I want to thank Joe Schmid of the Majesty of Reason philosophy channel on YouTube.

Joe is a philosopher and an agnostic who is interested in religious belief claims, and he’s always struck me as engaging with them in an open-minded way on an intellectual level.

A while back, Joe contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in debating James Fodor on the resurrection of Jesus.

James had written a book called Unreasonable Faith, in which he critiqued the case put forward by Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig.

I said, “Sure,” and I read the relevant part of James’s book ahead of time to familiarize myself with his views.

In the debate, James and I both gave 15-20 minute opening statements, and we both used slides for our opening statements, so you may get more out of the debate if you watch the video version of the podcast.

We then basically cross-examined each other for the rest of the two-hour debate time.

And here I want to give James Fodor a compliment, because he avoided doing something that debaters of lesser caliber frequently do.

Back in Episode 10, I told you about a cheap debater’s tactic known as the Gish Gallop.

What people try to do in a Gish Gallop is throw out issue after issue that is either a lesser matter or even completely unrelated to the debate at hand.

The Gish Galloper is hoping that his opponent will start discussing these lesser or unrelated matters and start going down rabbit trails and waste his time rather than discussing the actual subject of the debate.

For example, I remember a while back when I was debating the subject of whether sola scriptura is true, and my opponent had the burden of proving that it is true, yet he complained that I wasn’t discussing issues like

SOME GUY: (1) A single bishop currently Francis (2) Cardinals (3) archbishops, (4) a sacramental priesthood, (5) the immaculate conception, (6) perpetual virginity of Mary, such doctrines as (7) purgatory and (8) indulgences and (9) papal infallibility. (10) The bodily assumption of Mary, (11) ask Augustine, (12) aske Cyprian, (13) sacramentalism, (14) ecumenical councils and (15) conciliarism.

And then—the next night—when we were debating whether we are justified by faith alone, my opponent complained that I wasn’t discussing

SOME GUY: (1) The mass is a propitiatory sacrifice. What about (2) priests? What about (3) Mary? What about (4) Mary’s intercession? What about (5) Mary as the “neck” that turns the head of God’s grace, (6) purgatory and (7) punishments and (8) temporal punishments and (9) forgiveness of sins through a sacramental priesthood, (10) venial and mortal sins? Do we believe in (11) indulgences? Do we believe that you will someday stand before God because you have had (12) imputed to your account the righteousness of Christ, (13) Mary and the saints, (14) sacramental forgiveness (15) to maintain it through the sacraments of the church? Will (16) indulgences increase my righteousness before God in the sense of (17) lowering the amount of time I have to spend in purgatory?

Yeah, none of those issues have a direct bearing on sola scriptura or justification by faith alone. They may all be interesting topics, but they weren’t what we were there to debate.

If my opponent wanted to debate one of those topics, he should have asked for a debate on it instead.

I would be wasting the time I had available to speak—and wasting the audience’s time—if I had fallen for my opponent’s attempts to sucker me into spending time on issues we weren’t there to debate.

Well, I want to compliment James Fodor on not doing that.

Despite the fact that there was even less structure to this debate than the ones that that other debater and I had, James Fodor stuck to the topic and didn’t go Gish Galloping all over the countryside.

So James Fodor, good job! You didn’t stoop to using slimy debaters’ tactics like certain others.

Of course, Fodor and I have quite different views on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection, and I hope you enjoy our discussion.

So, as they say, let’s roll the tape.

* * *

JOE SCHMID: Hey peeps. Today we have a discussion style debate on the resurrection. Many of you will already know my guests, but if you don’t, Jimmy Akin is an author, speaker and senior apologist at Catholic Answers. I’ve put links to his YouTube channel, books and website in the description. James Fodor recently received a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Melbourne. He’s also an author and speaker, and I’ve put links to his book, website and YouTube channel in the description as well. So the resolution for tonight is the following question, what’s the best explanation of the facts about Jesus and the apostles post crucifixion? James will start with an opening statement defending his skeptical perspective. Jimmy will then give an opening statement defending his Christian perspective, and the rest of the video will be a back and forth discussion on points of disagreement that came up. But without further ado, let’s turn it over to James for his opening statement.

