal facts case--he will speak as though a high percentage of scholars' agreeing is in and of itself helpful to strong epistemic status, which of course is not the case.

Second, the strategy took on, as it were, a life of its own so that the "muscles" that would otherwise be used for defending the more robust case tended to atrophy because Christians arguing for the resurrection were not using those muscles.

Third, Michael Licona wrote a book that was a lengthy historiographical expansion of the minimalist account, with Habermas's approval (though I don't really think Habermas fully realized what was going on) in which Licona used the phrase "historical bedrock" for a very limited set of sources. In that book he put big question marks over the resurrection accounts in the Gospels. At this point the embrace of something like "higher criticism" really did enter the "minimalist" approach, as Licona made, as it were, a virtue out of necessity (or a necessity out of an alleged virtue?): Such-and-such isn't "historical bedrock," such-and-such is unsure because we don't know how much of it goes back to the original disciples and we don't know how much liberty the evangelists felt free to take. Therefore we should try to use other methods. This approach was embraced to a disturbing extent around the same time by William Lane Craig, who in the 2008 edition of his book Reasonable Faith actually states that the more forward approach of William Paley and company has been rendered "forever obsolete" by the work of higher critics. Note that this involves, once again, confusing sociology with epistemology.

Since then, Licona's 2017 book and his many presentations have further pressed the idea that the evangelists felt free to "take liberties," and his views have been endorsed by high-level people in the apologetics world, cementing still further the unhappy union between minimalist apologetics and these higher-critical approaches, even though that wasn't the original reason for the introduction of the approach or even for its earlier popularity.

Meanwhile, lay apologetics took off as a cottage industry, and many lay apologists are simply confused about the "appearances" used in the premises of minimal facts. Indeed, sometimes the articles, etc., written by advocates of the approach are confusing at precisely this point. For example, again and again people supposedly presenting the "minimal facts" will bring into popular presentations things that are not granted by a majority of scholars, such as Jesus' appearances indoors and outdoors, to skeptics, etc. This has caused many people to embrace the minimal facts model on the mistaken assumption that a majority of scholars admit far more than they actually do admit. And they are then very reluctant to let go of this assumption. It's too much of a shock for them to absorb, because they are so sure that minimal facts or minimalism is the best way to argue. The prominence of the debate format is part of the issue, too, since people assume that you must use something like this to have a punchy debate presentation.

The demonizing of anyone who points out these issues (aka me) as doing something invidious for criticizing other Christians' work certainly doesn't help in promoting clarity and getting the word out about what the minimal facts approach is and isn't able to support. It also doesn't promote a healthy discussion of the best way to proceed. This is part of why I'm not going to stop pointing these things out, especially since I'm one of the only voices with a following who is doing so.

Miracle reports, independence, and mutual support

This is the somewhat technical post to go along with my recent video on miracles and mutual support. It's been fun for me to revisit these topics mentally in the last week or so as I've been planning the video. Since 2008 when Tim and I published our mutual support paper in Erkenntnis, I've published individually a lot more work on independence and testimony. I'm going to include below a list of some relevant publications, some of them (alas) probably available only through institutional subscriptions. But some of them may be available to independent scholars through a free JSTOR account, so do give that a try. 

First, here is the diagram that I used in the talk. (Hat tip to Esteemed Husband for making it look nice.)

As I emphasized in the video, no line of support contains a loop. The discussion is necessarily simplified, especially as regards the role of background evidence concerning the reliability of a source (such as a single Gospel) that reports both the resurrection and the other miracle. Let me say a little more about that.

First, whether you have evidence that two reports are true or false, if they truly support one another in some way, this is always one-directional, even if you think that the people involved are lying or mistaken. The possibility of fabricated reports doesn't in any way mean that you have a loop. Let me make this concrete: Suppose that Joe tells you two different stories. In both of these stories, Joe is set upon by an enemy or by enemies who try to beat him up, and he wins the fist fight. You may suspect that Joe is lying in both cases. This would mean that you think he is a braggart who is trying to make himself look tough. Even so, there would be no loops of support. Call one story Report A and the other Report B. Call their contents Fight A and Fight B. Suppose that you, based on your other information about Joe (e.g., that he's a puny little guy) decide that neither Fight A nor Fight B happened. In that case, the reports still support each other, in the sense that receiving Report A gives you some additional reason to expect Report B, since Report A supports the umbrella hypothesis that Joe is a braggart who wants to look tough by telling fight stories. Hence, you have somewhat of an expectation that he will tell another story of the same general kind. By the same token Report B gives you some reason to think you may receive Report A, via the same route in the other direction. (Here it is somewhat helpful to imagine receiving the reports at different times and imagining that you receive them in one order and then imagining that you receive them in the other order, but this is just to help keep things clear.) So the reports are mutually supporting (each raises the probability of the other) via the proposition that Joe is a particular kind of liar, and that mutual support is non-circular. 

