Why Christian Apologists are Doomed to FAIL
WHERE WE ARE
As a skeptic who has rejected Christianity and who tries to promote critical thinking about Christianity and religious beliefs, I see myself as a defense attorney. My primary goal is to dismantle arguments given in support of belief in God, belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible, and belief in the divinity of Jesus. That is to say, my primary task is the critique of arguments and cases made by Christian apologists.
They have the burden of proof (like a prosecuting attorney in a criminal case), so all I have to do is poke holes in their arguments and cases. If I show that their arguments fail, then I have succeeded. I have no obligation to prove that there is no God, nor to prove that the Bible is a flawed book of purely human origin, nor that Jesus was an ordinary and flawed human being. Christian apologists make extraordinary claims about God, the Bible, and Jesus, so they have to provide strong and solid arguments for those beliefs. Otherwise, reasonable and intelligent critical thinkers are free to reject their extraordinary claims.
However, when I can, I do like to provide positive reasons and arguments for disbelief and skepticism, reasons and arguments against the existence of God, against the inspiration of the Bible, and against the divinity of Jesus. Skeptics have no obligation to provide such arguments, but such arguments could help some Christian believers to see that there are serious problems with Christianity.
In recent years, I have been writing and thinking a good deal about the case for the resurrection of Jesus by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics. Their case is composed of many sloppy, unclear, illogical, and pathetic arguments. As a skeptic, I enjoy finding the many fallacies, errors, and false claims that they make in their case for the resurrection of Jesus.
But today, I would like to present my own argument or case against knowing or proving the resurrection of Jesus. I will present a summary of my argument for the conclusion that the attempts of Christian apologists to prove that God raised Jesus from the dead are doomed to fail. They cannot succeed at this effort, given the information currently available about the historical Jesus (assuming that there was an historical Jesus).
MY SKEPTICAL ARGUMENT ON THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS
I summarized the case for the resurrection of Jesus by Kreeft and Tacelli in a brief argument containing two premises and a conclusion. Now I will do the same for my skeptical argument about the alleged resurrection of Jesus:
1. One can construct a reasonable argument for the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead ONLY IF one has first obtained dozens of relevant historical facts about the arrest, trials, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus, and about alleged appearances of a living and physically embodied Jesus after his crucifixion.
2. Given our currently available information, NOBODY can obtain dozens of relevant historical facts about the arrest, trials, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus, and about alleged appearances of a living and physically embodied Jesus after his crucifixion.
THEREFORE:
3. Given our currently available information, NOBODY can construct a reasonable argument for the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.
I am confident that both premises of this skeptical argument are true, and I am confident that the conclusion (3) follows logically from the premises. Neither of the premises is obviously or self-evidently true, so I need to provide reasons or arguments in support of those premises. I will do so in future blog posts here at The Secular Frontier.