Dive into Jimmy Akin’s debrief of his epic debate on Jesus’ resurrection against skeptic James Fodor! Jimmy breaks down strategies, dismantles alternative theories like the RHBS model, crunches probabilities, and explores paranormal evidence that challenges materialism. Packed with insightful analysis and respectful dialogue—perfect for truth-seekers! Listen now on The Jimmy Akin Podcast.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Recently I debated James Fodor on whether Jesus rose from the dead.
If you’re interested in watching that debate, it’s Episode 59 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast.
There’s also something to be learned by looking back at a debate, what happened, and the issues it involved.
In other words, there’s something to be learned from a debate debrief.
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Introduction
Back in November, Joe Schmid of the Majesty of Reason YouTube channel invited me and skeptic James Fodor to debate whether Jesus really rose from the dead.
That debate is in Episode 59 of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, as well as on Joe’s channel, so you can check it out.
After doing debates, it’s common these days to do what’s known as a debrief where you go back over the debate, note particular things you were trying to do in it, and comment on how you think it went.
Originally, I was hesitant to do debriefs, because I remembered examples from years ago where I saw back-and-forth spats develop between certain debaters that I thought were just not constructive.
They would relitigate the entire debate, add new arguments that they didn’t originally make, and—worse yet—they would continue these post-debate exchanges for multiple rounds in a spirit of hostility.
I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I thought, “Just let your work stand, guys! This endless back and forth isn’t constructive. Just let it be what it is.”
I thus adopted a rule for myself that I wouldn’t do such things.
Then YouTube happened, and a YouTube debate culture began to develop.
When I got back into debating, I was asked about doing debriefs, and I initially wouldn’t do them, remembering the endless back-and-forths from the old days.
But eventually I was convinced that debriefs didn’t have to turn into those kinds of exchanges, and so I modified my principle.
Today, I will do a single debrief after a debate—not an endless debate but just one discussion.
I also don’t add new arguments to what I said then, though I will answer questions if I’m asked what I might have said.
For example, in the debrief you’re about to see, I’m asked to explain a point that I raised during the debate even though I was not asked to explain it then, though I would have.
If I think an aspect of a debate contains an instructive lesson, I may even lift out that element and do a video on it.
Like Episode 10, which contained a particularly illustrative example of the debater’s tactic known as the Gish Gallop.
So it’s not that once I’ve done a debate it becomes a forbidden topic that I’ll never mention again.
I’m still discerning what the appropriate ways are to handle things after debates.
But I have modified my earlier position. I’m just not going to engage in rebuttal videos followed by counter-rebuttal videos followed by counter-counter rebuttal videos suffused with hostility.
I still don’t think that those are constructive.
And it may be that it’s really the attitude of hostility that is the really problematic element in what I saw others doing—not the mere extension of a discussion.
In any event, after my debate with James Fodor, I was asked to do a debrief.
The gentleman who asked me was John DeRosa of the Classical Theism Podcast, and he’s debriefed me before.
John is a really kind and intelligent gentleman, and he asks good and challenging questions, so I said yes!
Due to a variety of circumstances, including the holidays and a rather intense snowstorm here in Arkansas, it took us a while to actually do the debrief, but here it is.
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JOHN DEROSA: We are joined again today by Jimmy Akin, who is a senior apologist for Catholic Answers author, the senior apologist,
JIMMY AKIN: The senior apologist author. In fact, for Catholic Answers. I’m the senior employee of Catholic Answers. I’ve been there longer than anybody else.
JOHN: Wow. Author of many books, including, especially the Bible is a Catholic book and the one who has done several debates in recent years on a number of topics, some of which we’ve debriefed before. And today we join him again to do a little debrief on a recent debate he’s done on the resurrection. So Jimmy Akin, welcome back to the Classical Theism Podcast.
JIMMY: Yeah, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
JOHN: So going right to that recent debate, what was the debate resolution and who was your opponent?
JIMMY: Okay, so this was a debate that I had on Joe Schmid’s channel Majesty of Reason, and the resolution of the debate was what’s the best explanation for the facts about Jesus and the Apostles post crucifixion? It essentially was a debate on the resurrection of Jesus, and my opponent was James Fodor. He’s an Australian skeptic and he has a degree in neuroscience from the University of Melbourne. He is the author of a book called Unreasonable Faith, in which he responds to William Lane Craig’s book, reasonable Faith and Critiques the Arguments and proposes Alternatives to the arguments that Bill Craig made. And I had initially been contacted by Joe who said, you want to debate this guy? And he’s got this book and where he talks about his theory of what happened to the resurrection. And I said, sure. So I got the book and I read the relevant section, and then we had the debate.
