Debate with Richard Carrier (part 1)

Transcript Debate with Richard Carrier

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, let’s discuss a debate that generated a lot of buzz. I think that the reason that this debate generated so much talk is because many people have been anticipating an exchange between you and an atheist named Richard Carrier. This was a debate on the resurrection. [1] A little background on Richard – we will give that here in just a moment – but, Bill, I want to ask you: why do you think there was a lot of talk about this particular debate? It was rather anticipated.

Dr. Craig: It really was. There was a lot of excitement going into the debate. I think it is because of Richard’s prominence in the whole Internet Infidel network. For many people, I think he was the sort of “Great White Hope” which was going to come along and really bring down the case for the resurrection of Jesus, who was going to defeat it soundly, and show its fallacies. So a lot of people were really pinning their hopes, I think, on Richard Carrier.

Kevin Harris: The Internet Infidels, also known as the Secular Web, is one of the first secular atheist-naturalistic websites and still very large – at one point I think it was number one as far as visitors there and interaction. They try to do a good job as far as presenting an atheistic or naturalistic point of view. A lot of material about you there – they interact with it. I will just concur with you. There was a lot of talk about this debate because of Richard Carrier. He has a lot of fans, and he calls them his fans.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I find that rather odd, but you are quite right. It is Richard Carrier fans that I find strange. I don’t think, for example, that I have fans. I have students, but not fans. I find that rather odd.

Kevin Harris: Whether he means that in a facetious way or he’s actually thanking his fans, I don’t know. But he does have a following. And from what I’ve been able to see, a rather young following. That is why one of the reasons I thought this debate was going to be important.

Dr. Craig: I felt that the debate went very well from the Christian point of view. I don’t think that Richard came to grips with any of the four facts that I presented on behalf of the resurrection. He tried to argue in terms of broad generalities rather than grappling with the specifics. Not only with those specific four facts but with the specific lines of evidence in support of each of these facts. Then with regard to naturalistic explanations, again, it would be very broad brushstrokes; like that the disciples were prone to hallucinations, and therefore Paul was schizophrenic, and Mary was a psychotic, and this explains everything. There was no detailed defense of these naturalistic explanations in terms of the criteria that I was using to assess them – such as explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, degree of ad hoc-ness and so forth. So I felt there was a failure on his part to come to grips with specifics in an effective way. So I am hoping that as a result of this debate that many people who had great confidence in Richard Carrier’s attacks will think again and say, “Wait a minute. Maybe the evidence for this event is much more powerful than I thought. Maybe there is a reason why Richard Carrier finds himself amidst that minority of scholars who deny these facts.”

Kevin Harris: I might mention as well that Richard Carrier was a contributor to a book called The Empty Tomb. It was supposed to be the secular answer to all the evidence for the resurrection. What puzzles me is that Richard Carrier has studied you for a long time and written on you for a long time. He was very familiar with your four points. Yet, he just didn’t seem to address them. [2]

Dr. Craig: Yes, this is what shocked me as well, Kevin. I was anticipating that since my material has been out there for years that when Richard Carrier got up to speak in his opening address there would be a point for point parrying of the evidence that I laid out for my case. Instead, there were just generalities about the Gospels being myths rather than coming to grips with the four facts that I would present. In fact, the fact of the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea was never even touched in the debate by Richard even though that was the first of my four facts that needed to be explained and the first of my lines of evidence in favor of the empty tomb. If the burial account is accurate, then the site of Jesus’ grave was known in Jerusalem to both Jew and Christian alike. It would be impossible for a movement founded on the belief in the resurrection of a dead man to arise and flourish in a city where the location of his body was public knowledge. Yet, Richard never engaged at all with the burial account and only later in the debate did he begin to engage with the empty tomb and the origin of the Christian faith and so forth.

Kevin Harris: It is my understanding that he really didn’t want to debate the resurrection when arrangements for this were being made.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. He said, “I’m not going to debate the resurrection of Jesus. What I want to debate is the historical reliability of the Gospels.” It seemed to me that that was just an unmanageable topic. I mean, imagine just trying to debate the single subject of the historical reliability of the Gospel of Luke. Just that topic alone. Then pull in the other synoptics, and then pull in John, and you can see you just have an impossible topic for a 90-minute debate. So I said, no, I want to focus on a specific event in the Gospels, namely, the resurrection of Jesus. Richard agreed, “All right, we’ll do that. We will talk about the resurrection.” Therefore, I was so surprised in his opening statement when he got up to speak and what did he do? He launched into a general attack upon the reliability of the Gospels claiming they are mythical and giving examples of things in the Gospels that he thought were just symbolical and not meant to be historical rather than coming to grips with the four facts that I claim undergird the inference to Jesus’ resurrection.

