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Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the Apologetics three fifteen podcast with

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your hosts Brian Auten and Chad Gross join us for

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conversations and interviews on the topics of apologetics, evangelism, and

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the Christian worldview.

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Speaker 2: All we know is that there's still no contact with

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the colony and the xenomorph may be involved.

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Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is Brian Aughton

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joined by Chad Gross as always, and we've just recorded

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a lovely conversation with our guest today, Peter s Williams.

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We talked about all kinds of things revolving around the

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historical Jesus. You're almost spewed when we talked about ancient aliens.

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So tell us, tell us what we're going to get

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into today.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 4: So, Peter S.

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Speaker 5: Williams is my favorite author on the planet. I've said

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that multiple times and it's kind of funny. I was

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supposed to interview him so solo to do this interview

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because you were off looking for any spooks inspectors that

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you could find, but the technology didn't work out on

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his end, and you can ask my family. I walked

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around for about three hours kind of pouting because I

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was so pumped to interview my favorite author on my

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favorite topic, and I was like, so ready, and then

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it didn't happen, and oh my gosh, I was in

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a I didn't I didn't handle it very Christian like,

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but no, I'm kidding, But yeah, we had a great

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talk with him about his book Behold the Man, Essays

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on the Historical Jesus. We talked about philosophy, history, theology.

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We even got to talk about how to engage people

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on the topic and how to overcome maybe some roadblocks

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that they have in their own epistemology or theory of knowledge.

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Speaker 2: And yeah, we did get.

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Speaker 4: To ask me.

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Speaker 3: I'm not gonna say we talked about aliens, but we

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talked about aliens.

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Speaker 6: We did, and.

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Speaker 5: That was one of the most interesting parts arts of

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the discussion, just because of the justification he offered in

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covering that topic.

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Speaker 2: And I'm not going to.

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Speaker 5: Say what that is because I want listeners to continue

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on in here for themselves, but yeah, I really enjoyed it.

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And I also found it super interesting to talk about

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some more unique arguments for a high Christology and early

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high Christology, and so that was enjoyable as well. But

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I just you know, I always geek out when we

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interview him.

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Speaker 3: And the point where we were talking about aliens, you

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asked a question and then I said, I didn't really

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have anything to ask, So I said, well, I don't

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have anything to ask about aliens because it usually edit

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that out. But then the response, it was a great

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response and.

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Speaker 1: I got a lot out of it. But I'm curious

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if it came across like a rebuke.

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Speaker 2: You know what I mean, like, oh, yeah.

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Speaker 1: Because I was thinking, boy, I feel bad now.

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Speaker 5: Well what I said was that is not what was

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in my mind. I was genuinely just sharing something that

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related to what Peter said.

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Speaker 2: So I certainly didn't mean.

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Speaker 3: No SA So yeah, I don't. I don't think you

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guys were doing it. But I'm thinking maybe it. Maybe

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it's going to sound like you guys totally like dis

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me or something like, well, ancient aliens. There is a

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really good topic and you here's why. And then I'm like,

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then I'm crawling away.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you were right, guys.

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Speaker 3: Anyway, So we talk about his book Behold the Man,

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essays on the historical Jesus, and the difference with this

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book is like some of his books, not all of them,

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some of them are collections of essays and writings, and

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so they're put together intentionally in a particular order that

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serves a purpose for that collection. And this was really,

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in a way an eclectic sort of bunch of essays,

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but they all had the same sort of overarching purpose

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looking at the historical Jesus. So you'll hear more about

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it in the interview.

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Speaker 2: Let's go to it. Let's get ready. Switch me on.

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Speaker 1: Well, Peter S.

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Speaker 3: Williams, thanks for coming back to the podcast.

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Speaker 4: Oh a real pleasure. Thanks for having me guys.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, so we wanted to have you on to discuss

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your book, Behold the Man, Essays on the Historical Jesus.

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And I've been telling people that I get to interview

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my favorite author about my favorite topic, so this is

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really great. I just wanted to start out by allowing

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you to kind of talk about what inspired you to

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write the book and how does it differ from some

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of your earlier work on Jesus.

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Speaker 6: Okay, sure. So I've been doing a series of books

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with my publisher, which a Whip and Stock from the US.

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I've been doing a series of essays on books, and

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this is the fourth and as far as I know,

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final book in that series, and all of these books

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in the series are kind of collecting together previously written

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essays and other material, giving them a kind of spruce

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up and a revision, and in the last three of

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these volumes kind of giving an introductory kind of preface

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or chapter to kind of draw it together. And I have,

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as you say, written about the historical Jesus before. I

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did a book called Understanding Jesus some years ago, and

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more recently one called Getting at Jesus, which was a

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response to what the new atheist movement had to say

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about the historical Jesus. And this book has a fairly

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eclectic variety of topics in the papers that are gathered together,

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but I've introduced it with a new chapter that's putting

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the search for the historical Jesus in the context of

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the contemporary world views that people kind of bring to

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that investigation with them, and updating material that I've been

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thinking about for a number of years about the shift

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from what some would call a kind of pre modern

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theistic worldview, thinking about that the modernist kind of scientistic worldview,

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postmodernism coming out of that, and now actually there's a

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whole raft of so called meta modern writers talking about

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what is the worldview that's coming after modernism and postmodernism,

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both in the kind of the world of the arts

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and as a philosophy, and some people are talking about

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that the search for meta modern worldview or a post

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postmodern worldview. And so I kind of trace that intellectual

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lineage and get into where I think that the metamodernism

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has some correct criticisms of modernism and postmodernism, which the

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sort of criticisms which I, as a Christian philosopher, have

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been making of those movements for many years. But how

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I think they are failing to give satisfying answers, but

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in that very process showing that they are hungry for

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something better, for a worldview that is more conducive to

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the realities of our experience and the need for human flourishing.

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It's just that I think that a theistic, a Christian

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worldview can offer those things that they're looking for, although

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they're kind of frightened to go there. So that's the

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kind of worldview context. And then I say, when we're

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thinking about getting into the historical Jesus, you have this

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element of the worldview that you bring to the investigation

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and how that kind of affects your investigation.

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Speaker 4: There's the whole.

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Speaker 6: Category of gathering the relevant evidence for the investigation, so

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thinking about what are good rules of historical investigation and

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gathering relevant evidence, and then there's the need to explain

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the relevant evidence and to look for the best explanation

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of that evidence. So again that's about you know, what

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are the good rules for what makes a good explanation.

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And here's where the kind of worldview particularly starts impacting

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on what kind of explanations are you even going to

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allow to be considered in that investigation. You know, if

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you're really committed to a naturalistic worldview, you're not really

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going to be open to considering an explanation of the

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relevant data about Jesus that has anything supernatural happening in it, right, ye, Right,

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If you come to the investigation even with a naturalism

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that is kind of open to being shown wrong by

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empirical investigation, then you might be willing to consider a

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supernatural a Christian explanation of Jesus basically given sufficient evidence. Certainly,

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if you're agnostic when you come to the investigation, or

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you believe in some kind of a something supernatural out there,

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but you're not quite sure what So depending on kind

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of where you are on that kind of sliding scale,

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as it were, you'll be more or less open, and

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it will perhaps take more or less weight of evidence

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and argumentation to convince you that the Christian understanding of

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Jesus is the most plausible one. So you get this

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kind of interaction between these categories of the worldview that

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you bring to the investigation, the search for evidence and

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the need to explain that evidence. And then we get

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into the individual chapters on a sort of eclectic range

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of issues, which you can ask me to unpack in

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a moment, because I've said enough on this introductory bit.

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Speaker 2: No, it's certainly enough to what the appetite.

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Speaker 3: Yes, So would you say that looking at the different

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world views and sort of offering a critique of those

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is also part of that sort of deciding what sort

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of epistemology one's bringing to it. Like, if this is

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your approach, let me maybe open you or persuade you

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that you need to be open to other ways of

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evaluating how you might something. Is that the idea to

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sort of like open the door epistemologically, if you will,

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so that people can actually take the evidence in.

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Speaker 4: Yes, that's right.

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Speaker 6: The epistemology that the theory of knowledge that we bring

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to this is absolutely crucial, and that's a crucial element

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of worldviews. And so modernism basically wants to hold onto

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the idea that we can get truth, particularly about the

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material world, particularly through scientific empirical investigation, right, And I

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have no problem with that until you put a full

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stop at the end of the sentence and say, and

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that's the only way.

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Speaker 4: To know anything scientism, Yeah, scientist.

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Speaker 6: So I want to critique scientism that the postmodernists will

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kind of say to the modernist, you haven't really gone

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far enough in your rejection of things that we can know,

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because the modernist will say this, we can know, but

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we can't know stuff about about morals, about esthetics, about

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the supernatural, and there are these whole swathes of things

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that we can't know about what we can know this

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scientific stuff, and then the postmodernist wants to call into

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question even that, and like all all theories and narratives

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are kind of power plays, and it's just a language game,

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and we can't get outside of our language to actually

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no reality and so on.

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Speaker 4: So there I'm.

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Speaker 6: Kind of with the modernist against the postmodernist right, because

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I think we really can know things. Yes, so there's

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a kind of plague on both your Hous's critique going

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on there epistemologically and saying that what is it to

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have a properly skeptical attitude about investigating the historical Jesus?

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What is a proper skepticism, and saying we need to

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bring ideas to the table with us that don't close

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down our investigation before we've looked at the evidence, that

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don't make our mind up in advance of look at

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what the evidence might tell us, and that we can

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bring ideas to the table that actually open that open

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up possibilities, but again without prejudging. So you don't start

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off by just assuming, say the Christian view of Jesus.

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But you can come to the investigation assuming that that

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is at least a possibility that one could be open

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to given a good enough argument. Right, So not foreclosing possibilities,

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but you're open to possibilities, but on the basis of

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a good argument based in good evidence. And then then

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you get into the particulars of what of well, what

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rules make for what counts as good evidence? What rules

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make for what counts as the best explanation of data.

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But yeah, that sort of epistemological stream is a crucial

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element in those different worldviews, differs between them and is

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one of the major things that I get into in

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that introductory chapter.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, you mentioned metamodernism and in the opening chapter and

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how that might offer a more balanced framework for historical

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Jesus research. And you've spoken a little bit about this,

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but can you unpack a little bit for listeners specifically

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what you mean by metamodernism, because that term actually was

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was new to me, So I just want to make

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sure everybody knows.

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Speaker 6: Even the use of the term is quite controverted at

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the moment. Some writers in this field feel that, you know, postmodernism,

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the worldview that becomes kind of cultural dominant after the

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dominance of postmodernism that kind of arose in the kind

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of peaked in the kind of early nineties, say, but

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what has come subsequent to that since the kind of

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early two thousands. Some writers talk about polymodernism, but metamodernism

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seems to be the that's kind of mostly stuck. And

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many writers talk about a stance in the arts, particularly

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that kind of oscillate between modernist and postmodernist perspectives, or

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try to braid together modern and postmodern perspectives, things that

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kind of combine the kind of ironic detachment of postmodern

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art and literature and filmmaking and so on with a

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hunger and an ability to express deeply felt emotion without

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feeling that that's kind of cringey. For example, you often

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find these things kind of combined. And if I start

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mentioning the kind of arts that's been mentioned here, things

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like the Carteen series, Rick and Morty, or you know,

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compare that to the Simpsons, particularly, it's kind of peak,

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which would be kind of more postmar and Rick and

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Morty would be more kind of metamodern. Or the films

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of Wes Anderson or Oscar Winner a couple of years ago,

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everything everywhere, all at once. The writers and makers of

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that film explicitly called it a meta modern film, and

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it seemed to affirm a kind of modernist nihilism about

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reality on the one hand, and say, you know, nothing,

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nothing has any objective intrinsic meaning to it.

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Speaker 4: But I am going to choose.

