Embracing Uncertainty

(Image: Pixabay)

There’s been a lot of discussion in certain bits of the internet about my recent conversion to “heretical Christianity,” which I articulated in this article and this video interview. Reaction videos seemed to come in two waves: first traditional Christians telling me I’m not really a Christian, and then atheists telling me I’m believing a load of nonsense. Actually, I’m very grateful for all the engagement, and it’s given me a lot to think about.

I particularly enjoyed the response video on Phil Halper’s channel, in conversation Alex Malpass and Dan Linford, so thought I’d share some reactions.

Firstly, they had some important challenges on connecting a God of limited powers with Christianity (even Christianity in my heretical form). As it happens, I have an academic paper currently under review that tries to answer some of these challenges, which I’ll make public at some point. It’s one of the perennial challenges of being both an academic and a public philosopher that if you give the full argument (including considering all objections), it becomes inaccessible for a general audience; but if you don’t give the full arguments, academics think you’re stupid for not noticing obvious objections.

Secondly, they radically misunderstood my version of Christianity, which we could call “participatory Christianity.” I very much sympathised with their worries about the view they were critiquing, but it wasn’t my view! Again, this may reflect that fact you can’t lay out all the details with full clarity and precision in a popular piece. Alex thought my form of Christianity was all about God becoming a person so we can understand God better and thereby better relate to God. In fact, it’s much more metaphysical thesis, about God and the physical universe coming into a state of intimate, organic unity.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they missed out a crucial detail of my position, something I’ve tried to emphasise whenever I’ve spoken on this, namely how uncertain I am about the truth of Christianity. I’m pretty confident about the God of limited powers hypothesis, which I think is strongly supported by evidence. But I’m very uncertain about Christianity itself. I’ve come to think participatory Christianity is a credible possibility, largely because I think it fits well with the God of limited powers hypothesis, but I also think there’s a very good chance it’s false. How then can I call myself a Christian? Because I think faith is about trust rather than belief, and I think a probability of around 30% is sufficient for faith to be rational.

This is very important to bear in mind when evaluating my arguments for Christianity, because it impacts what I take my argument to establish. If we interpret my argument as aiming to establish the truth of participatory Christianity with 90% certainty, then I agree that my arguments badly fails. But I do think my argument establishes that there’s around a 30-50% chance that participatory Christianity is true, which is still very significant. Towards the end of this response video, it felt to me like the three of them were critiquing the kind of Christian apologist who argues that there’s no rational alternative to accepting Jesus rose from the dead, and that is very far from my position.

So what is my argument for there being a 30-50% chance that participatory Christianity is true? Much of it hangs on the case for the resurrection. I have a very different view of the resurrection from traditional Christians. I don’t think the resurrection experiences of the first Christians were a matter of seeing and touching a body. According to participatory Christianity, these were visionary experiences that revealed that reality had been transformed in a radical way, and that Yeshua was somehow at the core of this (I prefer to use the Jewish version of his name, to shake up people’s associations).

Whether we’re thinking of the traditional understanding or my visionary interpretation, is there any evidence for the resurrection? My view is that the evidence for the resurrection is significant but not overwhelming. Significant in what sense? I think the evidence for the resurrection is strong enough that it would settle matters if we were talking about a mundane event.

The following thought experiment might make this a bit clearer. Suppose instead of considering a movement that believed that in Yeshua’s resurrection we were considering a movement that merely believed that Yeshua had travelled to Jerusalem whilst he was alive. Imagine that we knew on historical grounds that several people saw Yeshua in Jerusalem, or at least that they had experiences in which it seemed to them that they were seeing Jesus. Suppose further that these people had had their lives transformed by these experiences and had subsequently spent the rest of their lives passionately defending the thesis that Yeshua had been in Jerusalem, often against violent opposition. Finally, let us imagine that one of these people, before his experience of seeming to see Yeshua in Jerusalem, was a violent opponent of the movement that claimed that Yeshua was in Jerusalem and was transformed by his experience into a supporter.

I don’t think many of us would have any qualms about accepting, on the basis of this multiple eye-witness testimony, that the movement claiming that Yeshua went to Jerusalem was correct. We could entertain skeptical possibilities if we were bored. We could muse on the possibility that three of these people had hallucinated seeing Yeshua in Jerusalem and then told the others, and that the power of suggestion made the others hallucinate, or at least think that they had had experienced Yeshua in Jerusalem. Nobody would take these skeptical options seriously, at least in the absence of independent grounds for doubting that Yeshua really had been in Jerusalem.

In the above thought experience, the imaginary evidence we were considering for the hypothesis Yeshua went to Jerusalem is identical to the real-world evidence we have for the resurrection (even the most skeptical historians of Christian origins, like Bart Ehrman, would accept this). What this thought experiment shows is that the evidence for the resurrection is significant in the sense I defined above: it would settle matters if we were dealing with a mundane event (e.g. Jesus going to Jerusalem).