Kevin Harris: Looking over Richard Carrier’s material before the debate, do you get the impression that he thinks that Christ is not historical? That Jesus did not actually exist?

Dr. Craig: That is his most recent position. Much of his material was published before he came to this view of a purely mythical Jesus. So, for example, in one of his articles that he published criticizing me, he makes a statement that “few people would deny that there is a historical core concerning Jesus of Nazareth and the people and characters about him that can be profitably mined by the historian for genuine historical information about Jesus.” The point that I was making in the debate was that part of that historical core that is recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today are facts like the burial in the tomb, the discovery of the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. Those are part of that historical core that Richard admits most scholars recognize. But now he has moved away from believing that even there is a historical core. He thinks it is all purely mythological and symbolical.

Kevin Harris: Many of us anticipated that Richard Carrier would talk about Paul’s view of the resurrection body. Did he go that direction?

Dr. Craig: No! He did not in the debate! This is the centerpiece of his argument in the book The Empty Tomb. It is interesting, Kevin, because listeners may not be aware of the fact that this is actually a very old strategy that is characteristic of mid-20^th century Protestant liberalism with respect to the resurrection. Protestant liberals could not believe in the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus because it is a nature miracle, and liberal Protestants just couldn’t swallow miracles. So what they wanted to argue was that the resurrection of Jesus, though a real event, was a non-physical event. Jesus rose spiritually from the dead while his corpse rotted away in the tomb. [3] The disciples then had spiritual, non-physical visions of Jesus. This enabled Protestant liberals to affirm the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection but denying the empty tomb and the physical postmortem appearances of Jesus. The strategy of these Protestant liberals was to drive a wedge between Paul and the Gospels. The strategy was to say that Paul believed in a purely spiritual resurrection – not a physical resurrection –, and moreover that Paul’s information is the earliest we have and therefore represents primitive, original Christianity, and that the Gospels came along much later and represent a legendary later redacted theologically reflected kind of Christianity rather than the original Christian belief.

What has happened is that Carrier, from a naturalistic point of view, adopts this same strategy that these Protestant liberals adopted and tries to employ it to show that, in fact, Christianity is just a myth, that it really isn’t true at all. Jesus isn’t risen from the dead, and that as naturalists we should think that all of this is just legendary and mythological. But the strategy is the same as these liberals in the mid-20^th century.

What he doesn’t recognize is that this traditional liberal strategy came under sustained and overwhelming criticism in the latter half of the 20^th century so that today the wide majority of commentators on Paul’s theology agree, first of all, that when Paul talks about a spiritual body he is not talking about the substance of the body; he is talking about its orientation. The body is spiritual in the sense that we say the Bible is a spiritual book or Billy Graham is a spiritual man. We don’t mean that they are some sort of invisible, intangible, unextended thing made out of spirit. We are talking about the orientation or character of these things.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, you can pick the Bible up and your hand will not go through it. You can shake Billy Graham’s hand.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. He is not like Casper the Ghost which is the analogy that Richard used to describe Paul’s doctrine of the resurrection body – that it is like Casper the Ghost, which is just crazy.

Kevin Harris: He claims that Paul actually used language to indicate this? And he tries to go to 1 Corinthians 15 and show that Paul believed this?

Dr. Craig: Yes, he tries to use Paul’s expression “spiritual body” to interpret it that way. The problem is Paul uses the same language in the same letter – in 1 Corinthians – in chapter 2 to talk about the contrast between the natural man and the spiritual man. Obviously, by “the spiritual man” Paul doesn’t mean the immaterial, massless, unextended man. He is talking about people who are filled with the Holy Spirit and under the direction and control of God’s Spirit. The contrast between the natural man and the spiritual man is not one of substance but of orientation. The same is true of the contrast between the natural body and the spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15. As I say, this is what most commentators think.

The other thing that most commentators came to recognize is that Paul believed in a transformation of the earthly body to the resurrection body. The way the resurrection comes to be is through a transformation of the remains of the earthly body, not an exchange of one body for another different, numerically non-identical body. Therefore, Paul most definitely would believe in the empty tomb. He would think the graves would be empty when the resurrection occurs.

But Richard, as I say, doesn’t take any cognizance whatsoever of this sustained criticism of the old Protestant liberalism which he, in effect, is still espousing.