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Speaker 6: To love the people in my family and find personal

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meaning in that. And I can find meaning in this

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meaningless universe by committing myself to the specific relationships that

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I find myself in and not be overwhelmed by the

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everything bagel. If you've seen the film that of we

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have so many choices in what some are called the

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kind of hypermodernist reality, we have so many choices, and

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the film used that both of the kind of symbol

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of the immigrant experience in America, our kind of experience

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of life in the kind of internet dominated world. You know,

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how do you commit to anything in a world where

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there's so much choice and variety and things are just

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of the moment and so on. But against really agreeing

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that with a backdrop inherited from modernism of the kind

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of Richard Dawkins esque the world is just pitiless and

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difference and no good, no evil, that's all that there is.

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So it was kind of I would describe it as

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a kind of trying to have your cake and eat

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it approach to the modern postmodern dilemma. And that kind

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of attempt to braid or oscillate between or cludge those

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views together is what some are describing as meta modernism.

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And my fundamental point would be really since that since

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the modernist and postmodernist outlooks at a fundamental worldview level

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actually contradict each other. Oscillating between two contradictory worldviews does

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not provide a coherent worldview in which it is satisfying

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to live. But that is what the meta modern movement

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as a whole is desperate for. If you look at

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the work of folks like Timothy Timothy Vermulion that I

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write about in the book, he really expresses this hunger

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for something more that the scottishilosopher Timothy Rowsen, who talks

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about the way in which modernism tore apart truth from

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goodness and beauty, and he says, the worldview that I

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would be looking for, and that's an expression if I

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haven't found it yet, but I'm looking for it. The

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worldview I would be looking for is a worldview that

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can somehow put together truth and goodness and beauty as a.

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Speaker 4: Kind of inherent part of it.

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Speaker 6: And as a Christian thinker, and I'm thinking, yeah, I

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know a worldview that does this. Central to the monotheistic worldview,

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in which God is the locust of truth and goodness

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and beauty objectively, inherently speaking, right, But so many within

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the metam movement have brought into the kind of new

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atheist modernist critique of that the evils of the kind

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of pre modern or traditional kind of worldviews, as if

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kind of buying into a contemporary version of an Abrahamic

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religious worldview would necessarily mean signing up to say, misogyny

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or colonialism, or you know, whatever list of evils you

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want to pick, and that doesn't at least that doesn't

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necessarily follow. So I think you want to start from

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the ontological basis of the view and kind of work

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your way up from there without worrying about everything that's

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kind of been inherited from cultures that have had that

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ontology at the center of them.

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Speaker 5: That's helpful, and I know the brand has a question,

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but I just wanted to say that's one of the

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things I appreciate so much about your work is I

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think that you're a little bit broader in the things

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you write about and cover, and I think that you

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work within those those three tenets that you talked about,

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the goodness and the truth and the beauty. I don't

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think you neglect any of those if anybody were to

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look at your body of work, And that's one of

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the things I appreciate about it so much.

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Speaker 4: Thank you. Yeah.

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Speaker 6: Yeah, that trick has been central to my work in

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philosophy since back in the days when I was doing

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my m fil thesis, and it's been central to a

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lot of the stuff that I've taught and written about

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and talked about over the years.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very evident.

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Speaker 3: Okay, So in the book, it shifts gears from talking

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about the different worldviews and epistemologies and sort of critiquing

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and laying those out. But then we get into Jesus himself.

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And I was kind of my ears perked up because

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I didn't start where I thought it would, would it starts,

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you know, you kind of start looking at the Epistle

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of James. So part of historical Jesus studies trying to

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get at, you know, the belief in how, you know Jesus,

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did early Christians believe that Jesus was God? You know,

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these sorts of questions are central to you know, looking

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at Jesus historically. So talk a little bit about the

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Epistle of James and why we might start there and

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how Jesus as God and sort of a high christology,

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if you will, of James plays a role.

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Speaker 4: That's right.

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Speaker 6: So I'm looking at James as evincing an early high

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Christology so called. Say, there were those who will say

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that Jesus's original followers viewed him as you know, the

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Messiah paths, as a pit, but not as the divine

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son of God, and that that idea is something that

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came into Christianity later and generally to you know, to

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try and make that move plausible, you need to push

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that idea of Jesus's divine into the era when Christianity

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leaves its Jewish roots and gets out into the Greco

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Roman world where maybe Christians can be influenced by ideas

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of Greek demi gods and so on, and then stick

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the idea that Jesus was divine into the early second century, say,

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or you know, even more visibly into a discussion at

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the Council of Nicia. According to Dan Brown's book The

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Da Vinci Code. Right now, that that Dan Brown idea

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is something you can undermine simply by looking at archaeology,

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which is something I did in a recent talk which

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you can find on my podcast. Gave a lecture at

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the European Leadership Forum in May on New Testament archaeology

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in Jesus and looking at how the archaeology itself shows

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that there was a high Christology at least one hundred

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or more years before the councilor and nicea. But when

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you can push that even earlier, when you look at

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the literary evidence in the New Testament. Of course, but many,

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not many people would think of going to the Letter

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of James to do this. And I think it's a

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particularly interesting letter to look at because whoever wrote it,

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it's clearly a Jewish milliare a Jewish Christian milliere, and

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it's written from a Jewish Christian to Jewish Christians in

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the diaspora. I think there is good evidence to date

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this letter very early, could even be as early as

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the kind of forties AD, not any later than the sixties.

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And I think there is actually plausible evidence thing that

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it was written by James, the brother of Jesus, which

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would make it particularly interesting, right, But that's kind of

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a separable string to this argument. At the very least,

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it's a Jewish Christian milia, it's early, and in the

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book there are a couple of indications that I talk

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about that the writer and thus his readers have a

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high christology about Jesus. Not only is there a discussion

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about the writer's use of Lord, which the Jews substituted

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for the holy name of God and refused to call

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the Roman empress Caesar Lord because they reserved that for

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God basically, and it calls Jesus Lord. But there's this

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phraseology used in the letters about James talking or whoever

391
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wrote it, talking about non Christian's blaspheming the holy name

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by which you are called, or the Holy name that

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is called over you. Now, terminology of blasphemy in and

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of itself doesn't necessitate blasphemy in a religious sense. It

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can just mean talking bad of although I would say

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the context here suggests that it means blasphemy in a

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religious sense, So that's interesting. But this phraseology of the

398
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Holy Name or the noble name that is called over

399
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you is a repeated Old Testament phraseology about the name

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of God being called over Israel as the people of God,

401
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that God owns Israel as his people. And now here

402
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is the author of the epistle saying to his Jewish

403
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Christian readers about non Christians blaspheming the noble name that

404
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is called over you, and that that is clearly I

405
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think from context, either a reference to the designation of

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Christians as Christians. It was originally an outsider term of abuse.

407
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The early Christians you see from the New Testament described

408
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themselves as followers of the way. I think of Jesus

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expression I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

410
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They said, you know the way, we are followers of

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the Way, and it was Christian was a term of abuse.

412
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It basically means christ slave that was coined by non

413
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Christians and then adopted by followers of the Way of

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their self description. Or it could be a reference to

415
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the name of Christ used in baptism, being called over

416
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people in baptism when they are inducted in baptism into

417
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the Christian community. But either way it seems to be

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an application of a Jewish way of describing God's ownership

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of Israel and then applying that to Jesus Christ owning

420
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Christians in a parallelism. So all of those indications, taken

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accumulatively together, I think give a very strong indication that

422
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the writer and thus the readers of James or whoever

423
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wrote it, have a high Christology. Plausibly, you know, in

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the in like the mid to late forties, in the fifties.

425
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And of course, since the writer and the readers who

426
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are in this diaspora that are being written to already

427
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have that view of Jesus, this is new information that's

428
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been communicated to them, then that idea must predate the

429
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writer and the readers going out from Jerusalem, where Christianity

430
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started to the places where they're being, where they are

431
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and where this letter is being written to them, which

432
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again pushes it even earlier. So I think that you know,

433
00:26:54,759 --> 00:26:58,400
it's not something many people have written about, but it

434
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is a very interesting place to go for evincing an

435
00:27:01,000 --> 00:27:08,480
early high Christology within years, within decades of the death

436
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of the historical Jesus.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I couldn't help but to think.

438
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Speaker 5: When I was reading that chapter, I was thinking of

439
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the Muslim scholar Shabi Ali's kind of evolutionary Christology, and

440
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I was imagining how he would respond to that, And

441
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I thought it would be fascinating in a debate if

442
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somebody would kind of take your argument and flesh it out,

443
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because I think it would catch him quite off guard

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because it's not typically one that you hear.

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Speaker 6: Yeah, right, I mean, you can find phrases in Pauline

446
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letters from the fifties. But I think this is as

447
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if not plausibly earlier than those Pauline references to our

448
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Christ as our Lord and God and so on.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, now you mentioned you said that you thought there

450
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was pretty good evidence that James, actually the brother of Jesus,

451
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actually wrote it. But then while you were talking about

452
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the or, you said James or whoever wrote it, right,

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which I understand the modesty there, But could you just

454
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offer maybe one reason why you think James wrote it.

455
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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 6: I look at some of the parallelisms between phrases in

457
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the letter, the language of the letter and the language

458
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of For example, James's speech is recorded in acts at

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the Council of Jerusalem. There are some interesting kind of

460
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parallelisms in the language he uses. But we have the

461
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unanimous testimony of the early church fathers such as Athanasius,

462
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Serial of Jerusalem, Eusebius, Oregon, and so on. All they

463
00:28:42,920 --> 00:28:47,559
unanimously attribute the epistle to James, the brother of Jesus.

464
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There's a kind of the Jewish and the local knowledge

465
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of Jewish conditions in that era displayed by the letter.

466
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The way in which the the Right's kind of authoritatively

467
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without having to introduce himself, and a kind of argument

468
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by elimination from like who would be able to write

469
00:29:12,839 --> 00:29:15,720
in that manner that we know of from from the

470
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early church writers and so on, so sort of argument

471
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from authorial prominence. I guess it's it's a kind of

472
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cumulative case. And perhaps that the most weighty part of

473
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that is simply the the unanimous testimony of all of

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the earliest writers who talk about him write letter, you

475
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know that that generation of early church fathers where you're

476
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talking about you know, at least kind of people who knew,

477
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people who knew people who were there ground zero.

478
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Speaker 2: Excellent, thank you. That was that was even better than

479
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one reason.

480
00:29:52,240 --> 00:29:56,119
Speaker 6: Well, very often in history and historical arguments, you're you're

481
00:29:55,960 --> 00:30:01,279
you're making a cumulative case. No historical argument is ever

482
00:30:01,359 --> 00:30:04,319
kind of knocked down in the way say a mathematomagical

483
00:30:04,440 --> 00:30:08,400
argument or sometimes a logical argument can be in philosophy,

484
00:30:09,359 --> 00:30:12,720
when you can disprove something by showing it self contradictory. Right,

485
00:30:13,119 --> 00:30:17,440
But in history you are looking at evidence and making

486
00:30:17,559 --> 00:30:20,039
arguments from them, just like you are kind of in

487
00:30:20,119 --> 00:30:25,079
the sciences, and so you want an accumulation of evidences

488
00:30:25,160 --> 00:30:27,119
that point in the same direction to make a kind

489
00:30:27,119 --> 00:30:30,200
of cumulative case, kind of like the case that a

490
00:30:30,240 --> 00:30:34,039
scientist makes in a paper or that a lawyer would

491
00:30:34,079 --> 00:30:37,279
make it in a court. That's the kind of inferential

492
00:30:37,400 --> 00:30:40,640
argumentation that a historian is doing. And so you get

493
00:30:40,680 --> 00:30:45,039
lots of indications that maybe in their own right would

494
00:30:45,079 --> 00:30:48,119
not be enough to convince you of something, but put

495
00:30:48,160 --> 00:30:52,680
them all together, then they become a weighted case for

496
00:30:52,759 --> 00:30:56,480
thinking something. Particularly when you're making a kind of comparative analysis,

497
00:30:56,720 --> 00:30:59,240
it's kind of sayn are there any are there any

498
00:30:59,480 --> 00:31:05,880
counter indications? Is there any apparently undermining evidence against this case?

