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The Best Schools interviews historian Mike Licona

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This is a long interview with one of our top resurrection scholars. (LINK FIXED!)

Excerpt:

TBS: You have also been a prominent public apologist for the veracity of the New Testament. For example, you have engaged in public debates with such well-known atheists as Dan Barker and Richard Carrier, as well as with such revisionist New Testament scholars as Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, and Stephen Patterson. Describe some of the high points in these debates. What are some key things that persons of faith should bear in mind as they face skeptics of the New Testament like this? What made you want to get involved in public controversy and debate? Looking back on your career on the debating platform, would you say, overall, it has been time well spent? If so, why?

ML: Sometime in the mid-1990s, I purchased audio-cassette tapes of William Lane Craig debating Frank Zindler and John Dominic Crossan. I was very impressed when I heard Dr. Craig pick apart their arguments in an intellectually sound manner. I have never enjoyed heated discussions. But there was something about confronting bad philosophy and arguments and being able to present a sound case for the truth of Christianity that was very appealing to me. I never imagined I would participate in a debate. At that point, Dr. Craig had two doctorates while I had not even completed my master’s thesis and had no intention of doing so. So, engaging in public debate in the type of forum he was doing was not even on my radar.

In the spring of 2003, Gary Habermas was invited to debate Dan Barker (left). He didn’t like debating and asked me if I would be interested in debating Dan. He said that if I ever wanted to get involved in debate, this would be a good first one for me, since Dan is not a scholar. So, I accepted an invitation to debate Dan and loved the experience. The next year, Gary turned down two more debates and referred them to me, which I accepted. Later Bill Craig passed along a few to me. And that’s how I got started.

Some items others should keep in mind if they decide to engage in debate or dialogue with nonbelievers is that your opponents are not your enemies. I don’t regard anyone I have debated as an enemy. In fact, I now consider some of them as friends. Hopefully, we’re all after truth. If Christianity is true, my opponents will have to answer to God some day. That’s between them and God. Since Jesus taught for us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, there is no reason for us to act in a nasty way toward those with whom we have a disagreement. I’d also suggest that if you’re going to get in the ring with some major scholars like Bart Ehrman and Stephen Patterson, you better be willing to do your homework and prepare diligently. Debate is not easy. It takes a lot of work and it can be very emotionally draining. It’s not for everyone. But if you have the personality for it and are willing to put in the effort, there will be plenty of opportunities to engage in public debate and we need more Christians who will join us. I love the challenge and doing something that I think has a lot of value.

Being engaged in public debate has been time well spent and there have been positive results. I’ve seen some who were on an authentic quest for truth become followers of Jesus after attending or viewing one of my debates, while others have returned to faith in Christ. Some have expressed that their faith was significantly strengthened after attending one of my debates, while others devoted their lives to full-time Christian ministry. Hey, I don’t give an altar call. I just present truth and answer objections as best and as honestly as I can. Students are hungry for truth. They want a foundation on which to base their lives that’s based on truth rather than wishful thinking.

TBS: In 2010, you published your doctoral dissertation as The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (IVP Academic, 2010). [Hereafter referred to as “Resurrection.”] It is an extremely impressive piece of work, which has now set the standard for historiographical work on the historicity of Jesus and the Resurrection. Just the list of endorsers reads like a Who’s Who of New Testament scholarship. What was the research path that led to your magnum opus?

ML: Gary Habermas and I were working on our bookThe Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications, 2004). I regard Habermas (right) to be the world’s leading expert on the topic. For several years he had been compiling a bibliography on academic sources written on Jesus’ resurrection and had more than 2,000 sources at that time. Today, that bibliography has expanded to around 3,400! Habermas had read the major works and catalogued where scholars stood on more than 100 topics related to Jesus’ resurrection. So, I asked him to which discipline the majority of scholars writing on the subject belong. He said the overwhelming bulk of them are biblical scholars and a small percentage are philosophers. I asked him if any professional historians outside the community of biblical scholars had published on the subject and he said he recalled seeing perhaps a handful of journal articles and one short book. At that point I decided that I wanted to conduct a thorough investigation of Jesus’ resurrection as a historian. I wanted to know how historians conduct their investigations and how those investigations differ from those conducted by biblical scholars and philosophers.

