Latest / Paulogia / Psychologist Makes My Resurrection Argument for Me (Dr Nick Meader response)

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Psychologist Makes My Resurrection Argument for Me (Dr Nick Meader response) · Paulogia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_11: If all Paul is saying what that paragraph said, it's possible this could be the case.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_11: Of course it's all it's possible.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_11: It's possible.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's possible.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_11: It's possible.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_11: It's possible also Jesus wrote a unicorn.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: Note to self add Jesus riding a unicorn.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Apologia's argument is just not Yeah, well constructed.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_09: The Bible tells us that Christ was trained as a carpenter.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_09: But in my most recent digs, I found artifacts that show he was not a very good carpenter.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome to Pologia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_04: And today we're returning to a glacier-paced series of back and forths with psychologist Nick Meader and his appearances on inspiring philosophy.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_09: By all means, move at a glacial pace.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_09: You know how that thrills me.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: In February 2025, I made a video reviewing volume two of Gary Habermas's Magnum Opus book series on the resurrection and the interactions it has with my own minimal witnesses hypothesis.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_04: The next day, Dr.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: Nick was on an inspiring philosophy live stream, the bulk of which was responding to my video.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, is that okay to stop the yeah?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, just as you were saying, really, I think here I am in agreement with Apologer.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh I'm probably not pronouncing correctly.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: But apologiable.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Apologia, sorry, yeah, apologia.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_04: So a year later, in February 2026, I finally made a video reviewing Dr.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_04: Nick's response.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_13: Hi everybody! Hi, Dr.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_13: Nick!
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: And a few weeks later, Mike and Dr.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: Nick jumped back on for a two and a half hour response to my response.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_11: We've been planning this for like a year, I think.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_11: I told you, I told you a year ago that after we did that stream.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_11: Paul's gonna respond, and then we're gonna we're gonna have some fun responding because we kind of know what's gonna happen and he didn't disappoint.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, but I told you even in ETS, you were you I think someone said, like, well, it's been a while.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_11: I'm like, Oh, he's still gonna do it.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_11: Use weight.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_11: Sure enough, finally here, finally here.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to it.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad, glad for Paul that he uh responded.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's yeah, it's nice to sort of carry on the conversation really.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_04: And in the spirit of carrying on the conversation, here I am just eight months later, to revisit Dr.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_04: Nick's so-called psychological insights into the veracity of Jesus' resurrection.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_04: Now, to be fair to myself, I didn't want to return to this main conversation without first completing this side quest challenge.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_11: I have so many more questions as to how his minimal witness hypothesis can explain all of the data we presented.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_11: Like, what about the reliability of the gospels?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_11: We have argued extensively already that, hey, we do have good reliability for the gospels.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_11: We have a lot of evidence.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_11: We have a six-hour playlist on evidence for the reliability of the gospels.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, he's kind of I kind of feel like he just kind of represented it as if we just assume that.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_04: And that's why, before returning to naturalistic explanations for the origins of Christianity, I needed to deal with this more fundamental six-hour gospel reliability case, which resulted in a two and a half hour video called Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_04: Of course, this spawned a four and a half hour livestream response from Mike and Pham.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_04: I did a 90-minute response to that called They Keep Trying to Prove the Gospels Reliable.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_04: Faith Because of Reason took up a challenge in that video with a six-hour video of his own, and I posted a 70-minute reply to that.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_04: If it's any consolation, my responses keep getting shorter.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_04: This gospel reliability side quest was 16 hours of apologist claims and about 5 hours of me responding.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_04: All of that so that I can come back to this conversation, confidently having demonstrated that the case for gospel reliability is weak.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: While Mike personally buys it, so-called the maximal data has certainly not earned the right to be considered a factual premise in any conversation about natural hypotheses.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_04: And that brings us to the title of Mike's video.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_04: He called it, Did Paul Gia accidentally concede the resurrection?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_04: That would be quite the goof on my part.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_04: Let's see.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_11: Around the 29-minute mark, I was like, I had to stop and I messaged Than.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_11: I'm like, Than, I think he accidentally made a mistake here and conceded the argument, which we'll get to.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_11: That's why I titled this as I did.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_11: I was kind of happy.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_11: I'm like, uh look forward to that.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: That I can't remember what happened at 29 minutes.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_04: Confused apologists are always hyper-focused on multimodality because they're under the mistaken impression that natural hypotheses would agree with and are attempting to explain Bible stories of group hangouts, having conversations, eating fish, and putting fingers in wounds.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think any of those things happened.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_11: Yes.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_11: Well, I actually played this a couple times and I was like, I think he kind of just conceded the maximal case here.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_11: Because he's not attempting to explain that data.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_11: Okay then.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_11: Then you don't have an explanation that can account for all the data to compete with the resurrection hypothesis.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_04: I did not, of course, concede any such thing.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's not that I don't have an explanation for quote all the data.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_04: I clearly stated that what Mike calls data isn't data.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_04: Data.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's not data.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_04: If I'd said that I don't need to explain how Santa Claus visits every home in one night, because Santa Claus isn't real, that would not somehow be conceding that Santa Claus is real.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_04: Mike confuses an event with a report about an event.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_04: If the author of Luke says people ate with Jesus, I have to explain why Luke contains that claim.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_04: I do not have to begin by granting that the meal occurred, nor do I need to grant that this is somehow rooted in eyewitness testimony.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_04: Like Mike, I had to play this clip a couple times because I couldn't believe a rational human could come to his conclusion.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_04: But here we are.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_11: There are so many points we can bring up that you need to account for.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_11: Like the automastic congruence and the reliability of the gospels.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_04: Discussed at length in the earlier reference videos.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_04: Not impressive.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_11: Like the fact that there are early reports of multimodal experiences in group settings.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_11: They are not.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: There are no multimodal group experiences in Paul's writings, which are first, nor in Mark, the first written gospel, where there are no appearances.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_04: We have to wait for Matthew or Luke, depending on which you think was written next.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: By standard dating, this is at least 40 years after Jesus died.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_11: We're not saying like Gary Habermass that all he's going to posit is Jesus died and that uh Paul experienced something and maybe Peter experienced.