499
00:31:05,920 --> 00:31:06,200
Speaker 4: And so on.

500
00:31:06,279 --> 00:31:09,880
Speaker 6: So you're kind of weighing up argument against argument where

501
00:31:09,920 --> 00:31:14,119
there are countering arguments, and trying to work your way

502
00:31:14,160 --> 00:31:17,759
through to what is the most sensible thing to think?

503
00:31:18,279 --> 00:31:21,359
But you can you can never say a proof, but

504
00:31:21,480 --> 00:31:23,519
you can say most reasonable.

505
00:31:23,759 --> 00:31:24,240
Speaker 2: That's good.

506
00:31:24,640 --> 00:31:26,799
Speaker 3: So we started in a place where I did you

507
00:31:26,799 --> 00:31:29,799
know you wouldn't think with your book with worldviews when

508
00:31:29,799 --> 00:31:32,960
we're talking about Jesus, and then we talk about epistemology,

509
00:31:33,359 --> 00:31:34,960
and then I think we're going to start with like,

510
00:31:35,440 --> 00:31:38,680
you know, the synoptics, but we start with James so

511
00:31:38,720 --> 00:31:40,839
that after James, I think, oh, well, now we'll go

512
00:31:40,880 --> 00:31:45,680
down to the synoptics where most people start because you know, reasons.

513
00:31:46,880 --> 00:31:50,039
But we started sort of like with John. And the

514
00:31:50,240 --> 00:31:52,920
thing that I tend to hear is that you know,

515
00:31:53,039 --> 00:31:57,160
John was later. John is more of a developed Christology.

516
00:31:57,480 --> 00:32:01,279
Maybe it was developed by the Yohaney community, you know

517
00:32:01,680 --> 00:32:05,440
these the community sort of finally decided that Jesus was,

518
00:32:05,839 --> 00:32:10,480
you know, more than just basic stuff here. He's now

519
00:32:10,519 --> 00:32:14,440
he's becoming divine and things like that. So why start

520
00:32:14,480 --> 00:32:17,559
here with John? What is the dating that you would

521
00:32:17,559 --> 00:32:21,680
suggest for John? And why this approach? Can you unpack that?

522
00:32:22,200 --> 00:32:22,440
Speaker 2: Yeah?

523
00:32:22,440 --> 00:32:24,880
Speaker 6: Well, as we said, I've already written a couple of

524
00:32:25,400 --> 00:32:30,319
books on Jesus, and perhaps they would be structured more

525
00:32:30,359 --> 00:32:32,680
in the way that you're kind of expressing that you

526
00:32:32,680 --> 00:32:35,920
would expect. And for example, in my Getting at Jesus book,

527
00:32:36,119 --> 00:32:39,079
I go through the you know, who wrote the Gospels

528
00:32:39,079 --> 00:32:41,759
and when and so on, and starting with the synoptics

529
00:32:41,799 --> 00:32:44,319
and the snoptic problem and arguing that, yeah, I think,

530
00:32:44,400 --> 00:32:47,039
you know, probably Mark was the first one published and

531
00:32:47,640 --> 00:32:50,200
dating it to well, I think plausibly as early as

532
00:32:50,200 --> 00:32:53,279
forty nine. And you know that's not beyond the pale

533
00:32:53,359 --> 00:32:57,720
these days in New Testament scholarship, atheist James called James Crossley.

534
00:32:58,279 --> 00:33:01,200
I think it's James Crossley. There's an athia anyway, would

535
00:33:01,240 --> 00:33:03,599
date it to the mid forties. You know, I'm not

536
00:33:03,640 --> 00:33:06,480
beyond the pale and dating it at forty nine. But

537
00:33:06,680 --> 00:33:10,200
here I am collecting together a collection of things that

538
00:33:10,319 --> 00:33:12,720
I've written here and there. But I think it is

539
00:33:12,759 --> 00:33:17,480
interesting that it's taking kind of the road less traveled

540
00:33:17,559 --> 00:33:20,640
a little bit, as you say, and looking at you know,

541
00:33:20,720 --> 00:33:24,599
high Christology in the Epistle of James, and then looking

542
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:27,599
at well, what can we say about that the particularly

543
00:33:27,599 --> 00:33:31,680
the dating, the origin, and that the historicity of the

544
00:33:31,799 --> 00:33:35,039
Fourth Gospel, let's call it the Fourth Gospel. I do

545
00:33:35,319 --> 00:33:38,559
argue that I think it is most plausibly written by

546
00:33:38,680 --> 00:33:42,119
John the Apostle. But I look at various arguments that

547
00:33:42,160 --> 00:33:47,440
have been given for dating the Fourth Gospel earlier than

548
00:33:47,440 --> 00:33:50,519
the traditional date. Now that the traditional date would be

549
00:33:51,039 --> 00:33:55,039
towards the end of the first century, but various people

550
00:33:55,160 --> 00:33:59,960
have given arguments for saying that they think it might

551
00:34:00,200 --> 00:34:04,640
be written from before the Jewish War, before the fall

552
00:34:04,680 --> 00:34:07,200
of Jerusalem in seventy eight. And there are a number

553
00:34:07,240 --> 00:34:11,639
of kind of archaeological references that are made in the

554
00:34:11,639 --> 00:34:16,280
Fourth Gospel that people try and argue our indications that

555
00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:21,599
the accuracy of these archaeological references are indications that that

556
00:34:21,639 --> 00:34:24,679
the information at least must have come from before the

557
00:34:24,679 --> 00:34:28,679
fall of Jerusalem, and that maybe that means the Gospel

558
00:34:28,960 --> 00:34:32,159
was written from before then. I don't think that those

559
00:34:32,360 --> 00:34:36,800
arguments hold water. And I go through arguments about that

560
00:34:36,840 --> 00:34:41,960
the sheep Pool and the sheep Gate in the Temple

561
00:34:42,360 --> 00:34:46,320
that I made in this context. I read everything that

562
00:34:46,320 --> 00:34:48,440
I could get my hands on on the archaeology of

563
00:34:48,480 --> 00:34:53,119
the of the Second Temple, and that the Jewish war conquest,

564
00:34:53,199 --> 00:34:56,119
which which kind of finalized with the G's hold up

565
00:34:56,159 --> 00:35:00,239
in the in the Temple there, and the archaeology of

566
00:35:00,239 --> 00:35:03,880
of the pool with its famous double pool and the

567
00:35:03,880 --> 00:35:07,559
colonnades around it that were discovered, and so on. I

568
00:35:07,599 --> 00:35:11,960
don't think there is a good argument to say that

569
00:35:12,360 --> 00:35:17,960
the Gospel must have been written before the fall of Jerusalem.

570
00:35:18,159 --> 00:35:19,800
But I do think there are good arguments to say

571
00:35:19,800 --> 00:35:23,400
that it was written by John the Apostle, and I

572
00:35:23,440 --> 00:35:26,679
would date it to the end of the first century,

573
00:35:26,679 --> 00:35:31,199
along with the traditional kind of dates around about of

574
00:35:31,320 --> 00:35:36,840
ninety eight ad ish, you know, And here I'm kind

575
00:35:36,840 --> 00:35:38,760
of saying, yeah, it would be lovely if you could,

576
00:35:38,800 --> 00:35:42,199
if you could show from these arguments that it was actually,

577
00:35:42,280 --> 00:35:46,280
you know, earlier than people thought. But you know, those

578
00:35:46,440 --> 00:35:48,199
arguments don't seem to hold up, and you've got to

579
00:35:48,199 --> 00:35:52,199
follow the evidence where it leads. But I do think

580
00:35:52,400 --> 00:35:55,039
where the evidence leads is it was written by John

581
00:35:55,519 --> 00:36:01,280
and that he is an eyewitness. So yeah, we've got

582
00:36:01,320 --> 00:36:05,360
eyewitness testimony in this gospel, but it's the latest a

583
00:36:05,400 --> 00:36:09,400
gospel like Luke would date to the mid first century,

584
00:36:09,480 --> 00:36:14,719
I think. But it's not by an eyewitness. It's a secondhand,

585
00:36:15,400 --> 00:36:19,079
a collation, a sort of journalistic collation, if you like,

586
00:36:19,280 --> 00:36:22,239
of reports from people who seem to know what they

587
00:36:22,239 --> 00:36:26,480
were talking about. But it's not an eyewitness report in

588
00:36:26,519 --> 00:36:30,199
that sense. That's where the evidence seems to point. I

589
00:36:30,199 --> 00:36:35,320
think Matthew's gospel might well be include material, the so

590
00:36:35,400 --> 00:36:39,960
called Q source material that might well be written by

591
00:36:39,960 --> 00:36:43,719
an eyewitness. That Q material could plausibly have been written

592
00:36:43,800 --> 00:36:49,079
by Matthew the apostle at the time. This collection of

593
00:36:49,199 --> 00:36:54,440
Jesus' teaching may may be then part of that gospel,

594
00:36:54,599 --> 00:36:57,320
whether or not the whole Gospel was written by Matthew,

595
00:36:57,639 --> 00:37:02,400
but Mark seems to pre date and again is not

596
00:37:02,440 --> 00:37:05,679
an eyewitness, although it does seem to be written by Mark,

597
00:37:05,960 --> 00:37:09,360
who has the scribe to Peter the Apostle, who was

598
00:37:09,400 --> 00:37:12,719
an eyewitness. So you just have to kind of follow

599
00:37:12,760 --> 00:37:16,519
the evidence where it leads, and I think people sometimes

600
00:37:16,559 --> 00:37:20,960
get a bit carried away with oh, you know, maybe

601
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:23,920
we can we can, we can push these arguments for

602
00:37:24,440 --> 00:37:29,519
early and so on, and are not sufficiently careful in

603
00:37:29,599 --> 00:37:32,480
making those arguments as I try and share.

604
00:37:33,440 --> 00:37:36,400
Speaker 5: Now you mentioned there you said this is this is

605
00:37:36,719 --> 00:37:40,159
a bit to the side of the central issue. But

606
00:37:40,519 --> 00:37:43,079
I'm something I've always wanted to ask you is that

607
00:37:43,559 --> 00:37:46,719
you mentioned you read every I read everything I could

608
00:37:46,840 --> 00:37:50,159
on the archaeology, right or something along those lines. So

609
00:37:50,199 --> 00:37:52,440
when I one of the things I find fascinating when

610
00:37:52,440 --> 00:37:59,400
I read your work is the amount of footnotes and

611
00:37:59,719 --> 00:38:05,280
how all widely read you are so and I honestly

612
00:38:05,320 --> 00:38:06,920
don't know of another author that I can point to

613
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:08,880
that I could say, oh, yeah, like this person.

614
00:38:08,960 --> 00:38:10,480
Speaker 2: I mean, I haven't seen that.

615
00:38:11,440 --> 00:38:15,280
Speaker 5: So my question is is how are you able to

616
00:38:16,360 --> 00:38:20,920
research so widely? And like I feel like, does he

617
00:38:21,039 --> 00:38:25,599
do anything other than read like, you know, like, I

618
00:38:25,639 --> 00:38:28,679
guess I'm just I'm kind of looking into I guess

619
00:38:28,719 --> 00:38:31,679
I'm looking into Like, how are you able to do

620
00:38:31,760 --> 00:38:32,800
that so effectively?

621
00:38:33,519 --> 00:38:36,519
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is a matter of putting the time in.

622
00:38:36,719 --> 00:38:38,840
Speaker 6: I do have time for other things in life, but

623
00:38:38,880 --> 00:38:42,119
I do spend a good chunk of my life reading things,

624
00:38:42,400 --> 00:38:46,800
underlining things and highlighting things in kindle books and so on.

625
00:38:48,239 --> 00:38:48,440
Speaker 4: You know.

