Why The “Minimal Facts” Model is Unpersuasive

March 5, 2009

Why The “Minimal Facts” Model is Unpersuasive

This post continues a thread over at Victor Reppert’s Dangerous Idea on what seems to be an increasingly common apologetic tactic designed to assert the historicity of Jesus Christ’s resurrection (and from there, assert the truth of Christianity).

As far as I can tell, this argument originates with Gary Habermas’ book Historical Jesus; what appears to be a straightforward summary from a Christian source can be found here. (UPDATE: epologetics seems to be down at the moment; here’s another site. You can also download a podcast of Gary Habermas explaining his argument on the Infidel Guy show.)

As you can see, the minimal facts (“MF”) argument takes the following form:

1. Lots of biblical scholars generally agree that various things recorded in the Bible actually occurred in real life — a) Jesus really lived; b) Jesus really died by crucifixion; c) Jesus’s disciples, as well as Paul and James the brother of Jesus all had some sort of real experiences that changed their lives; and d) Jesus’ tomb was found empty.

2. Therefore, those events are “facts.”

3. Accordingly, the nonbeliever bears the burden of proof to offer a well-defined secular hypothesis explaining the asserted “facts.” (Epologetics says: “Though nearly 2000 years have passed, not a single naturalistic explanation has been given that can account for the minimal facts. If you have any explanation that accounts for the known facts without the resurrection, I (and many, many others) would love to hear it.”)

4. The MF apologist will then pick apart arguments that generally fall under the category of theistic rationalism (that is, the Christianity of Thomas Jefferson and others) — arguments that presume the authenticity of the Bible but search for naturalistic explanations of the miraculous events recorded therein. One particularly favored punching bag is the so-called “swoon hypothesis,” which suggests that Jesus did not really die on the cross but instead fell unconscious and merely looked dead.

5. Therefore, the MF apologist concludes that the Biblical resurrection is the best explanation for these “facts” by default.

I have serious problems with each phase of this argument.

1. First, Habermas is essentially trying to conduct a meta-analysis of the historical literature. My understanding from the IG podcast is that Habermas continually updates a database of “biblical scholars” (as defined by him) and then marks fields as to whether that scholar agrees or disagrees with a particular asserted “fact.” This allows him to then sum up all the fields and conclude that 95% of his population accept “fact” A, 90% accept fact B, 70% accept fact C, and so on.

As an overview, note that Habermas’s methodology falls far short of the basics of performing meta-analysis in the social sciences and would not, for example, pass peer review in a secular academic journal. Wikipedia nicely summarizes some of the basics required for a formal meta-analysis. Habermas’s approach is really closer to a simple literature review, whereby the author summarizes the current state of the relevant research in their field to give the reader a “one-stop-shopping” kind of approach. (Lit reviews are great, but they don’t establish facts, which is Habermas’s goal.)

But I don’t want to limit my criticism of this model to form; it’s not just that Habermas is summarizing where he should be regressing. Fundamentally, the problem is that a meta-analysis is only as good as the underlying data being aggregated. Most “biblical scholars” are, by definition, believing Christians: why would you spend your entire adult professional life researching something if you think it’s ultimately worthless?

The underlying problem is one of selection bias: if an intelligent and informed person thinks the Bible is probably true and therefore significant, he or she is more likely to pursue a career in biblical study and then publish his or her findings (confirming that the Bible is true). If, however, an identically-qualified person thinks the Bible is probably false and therefore not significant, he or she is dramatically less likely to trundle off to seminary regardless, and is exponentially less likely to publish his or her findings confirming that the Bible is false. Robert M. Price is the rare exception — someone who finds Christianity to be false historically but nevertheless powerfully inspiring, and therefore worth devoting his life to studying. (Richard Carrier is another exception — someone who finds Christianity to be false and is active in the atheist community. But these are the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule.)

Those exceptions aside, the basic selection bias principle at work is clear: if you think Jesus was a well-meaning legend, you’re not likely to spend the time and money getting the sort of credentials that will let you in to Habermas’s study. A powerful example of this selection bias at work is the exclusion of Earl Doherty, whom Carrier described as “one of the most expert amateurs I have ever encountered.” But Doherty — who only has undergraduate degrees in History and Classical Languages, not Ph.Ds — doesn’t qualify as a biblical scholar, and so he’s out.