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_11: Like we're positing a lot more.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_11: If that's the case, it kind of sounds like you're accidentally conceding the point that the maximal case is successful.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: In order for the maximal case to be successful, you'd have to first convince your interlocutor that the maximal case has met its burden of proof.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: In my case, you clearly have not.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_04: Per the many hours of back and forth on gospel reliability.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_04: I could concede that the people who are convinced by your so-called maximal case tend to also believe in a resurrection.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_04: Is that a win for you somehow?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_04: If so, enjoy.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_11: And again, if we can clear up that issue of confusing reliability and truthfulness, because once we get over get over that, which we've already done, now we get to the actual data that needs to be explained.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_11: If you're just gonna say, I'm not gonna explain it, I don't need to, it sounds like you're conceding the maximal case, and that's what we want to hear.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_04: If I don't accept that the gospels are reliable, I have no need to treat gospel claims as reliable.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_04: This shouldn't be difficult to grasp, it certainly isn't a gotcha, and I'm a little surprised he said it out loud.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_04: Let me know in the comments if I've missed something here.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_04: And maybe I have, because Than and Mike seem quite convinced that I don't understand the nuance of what they call their maximal data case.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: But it seems like he still thinks that the max data case is us saying that when the gospels are reporting that so and so like experienced touching the wounds of Jesus or something like that, that that claim is identical to the claim of them testifying that they experience such and such a thing.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: Because the max data case is saying, hey, the gospels are reliable, therefore we have action, like we have the access to what the original witnesses testify to and what they claim to have experienced, but that is not equivalent to the to the claim of the gospels are recording what they actually experienced.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so on the max data case, we're saying, hey, we have all these claims from these reliable documents of all these people saying that they have these multi-sensory experiences.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: What explains all of this testimony of what they claim to have experienced?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: We are not trying to explain the fact that they did experience those things.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_11: And for further clarity, that doesn't mean we are granting truthfulness there, we're granting reliability.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_11: They go back to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_11: They go back to Paul.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, the that these that that's where these documents come from.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_11: Then the question arises okay, if these are reliable, are they also true?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_11: So gospel reliability, New Testament reliability is step one.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_11: Then we ask, okay, now that have we that we've established reliability, now we ask the question, are is what they're saying true?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_11: Paul has equated the two of them.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_04: If you say so, you have not completed step one, establishing gospel reliability.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_04: Therefore, you have also not gone on to step two to establish that what they're saying is true.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_04: If you want that to be two steps, that's fine.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_04: Either way, any natural hypothesis for the origins of Christianity must definitionally diverge from the gospels being true, which is the salient point, making this a distinction without a difference from my perspective.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_04: Your mileage may vary.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: While the minimal witnesses hypothesis does not rise or fall on the specific nature of the sincere but mistaken experiences had by Peter or Paul, I do think the strong candidate explanations are grief hallucinations for Peter and moral injury for Paul.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_04: As these things are clearly in the realm of psychology, and it's rare to have someone from the field engaging in apologetics.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_04: So we should definitely start with Dr.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_04: Nick's unique professional insights before we get to the resurrection.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_11: Nick Meeter here is a uh PhD psychologist, kind of an expert in this area, and so that's why we want to have him back on to look at some because Paul's gonna use a lot.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_11: One of Paul's main uh arguments is that some of the earliest followers of Jesus, namely Peter and Paul, his minimal witness hypothesis, had hallucinations of some sort.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_11: He won't say on what, uh, and that is the origin of Christianity.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_11: Oh, oh, also, Apollogio won't tell us what they experienced, what kind of hallucination it was.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_11: He's just saying they experienced something non-veridical.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, you're lacking explanatory scope and power.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_11: You're just saying like they experienced something.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_11: Great, but that's not really a complete explanation here.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_04: Correct.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_04: And as I said, the evidence is underdeterminate to be dogmatic about the nature of the non-veridical experience.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_04: Frankly, any experience you believe to be true, but is not, has identical explanatory scope and power, because the subsequent actions of that person are identical for as long as they continue to believe, regardless of original source.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_04: For example, imagine someone running for their life from a werewolf.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't matter if that person hallucinated a werewolf with no associated sensory input, or if they merely mistook something real for a werewolf.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_04: Their reaction to run is identical.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_13: A werewolf! Run for your life!
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_04: A werebear, actually.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_04: Again, as I've said, while I'm not dogmatic about it, I think grief hallucinations are a good candidate for Peter.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I mean, you have said it's plausible that one of the disciples did have a great grief hallucination.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_11: Like Peter, for example.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_04: He has?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_04: The psychologist grants this is plausible?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_04: Amazing! Thanks, Dr.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_04: Nick.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_04: This is progress.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_04: This is progress.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_04: In previous videos, Nick felt I was overstating the prevalence of grief hallucinations, objecting to a range of 30 to 60% of bereaved people.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_04: First, it is not unreasonable for Nick to have assumed that my source was the abstract of this 2015 study from Anna Castle Novo and her team, where it clearly states evidence suggests a strikingly high prevalence of PBHE's post-breavement hallucination experiences, ranging from 30% to 60% among widowed subjects giving consistency and legitimacy to those phenomena.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_04: That does sound familiar.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_04: Second, he can't know this, but long before I'd even heard of Nick Meter, I'd read in full all of the PBHE studies Nick includes in his citations, because I've been talking about this for years now.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: In my notes from that video, I had not the abstract on page 266, but in the concluding remarks on 273, which we'll get so you wanted to respond to that specifically.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that's that's a fair point.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I yeah, yeah, that that was me.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean, I think hands up and say, you know, I was making assumptions, which is unfair.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: So he's perfectly, yeah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was I shouldn't have said, oh, he read it from the abstract.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: How could I know that?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I don't have a camera in his room, do I?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: So you're a psychologist, you know how to read minds, don't you?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm a rubbish one.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: I need trained once at the Hollywood School of uh I appreciate that.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: There we go, there we go.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: I use the numbers 30 to 60 percent.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_04: What does his brand new book say?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_04: And I quote, feeling a sense of presence of the dead during bereavement is common, approximately 30 to 60 percent.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_04: You may recognize those as the very same numbers that I used.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_04: You will also note that his sentence doesn't qualify widows.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_04: Check in context.