626
00:38:49,199 --> 00:38:52,679
Speaker 6: Of course, this book, as I say, it's a revised

627
00:38:52,880 --> 00:38:56,920
collection of things that I've previously written. So the research

628
00:38:57,320 --> 00:38:59,960
is you know, the book basically came out. I've been

629
00:39:00,079 --> 00:39:02,079
doing a book a year for a number of years.

630
00:39:02,519 --> 00:39:05,519
But that's my dint of this essay on series have

631
00:39:05,679 --> 00:39:10,079
been you know, some new material gets written, but the

632
00:39:10,119 --> 00:39:13,199
bulk of them are kind of revisions of old stuff.

633
00:39:13,280 --> 00:39:16,639
So I don't have to do huge amounts of research

634
00:39:16,920 --> 00:39:19,960
in these particular years in order to get these books out,

635
00:39:20,000 --> 00:39:25,119
because it's drawing on research which I've done in previous years. Right,

636
00:39:25,360 --> 00:39:29,199
you know, when I originally wrote the essay, a bunch

637
00:39:29,239 --> 00:39:32,360
of these essays were published in the college journal for

638
00:39:32,400 --> 00:39:35,320
the Norwich In University College that I've been working for

639
00:39:35,480 --> 00:39:38,480
part time, Theophalos, which is an open source journal you

640
00:39:38,519 --> 00:39:41,079
can find online. You can find a lot of the

641
00:39:41,079 --> 00:39:45,599
original versions of my papers in Theophalist Journal. But then

642
00:39:45,639 --> 00:39:48,639
when I'm coming to the book, I will revise, do

643
00:39:48,760 --> 00:39:52,440
some additional research, see you know, you know what new

644
00:39:52,519 --> 00:39:55,360
stuff in that field has come out, so on, and

645
00:39:55,480 --> 00:39:58,360
try and sprust it up a bit, make sure it's

646
00:39:58,440 --> 00:39:58,960
up to date.

647
00:39:59,360 --> 00:40:00,400
Speaker 4: But yeah, I just.

648
00:40:00,400 --> 00:40:03,000
Speaker 6: Do have to spend a lot of time reading stuff.

649
00:40:03,079 --> 00:40:07,159
It's good that I enjoy doing that. I have more interests,

650
00:40:08,519 --> 00:40:10,159
but I love that in books when I read them

651
00:40:10,159 --> 00:40:12,360
as well, because then it gives me places to go

652
00:40:13,800 --> 00:40:18,119
in researching those topics and kind of forming my opinions

653
00:40:18,119 --> 00:40:18,639
on things.

654
00:40:19,280 --> 00:40:21,840
Speaker 5: So yeah, so then we you kind of move on

655
00:40:21,880 --> 00:40:25,440
in the book to the to the resurrection. And one

656
00:40:25,480 --> 00:40:27,360
of the things you talked about earlier on in the

657
00:40:27,400 --> 00:40:29,880
interview was this idea of you know, we have these

658
00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:34,159
these pieces of evidence or facts that need explanation, and

659
00:40:34,199 --> 00:40:36,199
then of course you move to, well, what's the.

660
00:40:36,079 --> 00:40:39,000
Speaker 2: Best explanation of these facts? Right?

661
00:40:39,360 --> 00:40:41,960
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then you talked about how it depends on

662
00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:46,360
what you're open to as an explanation. So how does

663
00:40:46,519 --> 00:40:51,119
one kind of handle the philosophical challenges to the idea

664
00:40:51,119 --> 00:40:53,440
of a miracle when it comes to the resurrection.

665
00:40:53,760 --> 00:40:59,440
Speaker 6: Yeah, and that's quite a diverse set of challenges really,

666
00:40:59,480 --> 00:41:01,280
I would say, because you could say, you know, there

667
00:41:01,320 --> 00:41:06,360
are traditional challenges even from defining what you mean by

668
00:41:06,400 --> 00:41:08,840
a miracle. I mean, David Hume is the kind of

669
00:41:09,159 --> 00:41:13,280
lowchi classicus of this, of saying that, you know, Hume

670
00:41:13,519 --> 00:41:16,960
notoriously defined a miracle as a violation of the laws

671
00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:20,639
of nature in a kind of what many have said

672
00:41:20,719 --> 00:41:24,800
is a bit of a prejudicial kind of phraseology really,

673
00:41:25,639 --> 00:41:30,159
and gave some notorious arguments against miracles which are still

674
00:41:30,159 --> 00:41:32,519
debated is today as to whether he is arguing that

675
00:41:32,559 --> 00:41:36,360
miracles are not possible, or he's allowing that they're possible

676
00:41:36,360 --> 00:41:39,960
but arguing that they're not ever ever plausible to believe in.

677
00:41:40,760 --> 00:41:44,239
Different people takeing different ways, and I have in various

678
00:41:44,239 --> 00:41:47,280
of my sources, particularly that there's a bunch of stuff

679
00:41:47,280 --> 00:41:49,599
on this in the Getting at Jesus book, looked at

680
00:41:49,639 --> 00:41:54,880
the interpretation of Hume's arguments and so on. Some of

681
00:41:54,920 --> 00:41:58,440
it comes from, as I say, that the worldview ontology

682
00:41:58,559 --> 00:42:00,960
that you bring to the question. If you believe that

683
00:42:01,079 --> 00:42:06,920
only the material, physical natural world exists, then of course

684
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:10,639
anything that happens must be a thing that it is

685
00:42:10,920 --> 00:42:14,119
possible to happen within that kind of an ontology, and

686
00:42:14,280 --> 00:42:18,480
must have a causal relationship as one can specify within

687
00:42:18,559 --> 00:42:21,519
that kind of ontology. If you are open to the

688
00:42:21,679 --> 00:42:25,800
possibility that there is a God outside of the natural world,

689
00:42:26,880 --> 00:42:29,880
then it seems to follow that one must be open

690
00:42:29,920 --> 00:42:34,639
to the possibility of events that are not tied to

691
00:42:34,880 --> 00:42:38,519
other events in the world by a kind of naturalistic description.

692
00:42:38,800 --> 00:42:41,719
Speaker 4: Right. So David Hume.

693
00:42:42,880 --> 00:42:47,480
Speaker 6: In one passage says that you know, if some lead

694
00:42:48,239 --> 00:42:53,199
were of itself to float in the air, and he

695
00:42:53,239 --> 00:42:57,440
talks about how we know that this is unbelievable because

696
00:42:58,800 --> 00:43:01,679
you know that can't happen, and that's never you know,

697
00:43:01,800 --> 00:43:05,119
people don't experience that happen, it's never been seen to happen,

698
00:43:05,440 --> 00:43:07,880
and so on. But he is really given that the

699
00:43:07,920 --> 00:43:12,280
game away where he says of itself, if God were

700
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:16,440
to cause a piece of lead to levitate, then the

701
00:43:16,519 --> 00:43:21,199
lead would not be levitating of itself. It would be

702
00:43:21,280 --> 00:43:25,920
levitating by the application of a particular choice on God's

703
00:43:25,920 --> 00:43:30,920
part to exercise his omnipotence to cause that to happen. Right,

704
00:43:30,960 --> 00:43:34,559
So it is not an instance of lead levitating of itself.

705
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:38,960
It would be a miracle, it would be an application

706
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:40,039
of God's power.

707
00:43:40,559 --> 00:43:42,760
Speaker 4: So the question is tied to you know, what.

708
00:43:44,280 --> 00:43:46,320
Speaker 6: Kind of things do you think exist and what kind

709
00:43:46,360 --> 00:43:48,599
of things do you think it's even possible to exist?

710
00:43:49,440 --> 00:43:52,280
So you know, there's a difference between saying I don't

711
00:43:52,280 --> 00:43:54,719
think God does exist and saying I don't think it's

712
00:43:54,760 --> 00:43:58,559
even possible for God to exist. It's not that too

713
00:43:58,639 --> 00:44:00,719
much of as we get into the ontolo logical argument

714
00:44:00,760 --> 00:44:02,039
for God's existence, right.

715
00:44:02,199 --> 00:44:02,360
Speaker 4: But.

716
00:44:05,559 --> 00:44:08,639
Speaker 2: That's a whole other story.

717
00:44:09,679 --> 00:44:11,840
Speaker 6: But you see how that your your kind of ontology

718
00:44:11,880 --> 00:44:15,000
can affect what you're kind of going to take seriously,

719
00:44:15,440 --> 00:44:17,840
but also you're you're you're kind of the way in

720
00:44:17,880 --> 00:44:20,960
which you describe miracles, whether you take kind of human

721
00:44:21,119 --> 00:44:26,039
arguments against miracles seriously or not. And then getting into that,

722
00:44:26,079 --> 00:44:29,960
I basically I would argue that you can't really address

723
00:44:30,079 --> 00:44:33,199
the issue dismiss the issue of miracles a pra or

724
00:44:33,280 --> 00:44:36,400
I You've got to get into the details of, well,

725
00:44:36,440 --> 00:44:38,920
what is the evidence and is there a good enough

726
00:44:39,199 --> 00:44:43,440
evidential case to convince me that a miracle has happened,

727
00:44:43,920 --> 00:44:48,039
And you can't set that bar so artificially high a

728
00:44:48,159 --> 00:44:51,320
priori that you're in a position where you're basically saying,

729
00:44:51,760 --> 00:44:56,480
you know, I could never be convinced, Then what you're

730
00:44:56,519 --> 00:44:59,920
what you're really saying is my my worldview is unfalsified

731
00:45:00,480 --> 00:45:05,199
on you know, empirically unfalsifiable, which is, you know, perhaps

732
00:45:05,639 --> 00:45:09,559
an uncomfortable position for modernists, people with a modernist kind

733
00:45:09,559 --> 00:45:13,800
of scientific worldview or scientistic worldview to be in. So

734
00:45:13,880 --> 00:45:18,440
if you want to leave your worldview open to empirical falsification,

735
00:45:18,920 --> 00:45:21,320
well then you've got to get into those details of well,

736
00:45:21,360 --> 00:45:24,000
what is the evidence and what are the good criteria

737
00:45:24,119 --> 00:45:28,000
for making you know what the best explanation is? And

738
00:45:28,239 --> 00:45:30,719
if you don't, you know, you're not just completely determined

739
00:45:30,760 --> 00:45:34,000
to rule out a theistic explanation from the get go,

740
00:45:34,559 --> 00:45:36,440
well then you know you might as well look at

741
00:45:36,440 --> 00:45:38,119
the argument and see where you end up at the

742
00:45:38,199 --> 00:45:40,199
end the end of considering it.

743
00:45:40,719 --> 00:45:41,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good.

744
00:45:41,679 --> 00:45:44,559
Speaker 3: So tied to miracles. Of course, this is all pointing

745
00:45:44,559 --> 00:45:48,599
towards the resurrection. And sometimes when we're talking about the resurrection,

746
00:45:48,639 --> 00:45:51,480
when it comes to apologetics, the discussion comes up with, well,

747
00:45:51,480 --> 00:45:55,000
what's the right approach of doing that? Should we look

748
00:45:55,000 --> 00:45:58,000
at data that scholars agree upon and try to narrow

749
00:45:58,000 --> 00:46:02,079
our focus and sort of make a case that way,

750
00:46:02,440 --> 00:46:04,239
or do we want to broaden that and just use

751
00:46:04,360 --> 00:46:07,840
every bit of available data possible. I kind of think,

752
00:46:07,960 --> 00:46:10,800
you know, it depends on who you're talking to. My

753
00:46:10,960 --> 00:46:15,039
personal opinion, and maybe you think the same based upon

754
00:46:15,199 --> 00:46:18,400
like the depending on the worldview of the person and

755
00:46:18,440 --> 00:46:21,000
what sort of epistemology they may have, what sort of

756
00:46:21,000 --> 00:46:24,320
background information they already have, things like that, What does

757
00:46:24,360 --> 00:46:26,159
your approach tend to look like?