After being accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Pretoria, I immersed myself in literature written by philosophers of history and professional historians on the nature of historical knowledge and the various methods of discovering the past. It didn’t take me long to discover that I had a serious challenge before me: Historians are virtually unanimous in admitting that the completely objective historian does not exist and that we are all persons of bias. I realized that I had my own biases. After all, I wanted to show that the resurrection of Jesus was an historical event. So, I put together a list of recommended steps for managing my bias and did my best to follow them. Did I obtain complete objectivity? No one can and I wasn’t an exception. I discovered that I could get pretty close to my goal of complete objectivity if I genuinely wanted to be there and engaged in a serious effort to get there. However, I found that unless I took deliberate and sustained efforts toward remaining there, I would go back to my default position. It was a continuous struggle.

I became obsessed with my research. I agonized over my biases and attempts to suspend judgment while my investigation proceeded. I was intentional in debating some of the finest and toughest minds taking a contrary view. I wanted to put my method and conclusions before them in order to see what they had to say and to learn from the process.

My completed dissertation ended up being around four times the size of the average one. It was a long and laborious process. But it yielded priceless knowledge to me. So, I was thrilled when IVP decided to publish it.

TBS: Resurrection is a 700-page work dense with scholarly annotation. Nevertheless, would you be able to summarize the main conclusions you reach in this work for our readers? What does this book add to conservative New Testament scholarship about the Resurrection? What’s new here? How does it differ from other magisterial work in this area, such as that of Gary Habermas and N.T. Wright?

ML: I think there are three major differences between my new book and where others have previously gone. First, I discuss issues pertaining to the philosophy of history and historical method with a depth that exceeds by far what other scholars have offered pertaining to the question of Jesus’ resurrection. Second, I interact with the debate over whether historians are within their professional rights to investigate miracle claims to a far greater degree than has been previously offered. Third, I subject a variety of hypotheses to strictly controlled historical method in a more comprehensive manner than has been previously offered. There are other contributions the book makes to the discussion, such as a discussion pertaining to the historicity of Jesus’ predictions pertaining to his imminent death and resurrection, as well as the meaning of two Greek terms upon which an important discussion hinges. But the above three are the major ones.

Worth the read. It sounds from the interview that things are going better for Dr. Licona.

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews philosopher R. Scott Smith

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UPDATE: I have changed the podcast in this post because the original one I linked to had some errors in it. I’m sorry!

Here’s an interview from Apologetics 315 in two parts:

Part 1: (MP3 file)

Today’s interview is (part one of two) with R. Scott Smith, Associate Professor of Ethics and Christian Apologetics at Biola University. He talks about his background and influences in ethics (J.P. Moreland,Dallas Willard), his opinion on the moral argument, the idea of naturalism grounding morality, the benefits of understanding ethical theory, and his recommended books on morality: Moral Choices by Scott Rae and Relativism by Koukl and Beckwith. Scott’s own published works include Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language after MacIntyre and Hauerwas andT ruth and the New Kind of Christian: The Emerging Effects of Postmodernism in the Church. Scott also mentions the article “Knowledge & Naturalism” by Dallas Willard as well as J.P. Moreland’s book Scaling the Secular City.

Part 2: (MP3 file)

Today’s interview is (part two of two) with R. Scott Smith, Associate Professor of Ethics and Christian Apologetics at Biola University. He talks about postmodernism, what it is, and how it is affecting the Church. He shares his thoughts on the good and the bad in the emerging church movement and the works of Brian McClaren. (See the first interview with Scott on ethical issues here.)

Sorry about this confusion.

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews philosopher Robin Collins on the fine-tuning argument

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The latest interview from Apologetics 315 is up, and it’s a must-listen.

Details:

Today’s interview is with Robin Collins, professor of philosophy at Messiah College. His training is in physics and in philosophy and he is a leading advocate for using the fine-tuning of the universe as a design argument for theism. He talks about his background and training, the fine-tuning argument, the different types of fine-tuning with examples and illustrations (laws, constants and initial conditions), two different ways of presenting the fine-tuning argument, answering common objections to the argument, the uniqueness of life, variations of the multiverse hypothesis, the failure of multiverse theory to explain away fine-tuning, objections to Victor Stenger, upcoming books, simplifying the fine-tuning argument for practical use, common mistakes when presenting the argument, the most common objection (who designed God?), and more.

Get the MP3 file from Apologetics 315.

Dr. Collins is extremely cautious and circumspect in his assessment of the fine-tuning argument. He takes the objections to the argument, like the multiverse, seriously and that comes across in the interview. He is familiar with criticisms of the argument and he has engaged with skeptics like Victor Stenger in his published work. I highly recommend it. It is a little more suited to intermediate-level Christians, but not so advanced that it’s impossible for non-math beginners to follow the broad thrust of what’s being said.