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_04: This is in a section called bereaved population, which is how you describe a general population in a bereavement study.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, the word widow doesn't appear anywhere in Nick's entire chapter on hallucinations.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_04: I got you, Nick.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_04: Now what?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_04: Now what are you gonna do?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I I quit.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: I give up.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_11: I give up.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_11: I give up.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: You're relinquishing your resistance.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: Good.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: And you are spouting a lot of psychological cliches you don't even understand.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know of anything.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: So what what do I mean?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think is the question.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I think is it okay to go back?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll I'll I'll try and explain what I mean.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So what happens is um the 30 30 to 60 percent is uh an unfortunate coincidence for Paul G.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So what Paul G is saying is oh, this uh the world's greatest psychologist uh got messed up.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's very kind of him to say that, but clearly I'm not the world's greatest psychologist.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: I presume that's with irony.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: But uh anyway, but um so so there there is the so 30 to 60 percent is um that is true, that is the range of widows.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're having so much agreement.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is excellent.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm writing my book, I'm I'm saying there's a difference in the estimates between when you have hallucinations by themselves, yeah, yeah, when they measure hallucinations just on on their own as a you know a more precise phenomenon, or whether you also include felt presence.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you do that, what you have is then you get the 30.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I so again I'm I'm not I'm not trying to to make a a summary of the whole sample again.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm just giving you a subset of that.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: So so I'm not I'm doing something quite different to what Paul Paul Agea was doing.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So so just I mean, it's it's quite petty, but I thought yeah, if it was gonna make a big deal of it, I just want to yeah, it's it's good to at least clarify that and yeah, just to make sure that we're on the same page and we're uh hopefully that that makes sense to him.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, you want to say that sense of presence shouldn't count because you think Jesus had breakfast with the disciples.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_04: Sense of presence doesn't account for fish, but is fully adequate for responding to unreliable gospels.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_04: But yes, we seem to both agree when comparing apples to apples, we get the same range.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm excited about our agreements.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Did I mention about there's a there's been a meta-analysis fair uh just a few years ago.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: So this is um, I think Lorna Stein's so so she she's done uh meta-analysis of uh essentially looking at the incidence of um hallucinations, but also delusions.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: But so it's it's slightly bigger.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: But but essentially what she's been doing is is looking at that broader, so in that sense, but there is a bit of data that we can kind of look at that and say, you know, how plausible is that?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what's quite interesting as well is um you know, when you look at the Castel Novo stuff, you know, yeah, as I said, uh yeah, the the methods there are are not the best.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you're looking at people with um problematic grief, you're looking at selected uh populations.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: So what's happened with the this more recent meta-analysis, what they've done is they've um they've looked at representative samples, their well-validated measures of of uh hallucinations, things like that.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And quite interesting, when they do the the meta-analysis, you actually get an incidence of just 2%.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_04: Naturally, I had to go find this paper.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_04: Here it is Incidence and Persistence of Psychotic Experiences in the General Population.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_04: We were speaking apples to apples for a minute there, but this study is entirely disanalogous.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_04: This 2% number measured how often anyone in the general population reports a hallucination or delusion for the first time in a given year.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_04: But we were talking about the prevalence of grief hallucinations, and this study says nothing about bereaved people.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_04: Dr.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_04: Nick cites this paper once in his book, in a section called General Population.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm gonna assume Nick knew this and wasn't intending to apply it to Peter in the chaos and ambiguity of a fluid conversation.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_04: Either way, this 2% is in no way connected to the 30 to 60% for the bereaved.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: It is not apples to apples.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_04: As these hallucinatory experiences occur during the times of excessive emotion, confusion comes about, often resulting in reports of the person believing their spouse is actually present.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_04: Contradictory views are reported in the literature, and some authors firmly believe in the true and genuine nature of grief hallucinations, arguing that hallucinatory experiences occurring out of bereavement do not describe to any definition of pseudo-hallucination.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's almost like the paper does what I said it said.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_04: And Nick is prone to cut YouTubers and researchers off before they finish their statements.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: But we still have to start with the data where it is and then extrapolate out, don't we?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think, at least from what we know here, is that um about 90% roughly uh you know have have that insight in in this context, yeah, when you look at the the biggest studies.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh obviously there are in-betweens where there's you know somewhat doubting and stuff.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: But but I think that so there's a sense that the data as it stands isn't you know that there's a lot, there's a question of whether you know this is a the sense of a true hallucination, the sense they don't know the difference between the the two.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_04: So sadly, Dr.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_04: Nick does not cite where he's getting this 90% number from.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_04: It sounds like someone making an educated guess, but I could be wrong about that.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_04: In section 20.3.4 in Dr.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: Nick's book, called Insight into Whether Hallucinations Are Real, he cites page five of this study, where Toe and his team found that of those having visual hallucinations, that 50% said it was not real, 18.8% summed out or possibly real, 6.3% strongly convinced, and 25% completely convinced.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_04: While Nick's book cites page 5, the numbers his book quotes are actually from page 3, in a similar chart where insight is 43% not real, 28.1% summed out or possibly real, 12.5% strongly convinced, and 15.6% completely convinced.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's okay because these numbers are actually worse for Nick's case than page 5.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: But Nick's book conspicuously omits the completely convinced category altogether, that would run counter to his claim that being completely convinced isn't feasible.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_04: In any case, half or fewer had confident insight that their hallucination was not real.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_04: These numbers do nothing but help my case.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's possible they they might have um not had insight about this.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, that that idea about the sense of presence, I think that that's a quite an important one.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I think again it gets to the you know, what is what data is is Paulogia trying to explain?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because essentially, um, so sense of presence is you know, obviously, is that you don't you're not you know it's not as if you you're seeing them there or hearing them or touching them.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's just just there's some sense that they might they're there in a a non-sensory way.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: So so essentially the the question is, is that a is that a way of explaining the data?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so essentially you what you got to ask first of all was would that lead Peter or whoever to believe, oh yeah, Jesus is raised from the dead, I feel his presence.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_04: Sense of presence can be intense.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_04: In Erlender Haroldson's Islamic study, one woman felt the presence of her dead mother standing at her bed and bending over her, close enough to sense breathing.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_04: She kept her eyes shut because she was sure she wouldn't see her, and still she said, I am sure she was there.