758
00:46:26,320 --> 00:46:28,079
Speaker 1: And do you have any thoughts on that?

759
00:46:28,440 --> 00:46:31,639
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I agree that you don't necessarily want to

760
00:46:31,639 --> 00:46:35,320
try and pick a one size pix all approach. You

761
00:46:35,400 --> 00:46:38,039
want to fit it to the occasion. But of course

762
00:46:38,039 --> 00:46:40,840
when you're writing for a general audience you often have

763
00:46:40,920 --> 00:46:44,800
to pick an approach. I do discuss in the opening

764
00:46:44,880 --> 00:46:49,239
chapter that difference between the kind of let's throw everything

765
00:46:49,320 --> 00:46:51,639
in the kitchen sink at it kind of approach to

766
00:46:51,719 --> 00:46:54,719
argument and the so called kind of minimal facts approach.

767
00:46:55,199 --> 00:46:59,199
I kind of contrast the kind of traditional Christian evidences

768
00:46:59,239 --> 00:47:03,199
approach is as you might find, say, in the work

769
00:47:03,239 --> 00:47:07,199
of someone like normanel Geisler, and I look at how

770
00:47:07,239 --> 00:47:12,159
he argues in his classic test on Christian apologics, and

771
00:47:12,199 --> 00:47:14,880
then contrasts that with the kind of approach taken by

772
00:47:14,880 --> 00:47:18,400
someone like Gary Habermass is currently coming out with his

773
00:47:18,519 --> 00:47:24,719
four volume massive Magnum Opus on the Resurrection. Three volumes

774
00:47:24,760 --> 00:47:28,559
are available thus far, and he has in his career

775
00:47:28,800 --> 00:47:31,880
taken this approach, which he calls the minimal facts approach.

776
00:47:32,239 --> 00:47:33,719
Speaker 4: I try and try.

777
00:47:33,559 --> 00:47:37,679
Speaker 6: And hive off a particular element of that approach. Haber

778
00:47:37,760 --> 00:47:42,360
Mass will use this rule, as you say, of general consent,

779
00:47:42,679 --> 00:47:46,159
of kind of majority consent or a large majority consent

780
00:47:46,920 --> 00:47:51,000
of scholars relevant to an issue, accepting it whatever their

781
00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:53,760
worldview might be. And I think that that might be

782
00:47:53,800 --> 00:47:57,920
a useful kind of rhetorical approach, depending on your situation.

783
00:47:58,519 --> 00:48:02,159
But I think, why not just say, let's just use

784
00:48:02,440 --> 00:48:07,000
good rules for what counts as evidence, and then use

785
00:48:07,039 --> 00:48:11,920
evidence that falls within those rules. Why add this rule

786
00:48:11,920 --> 00:48:16,440
about majority consent, because as haber Massive self says, you know,

787
00:48:16,559 --> 00:48:23,639
consent doesn't equal truth. And it's like sometimes he seems

788
00:48:23,679 --> 00:48:26,320
to be using that rule just as a kind of

789
00:48:26,880 --> 00:48:30,679
a rhetorical move to kind of try and get a

790
00:48:30,719 --> 00:48:34,760
shorthand on the conversation and kind of get to the

791
00:48:34,800 --> 00:48:35,440
point quicker.

792
00:48:35,519 --> 00:48:38,159
Speaker 4: And if someone is willing to go that way, then

793
00:48:38,360 --> 00:48:39,639
you know, great, fine.

794
00:48:40,440 --> 00:48:44,199
Speaker 6: Sometimes it seems that he, in particularly Michael Lacona, who

795
00:48:44,280 --> 00:48:48,159
uses a same or similar approach, is using it as

796
00:48:48,199 --> 00:48:52,239
a kind of bulwark against worldview bias. I often feel

797
00:48:52,239 --> 00:48:54,719
that Michael Lacona, in his work on the Resurrection is

798
00:48:54,760 --> 00:48:58,880
trying to kind of bend over backwards not to be

799
00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:03,440
biased to towards the Resurrection, that he ends up being

800
00:49:03,519 --> 00:49:08,599
overly cautious on what data he will allow. And I

801
00:49:08,639 --> 00:49:12,400
think actually that if you are careful in forming your

802
00:49:12,440 --> 00:49:18,159
criteria of evidence gathering, that that criteria itself should be

803
00:49:18,199 --> 00:49:24,039
the bulwark against bias. It's like, are these standard criteria

804
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:26,360
criteria that.

805
00:49:26,599 --> 00:49:30,320
Speaker 4: People with other world views accept and use?

806
00:49:30,679 --> 00:49:33,239
Speaker 3: So it's more like common ground finding the common ground

807
00:49:33,280 --> 00:49:35,239
that you can argue from sort of.

808
00:49:35,599 --> 00:49:39,039
Speaker 6: If I can show that these criteria result in this

809
00:49:39,119 --> 00:49:41,679
set of data, then that's the set of data that

810
00:49:41,719 --> 00:49:45,559
I should use. Whether or not people with those other

811
00:49:45,599 --> 00:49:49,280
world views a majority of them also accept that data,

812
00:49:49,360 --> 00:49:52,079
because all that shows is that they're being inconsistent with

813
00:49:52,159 --> 00:49:57,800
their epistemological foundations. And why should I be constrained by that?

814
00:49:58,559 --> 00:50:01,519
Why should the particular a person if I'm talking to

815
00:50:01,519 --> 00:50:06,079
a particular person in conversation, want to be limited by that, Well,

816
00:50:06,559 --> 00:50:09,199
it's going to depend on them. You know, when you're

817
00:50:09,199 --> 00:50:12,440
talking to a particular individual, you have to engage with

818
00:50:12,480 --> 00:50:16,800
the particular individual at where they're at. So I basically say,

819
00:50:16,840 --> 00:50:19,679
you can take these kind of three approaches, a kind

820
00:50:19,719 --> 00:50:27,400
of criteria approach with or without this majority consent criteria

821
00:50:27,400 --> 00:50:31,280
that Haber mass ads, and then there's actually no contradiction

822
00:50:31,480 --> 00:50:35,559
between that and the throw everything in the kitchen sink

823
00:50:35,559 --> 00:50:38,840
at it kind of approached that someone like Lydia McGrew

824
00:50:39,079 --> 00:50:43,239
for example, would take right, So that these are not

825
00:50:43,800 --> 00:50:50,039
mutually exclusive approaches, and in it, I tend to think

826
00:50:50,039 --> 00:50:54,119
that the best argument, strongest argument for something is all

827
00:50:54,199 --> 00:50:58,840
of the arguments taken together in context. But it may

828
00:50:58,840 --> 00:51:03,079
be you know, pH torrtally useful in particular situations, given

829
00:51:03,159 --> 00:51:07,559
restrictions of time, et cetera, to focus on a criteria

830
00:51:07,679 --> 00:51:10,599
approach or even a minimum of facts approach.

831
00:51:11,480 --> 00:51:13,159
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was that was really helpful.

832
00:51:13,559 --> 00:51:16,320
Speaker 5: So one of the things that people might find interesting

833
00:51:16,360 --> 00:51:21,599
in this book is some of the explanations that you

834
00:51:21,599 --> 00:51:27,000
you kind of tackle, and one of those is ancient aliens. Yeah,

835
00:51:28,039 --> 00:51:32,960
so I'm wondering, why do you think, like, what do

836
00:51:33,000 --> 00:51:37,440
you think draws people to those types of explanations, for example,

837
00:51:37,599 --> 00:51:40,760
ancient aliens? And kind of how can we as Christians

838
00:51:41,679 --> 00:51:46,039
respond if somebody perhaps says, hey, I think the best

839
00:51:46,039 --> 00:51:50,679
explanation of the resurrection, or maybe another phenomenon is ancient aliens.

840
00:51:50,960 --> 00:51:55,880
Speaker 6: Notorious non documentaries on the so called documentary channel as

841
00:51:56,000 --> 00:51:58,920
used to be ancient aliens. I mean there's a lot

842
00:51:58,920 --> 00:52:03,239
of this stuff that has media in past decades.

843
00:52:03,559 --> 00:52:03,920
Speaker 2: I like that.

844
00:52:04,159 --> 00:52:06,519
Speaker 5: Sorry to interrupt, but I like the description of so

845
00:52:06,599 --> 00:52:09,599
called documentary channels.

846
00:52:09,599 --> 00:52:16,639
Speaker 3: He almost uses coffee I did, anyway, go ahead, sorry.

847
00:52:16,719 --> 00:52:20,880
Speaker 4: But I mean going back to say, like the nineteen.

848
00:52:20,719 --> 00:52:25,800
Speaker 6: Fifties, you've had the growth of UFO religions, UFO cults,

849
00:52:25,840 --> 00:52:30,719
and would say where people have formed spiritualities, ways of

850
00:52:30,760 --> 00:52:35,199
life with belief in aliens as a central part of them.

851
00:52:35,239 --> 00:52:39,880
And many of these viewpoints want to co opt the

852
00:52:39,920 --> 00:52:44,800
historical Jesus into their worldview and fold him in. And

853
00:52:44,840 --> 00:52:49,559
I think people who have those views deserve an apologetic

854
00:52:49,599 --> 00:52:56,159
response from Christians just as much as say, Mormons deserve

855
00:52:56,480 --> 00:53:01,519
a response from Christian apologists or etc. So it's worth

856
00:53:01,639 --> 00:53:04,519
taking seriously from that point of view, just from the

857
00:53:04,519 --> 00:53:07,480
point of view that you know, apologetics is motivated by

858
00:53:07,519 --> 00:53:11,039
a Christian desire to love our neighbor, particularly to love

859
00:53:11,119 --> 00:53:17,360
their rationality, and to engage with them about what's reasonable

860
00:53:17,480 --> 00:53:20,480
to believe and to found your way of life upon.

861
00:53:20,760 --> 00:53:24,880
But also because popular culture, the so called documentaries that

862
00:53:24,920 --> 00:53:28,440
we've talked about and so on, have spread this kind

863
00:53:28,440 --> 00:53:32,599
of popular belief in aliens and particularly in explanations of

864
00:53:32,679 --> 00:53:37,320
things in human history in terms of aliens, and people

865
00:53:37,400 --> 00:53:41,719
with a kind of modernistic, naturalistic worldview might well say that,

866
00:53:42,239 --> 00:53:46,880
you know, in explaining the historical Jesus, well, you know,

867
00:53:46,920 --> 00:53:53,280
an explanation that involves aliens is at least a scientific explanation, right,

868
00:53:54,039 --> 00:53:57,880
rather than a supernatural explanation, and is to that extent

869
00:53:58,000 --> 00:53:58,760
more plausible.

870
00:53:58,960 --> 00:53:59,159
Speaker 4: Right.

871
00:54:00,000 --> 00:54:04,119
Speaker 6: Why should I go to a supernatural explanation when invoking

872
00:54:04,199 --> 00:54:10,360
aliens could surely explain the data for the resurrection ap

873
00:54:10,400 --> 00:54:14,559
plausibly at least that stays within a materialistic worldview in

874
00:54:14,679 --> 00:54:18,559
doing that, right, So, I think there are a number

875
00:54:18,559 --> 00:54:23,599
of reasons for kind of taking this seriously as seriously

876
00:54:23,639 --> 00:54:26,679
as an apologist would want to engage with a Mormon

877
00:54:27,079 --> 00:54:33,679
understanding of Jesus or a Muslim understanding of Jesus, etc. So, yeah,

878
00:54:33,679 --> 00:54:35,840
there's lots to engage with that. I have a chapter

879
00:54:36,119 --> 00:54:38,039
which is a revised version of a kind of a

880
00:54:38,159 --> 00:54:42,000
peer reviewed paper that I published in the Offerlics Journal

881
00:54:42,800 --> 00:54:47,559
about ancient alien theories and Jesus and UFO religions and

882
00:54:47,599 --> 00:54:54,559
so on, and looking at scientific evidence about the existence

883
00:54:54,599 --> 00:54:57,199
of alien life, you know, the search for Indian life

884
00:54:57,440 --> 00:55:01,840
or the SETI program search for extra terrestrial intelligence is

885
00:55:01,920 --> 00:55:08,519
definitely a scientific field. It interacts with scientific fields like

886
00:55:09,239 --> 00:55:13,000
the study of abiogenesis, the origin of life you get

887
00:55:13,039 --> 00:55:18,400
as astrobiology and so on. A whole host of scientific fields.