JOHN: The format was less structured than some of your other formal debates that we’ve debriefed before. So what was this format and how’d you like it compared to those other debates recently?
JIMMY: Well, basically we were asked, both James and I were asked to do 15 to 20 minute opening statements and then the rest of the, it was basically a two hour debate. The rest of the time was cross-examination. And the cross-examination was not structured in any particular way. Joe, as our host would try to ensure more or less equal time, but there weren’t formal time limits for this debate. And I thought I largely enjoyed this structure. It was nice with the opening statements to have a little bit of flexibility so you’re not trying to time it to the second and have a disagreement with the timekeeper and things like that. And I could see the cross-examination going very badly depending on who the debate opponent was, because some debate opponents will try to monopolize the time. But for this, I think the time kept came out more or less even between me and James, I’d have to go back with a stopwatch.
And if I wanted to find out, did one of us have slightly more time than the other? But James, in terms of the substance of the debate, he did a good job sticking to the topic. In fact, when I published the debate on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/jimmy, I did it as an episode of the Jimmy Akin podcast and I included an introduction in which I complimented James for actually sticking to the topic that we were there to discuss. And I compared him rather unfavorably to another debater I’ve interacted with who engages in Gish Galloping where he raises all kinds of issues that are not what we’re there to discuss. And essentially the Gish Gallup is an attempt to do one of two things, either to overload your opponent into trying to take on more than he can reasonably discuss, or B, get him to waste his time on something other than the debate. But that’s not fair to the other debater, and it’s especially not fair to the audience to waste their time by bringing up subjects and trying to get your opponent to engage in subjects that are not the topic of the debate at hand. So James did not do that, and I gave him a credit for that. I thought that was very good of him. He comes from an academic world as opposed to the apologetics world. And so I think that may have helped focus him in a way that some apologetic debaters are not focused.
And so that was good. If there was a flaw to this format of debate, I think that we got a little too much crosstalk. And I can’t say because I don’t want to be self-serving and say, well, James just kept talking over me because that’s a subjective thing and I’d have to go back and do a numerical count and I’m not interested in doing that to see who interrupted whom more. But I thought that there was a little too much crosstalk between the debaters during certain segments of the debate, but overall I thought it was an enjoyable, somewhat more relaxed format.
JOHN: I agree. And I wrote down just the two words that came to mind when thinking about the format is that it was a substantive and respectful exchange. And like you said, if you have two people who are willing to engage on the topic and they’ve already agreed upon that they’re going to interact respectfully and do so in a scholarly way, this format can be great. But as you said, there might be other debaters or other contexts where this format can get a little bit messy. And about the crosstalk thing, it’s interesting, I haven’t really studied this in detail, but my instinct is since now a lot more debates are done remotely or virtually that might contribute to the temptation to do crosstalk just because sometimes there’s a lag of time and you can’t sense when someone’s pausing, whereas when you’re doing an in-person debate, it’s a little harder and a little bit more obnoxious to talk over someone if it’s not allowed in that moment. But nonetheless, I definitely think it was a substantial and respectful exchange. So I want to give credit to that and I’m going to link, just so the listeners know, I’ll link to the original debate in the show notes on your Jimmy Akin YouTube channel or The Majesty of Reason or they can check that out. But your version is cool, it has that juxtaposition in the beginning. So in this debrief, I’ve kind of structured few.
JIMMY: I also want to give, forgive me for the crosstalk, I also want to give Joe Schmid credit for it because he was our host, he arranged the format of the debate and I thought it was very productive.
JOHN: Yes, no, and he did a nice job of moderating it and keeping things on the subject matter. So that was great. I kind of structured my debrief questions around the opening statements first. So I’m going to ask you a few questions about the openings and then we’ll get into the opening dialogue section and we’ll see where it takes us along the way. But as you brought up with the debate topic, it had to do with what best explains a certain set of facts, and many listeners are going to be familiar with that idea of developing a theory or proposal that best explains a set of facts or key claims connected to some event. Sometimes this is called reasoning to the best explanation or abductive reasoning. For example, when trying to explain the evidence surrounding the resurrection, people who deny that Jesus rose from the dead, they may suggest a swoon theory that Jesus didn’t really die or a conspiracy theory that the disciples stole the body and made up the resurrection or a twin theory that he had a twin who was crucified and so forth instead of him. Before we get to James Fodor’s theory itself, what do you think about this general approach and is it the same as minimal facts apologetics when the Christian tries to use these key claims?
JIMMY: Okay, so let me have you break those two questions apart. What’s the first question?