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_04: In Edith Stefan and Adrian Coyle's interviews, the participants' sense of having had an extraordinary experience by perceiving the actual near-physical presence of their deceased loved ones was central to all accounts.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_04: There is a sense that the deceased loved one is temporarily present in an almost physical form, perceived partly through near sensory awareness and partly through an equally vertical intuitive knowing.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_04: I could be wrong, but Nick's incredulity seems personal and not professional.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_11: The thing is that when I when I've looked at the literature, they seem to be saying that when people have hallucinations, they think that oh, the loved one was really there, like the spirit of the loved one was really there in the room.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_11: It's not, oh my gosh, the grave opened up and he's walking around eating a fish or like I mean, like That's right, Mike.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_04: The literature shows that people think the loved one was really there in the room.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_04: That's all minimal witnesses needs from.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: Psychology.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: I'm feeling very vindicated by this response.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_04: And of course, I see no reason to think that Peter was telling people that he had fish with risen Jesus.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_04: That's a legendary detail from the not yet shown to be reliable gospels.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: Probably a polemic against those suggesting Jesus wasn't bodily risen.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: But we are at a fundamental disagreement about how to model the gospels and therefore what the data that is in need of explanation actually is.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like Nick, would you I think so?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's there.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't mention uh social contagion.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what he's relying on as well?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know if I know it is.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: I would assume that's gonna be part of it, right?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_04: In academic social psychology, cognitive science, and sociology refers broadly to the spontaneous spread of effect, attitudes, beliefs, memories, or behaviors across individuals within a group or population through interaction, observation, or communication.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, given that I think people came to believe the resurrection of Jesus through the testimony of one person, that broadly applies, though not in any way fundamentally different than Nick's idea that people came to believe the resurrection of Jesus through the testimony of twelve people.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: Aha! So we've established my proposal to sound in principle, now we're just haggling over prize.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_04: I do not require a strong sense of social contagion, of people subsequently coming to think that they also had those experiences.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_04: But that is very plausible and supportable.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe John and James had something like this.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_04: If so, they may have claimed the experiences that 1 Corinthians 15's creed suggests.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe not.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'll try to be a little bit charitable to Paul here and say I'd yeah, I I don't know if he's deliberately straw man in there.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Cause I I think what I was trying to when I first watched it, I thought that looks what it is, but I I was then thinking I got sort of my nerdy psychologist uh mode and thought, well, okay, what what might be going on here?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I see.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_04: We're done lending psychological insights to the origins of Christianity, and now we're psychoanalyzing polygia.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think I will get a bill for this?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_04: Or is this a free session?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute, before you begin, I must ask that you pay in advance.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Five cents, please.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that there's a couple of uh frameworks I wanted to quickly go through just to help to see why sometimes we might fall into these kind of interpretations when we look at the uh when we're listening to someone from a different group.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_04: Do you suppose that any of these insights will apply also to Christians listening to a non-Christian?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_04: Or does this apply only to Nick and Mike's out group?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: So social identity theory is one of the classics that's been around for you know 50 years or more.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially what what here is what we're saying is that you know our group identity is about um is where we get our self-esteem from.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: It makes us feel and so what happens is often we we we tend to see our group in a particular way, we define them in terms of norms like, well, you know, as a skeptic, we're pro-science, we're um yeah, we're we're intellectual, we, we uh yeah, we we are analytical, we're skeptical, and and whereas when and obviously what we what what we try to do to again to improve our the feelings about our our fellow group members, but also our own self-esteem is to compare uh with other groups.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_04: I see.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_04: Group identity is where we get our self-esteem from, and that might cause a person to try to improve feelings about themselves and fellow group members by painting other groups in a negative light.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_06: Do we have a theory about why internet atheists can't think in um sort of careful, sequential, logical ways?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_06: You guys are like the kings of emotional rage at Christianity, not the kings of like uh careful investigation or science or anything else.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_06: That's like the level of the new atheism.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_06: We're gonna spout complete idiotic nonsense, make things up left and right, but we want you to view us as the champions of reason and logic here.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_11: Find your way back to Christ, get involved in a church to get you out of the depressing, isolated atheists.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_10: Atheism is the unnatural belief that people have to force themselves to accept atheists have invented their beliefs to delude themselves into thinking there is no higher power to tell them how to live.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_10: So, atheist, why are you believing a delusion?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_10: And do you really believe this odd fairy tale you've told yourself?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know, man.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_04: Sounds implausible.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: The outgroup is um you know, they're anti-intellectual, they're anti-science.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a sense that when Paul hears me saying, Yeah, psychology, there's some problems with it, he's you know, that the the there's one hypothesis you might be saying, yeah, this is triggering, uh, which would kind of move on to another bit, which is kind of uh system one reasoning, is that you know often our brains have these kind of shortcuts, these sort of intuitions that says, you know, I know what's happening here.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's uh he's an in-group member, he hates science.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: So that look, he's really he's he's dipping his hat, you know, he's tipping his hand, you know, he's he's showing his hatred of psychology.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a I mean I'm I'm just I mean, this is hypothesis.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'd I don't know poor.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, that makes sense.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_04: No, no, that's what or I was merely pointing out that when the psychology supported Dr.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_04: Nick's position, he was very bullish about psychology.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_04: And when psychology supported my position instead, then suddenly psychology was full of problems.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_04: But by all means, put me on the couch.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_04: Same time next week.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_04: And that ends any insight the live stream provided from the field of psychology, the reason why Dr.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_04: Nick was here and why it could have been interesting in the first place.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_04: The rest was non-specialist apologetics.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_04: But because they are apologetics aimed at me specifically, and because I hear these questions from others as well.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_04: Let's keep going.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_11: And let's okay, they heard words.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, Jesus heard oh, Peter heard words.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_11: I uh I I heard Jesus talking to me, therefore the tomb is empty, he rose from the dead.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_11: Like, I I still am trying to figure out how this is like getting him to where he needs to be to account for the data.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_11: This is what I keep thinking of.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_11: This meme right here.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_11: It's like they had an hallucination, then a miracle happened, then they believe Jesus rose from the dead.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_11: That's what it seems like to me, is what's happening here.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_11: Where where do how do we get over that gap on this minimal witness hypothesis?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_11: It I don't I've I've not seen it explained.