Absence of Evidence is Proof of Conspiracy
Part of an ongoing conversation. Our Mr Johnson says:
“You asked on what grounds that I do not believe in the resurrection. The answer being the only witnesses have been exclusively filtered through century after century of people who built their entire lives around the idea that it was true. “
I understood the answer.
My question was why you believe things that also have this property, namely, that they were passed along through the generations by people who believed them, such as the death of Caesar and his appearance as a ghost to Brutus, do not also excite equal skepticism?
Wbhat about the Death of Socrates?
Surely his immense bravery in the face of certain death is fictional. No one was in the room when he died except for his few followers and a guard easily bribed.
The followers then spent the rest of their lives preaching and teaching Platonic and, in later generations, Neoplatonic theology.
Plato, in fact, made a living out of writing imaginary dialogues about this figure — Plato would have been ruined, ruined, I say, had new evidence come out that Socrates, disguised as an Boeotian scullery maid, had been smuggled out of jail and spirited in a swift ship across the sea to Syracuse. The whole institution of Greek philosophy would have tottered!
By your standard, why is it reasonable to believe in the death of Socrates but not the death of Jesus?
“Suppose, for just a moment, that hypothetically a few centuries after the fact the hierarchy suddenly becomes aware of strong evidence suggesting that the story of the resurrection wasn’t true after all.
“Is it more likely that they A) admit their lives and faith were for nothing after all this time and disband or B) sweep it under the rug and continue as before?”
Which would you do, were it you?
I will wait while you ponder what you are saying about your fathers and forefathers.
Second question:
Let us suppose that the bones of Jesus were discovered in the Third Century by the Empress Helena, all Christians agree to perpetrate a knowing fraud on the pagan majority.
They giggle nervously and smirk whenever a pagan asks them about their incarnate and risen god-man. For some reason, even though it is a fraud, they still devote massive amounts of money, time, and effort to free slaves, build hospitals, raise churches, and do missionary work in Germany and Russia, and some are Martyred.
Odd that men will die for knowing frauds. Or perhaps you hypothetical is that only the Imperial Family knows the truth, and everyone else is deceived.
Later in the same generation as the discovered of the bones of Jesus, and Julian the Apostate, when he becomes emperor, attempts to discredit Christianity and remove it as the Imperial religion.
However, despite his knowledge of the fraud, he feels honor bound to continue to fool and deceive the world, and not to criticize a religion he is sworn to destroy.
Well! Under those conditions, I would say that your suspicions are worthy! What unimaginable dishonesty on the part of such a large number of people who sacrifice so much to help perpetrate this abominable fraud!
But what if neither Helena nor anyone else has ever discovered the bones of Jesus?
You see, what is wrong with your hypothetical question is that it assumes vast social changes for the better can be prompted by a small group of cunning con men.
Since the Christian worldview is logical, and the pagan worldview is frankly incoherent, the continuity of Christian belief is not evidence that we discovered secret evidence of fakery and then hid it. It is evidence indeed that it is not fake.
For one thing, a fake would be made easier to believe. Con men usually do not ask polygamists to give up their extra wives, or rich men to give their wealth to the poor.
I actually find the question bizarrely naive, even comical, considering the history of heresies which have racked the Church from the very beginning.
There are plenty of people in each generation, including highly placed officers in the hierarchy, willing to challenge and overturn central tenants of Christian orthodoxy, from the meaning of the Incarnation to the divinity of Christ, right down to the last nuance of doctrine or discipline.
Contemplate the heresy of Mohammed: he preached that Christ was not divine at all, and indeed was never crucified. Are you unaware that the entire southern and eastern parts of the Empire were conquered and converted to these new, non-orthodox ideas?
” People, once they have invested their entire life in a cause, do not give it up easily even when the evidence comes in…”
Apparently this casual condemnation includes two thousand years of men who built all of Western Civilization and all its accomplishments, including the men you earlier admitted were smarter and wiser than either of us, such as Newton and Aquinas.
I will wait while you ponder what you are saying about your fathers and forefathers.
My next question about this blanket condemnation is this:
Does that include you?
The current question is whether the evidence you dismiss so arbitrarily merits the same level of credibility as the evidence you uphold.