On the other hand, if you have, or gain, information that leads you to think of Joe as truthful and humble, as a person who tells things that are embarrassing to himself and doesn't make things up, if you learn independently that Joe has studied martial arts, and the like, this will decrease the probability that he is lying. In that case, Report A will have more force for Fight A (that that fight actually occurred). By the same token, you will have support from Report A (given your other background evidence about Joe's truthfulness) for a different umbrella hypothesis concerning character and circumstances--e.g., that Joe has (or tends to attract) enemies who try to beat him up, and that when that happens he is a good fighter. This "truthful" or "positive" unifying hypothesis will give you some additional reason to expect another actual fight in the real world, won by Joe. In this way, Report A supports Fight A; Fight A supports the hypothesis that Joe is a fellow who tends to get into fights and win them, which in turn raises the prior probability of Fight B. That also increases at least somewhat the prior probability that you will receive Report B, since Joe seems to tell you about these things. In turn, if you receive from Joe the input Report B, that provides some evidence via the opposite (non-looped) route that raises the prior probability of Fight A.

This means that in these kinds of scenarios, other background evidence that supports the truthfulness of a source that tells both stories tends to focus the evidential force of each report in such a way as to support the content of the other story. To apply this to a Gospel: The more separate reason we have to believe that John the evangelist is truthful and does not make up stories that promote a theological agenda, the more reason we have to believe (all else being equal) that his story about the healing of the man born blind is true. That, in turn, helps to support the hypothesis that there is something very special about Jesus (that he is at least a prophet, if not God himself), which increases at least somewhat the prior probability of the resurrection. And vice versa. The reports can be thought of as inputs. (Technically, as a strong foundationalist, I'm going to take the inputs at any given time to be things like your apparent memories at time t of reading the reports at time t - 1 and so forth--things to which you have direct access.) The force of each input in favor both of its own content and of the content reported by the other input is increased by other evidence that supports the truthfulness of a source that contains both reports.

On the other hand, if we were to have independent evidence that John the evangelist makes up marvellous stories about Jesus, the story about the man born blind would have little force to support the resurrection of Jesus, not only because it would probably be false (would have little force for its own content), but also because it wouldn't support a positive "unifying hypothesis" (such as Jesus' deity or the idea that there is something special and supernatural about Jesus) that would in turn increase the probability that Jesus would really rise from the dead. A negative "unifying hypothesis" (that John makes up theological stories) could still unify the reports--the report of the man born blind in John might give us some additional reason to think that John would also report the resurrection--but not by way of allowing each report to support the truth of its own content and thereby to support the other event.

To put it briefly, as we come to have more and more justified confidence that this person/author doesn’t make stuff up, we get closer and closer to an uncomplicated situation in which we can reasonably say, “Well, since that event happened, that makes it more likely that this other event happened, too.”

Another point: While the testimony of an otherwise highly reliable source is itself good evidence that the next thing he tells us is true, it is of course especially helpful if the story in question contains specific marks of realism. That makes the report even stronger evidence for what it attests, and this comes on a quasi-continuum. We should not be agnostic about each report on a passage-by-passage basis. That is something I have always spoken out against and will have much more to say about in The Eye of the Beholder. On the other hand, a brief, undetailed report will in the nature of the case carry less weight that a longer report in which we can point to specific marks of truth. In the accompanying video I draw a contrast in this regard between the account in John 9 of the healing of the man born blind and Mark's account of Jesus' healing of a blind man in Mark 8:22-26. Even the latter is not a bare statement, "Jesus healed a blind man near Bethsaida" and nothing more. It contains the oddity of Jesus spitting on the man's eyes (similar to his creating a paste from saliva and mud in John 9). It contains the bit of dialogue in which the man says he sees people walking like trees and Jesus touches his eyes again, which could potentially be embarrassing to a person wanting to make Jesus look more powerful. (Yes, I know that one can make up theological meanings for this, but those are subjective and unconvincing.) And there is Jesus' attempt to get him not to tell others about the miracle, which fits with other cases in the Gospels. So even here there are indicators of truth. An example of an even more spare account would be John 2:23, which just says that Jesus performed "signs," unspecified, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover. The healing of the man born blind in John 9, being longer and more detailed, provides more opportunity for markers of truth to come up. 

The discussion of general reliability above concerns one source that tells both stories. If you have additional evidence from another document, another person, etc., for one or both of the events or for details mentioned in the story, all the better. That, too, would be included in the direct evidence for that story as modeled in the diagram. In the video, I included a bundle of different things in E1. In the case of the resurrection, we have several different Gospel accounts, evidence for the reliability of those other Gospels, as well as other evidence (e.g., in Acts) for the disciples' early attestation of the physical resurrection under conditions of great personal danger. Undesigned coincidences between accounts help to show independence as well as truth--a twofer. Apparent contradictions help to show independence.

