It was recently suggested to me that, if my concerns about
epistemic entanglement in the minimalist arguments for the resurrection were
legitimate, they should preclude ever stating that any opponent acknowledges or
grants anything that one is going to use in an argument with a conclusion that
the opponent doesn't grant. This was supposed to be a reductio of my concerns on the assumption that it's obviously sometimes okay to state that an opponent grants something that one wants to use.
To recap, I object to the use in a resurrection argument of
the statement that the vast majority of scholars grant that the disciples had
experiences which they believed were appearances of Jesus risen. I also object
to the use of particular quotations mentioning appearances by specific
mainstream scholars (like Gerd Ludemann, Norman Perrin, and Dale Allison) in
the same way. My reason for the objection is that it equivocates on the term "appearances."
What is needed for the argument is that the disciples at least claimed that
they had experiences of a particular phenomenological kind. It seemed to them
that Jesus was with them on earth in 3D, in groups, able to eat and be touched,
etc. But these scholars don't grant that they had experiences of that kind.
Please note this isn't just an objection on the grounds that some of these
scholars don't really think Jesus was risen. I'm objecting on the grounds that
the phenomenological nature of the experiences they think occurred was very
different from what is actually needed for the argument. E.g. Perrin seems to
think the disciples merely had an experience of theological enlightenment,
which he calls a "vision," but doesn't seem to think even had a
visual component. All three of these scholars think that the group bodily
"seemings"—Jesus eating, having long conversations—were not something
the disciples experienced. The experiences rather were fleeting at most, and
the physical manifestations to groups were made up later.
When one says that someone grants appearance experiences and
then uses this "fact" later in the argument in a way that the person
does not grant, this is at best a fallacy of equivocation. Moreover, if the
person literally means something by talking of the appearance experiences that
would be evidence against one's conclusion, one is using something that is
evidence against one's conclusion as if it is evidence for it.
The example given as an alleged reductio of my concerns was "Richard
Dawkins concedes that there are gaps in the fossil record" in the course
of an argument for intelligent design in biology—a conclusion that of course
Dawkins does not agree with.
But it is not true that any use of an opponent's concession
runs into an entanglement problem. I may do a video on this some time, but for
now: Entanglement is a specific type of issue in which the very meaning of an
opponent's admission (and/or the reasoning he uses to reach it) is such that,
if that meaning were clearly understood, the proposition in question would (if
true) either be quite worthless to one's conclusion or even tell against the conclusion for which someone wants to use it.
I've given multiple examples: E.g. Turning "A is from Georgia" into "A is from the United States" in the service of an argument
for "A is from Massachusetts."
Turning "The number in the box is 20" into "The number in the
box is less than 21" in the service of an argument for "The number in
the box is 5." Here is a video I did on entanglement. This can also be thought of as using the popular fallacy of equivocation, if that is an easier way to think of it.
In the case of the minimalist argument, this involves
turning what would be accurately stated as "The disciples had only very
brief group appearance experiences of Jesus in which he definitely did not eat
and at most spoke only briefly" into "The disciples had appearance
experiences of Jesus" in the service of an argument for "Jesus rose
bodily from the dead." In some cases the person in question (e.g., Bart
Ehrman) doesn't grant group appearances at all.
In the case of Dawkins, as far as I can tell, there is no
necessary entanglement issue with using "Dawkins acknowledges gaps in the
fossil record" in the service of an intelligent design conclusion. It
would be a good idea, for the sake of clarity, to state immediately in the
context that Dawkins thinks that such "gaps" occur millions of years
ago and over periods of millions of years. Hence a term like
"suddenness" if Dawkins uses it cannot be used to
support a young earth. But there are intelligent design arguments (about, say,
the Cambrian explosion) that are not arguments for a young earth. It would also
be good to point out that Dawkins makes much of what he considers the similarly
abrupt appearance of flatworms as a sort of reductio of the use of gaps in the
fossil record to argue for design. This, however, would be solely for the purpose of avoiding all appearance of taking Dawkins out of context, not
because Dawkins is literally acknowledging gaps in a sense of that term that is
incompatible with or tells against a design conclusion. And whether or not it is useful for supporting a design conclusion is something that can be debated explicity with followers of Dawkins without any equivocation or "fuzzifying" of the meaning of Dawkins's statement about gaps in the record.