If you had some sort of clear standard, you could escape the natural suspicion that your yourself are heavily invested in this idea and not looking at the facts in a neutral fashion.
After all, you just said this is the main reason to disbelieve the testimony of hearsay. There must be an advantage to them to lie. They have not one nor two reasons to lie but (in your words) every reason in the world to lie.
Paul got wealth and prestige and money by spreading the doctrine of Jesus, and the Jewish and Roman authorities anointed him with honors. Peter likewise was exulted and died a wealthy man, surrounded by children and grandchildren, and John retired to a small island in the Mediterranean in his leisure years. Thomas traveled to India, sightseeing, and was well received by the natives. Bartholomew made a fortune in the tanning business. So the Church was a moneymaking juggernaut in Nero’s time, and many Christians in Rome went into business lighting the public streets. Others when into the entertainment industry. Perpetua and Felicitas are still remembered for their animal act.
The lie clearly helped them. Of course, had confessing the truth, that there was no Jesus, that he was a literary figure invented by Paul to fool the gullible, saved them from opprobrium, inconvenience, or even danger, we know from your insight into the human heart, Mr Johnson, that they would have confessed that truth with cowardly tears immediately.
But all this to one side. Let us hypothetically say we live in a universe where the bones of Jesus were never found. Was is the basis for dismissing the eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection?
You invent a specious motive for lying which applies only to hypocrites and simoniacs in the Church hierarchy, and not to educated pagans living the same world at the same time, and certainly not to people to whom Christianity involved a steep cost, up to and including their lives.
You ignore the glaring contrary evidence: if the early Christian Church were a fraud, why would its leader, Saint Peter, allow the account of his cowardice and his renunciation three times before cockcrow of Christ to remain in the forged manuscript?
Let me ask this: where in the Koran are there similar passages of Mohammed being displayed as a coward and a traitor?
If the whole story is make believe anyway, merely a scheme or a fraud, why put in the passages where the guys perpetrating the fraud both misunderstand the teachings they are inventing out of whole cloth, and are upbraided by the Master for having little faith.
You think the First Century Galilean fisherman would concoct such an elaborate scheme as to seed indications of his own human folly and weakness into the manuscript to make it seem more authentic to a hostile audience?
And then go ask the men of Jerusalem to believe Christ was risen, when no one in the audience would remember any Christ, any crucifixion, any three hours of darkness or earthquake that happened within living memory?
You ignore the eagerness with which heretics of that and every century seized upon the most trivial and legalistic distinctions to deny small part or large of Christian orthodoxy, up to and including the great and enduring heresy of Mohammed, which denies the divinity of Christ altogether, and which came nigh to destroying Christendom.
Why would Mohammed, or any the faithful Mohammedan propagate the story of the Virgin Birth of Christ if he knew the whole think was hogwash and snake oil?
You see, by your logic, by the standard you are using to believe in Lincoln’s Assassination is real but not in the Miracle of the Dancing Sun at Fatima is not, namely, where there is physical evidence, the report is to be preferred as more credible than one where there is not: in this case, the relic of the crown of thorns was just carried out of the burning Cathedral of Notre Dame. The healed people from Lourdes are also physical evidence. The Shroud of Turin is physical evidence.
The whole of Western Civilization, i.e. Christendom, is physical evidence. Here was have a case where a peoples that were once fine and dandy with slavery, gladiatorial games, divorce, sleeping with whores and concubines, and superstitions like astrology and bird-reading, were made illegal, and reformed either partly or wholly out of existence. Certain things, like legalized prostitution and slave-trafficking, return in areas and eras when Christianity is weak.
Now, every effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it. If Christ did not exist at all, or he was merely a madman with delusions of grandeur, why was Europe five, ten and fifteen centuries before his birth so different in moral and ethical accomplishments five, ten, and fifteen centuries after?
Your freedom and mine to discuss this topic right now at all is due to Christ. Without him, the highest form of civilization was China under Mandarins, or Rome under Emperors.
If this was all based on a lie, then how do you avoid the conclusion that the truth is not good for man, truth is deadly to civilization, and we need more lies like this?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