JAMES FODOR: Awesome. Thanks very much Joe, and thanks Yumi for agreeing to discuss this with me. So it’s a pleasure to be here. So what I’m going to be doing today is just talking about how I understand the facts relating to the crucifixion and postmortem appearances of Jesus and outlining what I call the RHBS model to account for these. Okay, so let’s start by outlining what I mean when I talk about the historical facts. So on the left here we have Jesus’s ministry, crucifixion and burial. So I’m taking those as given for the purpose of the discussion as essentially background and the three that I have on the right, the empty term, the appearances to individuals in groups and the origins of the belief that Jesus had been resurrected. Those are the facts that I’m particularly interested in trying to account for or to explain.

JAMES FODOR: So when we talk about explanations, let me just outline what I sort of mean by that. So an explanation is something that tells us how and why a particular set of facts or observations occurred or why we observed them. I think Charles Pear did a good job when he said that given an explanation, the facts to be explained should follow as a matter of course, which doesn’t mean that they will necessarily follow logically, but it means that they should sort of make sense and seem natural given the explanation. So we can assess explanations using a number of criteria. Three that I find useful are explanatory scope. So basically the range of facts to be accounted for with an explanation the more the better explanatory power. So this refers to how likely the facts are rendered by the explanation and as well as sort of the internal coherence of the explanation. And then plausibility. So the more likely are the postulated aspects of our explanation given our background knowledge, then the better is the explanation. This will be a key factor that I’ll come back to later.

JAMES FODOR: So in order to motivate what I’m going to be doing here, I first want to say that in my view the traditional Christian explanation for the relevant facts relating to the postmortem appearances and empty tomb of Jesus is not very good. Obviously this will be a point of contention, but some aspects that I think the resurrection hypothesis doesn’t do a very good job at accounting for is things like the idea that God had a reason or a desire to raise Jesus from the dead. The fact that Jesus appeared to his followers after the alleged resurrection, but only to his followers and the fact that Jesus did not meet the requirements for the Jewish

Messiah. So I’m sure we’ll discuss these more later, but the inability in my view of the resurrection hypothesis to account for these in some other aspects motivated the development of an alternate explanation, which I call the RHPS model.

JAMES FODOR: And I want to emphasize that I’m only summarizing the model here. So you can see in my book Unreasonable Faith, which unfortunately has been blurred out if you’re interested in reading a bit more detail. But lemme just outline in brief here what the model says. So first of all, re burial. The idea is that Jesus’s body was removed from the term probably by Joseph and Maroth, the in what was intended to be a temporary storage, the discovery of the empty term as well as the context in which the events were occurring, obviously then triggered individual hallucinations of the risen Jesus, which may be bereavement hallucinations. I’ll explain that a bit later. These individual hallucinations in turn led early disciples to have collective religious experiences of Jesus appearing to them. And again, I’ll talk more about that in a moment. Then following these initial experiences, the disciples discussed what had happened with each other.

JAMES FODOR: They tried to make sense of it. Their memories were then reshaped by processes that I’ll be outlining such as reconstructive recall, social memory, contagion and cognitive dissidence in. And these processes operated to essentially increase the coherence and the impressiveness of the accounts. And then finally we have socialization. So any sort of disagreements or residual doubts tended to be muted over time because of social pressures and injunctions to faith and things like that. So that’s the brief outline of how the model works. Let me now go through and discuss some of the individual aspects in a bit more detail. First of all, burial. Now we know that Jewish law required that the bodies be removed from the cross before the beginning of the Sabbath. And this is repeated for example in John. And the point mentioned there is in particular is that the tomb was nearby.

JAMES FODOR: And so that was actually the reason why those specific led Jesus there. Because it was getting late. Jesus’ body needed to be removed. The term Joseph MA’s tomb was nearby. Mark also emphasizes that the burial was hasty because the evening had sort of come rapidly on the Friday evening and there was a necessity to bury the body. Now we also know that the Romans feared civil disorder and that there was a particular desire for them to avoid the potential of mob riots. Matthew and Luke both mentioned this. So the hypothesis that I make is that they were particularly interested in having the body buried somewhere quiet, somewhere private, somewhere relatively out of the way close but out of the way. So it was to reduce the risk of further disorder which had already been precipitated in the events of Jesus’ trial. And so the hypothesis here is that Jesus was placed temporarily in a nearby private tomb and as soon as possible was reburied.