It is possible to envisage entangled uses of Dawkins'
admission that could be made. For example, if a YEC attempted to use Dawkins's admission in a way
that implied (or had to be taken to mean) that Dawkins acknowledges that fossil gaps appear over a much
shorter period of time.
Or, to change the actual situation, suppose that Dawkins had
acknowledged only very small gaps, where small is understood in terms of
phenotypical appearance. This is not actually the case. It seems that he
acknowledges what appear to be "large" gaps in terms of appearance,
but he thinks these do not have the significance that creationists attribute to
them. If Dawkins meant only small gaps and one used the statement that "Dawkins acknowledges gaps in
the fossil record" in an argument that requires large phenotypical gaps,
while giving the impression that Dawkins acknowledges what one needs for the
argument, this would run into an entanglement problem. But this doesn't appear
to be what is going on.
Another example of an unentangled granting is Bart Ehrman's
defense of the existence of Jesus against Jesus mythers. It's quite easy to use
a definite description of "Jesus" that is reasonable and
understandable by both Christians and non-Christians. E.g., "A Jewish
teacher who lived during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, was known as 'Jesus of
Nazareth', and was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate." One can state
correctly, without any sliding or equivocation, that Bart Ehrman acknowledges
that Jesus existed. Even Ehrman's arguments for the existence of Jesus are such
that Christians can also use them—e.g., that Paul said in a letter that he met Jesus'
brother, and that Paul appears in his letters to think of Jesus as a real, historical person.
Ehrman doesn't even seem to think of this as something he "grants" or
"admits" in the sense that he does so reluctantly. He's quite overt
and even emphatic in rejecting Jesus mythicism. But insofar as one thinks of
Ehrman as a "hostile" source (to Christianity), one might wish to use
some sentence like, "Even Bart Ehrman thinks that Jesus existed."
There doesn't seem to be any entanglement here. Entanglement would arise if one
implied that Bart Ehrman thinks that Jesus existed in such a sense that
"Jesus" is defined as including his actually working miracles. Entanglement would also arise if one seemed to be implying that Bart Ehrman understands "Jesus" to mean, among other things, "A person who claimed to be God," while in fact, Ehrman strongly denies that Jesus claimed to be God. But I don't know of anyone who does that.
When checking for entanglement, two things to check for are
term meaning and the actual arguments that are used by the person admitting the
proposition in question to support that proposition. On this basis, as well,
Dawkins appears to be acknowledging apparent gaps in the fossil record for the
same reason (namely, simply that in some cases we don't have a smooth set of
fossils showing a lot of transitional forms) that a proponent of ID would use.
Another hypothetical example of entanglement (which perhaps someone out there gets snared in) would be if a person arguing for a young universe used the premise, "Such-and-such a scientist acknowledges that the universe had a beginning" when the scientist in question believes that the universe had a beginning only as the conclusion of arguments supporting a Big Bang occurring many millions of years ago. In that case the entanglement occurs at the level of the reasons for which the scientist grants that the universe had a beginning. If the scientist didn't believe that the universe is very old, he would not be able to use these scientific reasons to conclude that it had a beginning, but the hypothetical reasoner here wants to use his "acknowledgement" in the service of an argument that the universe is very young.
In the minimalist case it is often assumed that, if some
skeptic or liberal scholar "admits" that the disciples had appearance
experiences, he must be doing so on the basis of strong arguments that are the
same as arguments that the Christian would use. It is sometimes left vague
what exactly this shared argument is supposed to be; usually we just find some
sentence like "The underlying data are so
strong that the vast majority of skeptics acknowledge these facts."
But perhaps the shared argument is supposed to be
"multiple, independent attestation to group appearances." Gary
Habermas has stated, incorrectly, that the Jesus Seminar admits multiple,
independent attestation to group appearances. This is not true; as I've argued
elsewhere, the pages that Habermas cites from the Jesus Seminar are merely
lists of ancient documents that mention group appearances. In context it's very
clear that the Jesus Seminar is not treating these as independent of one
another. Bart Ehrman has been explicit that he doesn't grant that there were
group appearances (though he says that if there were, they were like
"seeing at a distance"). Yet Habermas has boasted in a video that he
can argue strongly for the resurrection using only "Bart Ehrman's facts."
Entanglement is a tricky epistemological subject. But no,
avoiding entanglement does not make it impossible ever to use something that an
opponent admits in the service of one's own argument. One just has to be very
careful when doing so.
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