Reply to Hallquist on historical evidence

My claim is that there is more to explain for Christianity than for Mormonism or Islam. Unlike Craig or McDowell, I don’t say that the only rational conclusion is that Christianity is true. The “verdict” that the evidence demands depends on your antecedent probability. Still, I think you have some facts that are more likely to have occurred if Christianity is true than if Christianity is not true.




A critical point is that Luke, who also wrote his gospel and Acts, (both of which contain miracle claims throughout) has been shown to be exceedingly accurate about governmental systems before whom Paul appeared. This may seem trivial, but it makes it implausible that a long time passed between Paul’s journey’s and Luke’s writing. And his is not the first gospel written, Mark’s was. Maybe the miracles didn’t happen, but the journeys almost certainly did. So you have it written down within a third of a century of the crucifixion, if that.



You don’t have maybe one or two central miracles claimed, (the Qu’ran or the gold plates) you have a lot of them, and they are placed in public places. And there is no argument against them saying “We never heard of this guy.” In fact, the early Jewish anti-Christian polemic attempts to explain an empty tomb, not deny it. You have people engaging in very high-risk behavior on behalf of this upstart Jewish cult. You have them meeting on a day not the Sabbath, you have them saying the Jewish God was incarnate, and you have them getting martyred at least as far back as James the brother of Jesus (if not the stoning of Stephen–do skeptics think that that was fiction?). Something has happened to these people, and all I am claiming is that it takes a lot more explaining to figure that out than to explain the growth of the Mormon church.



I had someone on my site, Ken Pulliam, agree with me that the case for Christianity is better than the case for Islam or Mormonism historically, but that he found it more reasonable to suppose that Christianity was also not true.



So I guess I differ from Craig and McDowell in that I set the bar a whole lot lower for myself than they do. But I think I did clear it (or perhaps, can do so with a bit more explanation).