JAMES FODOR: So this was on Saturday evening after the end of the Sabbath and then leaving the tomb empty on the Sunday morning when it was discovered by some of his web followers. So that’s the basic idea of burial. Now let’s move to hallucinations, individual hallucinations. I’m not going to talk too much about this, but I’m just going to give a flavor of some of the things that I highlight in my book. So we know that individual hallucinations are actually fairly common. They are more

common in people with mental disorders, but that’s not necessary. They’re quite a large proportion of the broader population will experience hallucinations of different types including auditory, visual and even tactile hallucinations. So I’ve just given one reference for this, but there’s many studies that look at that and one type of hallucination that’s particularly relevant are called bereavement or post bereavement hallucinations.

JAMES FODOR: And these are experiences that follow the death of a loved one. These are also very common. One study found one third of people who’ve experienced a recent loss reported seeing, hearing or talking to the deceased. Now it’s true that in most cases of bereavement hallucinations, the person who experiences this does not then go on to believe that their loved one is still alive in some form. However, this can happen in the appropriate circumstances. I just saw one example here of another wise psychologically healthy 26-year-old who came to believe that his mother was still alive and reported having encounters and interactions with her. Again, I cite other examples in my book. And so the take home here is that individual hallucinations are not uncommon and they’re particularly known to occur in the context of bereavement. So then we move on to group appearances. And here I cite the work of Rawcliffe who has conducted studies on these sorts of phenomena.

JAMES FODOR: And I should say, I’ll be showing a number of quotes just to illustrate the literature that I’m signing. I won’t read all of them here if people are interested that they can pause and have a read of the quote. But the basic idea here is that when we’re talking about group experiences, we’re not talking about group hallucinations. The hallucination is a psychological experience that occurs in one person. But what can happen as royal Cliffe documents is that multiple people in a given sort of social context in a given situation can have separate hallucinations but which have shared content because they’re in the same situation. So this is not to say that two people share the hallucination in every respect. They’re not sharing exactly the same experience, but they’re having very, very similar experiences triggered by the context. And the idea is that subsequent comparisons would not typically don’t disclose major discrepancies.

JAMES FODOR: Any discrepancies that do exist are typically harmonized in subsequent recollection and conversation. And I’ll talk more about the mechanisms of those in a bit. So a number of studies have looked at how these sorts of collective experiences of unusual phenomena can occur. One study that I cite here looks at in the context of hauntings and poltergeist experiences, and they talk about how these sort of self-reinforcing attention selective attention processes can operate it so can operate. So people identify something that they label as abnormal or paranormal in this context and then they sort of fixate on that and are hypersensitive to other phenomena that they can then further label as that. And this results in what they call flurries of paranormal observations due to self-reinforcing attentional processes and perceptual contention, one person noticing something and then commenting on that to someone else who then notices it and so forth.

JAMES FODOR: This is a paranormal context, but other studies have looked at in a more religious context as well. Another relevant phenomena is suggestibility. So just

a couple of studies here that I cite people are, many people are readily able to have experiences solicited in them by suggestion. So one study actually constructed a haunted room and basically were able to elicit unusual sensations and hallucinations in a large proportion of the subjects, basically by just suggesting to them that they might experience something abnormal. Another study, which is that the second court here looked at asked people to keep a diary while living in a house that was labeled as haunted. And again, they noted an increasing frequency of anomalous or unusual events that were reported just because volunteers were primed to notice particular things. And the authors suggest that the best explanation for that is suggestibility.

JAMES FODOR: Another study that looked at similar sort of factors, but in this case, in a Pentecostal healing context described mechanisms for how these sort of miraculous healing events are constructed socially. So they talk about different techniques like suggestion, use of music is important, contextual factors, so the expectation of the audience and the beliefs that they have going into it. And then highlighting attention, selection effects, editing. So highlighting things that are consistent with the account are not those that aren’t. And so this is an interesting case of documenting how these effects, these sort of collective experiences of the paranormal or supernatural can be constructed in kind of real time. Now another thing that I do in my book is I cite a number of examples of how these sort of processes come together, how we or plausibly they have come together. We can explain how miraculous events can occur historically using these processes by historical example of when we have accounts of groups of people reporting miraculous or supernatural occurrences.