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: Now that Nick and Mike have granted that Peter could plausibly have had a bereavement hallucination, the incredulity shifts to how such an experience would have become a long-term commitment to a risen Jesus, the process some researchers call real making.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's a good question, and I'm glad you've asked.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_04: There were likely multiple factors at play, but we're gonna start with cultural context, which I mentioned briefly in a prior video in this exchange.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_04: The difference between monophasic cultures, like the modern West, which have a clear line between physical reality and visionary experiences, and polyphasic cultures, a huge percentage of all societies throughout history, where experiences in altered states of consciousness, such as visions, dreams, or trance states, were viewed as valid access points to divine truth rather than dismissed as mere illusions or hallucinations.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_04: First century second temple Judaism, where Jesus and Peter lived, operated as a polyphasic culture.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_04: Before we move on, I should note that Nick miscategorized what I'm talking about.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think his argument is that uh essentially um yeah, what we are you know us, yeah, us Western uh enlightened people, we yeah, we we now know the difference between um hallucinations.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: We now know people hallucinate.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, whereas you know in the back in the the first century, oh no, they they just thought um this was just resurrect.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and again, it's a kind of it it's almost drawing that you know us and us and them analogy kind of thing, really.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the sense that you know we are enlightened, we are we follow the science, they are primitive.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we're essentially going through these um essentially like Gustave Le Bon, Ernest Renan.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's there's a sense the the difficulty is I think is that um if you go back to the what they're actually saying in the 19th century, it's actually quite um it's actually quite it's not particularly um I'm sure Paul wouldn't like the politics of what they're saying.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_04: I had to look it up.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_04: Gustave LeBon and Ernest Renan were influential French writers from the 19th century, and when he alludes to their politics, Nick probably means that their ideas included racial hierarchies.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_04: But noting that many cultures, both ancient and modern, of all known races, interpret unusual experiences through their cultural expectations is not a comment on intellect.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_04: The monophasic and polyphasic distinction comes from anthropologists like Charles Laufman, John McManus, and Eugene Dequilly, who explicitly reject any split between primitive and civilized minds.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_04: And Brad Shore, who agrees that recognizing different modes of thought doesn't commit anyone to the primitive mentality myth.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_04: I would argue that between us, Nick is the more problematic by treating his own culture's filter as the human default.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_11: We are not denying that they thought dreams and visions were meaningful.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_11: That's not the issue.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: Great news.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_04: Once again, feeling affirmed.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_04: I feel validated by that.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_04: God! Not only is sudden violent death linked to an increase in the prevalence of bereavement hallucination, but research shows that violent loss triggers more intense struggles with meaning making.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_04: Interpreting the post-death encounter as a mission-extending resurrection would have been a powerful way to resolve the crisis for Peter.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_04: This might have been a factor alongside cognitive dissonance, as Dr.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_04: Nick agrees.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Is where, you know, that let's say Peter had an hallucination, and there's a sense that you might say that the cognit cognitive dissonance led him to then you know think that he really saw a bodily resurrected Jesus when actually he was just having some some vision or something like that.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that might be you you you could sort of plausibly posit that, I think.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_04: Keeping Peter's cultural context in mind, we also look to research across anthropology, psychology, and religious studies from scholars like Tanya Lerman in the concept called real making.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_04: The difference between abstractly knowing something exists, like dark energy, and feeling that thing as tangibly as mother's love.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_04: The brain uses dopamine to tag certain experiences as significant and real, and repetitious practices like prayer and reflection reinforces even brief visions to an elevated part of one's self-identity.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_04: This internal reinforcement can be supplemented by external validation.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_04: In polyphasic societies, reality is socially mediated through what anthropologists call a cycle of meaning.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_04: If any of Peter's fellow grieving followers, who shared his cultural and Jesus community expectations, gave him positive feedback, it would help him transform a private vision into a shared truth.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_04: Nothing here is miraculous, of course.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_04: Every day people misinterpret their own experiences.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_04: I think a Steel Man version of Mike's objection is that I'm leaving the process between Peter's experience and Peter's resurrection belief as a quote black box.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_04: I another suggest candidates for ingredients, but we're not publishing a black and white recipe.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_04: And of course, one simply cannot be dogmatic here, as the data is hugely underdeterminate.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_04: We can't even fully identify the combinations of motives and psychological factors for people that are alive today.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_04: But that lack of specificity is a function of having a plethora of natural options.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say I have a plethora?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_04: Not some reliance on a miracle.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_04: All that said, we do have one solid example of someone who interpreted a vision as resurrected Jesus, the Apostle Paul.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, yeah, Paul may have had a hallucination.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_11: What kind of hallucination was that?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_11: It can't be a grief hallucination.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_11: Why did it convince him that Jesus physically rose?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_04: At very least, whatever Paul experienced was vision-like, per his own words.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_04: He says he received the gospel by revelation from Jesus Christ, that God was pleased to reveal his son to him, using the word apocalypsis, an unveiling from heaven.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_04: He had visions and revelations from the Lord, with an experience whether in the body or out of the body, he did not know.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_04: By Christian theology, this could not have been Jesus in bodily form, because his second coming was to usher in judgment.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_04: Christians aren't waiting for a third coming.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_04: Paul himself affirms in 1 Thessalonians 4 that Jesus would die and rise, and that his subsequent return is in the future.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_04: In 1 Corinthians 15, 23, resurrection in the past, then when he comes, those who belong to him.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_04: If that's too ambiguous, Hebrews lays it out.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_04: So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many, and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_04: Not a third time.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_04: If what Paul saw was the body of Jesus, all of that is wrong.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_04: Paul saw a vision according to the New Testament.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_04: And Paul interpreted this vision to mean that a man rose, the thing that Mike thinks is implausible.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_04: Personally, I see no reason to prefer that God planted the vision in his head over some combinations of the many natural factors that we know put visions in people's heads.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_04: At very least, I see no reason why a natural vision would not generate the same response as a supernatural one.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_11: Well, I mean, the whole issue of social norms, like he says, well, maybe the they interpreted their hallucinations and their social norms.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_11: Great, what are they?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_11: What are they?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_11: Like, you just can't say they had social norms.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_11: What were those social norms of the time?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_11: Because we can look at social norms of the time and we can see that the messianic expectations were not a dying and rising messiah, who was also God, by the way.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_11: The social norms seem to work against this whole reading.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_04: Mike is right that there was no standard expectation that the Messiah would be crucified and rise ahead of everyone else.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_04: Indeed, the more we learn about early Judaism, the more we learn about a great pluralism of views on a great many topics, not unlike how Christianity is splintered across denominations.