Kevin Harris: Bill, this strategy of saying, “No, Paul believed, and the disciples believed, in a spiritual resurrection. The body did rot away in the tomb, it was a spiritual resurrection.” You still get somewhat of a resurrection there, but it erodes the case for Christ, it seems, in that they want to back you away from showing historical evidence.

Dr. Craig: It is more than that. I think what Richard would say to the Protestant liberal who claims, “Yes, I do believe in the resurrection. I believe he spiritually risen;” Richard will then use his naturalism to say, “Wait a minute – which is more probable? That there were hallucinations and maybe theft of the body or relocation of the body, or to believe that there is this immaterial, supernatural event that you talk about?” [4] He will say it is far more plausible and probable to think that these were just hallucinations or something of that sort.

Kevin Harris: In other words, if you can get people of faith, Christians, to accept that it was merely a spiritual resurrection – immaterial, non-corporeal resurrection – and Jesus’ body was rotting away in the tomb all along, you have taken them in a step away from the Christian faith.

Dr. Craig: Oh, yes, quite definitely. And Richard will then say you no longer have any reason then to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Why believe in this invisible, spiritual resurrection?

Kevin Harris: This is what is disturbing to me, Bill. Chase this for just a moment. I am afraid that many Christians sitting in our pews today don’t understand the bodily nature of Christ’s resurrection. They are happy to think that it was an immaterial, incorporeal body, and it was just kind of a specter of him. And they go to John 20 where Jesus said, “Don’t touch me because I am not yet ascended to the Father.” Misunderstanding that verse – which we will talk about at another time – misunderstanding that they will think you weren’t supposed to touch him because he is not material.

Dr. Craig: And that is absurd. John has the physical demonstrations of showing the hands and inviting Thomas to put his finger in the wounds, and Jesus eating fish with the disciples. Clearly, John believed in a physical resurrection body. In fact, it is unanimous in the Gospels. All of the Gospel appearance stories presuppose a physical, tangible, resurrection body of Jesus.

Kevin Harris: So our listeners need to understand that. Bodily resurrection.

Dr. Craig: Not just bodily, ironically enough, Kevin. Physical. A physical body, not some sort of ectoplasmic spiritual body, but a tangible, material, physical resurrection body in which Jesus rose.

Kevin Harris: A quick objection that I hear coming up. What about a person who is burned and there is nothing but ashes left, or there is a person lost at sea and there is just not anything left of that body? Is God going to be able, in all his power (which is ironic), to pull all those molecules back together.?

Dr. Craig: The original Jewish belief in resurrection, interestingly enough, was not the resurrection of the flesh. Jews in their funerary practices would allow the body to decompose for a year until the flesh was rotted away. Then they would collect the bones and put them in boxes called ossuaries to be preserved for the resurrection. So actually in Jewish belief it was the bones that were the primary object of the resurrection. You see this used symbolically in Ezekiel 37 where the prophet is shown the valley of dry bones. [5] You remember? He says, “Will these bones live again?” And Ezekiel says, “Lord, thou knowest.” And then he has a vision of how the bones are assembled and clothed with sinews and then flesh and then they become alive. That is a Jewish picture of the resurrection. It is the bones that are the primary object. Now, the Jews in handling the case of Jewish martyrs where even the bones might be destroyed knew that God in his power could create a new body out of nothing for those who had all earthly remains destroyed. In that case, there are no remains of the body left and so God will create a new body for them simply out of nothing or out of anything. But so long as there were remains, particularly the bones, those would be the principal object of the resurrection.

Kevin Harris: Bill, we want to do a part 2 on this because we are about out of time. There is going to be a lot of evaluation and commentary that usually occurs after the debate. So we anticipate a lot of that. A lot of times we will wag and the blogosphere will be ablaze. We want to talk about some of the things that may occur. Let me mention this in closing. There will be some sour grapes, as well, I think, among those who just admit that Richard Carrier lost this debate, and that his arguments don’t stand up to the evidence for the resurrection. What do you say to those people who just want a grudge match?

Dr. Craig: I want to say emphatically that if Richard Carrier did lose this debate he did not lose it because of rhetorical tricks on my part. He lost it because his arguments were weak, and he could not respond effectively to the evidence. This debate was not won or lost on the basis of rhetoric or clever debating tactics. He simply did not come to grips with the evidence nor did he offer and sustain effective objections. So I just want to insist on the argumentative content of the debate. I think that there the Christian side clearly had the superior argument. [6]