Of course, the crucial difference is that the resurrection is not a mundane event. If you’re starting from an atheistic worldview, then the resurrection is an incredibly improbable event. From that starting point, the evidence we have simply isn’t strong enough to overcome the initial improbability of a resurrection. Extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, and we do not have extraordinary evidence for the resurrection. Atheists should instead go for the kind of skeptical scenarios I outlined in my thought experiment above. They should think:

1. First a few people hallucinated seeing Yeshua – Ehrman thinks we have good historical reason to think Mary Magdalene and Peter hallucinated first, and later Paul hallucinated independently.  

2. These first hallucinations planted the seed that made others hallucinate seeing Yeshua, or at least think that they had had experiences of seeing Yeshua.  

However, whether an event is improbable or not depends on one’s worldview. What’s drawn me to embrace participatory Christianity is that I’ve come to think it fits well with the God of limited powers hypothesis, a hypothesis that I think is well supported by evidence. Hence, in contrast to an atheist, I approach the evidence for the resurrection already thinking participatory Christianity – a view which involves a visionary view of the resurrection – has a non-negligible chance of being true. This means I’m more open to the evidence taking my confidence in the truth of the resurrection – on a visionary interpretation – to somewhere significant.

At the same time, the resurrection – even on my visionary interpretation – is not a mundane event, like someone going to Jerusalem. Even though it fits with my worldview, it’s still a bold metaphysical hypothesis. The claim is not just that people had experiences but that they had experiences that revealed to them a radical change in the nature of reality. I’d need more than the evidence we have to be confident that it happened. Taking all this into consideration, the evidence leaves me thinking that the resurrection (or rather the visionary version of it) is a credible possibility but far from certain.

There’s one other thing that puts my confidence in the truth of participatory Christianity up a little bit higher. Before I say what this is, let me be very clear: as I said in the Aeon article, I take this to be fairly weak evidence considered on its own, but I think it significantly adds to the case in the mix. When this was discussed in the response video, Alex seemed baffled by this idea that a piece of evidence could prove nothing on its own but have evidential force in the mix. I was a bit baffled by this bafflement, as this is a pretty straightforward point about how evidence works.

Suppose Joan is suspected of murder, and there are two bits of evidence: she was in the general location where the murder took place at the time it happened, and she was wearing the same clothes as the murderer wore. Perhaps each of these isn’t strong evidence on its own, but the fact that there are these two independent bits of evidence that both point to Joan being the killer can end up giving us a strong case. In our standard Bayesian way of understanding evidence, the reason this works is that you multiply together independent bits of evidence, which can jump multiple low probabilities to a very high probability.

Coming back to Christianity, the other bit of evidence that I think adds to the case is that Jesus was such an extraordinary moral teacher, both in terms of the form and content of his teaching. I’m not saying he was the only great moral teacher in history, but he was pretty rare. In the response video, there was bafflement from Alex as to how this could be seen as evidence. And again, I’m baffled at the bafflement.

To repeat: I’m not saying this is significant evidence on its own. But it’s very plausible that it provides some evidence, even on its own. In Bayesian reasoning, evidence supports a hypothesis if the evidence becomes more likely if we assume the hypothesis is true. Suppose you picked a random person from the street. How likely is it that they’d be an extraordinary moral teacher? Pretty unlikely. Suppose you add that this person is uniquely divine. How likely is it then? I’d say the probability is significantly increased. This is all that required, on Bayesian reasoning, for the fact that someone is a great moral teacher to be (some) evidence that they are uniquely divine.

I’m going to say it one more time: this in itself proves nothing. I have to keep repeating this, because I just know many people on Twitter are going to say, ‘I can’t believe Goff thinks that proves Christianity!”.  Obviously, on its own the fact that someone is an extraordinary moral teacher isn’t going to convince you that they are uniquely divine. But it’s significant that in relation to one and the same hypothesis we find two independent bits of evidence that point in the same direction, especially given it’s pretty rare for such great moral teachers to emerge.

Alex expressed some skepticism about this ‘joining up the dots’ reasoning, comparing it to conspiracy theorists. This is pure rhetoric. It is uncontentious that independent bits of evidence for the same conclusion boost each other. Yes, conspiracy theorists do this badly. But good historians, investigative journalists, and detectives do it well. The only reason this feels like a good objection in this context is because of the stereotype that religious people are intellectually weak.

To summarise, I take participatory Christianity seriously for the following three reasons:

1. It fits with a hypothesis I believe is well-evidenced, namely the existence of a God of limited powers. If it weren’t for this first fact, all the others would be meaningless, as Christianity would be too improbable to start off with.

2. The resurrection (in either visionary or non-visionary form) is supported by significant but not overwhelming evidence.

3. Jesus is an extraordinary moral teacher, which is not significant on its own but significant in the mix.

At the same time, participatory Christianity is a bold metaphysical hypothesis, which leaves the Ockhamist in me demanding more evidence. In the end, I’m left 50/50 on the truth of Christianity. On an intellectual level, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were false. I’m a Christian because I choose to trust that Christianity is true, in terms of how I understand my deepest spiritual experiences and how I shape my fundamental life goals. This trust brings me deep happiness and has made me a better person.

I’m grateful to Phil, Dan and Alex for their challenges, which have prompted me to refine the argument a bit. I invited myself on their channel to discuss these issues with them, and they have kindly accepted, so watch out for that one.

Here’s a selection of some of the other responses, from both Christians and atheists:

Conversion Review: Philip Goff