JOHN: Do you use this approach of taking a set of key claims and then trying to show that the resurrection is the best explanation of it? Would you affirm that as an apologist?
JIMMY: Yes, but as I point out in the debate, I’m neither what you could call a minimal facts apologist on the resurrection or a maximal facts apologist. A minimal facts apologist is someone who identifies just a very few key claims like Gary Habermas, for example. I think he identified four facts that are pretty non-controversial and would then try to defend the resurrection based on those four facts. Or I may have the number wrong. It’s been a while since I read Gary’s book on this. A maximal facts person would be someone who just says, well, I’m going to appeal to everything the New Testament says and treat it as if it’s all the inspired word of God. Well being maximal facts is fine. If you’re debating someone else who also believes in the inspiration and an errancy of scripture, then you can appeal to just anything scripture says as if it’s true.
But that’s not so useful for debating the resurrection because scripture clearly teaches that, and that’s not in dispute. What you would want to use maximal facts for is like debating some doctrine or something that is discussed in scripture. But when it comes to the resurrection, if you’re debating did it happen, then you don’t want to take that approach. So when I debate the resurrection, I neither take a minimal facts approach nor a maximal facts approach. The reason I don’t take a minimal facts approach, as I pointed out in the debate is nobody ever sticks with the minimal facts. You read minimal facts advocates, and they inevitably start appealing to things that were not listed in their list of minimal facts, and they start appealing to things that are mentioned in the course of the crucifixion narratives.
And my opponent, James Fodor, he wasn’t a minimal facts person either. He would appeal to certain things in the crucifixion narratives, in the passion narratives that are not on anybody’s list of minimal facts. What I would describe myself when it comes to the resurrection as is a key facts advocate, I think there are certain key facts that we can use to organize the discussion in a constructive way, but I think we need to go beyond those for supporting detail when we start arguing the case itself. And when I’m operating in this mode, I am not just assuming that everything scripture says is true or accurate. I’m happy to give different weights to different claims based on various indicators of probability and scholarly criteria like multiple attestation and things like that. So I would acknowledge, okay, here we’ve got a claim in scripture, but it’s weaker than this other claim in scripture because we have multiple attestation or we’ve got admission contrary to interest or something else that strengthens the other claim.
JOHN: Okay. No, that is helpful to distinguish those two approaches. And obviously you are arguing that the best explanation of those key facts, and in the debate you had some nice slides where you showed some tables and illustrations that people could look at, which is a great visual. You said the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead or God raised Jesus from the dead different ways to say it, whereas James Fodor presented an alternative explanation for those facts, and it’s different than any of the ones that I mentioned, the swoon theory, the conspiracy theory, and so on. His was called the Rh RHBS model for explaining the facts.
JIMMY: And
JOHN: So I wanted to ask you, what is that theory and how does it differ from some of the other naturalistic proposals for the facts surrounding the resurrection?
JIMMY: Okay, you’ll have to forgive me because I have a mind that focuses on word play. And so something just occurred to me that had not occurred to me before. When you said its initials are HBS, it does not stand for really high bs. It stands for re burial hallucinations group experiences, actually, was it biases and socialization? Yeah, biases and socialization. I had cognitive biases in my notes, but it’s just biases the way he does it, and basically he’s making a composite hypothesis. It’s very much like the hypothesis proposed by Herman Reus back in the 17 hundreds. Reus proposed that the disciples stole the body and then lied about it to create the resurrection appearances. And James’s theory is very similar to Reimer’s except he takes the deception out because if you’re going to steal the body and then lie about it, you’re using deception. And modern scholars who’ve considered reimer’s proposal have said, this is just not credible given the evidence we have about the first followers of Jesus.
They were sincere. They were not this bunch of crooks. We don’t have evidence that points in that direction. We have evidence that points to their sincerity. And so what James did was he essentially recreated the proposal in a way that doesn’t involve the disciples deceiving anybody. So he proposes to explain the empty tomb and what happened to Jesus’ body. He says someone probably Joseph of e matha reburied it. So he did initially bury it in his tomb like all four gospels say, but then he very quickly reburied it somewhere else. And since the body was not present on the day on Sunday, the first day of the week, that led the disciples to begin having experiences, initially one or more disciples had a hallucination of Jesus as resurrected, and then they began to discuss this and it spread as a kind of mental contagion. There were some group experiences where not everyone didn’t see exactly the same thing, but they had these group experiences and then in talking about ’em with each other, it kind of smoothed off the rough edges and it led to the development in the early Christian community of a widespread belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that he did and said various things after the resurrection, even though he did not actually rise from the dad.