888
00:55:19,000 --> 00:55:21,920
Design detection overlaps with this and looking for signs of

889
00:55:22,760 --> 00:55:27,519
alien civilizations, etc. But going into questions about, you know,

890
00:55:27,840 --> 00:55:34,119
scientifically speaking, just just on secular scientific grounds, how plausible

891
00:55:34,159 --> 00:55:39,239
is it to think that there are intelligent aliens out

892
00:55:39,239 --> 00:55:43,440
there in the universe, that there are any relatively close

893
00:55:44,159 --> 00:55:47,480
to Earth, if there are any, particularly that there would

894
00:55:47,559 --> 00:55:52,159
be any who would be minded and capable of coming here,

895
00:55:53,480 --> 00:55:57,599
what are the plausibilities of that? Before you even get

896
00:55:57,599 --> 00:56:00,039
into what is the plausibility of them arriving in the

897
00:56:00,079 --> 00:56:03,280
first century and being interested in doing things that might

898
00:56:03,320 --> 00:56:07,320
give rise to people thinking that Jesus was a miracle

899
00:56:07,360 --> 00:56:10,800
working divine risen, son of God, when you know he's

900
00:56:10,840 --> 00:56:14,800
an alien or it's an alien conspiracy or something along

901
00:56:14,920 --> 00:56:18,880
those lines. But I look at the secular scientific evidence

902
00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:21,760
in order to argue that even if you think that

903
00:56:21,840 --> 00:56:27,000
there could be aliens out there, actually probably not intelligent.

904
00:56:27,360 --> 00:56:29,440
And even if you think they're intelligent, they're probably not

905
00:56:29,480 --> 00:56:33,119
anywhere anywhere near us. And even if they're anywhere near us,

906
00:56:33,159 --> 00:56:36,360
what makes you think that they would be interested or

907
00:56:36,400 --> 00:56:40,360
capable of interstellar spaceflight? And even if they were, what

908
00:56:40,440 --> 00:56:42,639
makes you think that they're close enough to be able

909
00:56:42,679 --> 00:56:46,239
to safely get here or send equipment here? And even

910
00:56:46,280 --> 00:56:48,199
if they did, what makes you think they would happen

911
00:56:48,239 --> 00:56:50,800
to arrive in the first century? You know, well before

912
00:56:50,800 --> 00:56:55,960
we've been you know, broadcasting our existence through technological use

913
00:56:56,599 --> 00:57:00,840
of radio frequencies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So

914
00:57:01,079 --> 00:57:07,639
just going into the compound implausibility of that, as I've

915
00:57:07,679 --> 00:57:12,039
rejoined to those kind of ancient alien theories that want

916
00:57:12,159 --> 00:57:18,519
to link everything, including the historical Jesus, into the aliens,

917
00:57:18,559 --> 00:57:19,639
did it mean.

918
00:57:20,480 --> 00:57:23,199
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know what I have to ask about

919
00:57:23,360 --> 00:57:27,039
ancient aliens. To be honest, what do you think, Chad?

920
00:57:27,480 --> 00:57:29,559
Speaker 2: Oh? No, I thought that was a good explanation.

921
00:57:29,639 --> 00:57:31,599
Speaker 5: I just I really like the point about you know

922
00:57:31,679 --> 00:57:34,360
that they somebody who believes this, especially since this has

923
00:57:34,400 --> 00:57:37,079
been kind of a phenomenon since the nineteen fifties, you know,

924
00:57:37,159 --> 00:57:39,800
deserves an answer, just like the Mormon or the Jehovah's

925
00:57:39,800 --> 00:57:43,320
Witness or the atheist or anyone else, because I think

926
00:57:43,360 --> 00:57:46,719
that the tendency might be for somebody to hear. Oh gosh,

927
00:57:46,760 --> 00:57:48,679
you know, why would you even why would you even

928
00:57:48,679 --> 00:57:52,360
address that? But yeah, you know you don't want to

929
00:57:52,400 --> 00:57:55,159
be kind of a snob about the explanations that you're

930
00:57:55,199 --> 00:57:58,000
willing to engage with, especially if somebody believes it, because

931
00:57:58,000 --> 00:58:01,039
you could you could lose them if you disc on it, right, yea.

932
00:58:01,559 --> 00:58:05,679
Speaker 6: Just because of an explanation doesn't strike you as plausible, that's

933
00:58:05,760 --> 00:58:08,400
no reason not to engage with it. The reason to

934
00:58:08,440 --> 00:58:13,199
engage with the thing is because other people find it plausible, right, right,

935
00:58:13,639 --> 00:58:16,119
And you want to love them and love their rationality.

936
00:58:16,320 --> 00:58:19,280
Say that's right. You want to take people seriously, and

937
00:58:19,320 --> 00:58:24,119
that means taking their ideas seriously, even if you don't

938
00:58:24,159 --> 00:58:26,000
think that they are ultimately supportable.

939
00:58:26,320 --> 00:58:26,559
Speaker 2: Yeah.

940
00:58:26,599 --> 00:58:29,480
Speaker 5: I remember once I was teaching a Sunday school class

941
00:58:29,519 --> 00:58:32,599
and there was a young lady in the class who

942
00:58:32,679 --> 00:58:36,320
had a sister who believed in fairies. It was kind

943
00:58:36,360 --> 00:58:39,840
of a branch of like a new age. And she

944
00:58:40,000 --> 00:58:42,719
believed that a fairy lived in her in the necklace,

945
00:58:42,920 --> 00:58:44,840
Like she had a crystal around her neck, and she

946
00:58:44,960 --> 00:58:48,400
believed that a fairy lived in it. And she also

947
00:58:48,480 --> 00:58:51,480
believed that there were like devious fairies who would do

948
00:58:51,599 --> 00:58:55,159
things like hyder car keys and things like that. And

949
00:58:55,239 --> 00:58:59,400
so when this lady shared about it, a number of

950
00:58:59,440 --> 00:59:03,920
people in the room kind of laughed. And thankfully, I

951
00:59:04,400 --> 00:59:07,400
give credit to the Holy Spirit for this. I looked

952
00:59:07,440 --> 00:59:10,159
at them and I said, because I was the teacher,

953
00:59:10,239 --> 00:59:14,239
I said, I said, you just lost any opportunity you

954
00:59:14,320 --> 00:59:18,559
have for reaching that young lady. I said, because you

955
00:59:18,559 --> 00:59:21,679
you if you were to laugh at her, or ridicule

956
00:59:21,760 --> 00:59:25,400
her or discount her, I said, she won't hear anything

957
00:59:25,440 --> 00:59:29,239
you have to say after that. And so I really

958
00:59:29,280 --> 00:59:32,360
like that that idea of like honoring somebody's view even

959
00:59:32,400 --> 00:59:34,679
if you don't find it personally plausible.

960
00:59:35,000 --> 00:59:36,559
Speaker 1: Well, you know, that's interesting.

961
00:59:37,159 --> 00:59:40,760
Speaker 3: I said, I don't have anything to ask about this

962
00:59:41,480 --> 00:59:45,719
because I simply just wasn't interested. But you know, I'm

963
00:59:45,760 --> 00:59:48,000
really challenged by what you're both of you have said

964
00:59:48,000 --> 00:59:51,280
there and this idea, because I kind of felt that way,

965
00:59:51,519 --> 00:59:54,360
like I don't really care about this subject. I find

966
00:59:54,400 --> 00:59:57,079
it hard to engage with subjects I'm not interested in.

967
00:59:57,159 --> 01:00:01,840
But you're right, you know, if someone is seriously dealing

968
01:00:01,840 --> 01:00:04,599
with that, Like I remember talking to a lady about

969
01:00:04,599 --> 01:00:08,719
angels or something like that, and you know, it was

970
01:00:09,079 --> 01:00:11,719
an idea. I thought, how can anybody believe that? But

971
01:00:12,239 --> 01:00:14,840
you know, because I knew this person and they were

972
01:00:14,880 --> 01:00:20,199
talking about it, suddenly the desire and the motivation was

973
01:00:20,239 --> 01:00:24,480
there to learn about that. So, yeah, you're saying those

974
01:00:24,480 --> 01:00:25,800
things really correct me.

975
01:00:26,000 --> 01:00:26,320
Speaker 1: Thank you.

976
01:00:27,199 --> 01:00:30,639
Speaker 5: Yeah, I wanted to ask that. Sometimes when you get

977
01:00:30,679 --> 01:00:35,000
into conversations with somebody and you're talking about evidence and

978
01:00:35,039 --> 01:00:38,840
what is the best explanation of the evidence, sometimes I think,

979
01:00:39,280 --> 01:00:45,320
and I experience in conversation that people aren't as driven

980
01:00:45,960 --> 01:00:49,840
by the evidence and the facts as you would think

981
01:00:49,880 --> 01:00:52,840
they would be, and a lot of it boils down

982
01:00:52,920 --> 01:00:58,559
to what feels comfortable or kind of their own personal experience,

983
01:00:58,639 --> 01:01:03,320
even if their experience contradict with known data. So when

984
01:01:03,320 --> 01:01:06,519
you're in a conversation with somebody and it seems like

985
01:01:06,719 --> 01:01:11,559
they're reluctant to consider things that they're not comfortable with,

986
01:01:11,679 --> 01:01:15,599
but it's more based on feelings and experience than dealing

987
01:01:15,679 --> 01:01:19,039
with data, what are some ways that you can kind

988
01:01:19,079 --> 01:01:23,400
of challenge their epistemology, if you will, or even maybe

989
01:01:23,440 --> 01:01:27,719
they're ontology depending to get them to be more open,

990
01:01:27,920 --> 01:01:32,599
to allow the facts to inform them more than their

991
01:01:32,719 --> 01:01:36,159
experience or their feelings or their preferences. And I guess

992
01:01:36,559 --> 01:01:38,599
admittedly that's a challenge for all of us.

993
01:01:39,119 --> 01:01:41,000
Speaker 4: Yes, well, I'm glad you said that.

994
01:01:41,039 --> 01:01:46,239
Speaker 6: I think that is a challenge for everybody of every worldview, right,

995
01:01:46,599 --> 01:01:48,719
But to take us back to what we were saying

996
01:01:48,760 --> 01:01:52,559
earlier about truth and goodness and beauty, for example, I

997
01:01:52,599 --> 01:01:56,079
think it's kind of a bit of a holdover from

998
01:01:56,559 --> 01:02:02,000
modernist thinking to make this separation between kind of facts,

999
01:02:02,039 --> 01:02:05,559
particularly kind of empirical facts that we that we get

1000
01:02:05,559 --> 01:02:08,440
at in a kind of scientific kind of a way,

1001
01:02:09,760 --> 01:02:13,039
and then to say everything else is just subjective.

1002
01:02:14,000 --> 01:02:16,320
Speaker 4: And I tend to think.

1003
01:02:16,079 --> 01:02:19,800
Speaker 6: That we start from this kind of first person, conscious

1004
01:02:19,840 --> 01:02:24,559
awareness of ourselves and of an apparent world beyond us,

1005
01:02:25,480 --> 01:02:29,960
and I tend to adopt an epistemology of it is

1006
01:02:30,119 --> 01:02:34,840
wise to start from a position of trust. That if

1007
01:02:34,880 --> 01:02:39,760
you reject trust from the outset, you're never actually going

1008
01:02:39,800 --> 01:02:43,199
to think you can reasonably believe anything, really, apart from

1009
01:02:43,239 --> 01:02:48,239
a very few kind of apparently indupable things. You know,

1010
01:02:49,079 --> 01:02:51,800
I think therefore I am kind of kind of stuff.

