The Lydia McGrew Podcast

Does it make it okay to use an acknowledgement of an "appearance fact" by a non-conservative scholar, even if he means something different by it than is needed for the argument, if we know that his different meaning is a result of his bias? Nope. Entanglement problems don't go away even if you know that the person would think differently if he weren't biased against a particular...

Why is it not illicit (per se) to use a premise that an opponent grants, even if he doesn't agree with your conclusion, but illicit for minimalists to say that a scholar grants that "the disciples had resurrection appearance experiences" when the scholar doesn't mean the same thing by the phenomenology of such experiences? Aren't these argumentative moves the same thing? Woul...

Contrary to what I say at the very end, I decided to share this video on September 13 instead of the 20th, to put it closer to 9/11 itself. I will complete the miniseries on Kamil Gregor's naturalistic theory of the resurrection evidence next week. Are undesigned coincidences just (wave hands) some weird apologetics thing? Not at all. We find them in ordinary witness testimony in secular conte...

Here I wrap up my discussion of Kamil Gregor's pareidolia explanation of the resurrection evidence. I first ask whether Gregor is fairly representing the claims of Christian scholars like Michael Licona and Craig Evans concerning Greco-Roman history. Unfortunately, his use of their claims is not all that far off, despite the fact that they would no doubt want to disclaim the extent to which he...

Skeptics are fond of saying that they have an explanation of the evidence that does just a job as good as, the theory that Jesus rose again (or at least very close) but that has a higher prior probability than the resurrection. Here I argue that Kamil Gregor's pareidolia theory doesn't even come *close* to being as good an explanation of the resurrection evidence, even just considering the stories...

I continue illustrating the fact that skeptics develop theories that they claim explain the evidence just as well as the resurrection, even though this can be easily seen to be untrue. They then run the priors, claiming that these explanations have a much higher prior probability than the resurrection, so it's a win-win for the skeptical side--equal or nearly equal explanatory power and higher...

Here I point directly to Arif Ahmed's "run back to the priors" move. He very nearly admits that his "explanation" of the resurrection evidence doesn't do a very good job explaining, but then he says that however low the prior probability of a naturalistic hypothesis, the prior probability of the resurrection should always be much, much lower. This means that he could al...

There are two different ways to try to address a strong case for some hypothesis H, and they are not sharply distinct from one another. One way is by just saying that "somehow" we have this and this and this evidence but H is not true. Another is to make a stab at actually explaining a set of evidence if H is not true. When there is a really strong case for H, what will happen is that th...

Skeptics tend to be far too quick to make two assumptions: 1) That it is easy to find a naturalistic alternative to any claimed miracle that does just as good a job as the miracle itself at explaining the evidence for it and 2) That the conjunction of "no miracle" with the evidence in question will always have a higher probability than the miracle itself. For a well-attested miracle like...

We turn technical again today with a discussion of why it's enlightening and useful to investigate the case for a historical claim using a full partition. Which explains the specific evidence better? "The claim is true" or "The claim is false"? This allows one to see if there is a "cost" to adding auxiliary hypotheses to ~H ("the claim is false") in orde...

This video was originally recorded with Women in Apologetics with the intention that it would be exclusive content for the fall apologetics conference. As announced briefly on Facebook, that session will not occur as planned. However, WIA was entirely willing to send me this video file, so I am now able to share it here on my channel. If you have questions about this change in WIA's conference...

Should you really care whether the voice of the Father at Jesus' baptism said, "You are my beloved son" or "This is my beloved son"? That depends entirely on what other baggage is being brought along with the answer to the question. If Matthew is "making" something public here that really only could have been heard in the privacy of Jesus' own mind, and if Joh...

I got this book of essays by eminent Gospels scholar Harold Attridge on interlibrary loan and then couldn't remember why. So I decided to make a video about part of it--Attridge's insanely complex theory about layers of source elaboration in John 7. If you ever wondered why I list "preference for complex over simple theories" as a bad habit of New Testament scholars, this essay i...

Is consensus in Gospels scholarship really diverse? The sad fact of the matter is that there is a great deal of social pressure not to be "too conservative," and even some Christian scholars engage in subtle and not-so-subtle pressure tactics against conclusions that are deemed overly conservative. These include name-calling without engaging arguments, straw-manning harmonization, blurri...

It's strange, but it's true: Evidence that is *improbable* even given the hypothesis that it supports can provide as strong an argument as you could want in favor of that hypothesis. At the same time, such evidence, if we don't happen to have it, is resistant to being used in an argument from silence. And historical evidence fits this pattern very well. This sounds a warning: Don't...

Here I return to a point I discussed a couple of weeks ago, here:https://youtu.be/Xs4mRIzICKwThe historical reportage model and the fact-changing literary device model give quite different probabilities to finding details in the Gospels confirmed. The literary device model says that it was part and parcel of the Gospels' genre that their authors felt licensed to change details. In fact, Dr. Li...

Here I'm anticipating a possible criticism--namely, that no matter what the details are like or even could be like in the Gospels, I'm always going to say that they indicate truthfulness or at least don't constitute any evidence worth speaking of against truthfulness. I give three categories (and I stipulate these aren't exhaustive) of kinds of details that *could be* in a document...

Today I'm taking a hypothetical police case in which a mother and daughter testify. Since they live together and haven't been kept separate before they testify, it seems like their testimony can't possibly be regarded as independent, right? And that lessens the force of their two testimonies for what they agree on, right? I mean, c'mon. They've got to be influencing one another...

Anybody who is trying to study the Gospels honestly is trying to get a good model of what they are like. Those who think that the Gospel authors were writing in a genre in which they were licensed to change and fabricate even details are making non-deductive arguments for their own model. (And it's disturbingly misleading to say that these claims are restricted to just details, but that's...

It's important to remember that unexplained allusions are not just realistic details. In fact, they are awkward and puzzling and in that sense "unliterary." I illustrate this by reviewing the "dispute about purification" allusion in John 3 and then reading a passage from one of the widows of Civitella that contains an unexplained allusion.

Unnecessary details provide a commonsense clue to truthfulness. See how this works in the testimony of a witness to the horrific Civitella massacre, which took place in 1944. We also find unnecessary details in the Gospels. "The Witnesses of Civitella," translation of testimonies, found here:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1535685X.1991.11015699Thanks to Luuk Van de Weghe for...

Two years ago I discussed Dirk Bogarde's visit to Bergen Belsen, his biographer's doubts, and the unexpected confirmation from an independent source. Go here to watch that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW1nLyn70ZE&t=922sI've been revisiting that topic recently in my research, and I was struck by an unnecessary detail in one of Bogarde's interviews that all by itself is notew...

Have you heard this critique of the "green grass" undesigned coincidence between John 6:4 and Mark 6:39? Here's how it goes: "The green grass around the time of Passover doesn't help to confirm the reliability of John and Mark, because there are times other than Passover when the grass is green in the Holy Land." But we aren't saying that the green grass *predicts*...

Here Than and I talk about two pieces of mathematical malpractice in Blais and Paulogia's video on Bayes' Theorem and the resurrection. Blais tried to give the impression that Than made a mistake by his in-principle argument that testimony can (in principle) overcome even a very low prior. Blais implied that Than somehow neglected to admit that this "only holds when" the number o...

Than and I get into the much-vaunted issue of the prior improbability of miracles. Is it really true that a miracle has such a low prior probability that no testimony can overcome it? Is it really true that one would have to throw out one's knowledge of science and the laws of nature in order to believe that a miracle occurred? Is it true that one would have to be able, on theism alone, to pre...