JOHN: Okay. No, that’s helpful. And then in your opening statement, you took his initial theory, the RHBS model as he proposed it with those four things, Robert, burial, hallucination, biases and socialization, and you actually suggested we really should call it the R-S-H-B-S model instead, why did you make that move? How does that adjustment help clarify things?
JIMMY: It calls attention to an element that is part of his model that you can miss the significance of because it’s not just, and he does believe, he mentions in his book that not only did Joseph Athea or whomever rebury the body of Jesus, he also kept silent about it effectively. And this is what I point out in the debate is this is an essential element of his model because if Joseph Arimathea or anybody reburied Jesus and immediately said to the disciples, oh yeah, I reburied him, well then it’s going to short circuit the hallucinations and the collective experiences and the whole process is going to fall at that point. So not only do you need to have a burial for this model to work, you need to have the rebar keep his mouth shut, at least during the early critical stages of this process. I mean at some point you could say it got a life of its own and kept going, but in the early stages he had to keep his mouth shut, or if he didn’t keep his mouth shut, word had to not effectively impact. The word of the re burial had to not effectively impact the core disciples either. Like maybe he said it in passing and they misunderstood or didn’t hear or forgot or something, but you need them to not be aware of the re burial for everything to work. And so that’s a key step that needs to be pointed out, which is why I proposed silence as the S in R-S-H-B-S because even if you’ve got a burial, you need silence before you get to hallucinations and biases and socialization.
JOHN: Okay. I think that’s a helpful clarification in addition, and I just want to ask, how do you think the model fares and how does it compare, let’s say to the swoon theory or the twin theory? Why does FDO propose this sequence of steps as opposed to just one of those simpler theories and how do you think it fares compared to them?
JIMMY: Well, in terms of its explanatory power, it fares better, and I think that’s why James proposed it. One of the things that I identify by going through the key facts concerning the resurrection, things like they found the tomb empty, they reported sea in him and so forth, is a lot of the alternative theories that have been proposed will explain one or a few key facts, but not all of them. For example, the swoon theory, well that explains the empty tomb, but it doesn’t explain the ascension of Jesus because it’s also an essential Christian claim that he ascended into heaven. That’s why you can’t just go to Jerusalem and meet Jesus. Now if you’re an early Christian, he’s no longer on earth. And so of three of the key facts that I focus on, the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances and the ascension, some of the alternatives that have been proposed, we’ll explain the empty tomb, but they won’t explain the resurrection appearances or the ascension or they explain the resurrection appearances and maybe the ascension like they hallucinated the resurrection appearances including the ascension, but they don’t explain the empty tomb.
And so you need a composite hypothesis that will explain all of them. And Reimer’s deception theory does that they stole the body that explains the empty tomb and then they lied about the resurrection appearances and they lied about the ascension. Well, James is a non deceptive theory, will do the same thing. You’ve got a re burial which explains the empty tomb, then you’ve got these various psychological processes. He proposes to explain the resurrection appearances including the ascension. And so just like the resurrection hypothesis that I advocate explains all those key facts, his body, he was resurrected, so that explains the empty tomb. He was resurrected. So that explains the ascension appearances, including the resurrection appearances, including the ascension. And so basically you’ve got three theories that have sufficient explanatory power to explain all the key facts resurrection. The disciples are crooks and then James’s model.
And so I think it fares better than most of the other models like twin or swoon or went to the wrong tomb or things like that. In terms of do I think it’s successful overall, I would say that your conclusion is going to be driven by your prior beliefs and what you’re willing to accept. James is a naturalist or he terms himself a naturalist. You could also say he’s a materialist. He doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as spirits. He doesn’t believe there are such things as paranormal phenomena. And so I would say that his prior beliefs drive him to conclude that, well, anything must be more probable than a resurrection. Any natural explanation must be more probable than that. He didn’t want to admit that, but that’s functionally how I saw him operating in the debate.
JOHN: I’m going to come back to that point about the paranormal because that played a key role in some of the dialogue. I just want to hop down to one other thing though that you had said because you brought up the fact that it was a composite theory, the
JIMMY: R-S-H-B-S
JOHN: Model. And then so I’m kind of hopping ahead to the dialogue because I wanted to ask you about the numbers that were involved because toward the end of your opening statement, you gave some numbers or illustrations with numbers and probabilities to highlight the composite nature of his theory. But then in the dialogue section you said you were not attempting a mathematical formalization of assessing hypotheses and then Foor objected and said, well, you did present numerical values in your opening statement. Can you just hel... Read more on Catholic.com