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_04: That said, Mike seems to be insisting that innovation cannot happen, and that unexpected ideas are somehow disconnected from cultural context.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_04: This is short-sighted and obviously incorrect.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_04: New ideas are almost always a recombination of existing ideas, and are almost always products of their unique time and place.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_04: You don't need to find hip-hop before hip-hop to explain that hip-hop came from the Bronx, from DJs developing techniques to remix their musical inspirations, from RB, blues, Jamaican, and Latin artists.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_04: One can identify the traditions, technologies, and circumstances its creators transformed.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_04: Explaining where the push for women's suffrage came from doesn't require finding women who were already voting.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: The idea that governments should answer to the people they govern was in wide circulation, and campaigners extended that principle to women.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_04: If women had to obey the laws, then women deserve to have a voice in making them.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_04: The conclusion was radical, but every piece of the argument was already on the table.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_04: So too, scholars find the ingredients of Christianity in Judaism, ready for a disciple with a vivid experience and a supportive community to try to interpret.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_04: Daniel 12 links resurrection to the vindication of the wise.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_04: 2 Maccabees 7 holds out to Jewish martyrs under torture the hope that God will raise them.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_04: Paul builds on this when he calls the church the first fruits, treating one man's resurrection as the start of the resurrection promised to everyone else.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_04: Scripture also supplied the stories of a righteous person killed by the wicked and vindicated by God.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_04: The suffering figures in the Psalms aren't called the Messiah, but the pattern was there.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_04: The wisdom of Solomon even depicts the killers looking on in shock when the righteous man is counted among God's children.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_04: Post hoc reading these passages as being about Jesus also helped his followers come to terms with the crucifixion.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_04: If his death fulfilled scripture, then it belonged to God's plan.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_04: The cross turned from a stumbling block into a foundation stone.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody would have had to combine these ideas in exactly this way beforehand.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: If we grant those two kind of building blocks or pillars, right, to grant the explanatory force of the model, wouldn't that then also predict that we would find more people who had grief hallucinations that they interpreted as resurrections?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's and we'd already have that, especially when you look at other messianic figures.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be replete with them, wouldn't you?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: You'd expect to see it all over the place.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_04: No, the model predicts resurrection interpretations only where several conditions coincide: a revered death leader, followers not wiped out with him, an apocalyptic resurrection framework, a claim of divine vindication, an experience interpreted as contact, and a community able to spread the interpretation.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_11: We have a lot of data that we know is reliable and early, like that Jesus predicted his death and resurrection.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_04: When it comes to the Gospels, Mike holds the notion that the reliability is at a document level and not at the individual claim level, and that the four documents are reliable, the debates over which you can check in the aforementioned gospel reliability side quest.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: That said, I've examined the Jesus resurrection predictions as both isolated claims and jointly in the documents, and neither methodology convinces me that historical Jesus made these predictions.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm motivated to accept these predictions, because that would actually lend significant evidence toward my hypothesis.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: If I could confidently say that Jesus was telling Peter that he would rise from the dead, that would answer a lot of objections about why Peter might interpret a non-vertical experience as a resurrection.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_04: He would have been expecting it.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_04: So, Christians, please make this case stronger.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_04: I would love to be convinced.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_04: Like that Jesus was known to be a miracle worker.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_04: Pony the circle drawer, Apollonius of Tiana, Emperor of Stasian, Russ Butin, Sapphias Ibaba, and Benny Hill also had reputations as miracle workers.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yet I don't think any of them, nor Jesus, performed supernatural miracles.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_12: It's a miracle! No.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_12: It's a miracle! No.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_11: Like that the Christian ideas of messianic expectations were unlike uh what the surrounding Jews were expecting with who they thought the Messiah was going to be.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_11: Just covered that.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_11: Like the fact that skeptics like James and Paul converted.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: Each of these men warrants a chapter in my writing project.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_04: But very briefly, in Mike's order, we have no solid reason to think James, the brother of Jesus, ever was a skeptic.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_04: The supporting verse in Mark is better translated associate than family, as the footnote in modern translations like the NIV will tell you.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_04: And the verse in John refers to his brother's unbelief, with the same word the disciples were described as sometimes having unbelief, and we don't call the disciples skeptics.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: On the flip side, we have no idea what James came to believe about Jesus, because we have none of his words.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_04: The letter with his name in the New Testament is widely considered pseudo-pickerful forgery, though even it doesn't actually illuminate his resurrection claims.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_04: Hegesippus remembers him as James the Just, respected for his righteousness, even outside the Jesus movement, while Josephus reports that law-observant Jews protested his execution.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_04: That fits with James remaining a devout Jew, even while proclaiming Jesus the Messiah.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_04: In an honor-shame culture, James turned around his family's plate, from the depth of shame to one of high honor.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_09: How convenient.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_04: As for Paul, scholars like Paula Frederickson are leading the Paulin Judaism perspective that it would be inappropriate to call his doctrinal shift a conversion in any sense of going from one religion to another.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_04: This is more akin to Calvinism versus Arminianism, or pre-trib versus post-trib.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_04: I do have extensive thoughts on how a man causing harm to one sect of his religion came to accept and transform this sect, with a likely candidate being some form of moral injury within his context and demeanor to embrace visionary experiences.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_04: But since this segment is in the context of Mike rattling things off, so this is enough for now.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_11: Like we know that the resurrection belief that Jesus physically rose from the dead was early, based on the creed and other parts of the New Testament, uh 1 Corinthians 15 that is, that this was a very early belief.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_04: Obviously, I agree the resurrection was an early belief, because I'm advocating that Peter had this experience shortly after the death of Jesus.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_04: But as for the distinction between Jesus physically rising from the dead and some kind of non-physical resurrection, your interpretation is not universally accepted.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_04: In that chapter, Paul addresses this, saying, It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_04: If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_04: Mike often quotes scholar N.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_04: T.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_04: Wright, who points out that in the Greek Old Testament, the word there covers both ordinary sighting and visions of God.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_04: So this passage alone can't settle whether an appearance was objective or visionary.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_04: And that's why Mike and his cohort reject Habermass style minimal facts argumentation that use only Paul and not the gospels.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_11: This is that I'm not a minimal witness guy or minimal facts guy.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_11: I think we should use maximal facts for the resurrection.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_11: And you're on the same page there, which is great.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_04: We've heard in prior inspiring philosophy streams that Paul alone doesn't firmly establish physical resurrection.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_14: And then in 1 Corinthians 15, 8, he says, Jesus appeared to me.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_14: Now, if you look up that Greek word for appeared, sometimes translated as was seen, is it true that that word does not necessarily indicate the physical appearance of a person?