JAMES FODOR: These are just a few that I’ve shown here. I’m not going to talk in detail about them. You can see my book for more information, but we have ti and me Mendel Sen who were both Messiah Jewish Messiah claimants. Mendel Sen is a particularly interesting case because he is quite a recent figure who still has an active following and including people who believe that although he has died, but they believe he is in some sense still alive or has returned and report experiences of him. We have Southeast side Baba and Anand Damia Ma who were both Indian religious figures who were believed to be reincarnations of Indian gods, both of whom have a vast array of miracles attributed to them. And I document some of these in my book.

JAMES FODOR: Simon Kangu was some sort of charismatic Christian leader in the Congo in the early 20th century and he was actually persecuted by the Belgian authorities, a very interesting case there. People are interested in that. A lot of miracles attributed to him. One last case, which I couldn’t help but include, this is not actually a religious leader, but this is an American anthropologist Bruce t Grindle, and he records an account of experiencing what he describes as a corpse coming back to life and dancing in an anthropological context of when he was conducting research. I think it was in Africa in the 1960s. And what’s interesting is he didn’t actually believe that that’s what happened. He just reports experiencing that in that particular context. So a very interesting account to look at there. So these

are just some examples of how these processes that I mentioned can come together to generate these sorts of collective experiences.

JAMES FODOR: Another slightly different set of phenomena called mass hysteria. So this is less a single event and more when many people in a given community or given context of report having some sort of experience which we can demonstrate is not actually vertical. And again, I won’t go through these here, you can look these up if you’re interested. The one that I find most interesting is genital shrinking epidemics, which actually have been documented multiple times in history. So this is when in a particular social context there comes to be a widespread but lymph amongst males that they genitals are shrinking due to some sort of disease even though there is no such disease. And the doctors can tell that no such thing is happening, but nonetheless, people can still come to believe that this is happening, which is sort of somewhat surprising. Okay, so that finishes up the collective religious experiences component.

JAMES FODOR: And now I’m going to talk a bit about memory on cognitive biases. So here again, I’m just going to touch on a few key ideas. So one is the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. So there’s been extensive documentation in recent years, recent decades about how eyewitness testimony is not always reliable and many details can be wrongly remembered and also how false memories can be encoded. The particular example that I’m highlighting here is a very unfortunate story of a rape victim, Jennifer Thompson Canino, who what’s particularly interesting about her case is that she particularly made an effort to consciously encode and study the details of her attacker so that she’d be able to identify them later and later in court she confidently identified her attacker, said she’d never been so sure of anything before she was a hundred percent sure that that was her attacker, the person that she identified Ronald Cotton was convicted and sent to prison.

JAMES FODOR: But several years later it was found that he was actually innocent using DNA evidence. And there’s an interesting book written about that experience and how both of them then have come together and to highlight the problems with the use of reliance on eyewitness testimony in the legal system. Other studies have looked at mechanisms of how memories can become distorted and or contaminated over time. And so there’s a large body of literature looking at the reconstructive nature of memory. So when we remember things, we don’t just encode them like it’s a videotape or a recording. We record memories as connections of associations and every time we recall or repeat an event, we’re actually sort of modifying reconstructing and editing their memory. And this particularly in social context, this sort of selective rehearsal, identifying things that are important and reiterating those and leaving other things out because of that particular reasons for sharing things like the social context of sharing that exacerbates these tendencies as well as what it mentions here, the schema activated during retelling.

JAMES FODOR: So that’s essentially the way we make sense of something, the conceptual apparatus to make sense of it. So it’s not like we just remember a set of facts. The way we remember things is shaped by the story that we used to make sense of it and that in turn distorts the memory over time towards greater

coherence with that chema. There’s another study here that talks about how false memories can be quite readily elicited in participants. So this one story, sorry, this one study elicited a memory, a false memory of seeing film of a sinking passenger lineup in 36% of participants, which is already quite a lot. But then they found out that when they exposed those participants to another participant who reported that they had seen the event, so essentially a confederate who was saying that they had seen the same thing, the proportion of people who remembered seeing that non-existent footage increased to 76%. And this is just one example of other studies showing that we readily incorporate details from other people into our own memories and then think that we’ve remembered them ourselves even... Read more on Catholic.com