You Tube Theology

http://trinities.org/blog/archives/6226 Weekly podcast exploring views about the Trinity, and more generally about God and Jesus in Christian theology and philosophy. Debates, interviews, and historical and contemporary perspectives. Hosted by philosopher of religion / analytic theologian Dr. Dale Tuggy.

Show notes: Dr. Craig Evans is a leading New Testament scholar. He teaches at Acadia Divinity College of Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Dr. Evans is here with us again to talk about Bart Ehrman's historical methodology in his book How Jesus Became God.

Dr. Evans, Bart Ehrman is a learned, serious, and original scholar, and seems well aware that history is a game of inference to the best explanation. That is, we don't just line up premises and deduce conclusions, but rather we hypothesize so as to best explain all the available facts, comparing hypotheses for simplicity, clarity, scope, and so on. But in his 4th chapter, he tries to disqualify, on general methodological grounds, any hypothesis that assumes or asserts the existence of anything supernatural. In this way, he thinks, the historian, as such, can't hypothesize that God actually raised Jesus from the dead. I was quite surprised, though, by the ways he tries to disqualify supernatural claims.
In discussing what he thinks we can't know about the resurrection, Dr. Ehrman asserts that "it is not appropriate for a historian to presuppose a perspective or worldview that is not generally held." page 146
Dr. Evans, do you agree with this methodological rule?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander!
e.g. Time machine, send Ehrman back to the year 1500
Majority of world converts, leaving agnostic and atheist historians in a small minority even of historians.0
Dr. Ehrman says, "A resurrection would be a miracle and as such would defy all 'probability.' Otherwise, it wouldn't be a miracle. To say that an event that defies probability is more probable than something that is simply improbable is to fly in the face of anything that involves probability." (165)
He must mean that the probability of any miracle is 0. That would mean that we are as certain as certain can be that such things do not happen?
How can he assert that? What is his evidence for that?
Contradiction in the concept of a miracle.
Then, show us the contradiction!
If God exists, the probability of Jesus getting raised from the dead is going to be higher than 0!
Even testimony from any sane person should count as some defeasible evidence for the resurrection claim.
Ehrman says that supernatural explanations "cannot be appealed to as a historical response because ... historians have no access to the supernatural realm..." (148)
Dr. Evans, do you agree with this claim?
No access - this presupposes that supernatural events never happen. If some did, we might have access to them by way of testimony or some some sort of physical evidence.