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_11: That word by itself.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, yeah.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_11: That word by itself would not indicate that.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like, well, unless we know what the appearances were like, yeah.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_03: I get why a skeptic would think that you know, maybe this isn't a rational belief.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_03: You need the goal.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: Gospels for that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_11: And if you're like if you're going to be preaching a very early belief within a few years of Pentecost that Jesus rose from the dead, eyewitnesses are going to be around.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_11: Like there's going to be people going, wait a minute, what are you talking about?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_11: Like, I mean, like, I I it seems just very, very unlikely.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_04: Witnesses to what exactly?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_04: Who would count as a witness to a non-resurrection?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_04: As far as reliable history can tell, from the original twelve, only Peter and maybe John were out actively preaching, the rest scattered, never to be heard from again.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_04: Perhaps a detail being covered up by the passages where disciples doubt.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_04: Your very unlikely assessment seems to be based primarily on your own incredulity, to which you are entitled, but is not a transferable reason.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I guess Paul Paul would say that yeah, he's writing a book, so he'll give all the information there.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I think at the moment it's been around for a few years, hasn't it?
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it it isn't clear what exactly what data he's doing with.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because he obviously he's talking he he presumes we must know something about Peter, right?
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: And Paul.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, where are we getting that information from?
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we don't really know what the sources he's saying.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously he's discarding the the gospels completely.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's what he was saying in his in his previous video, wasn't he?
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_04: Great question.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_04: I'm taking the seven undisputed letters of Paul to be reliable.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_04: By reliable, I mean that those particular letters accurately convey the thoughts of the author.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_04: I don't assume each sentence is correct, just that it reflects Paul's thought at the time of writing.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_04: This is exactly Mike and Fan's model.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_04: But they extend that reliability across the entire New Testament.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_11: Gospel reliability, New Testament reliability is step one.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_11: Then we ask, okay, now that have we that we've established reliability, now we ask the question, are is what they're saying true?
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_04: To most of critical scholarship, this is unwarranted for the Gospels, but pragmatically likely for the seven Pauline epistles.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_04: Of course, Paul gives us a lot of information about Paul, but Galatians chapters one and two are the only real passages about Peter.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_04: So information is sparse.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_04: The single phrase mention of Cephas, whom most scholars assume is Peter, though that's not universal, in 1 Corinthians, is Paul passing along someone else's report.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_04: So should be treated as hearsay, since it is hearsay.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_04: Inadmissibles, hearsay.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_14: Well, he just said he heard it, so yeah.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_11: The Christians didn't even use resurrection language to describe just dead saints.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_11: Like they they weren't like John the Baptist, also resurrected.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's the worst possible example you could have chosen.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_04: In Mark 6:14 and Matthew 14.2, King Herod says of Jesus, This is John the Baptist.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_04: He is risen from the dead.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_04: That is why miraculous powers are at work with him.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_04: Luke 9 7 reports that some were saying that John had been raised from the dead.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_04: The Bible sure thinks that some people were using this kind of language.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, let's just talk about what just happened here.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_11: Where do I start?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_11: Okay.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_11: Why was Herod claiming that John the Baptist had risen from the dead?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_11: Because someone was walking around physically doing miracles.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_11: He was like, hey, there's an actual guy out there walking around doing miracles.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_11: That must mean someone rose from the dead.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_11: Guess what didn't happen on Paul's hypothesis after Jesus died?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_11: Somebody walking around doing miracles.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_11: It was all hallucinations.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_11: The body is still in the tomb.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_11: So, yes, if you see somebody walking around on two feet, it's like positing a resurrection makes sense.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_04: Mark says John the Baptist's disciples had already put him in a tomb.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_04: As far as we know, Herod did not personally inspect that tomb, nor were there reports that John's body was missing.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_04: This example establishes that people in that time and culture were open to individuals resurrecting as a candidate explanation.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_04: That people weren't checking tombs before making such claims, that a body in a tomb, if they had bothered to check, wasn't enough to stop a rumor, and the testimony alone was enough for people to accept claims of a resurrection.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_04: The John the Baptist example undermines standard resurrection defenses on all these fronts.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_04: But if you want to bring it up in the context of resurrection claims requiring a physical body, this single data point is insufficient to establish that as a minimal requirement.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_04: One example of a live person prompting resurrection ideas does nothing at all to rule out that a vision might not or could not evoke the same reaction.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_11: By that logic, those same people would not have posited a resurrection for Jesus.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_11: Thank you.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_11: Argument conceded.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_04: From where I'm sitting, this example is a net loss across the board for an apologist.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I will always be delighted for one to bring it to bear.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_04: So thank you.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_11: Thank you.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_11: Come again.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_11: Like this is the problem.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_11: You just can't say Peter experienced something.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_11: He convinced everyone else.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_11: Paul experienced something, but I don't need to tell you what it was.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_11: And then everything else was legendary development.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_11: That is there are so that makes so many ad hoc assumptions.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_11: Because you go start asking, okay, why was the creed, why does the early creed report group appearances?
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_11: Why do the early sermons and acts report multimodal group appearances?
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_11: Why why did they start developing these stories the way they did?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_04: Because saying Jesus appeared to groups won more converts than saying Jesus appeared to just one guy.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_04: In the world of ideas, stories, and memes in the non-internet sense, they actively change through variations, selection, and transmission.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_04: As people retell a story, they introduce changes, whether deliberately or accidentally.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_04: The versions that are more memorable, emotionally compelling, useful, or compatible with an audience's beliefs are the ones more likely to be repeated.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_04: Over time, those versions will spread while others disappear.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_04: This is a process where evangelism is the selection criterion, not historical accuracy.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_04: There's nothing ad hoc about this.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_11: Yes, Peter had a hallucination, therefore they developed the creed of 1 Corinthians 15 within a few years of Pentecost that Jesus physically rose from the dead.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_11: Like that's that's such a leap.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_04: Your personal incredulity isn't a reason this is wrong.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_04: The creed doesn't establish physical resurrection, as already noted.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_04: Your dating of 1 Corinthians 15 is based solely on vibes.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_04: All that can be confidently said is that it predates Paul's letter.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_04: That said, by my hypothesis, resurrection belief may well have begun within weeks of Jesus dying.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_04: No problem.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's those surrounding details that are the accumulated embellishments.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_11: And if that's the case, the gospels are reliable.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_11: We have the disciples and the women experiencing a a on a naturalistic hypothesis, a hallucination of Jesus that is they're hearing his voice, they're able to touch him, they're seeing too.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_11: So this is multi-sensory.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_04: The earliest report is from Paul with no hearing, no touching.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_04: The next report is Mark with no experiences at all.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_04: These tangible details are features of the later narratives only.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_11: They just explain things ad hoc way.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_11: And the point I was trying to make is if we just go with a natural thing being buried in a tomb, why are you dismissing it when all the data points to that?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_11: And you're coming up with all these ad hoc convoluted explanations to make Jesus remain on the cross or get thrown in a mass grave.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_11: You're not actually following the data.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_11: So if you can't actually follow the data when it comes to being buried, why do you think why are you why do you think I'll believe you when you say you're following the data when it comes to the resurrection hypothesis?