As I say, it's been a lot of fun to return to this material, and believe it or not, there are still more complexities that I haven't discussed here. I've been making some additional notes in a document of some other thoughts on the probabilistic issues that I'm not including here.

Below is a small bibliography, ordered from most recent on top to oldest on the bottom, of some of my professional publications on these topics, including a more recent individual publication in Erkenntnis on undesigned coincidences. At a minimum, the combination of the video and this post shows that it is possible to "keep accounts" so that we are not using loops of support when there really is mutual support between miracle accounts (or between any accounts). Evidence for Gospel reliability is highly relevant to all of these issues, though "keeping accounts" is somewhat complex.

************************************

“Undesigned Coincidences and Coherence for an Hypothesis,” Erkenntnis, 85 (4) (August 15, 2020), pp. 801-828. On-Line First, August 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0050-4 Author’s accepted manuscript version archived here.

“Finessing Independent Attestation: A Study in Interdisciplinary Biblical Criticism,” Themelios 44.1, pp. 89-102 (April, 2019)

“Accounting for Dependence: Relative Consilience as a Correction Factor in Cumulative Case Arguments,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 95:3 (2017), 560-572, DOI 10.1080/00048402.2016.1219753. Abstract here. Does not include whole article.

“Evidential Diversity and the Negation of H: A Probabilistic Account of the Value of Varied Evidence,”  Ergo 3:10 (2016), available here.

“Foundationalism, Probability, and Mutual Support,” With Timothy McGrew, Erkenntnis 68 (2008):55-77. JSTOR entry here (does not include whole article).

Pain is the price of patriotism

The events of the last few days here in the U.S. could almost have been calculated to break the heart of anyone who loves this country. First I'm referring to the loss of the Senate to the Democrats. And here I solidly blame none other than our feckless man-child of a President, Donald Trump. In a distant alternative possible universe, had Trump been less narcissistic, had he thought that something mattered besides himself, he would have taken the spotlight off the presidential election shortly after November 3 (whatever he thought about the fairness of the results) and focused solidly on using his considerable influence with his base to rally the voters for the Georgia runoffs. Well, we all know how that went, including Lin Wood's insane recommendation to Republican voters to stay home. The elections were close. Had Trump barnstormed Georgia on behalf of those candidates, the Democrats might not have won the Senate. I don't usually indulge in such what-ifs, and there are plenty of places where I think Trump gets blamed that are far more complicated than they are made to appear in Punditland, but this one is just too darned obvious. 

And then, of course, the Capitol-storming yesterday, deadly for at least four people, deadly for any remaining shred of American dignity. (The news media seem to be notably coy about three of these--who they were and what exactly happened--but about Ashli Babbitt, the woman whom the police shot, there seems to be little doubt about what happened.) This ridiculous attempt at insurrection (seriously?) will be treated as iconic of conservatism for decades to come (at least) and used as a stick with which to beat everyone who supports conservative ideals and ideas. Don't like gay "marriage"? Well, you're just like those terrifying insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building. Maybe you're planning terrorism, even. Don't think a man can turn into a woman? The same. Support the lives of the unborn--man, you're a scary person. And on, ad infinitum. 

If that hasn't upset some readers already ("How terrible that that is why she's upset!" "She didn't say what I wanted her to say!"), here follows my really upsetting paragraph, so feel free to skip, especially if you lean a bit left or are wanting me to say some predetermined thing you have in mind to prove my non-partisanship. I basically like this take by Ben Domenech, with a caveat or two. More about the caveats below. He is so right about the demonization of the really peaceful Tea Partiers not so long ago, the boy who cried wolf phenomenon, and so forth. The most I can say to prove my non-partisanship is that, while I think it tragic, I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for Ashli Babbitt, whom the police shot. She paid high for her mad folly, for her anarchic action; death in that context could have been foreseen as a not-implausible result. This is horrible. If she was motivated by malice, her death would be less tragic, but I don't at all know that she was motivated by malice and suspect (call me naive) that she was incurably muddle-headed by ideology. But everybody who invaded that building forcibly certainly deserves arrest. What I'd really like to see at this point is for the same spirit of get-tough-on-rioters to travel to Portland and other cities so that the truly malicious evildoers who burn down innocent people's businesses would also have a credible deterrent thought to think: "Hey, maybe the police will shoot me if I try to do that." Supported (in my fantasy world) by the eager tough-mindedness of the media that stridently reported yesterday's invasion of the Capitol. But no, "Civil Rights Groups Raise Alarms About Mayor's Harsher Stance on Protesters," as the anarchy in Portland goes on without apparent end and peaceful businessmen have no credible hope of living their peaceful lives. That is shameful. And those who are saying diametrically opposite things now about the rioters yesterday from what they were saying this summer are nothing but despicable partisan hacks whom I will never try to satisfy. (I'm looking at you, Sally Kohn: 5/30 on Twitter, "I don't like violent protests, but I understand them. And those wagging their fingers against them need to read up on their American history." Yesterday, "The mobs storming the Capitol right now are neither patriots nor revolutionaries. They are traitors and cowards, trying to upend our democracy by force." I'm looking at Nancy I-don't-know-why-there-aren't-uprisings-all-over-the-country Pelosi. And more.) Yes, this paragraph probably means that I don't evaluate these two types of mobs exactly as some reading this would like me to. But I do condemn them both, believe both are shameful and both should be arrested and stopped, violently if there is no other way, and that's the most you're going to get out of me.