About Robin Collins:

Robin Collins (PhD, University of Notre Dame, 1993), is professor of philosophy at Messiah College, Grantham, PA specializing in the area of science and religion. He has written over twenty-five articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, such as the fine-tuning of the cosmos as evidence for the existence of God, evolution and original sin, the Doctrine of Atonement, Asian religions and Christianity, and Bohm’s theory of quantum mechanics. Some of his most recent articles/book chapters are “Philosophy of Science and Religion” in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion, “Divine Action and Evolution” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (2009) “The Multiverse Hypothesis: A Theistic Perspective,” in Universe or Multiverse? (Cambridge University Press), and “God and the Laws of Nature,” in Theism or Naturalism: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He recently received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to finish a book that presents the case for design based on physics and cosmology, tentatively entitled The Well-Tempered Universe: God, Cosmic Fine-tuning, and the Laws of Nature.

You can read Robin Collins’ testimony here.

The fine-tuning argument

Here’s a short article where Collins gives TWO examples of the fine-tuning. He is very modest in his argument, merely asserting that the fine-tuning is more compatible with theism than it is with atheism.

Excerpt:

Science is commonly thought to have undercut belief in God. As Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg famously remarked, “the more we find out about the universe, the more meaningless it all seems.” Yet, the discoveries of modern physics and cosmology in the last 50 years have shown that the structure of the universe is set in an extraordinarily precise way for the existence of life; if its structure were slightly different, even by an extraordinarily small degree, life would not be possible. In many people’s minds, the most straightforward explanation of this remarkable fine-tuning is some sort of divine purpose behind our universe.

This fine-tuning falls into three categories: the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, the fine-tuning of the constants of physics, and the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe. “Fine-tuning of the laws of nature” refers to the fact that if the universe did not have precisely the right combination of laws, complex intelligent life would be impossible. If there were no universal attractive force (law of gravity), for example, matter would be dispersed throughout the universe and the energy sources (such as stars) needed for life would not exist. Without the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, there would not be any atoms with an atomic number greater than hydrogen, and hence no complex molecules needed for life. And without the Pauli-exclusion principle, all electrons would fall to the lowest orbital of an atom, undercutting the kind of complex chemistry that life requires.

Some fundamental physical numbers governing the structure of the universe—called the constants of physics—also must fall into an exceedingly narrow range for life to exist. For example, many have estimated that the cosmological constant—a fundamental number that governs the expansion rate of empty space—must be precisely set to one part in 10120 in order for life to occur; if it were too large, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for galaxies and stars to form, and if it were too small, the universe would have collapsed back on itself. As Stephen Hawking wrote in his book A Brief History of Time, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [i.e. the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Finally, the initial distribution of mass energy at the time of the big bang must have an enormously special configuration for life to occur, which Cambridge University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has calculated to be on the order of one part in 1010123. This is an unimaginably small number.

I know what you’re thinking: How do we know that non-Christian scientists acknowledge the fine-tuning of gravity in the way that Collins describes?

Well, the New Scientist actually talks about the fine-tuning of the force of gravity. And they’re not Christians.

Excerpt:

The feebleness of gravity is something we should be grateful for. If it were a tiny bit stronger, none of us would be here to scoff at its puny nature.

The moment of the universe‘s birth created both matter and an expanding space-time in which this matter could exist. While gravity pulled the matter together, the expansion of space drew particles of matter apart – and the further apart they drifted, the weaker their mutual attraction became.

It turns out that the struggle between these two was balanced on a knife-edge. If the expansion of space had overwhelmed the pull of gravity in the newborn universe, stars, galaxies and humans would never have been able to form. If, on the other hand, gravity had been much stronger, stars and galaxies might have formed, but they would have quickly collapsed in on themselves and each other. What’s more, the gravitational distortion of space-time would have folded up the universe in a big crunch. Our cosmic history could have been over by now.

Only the middle ground, where the expansion and the gravitational strength balance to within 1 part in 1015at 1 second after the big bang, allows life to form.

Here’s a very long paper by Collins on the fine-tuning argument, where he answers several objections to the argument, including the multiverse/many-universe hypothesis.

If you want a longer response to the multiverse argument, but you don’t want to shell out big bucks for Collins’ chapter in the “Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology“, then you can just get James Sinclair’s essay in “Contending With Christianity’s Critics“.