Why Doesn’t Michael Shermer Believe in the Resurrection?
A few days ago one of my favorite skeptics, Michael Shermer, wrote a fascinating piece explaining the problems at the increasingly woke Scientific American, where he wrote for almost 20 years before being let go. A year ago, in response to the news that his “hero” Ayaan Hirsi Ali had declared for Christ (news I celebrated here), he wrote an article for Skeptic Magazine called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” (Echoing the title of a famous book by Bertrand Russell.)
Perhaps after falling out with skeptical comrades-in-arm, Shermer should reconsider the arguments against Christianity he gave, and see if Ali wasn’t on target after all.
Let’s begin with Shermer’s skepticism about the Resurrection.
Leaving the Camp
Shermer quotes St. Paul as saying, “If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain.” He then raises a series of what he sees as challenges to the claim that Christ did rise from the dead:
My first question is this: Why don’t Jews accept the resurrection as real, either in Jesus’ time or in ours? Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the same holy book … Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians, and still they reject them. That’s telling.
What a peculiar argument.
Why don’t Jews accept the resurrection? Because the moment they do – and actually, millions have – they tend to become Christians, and are no longer counted as Jews religiously. Rodney Stark argues that numerous Jews did, in fact, embrace the Messiah Jesus in the early centuries. But when Christianity and Judaism split into competing and often hostile camps, they were forced to choose. Accepting the resurrection meant being lost to your community.
It is naïve to expect most people to pay such a price – especially when persecution of Jews stokes understandable resentment – to consider evidence dispassionately. Give an altar call for Anglicanism in Ireland, and lots of luck getting a positive response. (Remember Tevye? “Without tradition, our lives would be as shaky as, as – as a Fiddler on the Roof!” So when Tevye’s daughter married outside the Jewish faith, her father disowned her.)
And even if many Jews had not come to Christ, and even if that option were realistically open to all, it is unlikely that “all” Jewish intellectuals have read, say, NT Wright’s magisterial The Resurrection of the Son of God. (I know of two who did study the evidence for Easter, and admitted it was strong, without becoming Christians.)
Of Course It’s Rare!
Shermer’s second argument makes an equally fallacious popular appeal. He claims that in all of history, more than 100 billion people have lived. However:
Not one has died and returned from the dead, unless you are a Christian, in which case you believe that one person did — Jesus of Nazareth. So the claim that one person out of those 100 billion people who died came back from the dead would be extraordinary indeed — 100 billion to 1.
I have seen this argument before, but didn’t expect such silliness from someone of Shermer’s stature.
First, I am curious how he knows how many people have been resurrected? What are his sources? Does he have videos of the bodies of all those billions, which he has constantly monitored to ensure they didn’t slip out of their graves?
I deny that these are silly questions. Shermer is making a claim, and in my view, claims should be backed up with good evidence and sound reasoning. And the best reason to assume that no one else has risen from the dead is the general belief that that doesn’t happen in the course of nature. In short, Shermer is arguing in a circle: “To die is to end. To die is to end because everyone who had died, ended. And we know that because to die is to end.”
In fact, we have reports of other people returning from the dead, in the New Testament and elsewhere. (We may ask whether those sources are accurate another day. )
But no one says Jesus simply won the lottery, returning from death by blind luck. Among those 100 billion people, Jesus is, to use Shermer’s term, extraordinary:
- He is the most influential person who ever lived. History is divided into before or after his life. You can say that of no one else.
- His teachings, which confounded the cruel doctrines of the Roman Empire, are arguably the greatest ever given, as recognized by great psychologists, moral teachers, and reformers, not all of them Christian. Mortal souls by the random billion did not inspire Augustine, Mother Therea, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John Wesley to change the world.
- Jesus is said by those who followed him to have done extraordinary miracles.
- He also claimed a relationship with God that was out of the ordinary.
- The Jewish Scriptures, as well (I argue) as the scriptures of many other faiths, point uniquely to Jesus of Nazareth as the “Messiah” or “Sheng Ren” who will bring a blessing to the whole earth. (Dr. Michael Brown here at The Stream is the go-to man on that first point: the second is my chief area of expertise.)
- God promised Abraham that through his seed, He would bless all nations. Jesus, the “seed” of Abraham, has uniquely blessed people around the world. Shermer seems to doubt this: I’ll deal with those challenges in a later article.
No, Jesus did not rise by demographic happenstance. Easter signifies God’s approval of Christ’s ministry, and hope for all who suffer from entropy, “first fruits” of a new Creation. The fact that most people do not rise, at least not yet, is not merely irrelevant to the Christian claim. If resurrections were common, Christianity would make no sense! The Gospel would no longer count as “good news,” or news at all!
The Resurrection vs. the Volcano
Shermer also claims that the evidence for the resurrection is not even as good (citing philosopher Larry Shapiro) as “the evidence on which historians rely to justify belief in other historical events such as the destruction of Pompeii.” Furthermore, because “miracles are far less probable than ordinary historical occurrences like volcanic eruptions,” they require much better evidence to believe.
This is misleading in one way, mistaken in another.
First, the destruction of Pompeii is atypical of historical events, because the remains of the city lie with us still. Our evidence for, say, the early death of Alexander, or Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, is literary and orders of magnitude weaker, yet no serious historian I know of denies either. Pompeii sets up an unrealistically high bar for historical events to meet.
Second, Shermer begs the question again when he claims that miracles are “less probable” than volcanic eruptions. In fact, they seem more common. I have met many people who described miracles in the strong sense – not just fortuitous events, but evidence that the hand of God has moved – which they say happened to them. I have never met a person who had a volcano erupt under her home. New Testament scholar Craig Keener has recounted hundreds of miracles from around the world. History is littered with such accounts, a few of which (like the resurrection) seem to have changed the course of history.
Furthermore, as I argue in Jesus Is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels, early accounts of Jesus’s life are also “extraordinary” in the sheer density of compelling historical evidence they carry. I describe 30 interweaving threads of fact that show the gospels are powerful historical accounts. I then compare those documents to “alt gospels” that skeptical scholars point at to show that gospels are common. I demonstrate that the evidences found in the gospels are almost entirely absent in works popular among such skeptics, like the “Gospel” of Thomas or the Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
Remarkably, two friends happened to be writing books demonstrating the credibility of the gospels from similar angles at about the same time, though we barely compared notes: Lydia McGrew, and the late Tom Gilson.
The gospels are rich mines of historical fact. It is hard to find a “skeptic” who has grappled with that evidence honestly, yet still calls it weak.
Think Again
Drawing on Shapiro again, Shermer cites various theories to explain the gospels away – superstitious disciples, late testimony or inventions. He does not so much as mention the counterevidence that myself and other scholars have put forth for the Resurrection of the Son of God.
Shermer ends by unironically appealing again to reason:
I am not a Christian because there is not enough evidence to believe that the core doctrines about Jesus’s resurrection are true.
In fact, the resurrection really can be compared to a volcano, because it left a mountain of evidence behind. It is hard to understand history apart from that tectonic event. “Nothing to see here, folks,” say some historians, at the gaping hole where the trajectory of human events was forever altered and evidence billows through every crack in the earth.
Maybe while he’s thinking through old relationships, Shermer should follow Ali’s example and reconsider Christ. For like that old book by Bertrand Russell of the same title, Shermer’s reasons for “why I am not a Christian” sound more psychological than logical.
Shermer also critiques the impact of Christianity. I shall join that debate in a subsequent article.
David Marshall, an educator and writer, holds a doctoral degree in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case for Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.