1011
01:02:52,760 --> 01:02:54,639
You know, if you want to believe that there really

1012
01:02:54,719 --> 01:02:57,239
is a world outside of yourself and you're not in

1013
01:02:57,320 --> 01:03:00,440
the matrix, and that you really can but what you

1014
01:03:00,519 --> 01:03:04,599
had for breakfast, and that generally speaking, what your senses

1015
01:03:04,719 --> 01:03:08,599
tell you can help you reliably navigate the world and

1016
01:03:08,679 --> 01:03:11,400
so on, those are not things that you can prove,

1017
01:03:12,079 --> 01:03:15,519
certainly not scientifically, because any science you did would have

1018
01:03:15,599 --> 01:03:19,880
to rely upon you assuming that those things were true

1019
01:03:20,360 --> 01:03:23,920
and remembering the results of your experiments and so on.

1020
01:03:24,000 --> 01:03:25,719
But then how do you know you trust your memory?

1021
01:03:26,119 --> 01:03:28,719
So we start from this position of trust, and even

1022
01:03:28,800 --> 01:03:33,039
to kind of use the basic rules of logic. Those

1023
01:03:33,039 --> 01:03:36,360
are things that you can't argue for because they are

1024
01:03:36,400 --> 01:03:39,480
the basis of arguing for anything. So in a sense,

1025
01:03:39,760 --> 01:03:43,880
trying to argue for them would be circular. But they

1026
01:03:43,920 --> 01:03:46,800
are the very foundation of rationality, and you just kind

1027
01:03:46,800 --> 01:03:53,719
of intuit that you see that, and we experience things

1028
01:03:53,840 --> 01:03:58,840
like look at that rainbow, that's beautiful, and I don't.

1029
01:03:59,559 --> 01:04:01,639
I'm no more or going through some sort of argument

1030
01:04:01,800 --> 01:04:05,559
in my head to the conclusion, you know, premise, premise, premise,

1031
01:04:05,840 --> 01:04:09,039
et cetera, conclusion that rainbow is beautiful than I am.

1032
01:04:09,079 --> 01:04:13,719
When I'm remembering that I had toast for breakfast. It

1033
01:04:13,880 --> 01:04:16,320
just seems to me that I remember having toast for breakfast,

1034
01:04:16,920 --> 01:04:22,519
and it's entirely reasonable for me to believe that until

1035
01:04:22,559 --> 01:04:28,760
and unless I'm given some sufficiently convincing counter argument, which

1036
01:04:28,880 --> 01:04:32,920
ultimately would be based and grounded in things which I

1037
01:04:33,000 --> 01:04:38,840
have to accept intuitively, right, that that rainbow is beautiful

1038
01:04:38,880 --> 01:04:41,480
as something I experienced, and I think that that is

1039
01:04:41,559 --> 01:04:45,599
reasonable to believe until unless I'm given sufficient counter arguments

1040
01:04:46,280 --> 01:04:48,960
to say that no, it's you know, actually that rainbow

1041
01:04:49,000 --> 01:04:52,159
is ugly and you're mistaken, or actually, no, nothing is

1042
01:04:52,360 --> 01:04:56,880
objectively beautiful. You know, that's just a subjective expression of

1043
01:04:56,920 --> 01:05:02,119
your own emotion, like a kind of emotiva aesthetics parallel

1044
01:05:02,159 --> 01:05:05,039
to a kind of emotive emotivist approach to ethics. That

1045
01:05:05,079 --> 01:05:08,719
would say, you know, saying child murder is wrong is

1046
01:05:08,880 --> 01:05:10,719
just an expression of your emotions.

1047
01:05:11,880 --> 01:05:13,960
Speaker 4: Well, no, I'm with C. S. Lewis.

1048
01:05:14,000 --> 01:05:16,920
Speaker 6: When you know, the ancients when they ask, you know,

1049
01:05:17,039 --> 01:05:22,480
can can an emotional reaction be appropriate or inappropriate to

1050
01:05:22,559 --> 01:05:27,920
the thing and is directed towards Modernism loses this, this

1051
01:05:28,119 --> 01:05:32,480
idea that our subjective reactions to things can be either

1052
01:05:32,639 --> 01:05:39,360
objectively appropriate or inappropriate, and they're not just subjective full stop,

1053
01:05:39,519 --> 01:05:43,719
because they are your reaction to the world. That your

1054
01:05:43,760 --> 01:05:46,519
reaction to the world emotionally speaking and so on can

1055
01:05:46,559 --> 01:05:49,719
be appropriate and inappropriate, your trust can be appropriately or

1056
01:05:49,719 --> 01:05:56,119
inappropriately placed in things, et cetera. So I wouldn't to

1057
01:05:56,239 --> 01:05:59,400
kind of question a little bit of the kind of modernism,

1058
01:05:59,599 --> 01:06:04,039
perhaps of the epistemology that you were kind of outlining

1059
01:06:04,119 --> 01:06:09,079
there and wanting to affirm that, yes, it is reasonable

1060
01:06:09,119 --> 01:06:14,400
for us to trust our experience and our kind of

1061
01:06:14,440 --> 01:06:19,400
intuitive reactions to things, but we do have to be

1062
01:06:19,559 --> 01:06:23,840
open to being shown wrong, and there are very few

1063
01:06:23,920 --> 01:06:29,800
things where it is kind of impossible for us to

1064
01:06:29,840 --> 01:06:32,800
be shown wrong without kind of giving up everything. You know,

1065
01:06:32,800 --> 01:06:36,840
I cannot, you know, conceive of an argument showing me

1066
01:06:36,880 --> 01:06:40,760
that the law of non contradiction is not true right,

1067
01:06:41,000 --> 01:06:45,519
because any argument would have to assume that that logical

1068
01:06:45,599 --> 01:06:48,920
law is true. I would find it very hard to

1069
01:06:49,760 --> 01:06:53,679
conceive of an argument that could convince me that torturing

1070
01:06:53,760 --> 01:06:56,480
small children just for the sheer heck of.

1071
01:06:56,400 --> 01:06:58,320
Speaker 4: It is evil.

1072
01:07:00,199 --> 01:07:04,840
Speaker 6: Even an atheist like Karen Nielsen would say, those kind

1073
01:07:04,840 --> 01:07:09,559
of basic moral intuitions are more certain than any skeptical

1074
01:07:09,800 --> 01:07:13,719
argument that you could imagine being lodged against them, And

1075
01:07:13,760 --> 01:07:17,280
so it's not really open to counter argument. But sure

1076
01:07:17,320 --> 01:07:19,639
there are things that are open to counter argument. I

1077
01:07:19,880 --> 01:07:23,480
seem to remember having toast for breakfast, but I could

1078
01:07:23,559 --> 01:07:26,559
just about conceive of you giving me enough evidence to

1079
01:07:26,599 --> 01:07:31,440
convince me that actually you had employed some kind of

1080
01:07:31,519 --> 01:07:37,280
psychiatrist to hypnotize me into believing that I had toast

1081
01:07:37,360 --> 01:07:41,199
when I didn't, and then forgetting that I'd been hypnotized.

1082
01:07:41,320 --> 01:07:45,079
And maybe if you showed me a video of me

1083
01:07:45,559 --> 01:07:48,039
being hypnotized by him, and then I would say, no,

1084
01:07:48,159 --> 01:07:50,039
hang on a minute, have you just generated that using

1085
01:07:50,079 --> 01:07:54,639
an AI to create a fake video? But you know,

1086
01:07:54,760 --> 01:07:59,079
maybe you could do enough right to convince me. And

1087
01:07:59,159 --> 01:08:04,000
so there are things where we can reach a point

1088
01:08:04,079 --> 01:08:09,360
of being irrational to keep believing our initial position on

1089
01:08:09,440 --> 01:08:11,920
the basis of other things that ultimately will track back

1090
01:08:11,960 --> 01:08:13,920
to intuitions. But we do have to be to be

1091
01:08:14,039 --> 01:08:18,119
open and getting to a point. Whether you're thinking of,

1092
01:08:18,359 --> 01:08:20,800
you know, ourselves or convincing other people of getting to

1093
01:08:20,880 --> 01:08:25,720
that kind of tipping point of them being or us

1094
01:08:25,840 --> 01:08:29,119
being open to being shown to be wrong. It's ultimately

1095
01:08:29,159 --> 01:08:32,960
something that only we or they control, right, We're not

1096
01:08:33,239 --> 01:08:38,439
were in charge of what other people will allow themselves

1097
01:08:38,560 --> 01:08:42,720
to be convinced by. I think it's Brian Left how

1098
01:08:42,840 --> 01:08:48,159
the philosopher who said arguments don't convince people of anything,

1099
01:08:48,199 --> 01:08:53,159
they only appeal to them to be convinced, or something

1100
01:08:53,239 --> 01:08:56,600
something like this. Arguments don't prove anything that they appeal

1101
01:08:57,000 --> 01:08:59,560
for our making up our minds on things.

1102
01:09:00,319 --> 01:09:02,560
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's really helpful. I like that we have to

1103
01:09:02,600 --> 01:09:06,079
be open to being shown that we're wrong. I mean,

1104
01:09:06,199 --> 01:09:08,920
I'm thinking that might be a good you know, when

1105
01:09:08,920 --> 01:09:11,079
you enter into a conversation with somebody and you might

1106
01:09:11,119 --> 01:09:14,640
be talking about a topic that you disagree with, maybe

1107
01:09:14,680 --> 01:09:16,920
that would be a good kind of question to ask

1108
01:09:16,960 --> 01:09:18,800
at some point of like, well, hey, you know, I

1109
01:09:19,279 --> 01:09:22,319
could be wrong, but are you open as well to

1110
01:09:23,159 --> 01:09:26,159
the possibility at least that you might be wrong, or

1111
01:09:27,119 --> 01:09:31,319
that alternative view might be the case. I was just

1112
01:09:31,359 --> 01:09:33,640
thinking when I asked the question, I guess for context,

1113
01:09:33,720 --> 01:09:35,960
I was thinking of just a conversation I had last

1114
01:09:36,000 --> 01:09:40,399
summer with a couple Mormon elders, and you know, I said,

1115
01:09:40,640 --> 01:09:44,119
you have had an experience that you believe was an

1116
01:09:44,119 --> 01:09:48,319
experience of God, and so have I, but unfortunately we

1117
01:09:48,439 --> 01:09:51,840
believe things that contradict. So do you agree, at least

1118
01:09:51,840 --> 01:09:55,079
on that basis that we both can't be right? And

1119
01:09:55,560 --> 01:09:58,960
they affirmed like, yeah, you know you And I said, okay, well,

1120
01:09:59,000 --> 01:10:04,479
then how do we adjudicate between whose experience? If either

1121
01:10:04,680 --> 01:10:08,000
experience was genuine, how do we adjudicate which one was?

1122
01:10:08,039 --> 01:10:10,800
And I was trying to lead them to the idea,

1123
01:10:10,800 --> 01:10:13,239
well that's where you look at the evidence, that's where

1124
01:10:13,279 --> 01:10:16,359
you look at reality, and they kind of just said, well,

1125
01:10:17,039 --> 01:10:19,680
I don't know, and then I suggested.

1126
01:10:19,119 --> 01:10:20,720
Speaker 2: Well how about we look at some evidence.

1127
01:10:21,279 --> 01:10:23,680
Speaker 5: But it just seemed like even when I was able

1128
01:10:23,720 --> 01:10:27,159
to show them something that was pretty objective, they just

1129
01:10:27,239 --> 01:10:32,479
always punted to that experience that they had. But I

1130
01:10:32,520 --> 01:10:36,319
think that goes back to what you're saying. They weren't

1131
01:10:36,359 --> 01:10:39,640
open to being shown that they were in error, and

1132
01:10:39,720 --> 01:10:43,039
of course that's very difficult to admit, especially with something

1133
01:10:43,039 --> 01:10:44,920
that important. So I appreciate that as well.