All that said, the last few days have been dark, in more senses than one. The take from Domenech doesn't give us a whole lot to hope for. If, as he says, the anarchic spirit is now running loose on the American right and is not going away, how in the world can principled conservatives speak credibly to the legitimate concerns of that political element while firmly refusing to become like them? That's the million-dollar question, and I don't have a good answer. Neither, apparently, does Domenech. If he does, he's not revealing it. What has just happened is, like so much of the last four years, a mix of tragedy and farce and turns the country into a mix of tragedy and farce. Yesterday is in some ways the unkindest cut of all. Who could have imagined four years ago the image of "Buffalo horns guy" posing in the Senate chamber with some people (on both sides) actually believing that he is a representative of "the right" in the U.S.? 

And in response we have the President, apparently really shocked (is it possible?) at what his incessant, narcissistic drum-beating of the past few weeks and days has raised, calling for non-violence after it's too late. Can he really be that stupid? I suppose he can. And that is the best we can say for him! Dear Lord, I can remember being a child and being told quite solemnly all about respecting the "office of the President" no matter who was in office. There was still some vestige then of respect for the processes of our governance--respect owed, perhaps, to history, to the vision of the Founders, and to that partly-abstract, partly-concrete entity that we called "our country." The land of the free and the home of the brave, remember? The land of Presidents we could be really proud to get behind, or who could (to put it no higher) at least pretend to behave themselves. Are we now either free or brave? I wonder.

Cynicism is a luxury we cannot afford. And that is my main caveat about Ben Domenech's otherwise insightful piece. He says he wasn't as depressed as others were (presumably conservatives) about yesterday's events. I have to say it: Maybe he should be more depressed. Being hurt by the slow, painful death of ideals in our society is what we pay for being human. Pain is the price of patriotism. If we are to rebuild anything from the ruins of conservatism, if we are even to survive the current and growing totalitarianism of leftism, we have to continue to hurt and to have ideals. This is something that my recent re-reading of Witness by Whittaker Chambers has taught me. Chambers regained his humanity when he learned to love--first his wife, then their unborn child, then his farm and his country--and thus learned again to suffer, but to suffer creatively, to suffer as a witness. That painful process of learning to love was what made him give up the Communist idea that the ends justify the means. We cannot travel the opposite road now. Clear-eyed we must be, and being clear-eyed will undoubtedly lead to pessimism. But hardened we cannot be.

I could close there, but since I'm not blogging a whole lot these days and was only moved by these recent events to blog now, I want to add this: The future of this country and of Western civilization lies, I now firmly believe, with those who are willing to share constructive ideals and truths in person as well as virtually. To do that, we must be both brave and free--free in heart, at least, and claiming our freedom with our actions as much as we are able. While I'm quite willing and even grateful to use the blessings of technology, and while I hope to continue to have the opportunity to do so and to reach more people that way, we can't convey everything that needs to be conveyed that way. The John MacArthurs of the world, these courageous Canadian pastors and elders, and many others quietly "breaking" the insane lockdown "rules" to meet in their churches, to meet with their friends and neighbors and loved ones, to fall in love without masks and get married, to baptize (which you can't do six feet apart), to hug the grieving, to teach children (yea, even children outside their own households) by standing at their elbows while tutor and student see each others' faces, the builders of incarnate community and interpersonal love are the future of mankind. Does that sound over-the-top to you? So be it. 

I hear people speak of our hope in Jesus and of their hope for revival in the U.S. or in the West. That's all well and good. But the high probability is that revival will bear fruit in the dark, lonely spaces of individual hearts and souls only insofar as those souls become strongly connected to in-person communities of saints and brethren. So pastors: Open up your doors and invite them to come in. And sing. And pray together. And speak the truth about unpopular social subjects, and encourage your people by word and example to be willing to lose everything for the truth. It's the only way. It will hurt. But pain is the price not only of patriotism but also of discipleship.