Please note here that I am not trying to impugn the character of Dr. Habermas — even though he’s the one who designed the selection criteria and he’s the one who gets to decide whether X scholar is in or out. The field itself is a sufficient gatekeeper; it doesn’t need to have Habermas put his thumb on the scale.

Thus, even if Habermas were to read this blog and allow Doherty in to his study, his underlying methodology is designed to marginalize Doherty’s contributions — which is the exact opposite of what a good literature review or meta-analysis would do. If Habermas sets his threshold at 90% (and in practice it’s set much lower; see below), then so long as a Christian is just nine times more likely to attend seminary than a non-Christian, the skeptic will be dispersed like a drop of ink in a glass of milk.

That’s not an accident; that’s the whole point of Habermas’s exercise. That’s why you’ll hear Habermas refer repeatedly to liberal theologians in his presentation, saying things like, “The Jesus Seminar folks are not sympathetic to my cause, and even they agree….” Well, true. But the Jesus Seminar folks are liberal Christians, not atheists. As ex-Jesus Seminar fellow Bob Price notes, among Jesus Seminar fellows, their “methods and assumptions differ little from those [conservative Biblical scholars] and his allies use,” and most Jesus Seminar fellows are “far less skeptical, less methodologically rigorous, than Rudolf Bultmann and the critics of the previous generation.”

In other words: Habermas’s argument is a strategy for ignoring Biblical critics outside the mainstream, by padding the universe from which his meta-analysis is drawn with Christians. At its core, Habermas can tell us what Christians believe, but not what actually happened. I expand on this immediately below.

2. Second, I think Habermas avoids calling his methodology a meta-analysis because he doesn’t want to call attention to the huge leap of logic here at step two. For comparison, let’s take a look at a really simple meta-analysis: one compiling statistics on various prospects on the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. (I’m a Rays fan.)

Go ahead and click on that link and you’ll see an excellent example of what even a simple meta-analysis is supposed to do. As it turns out, there are a number of recognized “experts” in picking baseball prospects — Keith Law at ESPN, Baseball America, Kevin Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus, and so on. Now each of these people share a pretty common set of background principles, but they’re all different in their approaches, and so each one will put out “prospect lists” that differ slightly from each other.

By aggregating all of the data across all of the prospect lists, the Rays Index people use meta-analysis to tell the fan something interesting. For example, all of their sources list David Price as the #1 prospect on the Rays. Half call Tim Beckham as the second-best prospect, another third of them say it’s Wade Davis, and one guy says it’s Desmond Jennings. And so on.

The meta-analysis part comes in the “TVI” column on the right, which summarizes the overall value placed on prospects across all of the expert lists. By looking at it, you can see that generally the scouts agree that Price is awesome, with Beckham and Davis right behind him, and Brignac, Hellickson, and Jennings after that. And that tells you something you didn’t know.

But think about what it doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t tell you that Tim Beckham is the second-best prospect on the Rays. Rather, it tells you that in the opinion of the experts who comprise the sample, there’s rough consensus that he’s the second-best prospect. In reality, Beckham is 19 years old. He could get run over by a bus, or hit .100 at A-ball, or whatever and turn out to be one of the very worst players in the Rays’ organization.

In other words: a meta-analysis doesn’t give you facts; it gives you a summary of the data compiled by the sources comprising your universe. Similarly, Habermas’s meta-analysis/literature review doesn’t tell us what actually happened — it tells us what his sources (almost all of whom are Christians) mostly believe to have happened.

Worse, Habermas also concedes that for the linchpin “fact” in his argument — the empty tomb of Jesus — the level of agreement among his sources is not 95% but only 70%. Think about that for a moment. What Habermas is really saying is that, among Christians who have dedicated their lives to studying the Bible, nearly one in three denies the empty tomb!

Isn’t that staggering?? I mean, if three out of every ten biologists denied the common descent of all living animals from a last universal common ancestor, then the creationists would really be on to something. Imagine if three out of every ten cosmologists thought it was possible that the universe was 6,000 years old instead of fourteen billion, or if three out of every ten astronomers thought that the Moon landing was faked, or… you get the idea.