1134
01:10:45,119 --> 01:10:48,760
Speaker 6: Yeah, I found that the specific Brian left our quote

1135
01:10:48,800 --> 01:10:52,000
because I use it in there in one of my books,

1136
01:10:52,199 --> 01:10:54,840
A Universe from someone I created in Arguments do not

1137
01:10:55,000 --> 01:11:01,159
compel our assent, They merely appeal for it. Arguments do

1138
01:11:01,239 --> 01:11:04,680
not compel our assent, They merely appeal for it. So

1139
01:11:05,640 --> 01:11:08,119
I think that's right. And this is this is where

1140
01:11:08,319 --> 01:11:16,960
you know, personal relationship, trust, genuineness of that interaction and

1141
01:11:17,079 --> 01:11:21,640
relationship and time invested into it often really matter.

1142
01:11:22,279 --> 01:11:22,479
Speaker 4: You know.

1143
01:11:22,760 --> 01:11:27,039
Speaker 6: Research on conversion generally shows that people tend to take

1144
01:11:27,079 --> 01:11:30,560
a number of years to move from a non Christian

1145
01:11:30,640 --> 01:11:35,960
spirituality into embracing a Christian spirituality. This is not the

1146
01:11:36,000 --> 01:11:42,399
sort of thing that typically happens in one conversation, right,

1147
01:11:43,159 --> 01:11:48,279
And it's something that takes place within a context where

1148
01:11:48,319 --> 01:11:52,960
people are assessing, you know, are you genuine and trustworthy?

1149
01:11:54,640 --> 01:11:59,520
Can I be open and real in this situation? How

1150
01:11:59,600 --> 01:12:05,720
can of combative is this? Are you disagreeing me? Disagreeing

1151
01:12:05,760 --> 01:12:09,399
with me just because you love a good argument or

1152
01:12:09,560 --> 01:12:12,600
because you want to win? And show how stupid I am,

1153
01:12:13,279 --> 01:12:17,079
or are you disagreeing me with me because you want

1154
01:12:17,119 --> 01:12:17,920
what's best for me?

1155
01:12:19,159 --> 01:12:19,359
Speaker 4: Right?

1156
01:12:19,600 --> 01:12:22,680
Speaker 6: And those are the whole host of different situations, right,

1157
01:12:22,760 --> 01:12:26,800
And we know this on our own experience. And this

1158
01:12:26,920 --> 01:12:31,319
comes back again to love as the motivation for Christian apologetics.

1159
01:12:31,319 --> 01:12:34,399
And you know, do unto others as you would have

1160
01:12:34,479 --> 01:12:39,399
them do to you applies to apologetics just as much

1161
01:12:39,560 --> 01:12:40,960
as to anything else.

1162
01:12:41,079 --> 01:12:41,279
Speaker 4: Right.

1163
01:12:41,560 --> 01:12:44,680
Speaker 5: M hm, that's really good. I'm just curious kind of

1164
01:12:44,720 --> 01:12:48,520
like more of a personal or reflective question, what what

1165
01:12:48,720 --> 01:12:50,600
is you know, you've written a good bit on the

1166
01:12:50,680 --> 01:12:54,079
historical Jesus, as we've talked about throughout the interview. What

1167
01:12:54,239 --> 01:12:57,640
is that research over the years done for your own

1168
01:12:58,119 --> 01:13:00,399
your own faith or your own walk with you Jesus.

1169
01:13:01,399 --> 01:13:07,640
Speaker 6: Yeah, well's kind of two issues there. I think certainly

1170
01:13:08,760 --> 01:13:14,039
my confidence in the credibility of the testimony that we

1171
01:13:14,079 --> 01:13:19,600
have about Jesus and the kind of the Christian picture

1172
01:13:19,760 --> 01:13:23,720
of Jesus that are put together from historical sources is

1173
01:13:23,760 --> 01:13:29,840
definitely increased by my investigation over the years of those

1174
01:13:29,960 --> 01:13:35,119
kind of issues in terms of the textual integrity of

1175
01:13:35,239 --> 01:13:41,000
the sources and the testimonial reliability of those sources, the

1176
01:13:41,000 --> 01:13:47,000
internal and external evidence, also the non biblical, the extra

1177
01:13:47,079 --> 01:13:52,760
biblical evidence, both written and archaeological, as it pertains to

1178
01:13:52,840 --> 01:13:56,880
the historical Jesus. But I think you've got to make

1179
01:13:56,920 --> 01:14:02,840
a connection between that personal spirituality and of the approach

1180
01:14:02,880 --> 01:14:06,520
that I took in my book Understanding Jesus, the subtitled

1181
01:14:06,520 --> 01:14:10,880
Five Ways to Spiritual Enlightenment, and I gave this kind

1182
01:14:10,920 --> 01:14:14,520
of cumulative case argument for the Christian view of Jesus.

1183
01:14:15,640 --> 01:14:18,960
But not only from the point of view of the

1184
01:14:19,079 --> 01:14:21,640
kind of abstract you know, who did he think he

1185
01:14:21,840 --> 01:14:25,000
was and did he do things that would back that up?

1186
01:14:26,520 --> 01:14:28,840
But from the point of view of what role did

1187
01:14:28,920 --> 01:14:33,159
Jesus seem to think he should play in your personal

1188
01:14:34,000 --> 01:14:37,520
way of life, in your personal spirituality, what role did

1189
01:14:37,600 --> 01:14:40,279
Jesus see himself playing in your spirituality?

1190
01:14:40,359 --> 01:14:42,840
Speaker 4: And did he do things that lead you to take

1191
01:14:42,880 --> 01:14:43,640
that seriously?

1192
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Speaker 6: And so from the point of view of faith being

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01:14:49,199 --> 01:14:56,600
about making a personal commitment of trust and allegiance to

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01:14:57,800 --> 01:15:01,239
following Christ, to the way way of life, the way

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01:15:01,279 --> 01:15:06,319
of relating to God that he promulgated, And so it

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is not Christianity is not just a kind of our worldview.

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It only includes that but it is about this question

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of what kind of spirituality are you going to have

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and what role does Jesus play in that? And that

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ultimately is about who are you going to trust, where

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01:15:27,279 --> 01:15:30,159
is your allegiance placed, what are you you know, who

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01:15:30,239 --> 01:15:35,159
are you committed to ultimately in arranging how you're going

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01:15:35,199 --> 01:15:41,159
to live your life? And I think it's the apologetic

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01:15:41,279 --> 01:15:48,279
stuff supports that, but it's not to be confused with that.

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It is a signpost to the real thing. It's not

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01:15:53,239 --> 01:15:57,680
the real thing itself. And so you've got to come

1207
01:15:57,720 --> 01:16:00,359
to that point of grappling with if or you know,

1208
01:16:00,479 --> 01:16:04,760
asking the question is the Christian worldview true? Is the

1209
01:16:04,840 --> 01:16:09,079
Christian idea of who Jesus was true? Well, that's that's

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one thing, but actually asking okay, what am I going

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01:16:14,119 --> 01:16:19,800
to do with Jesus? How am I going to react

1212
01:16:19,960 --> 01:16:23,760
to this? On a personal level, it's whether the rubber

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really hit the hits the road. And there again, you know,

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01:16:28,640 --> 01:16:33,720
no amount of argumentation can put your arm behind your back.

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01:16:34,640 --> 01:16:38,239
You know, I always describe arguments attach a price tag

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01:16:38,520 --> 01:16:44,119
to things. A good argument you attaches a price tag

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01:16:44,159 --> 01:16:47,479
to the rejection of a particular conclusion, and that is

1218
01:16:47,520 --> 01:16:51,800
a price tag in terms of rationality, in terms of

1219
01:16:52,399 --> 01:16:57,159
personal consistency. Perhaps you know, am I committed to being

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a person who is consistent in the things that I think,

1221
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who is reasonable.

1222
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Speaker 4: And so on?

1223
01:17:05,279 --> 01:17:08,560
Speaker 6: But there's still a shift from that to what am

1224
01:17:08,560 --> 01:17:10,880
I ashes going to do? You know, as Jame says,

1225
01:17:11,039 --> 01:17:12,720
you you.

1226
01:17:12,720 --> 01:17:15,800
Speaker 4: Believe there's there's one God. Oh you're doing well.

1227
01:17:16,199 --> 01:17:22,520
Speaker 6: Even the demons believe and tremble right, this is not

1228
01:17:23,159 --> 01:17:25,039
where it's at. This is not the be all end

1229
01:17:25,119 --> 01:17:29,199
or what really matters is grappling with how am I

1230
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personally going to react to Jesus.

1231
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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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01:17:32,640 --> 01:17:36,159
Speaker 5: I love that idea of apologetics being a sign post

1233
01:17:36,199 --> 01:17:40,439
to Jesus, but that doesn't equate to the actual experiencing

1234
01:17:40,560 --> 01:17:43,000
him or following him, and they shouldn't be confused.

1235
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Speaker 2: I really like that. That's helpful. Well.

1236
01:17:45,600 --> 01:17:46,079
Speaker 4: Peter S.

1237
01:17:46,159 --> 01:17:48,800
Speaker 3: Williams, thank you so much for being with us again.

1238
01:17:49,239 --> 01:17:51,880
And we've been talking about your book Behold the Man,

1239
01:17:52,239 --> 01:17:55,880
Essays on the Historical Jesus and listeners. If you want

1240
01:17:55,920 --> 01:18:01,239
to find more resources and writings and stuff Peter S. Williams,

1241
01:18:01,279 --> 01:18:05,600
you can go to Peterswilliams dot com. It's not Peter's Williams,

1242
01:18:05,760 --> 01:18:10,439
it's Peter Swilliams, and there's also his YouTube channel and

1243
01:18:10,479 --> 01:18:14,319
there's tons of great playlists there with all kinds of

1244
01:18:14,479 --> 01:18:17,560
great content. So, Peter, thank you so much for being

1245
01:18:17,600 --> 01:18:21,319
with us again. Enjoyable read and great conversation as always, Thank.

1246
01:18:21,159 --> 01:18:22,159
Speaker 2: You, Yes, thank you.

1247
01:18:22,439 --> 01:18:23,279
Speaker 4: It's a great pleasure.

1248
01:18:24,800 --> 01:18:27,279
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you have a

1249
01:18:27,359 --> 01:18:29,680
question you'd like us to address, or just a message

1250
01:18:29,720 --> 01:18:32,359
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1251
01:18:32,479 --> 01:18:36,319
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1252
01:18:36,439 --> 01:18:39,560
leave a voice message for us using speak pipe. Just

1253
01:18:39,720 --> 01:18:43,640
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01:18:43,720 --> 01:18:46,520
leave us a message. And remember, if you include a

1255
01:18:46,520 --> 01:18:49,479
Ghostbuster's quote in your question, we guarantee that we'll read

1256
01:18:49,520 --> 01:18:52,319
it on the podcast. We also ensure up to fifty

1257
01:18:52,359 --> 01:18:56,359
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1258
01:18:56,439 --> 01:18:59,359
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01:18:59,359 --> 01:19:02,239
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1260
01:19:01,800 --> 01:19:03,279
Speaker 2: With a friend if you've found it useful.

1261
01:19:03,760 --> 01:19:06,800
Speaker 3: Remember you can find lots of Apologetics resources at apologetics

1262
01:19:06,880 --> 01:19:10,560
three fifteen dot com, along with show notes for today's episode.

1263
01:19:10,920 --> 01:19:15,520
Find Chad's apologetic stuff over at Truthbombapologetics that's truthbomb dot

1264
01:19:15,560 --> 01:19:18,920
blogspot dot com. This has been Brian Aughton and Chad

1265
01:19:18,920 --> 01:19:22,279
Gross for the Apologetics three fifteen podcast, and thanks for listening.