In other words: Habermas’s case is, on close inspection, a powerful argument against the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and a good reason for even Christians to take seriously the work of skeptics, such as Robert Price and Jeffrey Jay Lowder’s The Empty Tomb.

3. Third, Habermas’s argument rests on the same sort of god-of-the-gaps inference as other failed apologetics. Even if the items asserted to be “facts” were, indeed, actual facts, it would be reasonable for someone challenged to provide an explanation to say, “I don’t know.”

Imagine that you’re a twelfth-century Viking skeptic, watching a mighty lightning storm. “Eric,” says your religious friend, “if mighty Thor is not creating those thunderbolts by striking Mjolnir against the sky, then what is your secular explanation for lightning?” Knowing nothing of electrons, are you forced to concede the existence of mighty Thor by default? Isn’t, “I don’t know,” in fact, the better answer?

4. Fourth, the sort of secular arguments that Habermas and MF apologists are seeking as potential refutations are, at their core, very strange. I do not think I am mischaracterizing anyone here; check out this apologetics site employing the MF model for example, for a refutation of the swoon hypothesis:

The Swoon Theory (basically that Christ did not actually die on the cross, but only “swooned” and later was rescusitated) is counteracted by medical studies examining death by Crucifixion. The victim dies ultimately of asphyxiation, although their are other contributing factors. The spear wound to Christ’s side was a wound inflicted as a final stroke to insure His death.

Now this is not a straw-man, because there are serious historians and theologians who have offered and defended the swoon hypothesis. But it is nevertheless a very odd argument; essentially, the apologist is saying that if you accept John 19:34 as literally true, then you have to believe Jesus died on the cross. Well, sure. But if John 19:34 is evidence, why not just quote John 19:30, which says that Christ “gave up his spirit” on the cross? Why not just quote John 3:16 and be done with it?

Asking the atheist to offer a naturalistic explanation for the resurrection of Jesus assuming that the Bible is true is sort of like asking the literary historian to explain why Captain Ahab didn’t just take the Pequod, sail off to Barbados, and spend the rest of his days drinking rum, eating fresh conch, and lying on the beach. I suppose the clever English major could come up with a reason involving Ahab’s fatal pride, but the real reason is: because Herman Melville didn’t write Moby Dick that way!

5. Finally, even if you concede the rest of the argument, Habermas’s conclusion requires you to assess the probability of whatever ad hoc theory you concoct at argument #4 and weigh it against the probability that the resurrection actually occurred. This is conceptually impossible, and not simply for the reasons given by David Hume. Any comparative analysis requires you to assign some nonzero value to Pr(R|B), which is the probability of the resurrection given our background knowledge. If Pr(R|B) is zero, then Pr(R|B&E) — the probability of the resurrection given our background knowledge and some new evidence E — is also zero via Bayes’ theorem.

In other words: the MF apologist must begin with the assumption that the probability of a resurrection given our background knowledge (i.e., that the Bible is not true) is not zero and is therefore possible. For example, Lydia McGrew asserts on page 2 that “…and this is true because the probability that the resurrection took place is virtually nil if there is no God and higher if there is.”

That sounds reasonable on face, but notice the dodge: McGrew asserts that Pr(R|B) is “virtually” nil, which is a clever way of arguing that it is not zero without offering a justification for why Pr(R|B) cannot be zero.

My own assessment is that asking someone to define Pr(R|B) is another way of asking someone whether they believe in God. If you do, you’re likely to say that it’s at least possible. If you don’t, you’re likely to say that it’s zero. But nobody has a rigorous argument for why Pr(R|B) is nonzero — at least, not one that I’ve seen — and so therefore I conclude that Habermas’s argument, even if corrected for the myriad flaws identified above, amounts to nothing more than a tautology. If you believe in Jesus going in, you’ll conclude that the resurrection hypothesis “is more likely” an explanation than secular alternatives; if you don’t, you won’t.
In other words, Assessing Pr(R|B) is just another way of asking someone whether they believe in God.

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