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_11: All the data shows Jesus was buried in a tomb.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_11: Fight me.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_11: Like it's sorry, that that's just what it shows.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_11: And to you just dismiss that away tells me you're not actually following the data where it leads.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_04: There is no active scholar today who's written more prolifically and viceusly defending the historical burial of Jesus than Dr.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_04: Craig Evans.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_04: Dr.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_04: Evans was a guest on my channel recently, since the recording of Mike's live stream.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_04: I'd strongly encourage you to watch it if this topic interests you.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_04: So, what did Dr.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_04: Evans say about the data for Jesus' burial place being remembered?
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_05: Joseph Arimathea took pity on Jesus and his family, and so had him placed in a private tomb instead of the dishonorable tomb set aside for the criminals who were executed.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_04: And when you say tomb, you're talking about like the graveyards of the condemned.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_04: But those weren't necessarily like Jodia said, those aren't necessarily like rock-cut tombs outside of town.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_05: He's right on that.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it can easily be a trench grave where your body is placed and simply covered over.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_05: There's no, in other words, no tomb as such at all, but it is a burial.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_04: Gotcha.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_04: So if we didn't have the Joseph Vermathea story, if that hadn't survived, one might imagine that Jesus was also handled the same way.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's the most likely thing that happened.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's a perfectly legitimate assumption.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_04: If not for the gospel account, the historical data is that Jesus' body would not end up in a remembered location.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_04: The only data supporting Jesus in a tomb is.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: And as you'll recall, the gospels are not reliably historical data.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_04: They are evangelical tracts.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_04: I love I love when you get on your angry reference.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_11: I think you're cute when you're angry.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_11: I'm just I'm just like, look, let's just talk about Jesus being buried in a tomb.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_11: Explain to me why you don't think that happened.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_11: Like, and then you gotta start explaining away Josephus' references to crucified victims being buried.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_11: Yo, the archaeological data of Johannin.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_11: You have to start explaining away passages in the Gospels, in Paul.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, there's the character of Pilate.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, all this stuff comes into play.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_04: None of that needs explaining away.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_04: That's all distraction.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_04: Who buried him?
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_04: Most likely Romans.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_04: And if it was Romans, he'd have been left to hang, eaten by animals, and then dumped in a ditch.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_04: If you think your case carries for Judean exception from the Roman rule, I do not, can defend why I do not, but I can also grant it for the sake of the argument, then the next most likely candidate for who disposed of the body is the family.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_04: If the family is powerful and local.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_04: The Gospels do not paint Jesus' family as local or powerful, so this option is generally set aside for Jesus.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_04: This scenario would land him in Galilee.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_04: So lastly, the final stopgap to keep the land clean was the Sanhedrin, and their instructions are clear that the body must go to one of two specially designated criminal graveyards where no veneration of any kind was allowed.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it can easily be a trench grave where your body is placed and simply covered over.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_05: There's no, in other words, no tomb as such at all, but it is a burial.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_04: The convenient wealthy benefactor option doesn't show up on the list of things that most likely happened.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_04: I see no warrant for Mike's chest thumping.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_11: I am so ready.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_11: I am so confident in this argument.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_11: Clip me.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_11: Like, seriously, come debate me in person.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_04: I'm more than ready for you guys to come on and call and give when he's advocating for the least likely thing, and I'm advocating for the three most likely things.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_04: It's not that Joseph Verimathea is outrageously implausible.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_04: It's plausible in a that's not impossible kind of way.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_04: We would expect that any explanation developed to answer why what happened to the body was not what usually happened to a body, would have some verisimilitude in the original culture if it was being used as an effective polemic.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_04: But again, if the Joseph Vermathea story wasn't in the Gospels, no historian would advocate confidently that Jesus' body ended up in a remembered location.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_04: So if we didn't have the Joseph Vermathea story, if that hadn't survived, one might imagine that Jesus was also handled the same way.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's the most likely thing that happened.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's a perfectly legitimate assumption.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_04: So once again, this is ultimately just a gospel reliability issue.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_04: Thus the gospel reliability side quest that delayed this response, which is really the main quest.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_04: Since Mike's resurrection case rests entirely upon it.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_03: You're all basically NPCs.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_03: Only Morty and I are real, so your side quests don't matter.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_04: And if I came to be convinced that the gospels were reliable cover to cover, I'd just believe what he believes, and no apologetics would be necessary.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Paul's argument just Paul Paul A's or argument is is just not you know well constructed yet.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, it might be that in his book he makes that more clear, I think.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: But at the moment it's a case of um Yeah, I think uh yeah, it it doesn't really, as you say, it doesn't deal with the data.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_04: Actually, after these five back and forth videos, I'd say that team Nick and Mike has moved a lot closer to my position.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_04: Nick has said the chance of one bereaved person having that kind of experience is not that low, that it's possible that such a person may not have had insight into whether the experience is vertical.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_04: And that cognitive dissonance could plausibly lead Peter to conclude his conclusion was real.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_04: Mike has said that he would grant that ancient people had numerous hallucinations they took as real encounters.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_04: Where Mike has not convinced me is that the gospels are reliable and should be treated as direct eyewitness accounts rather than evangelically motivated legendary development.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_04: Where I have not convinced Mike is that a man in first century Judea, dedicated full-time to an apocalyptic mission, might have an experience which prompts him to sincerely believe Jesus was raised from the dead.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sure everyone agrees that one of these propositions is far more likely than the other.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm equally sure that we won't agree on which that is.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_07: Well, I guess this is a case where we'll have to agree to disagree.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_07: I don't agree to that.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_09: Neither do I.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_11: Is Paul's reaction to this already up?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_11: Oh, it might already be.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_11: There will be a reaction to this.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_11: You mark my words, but my response to that is gonna be is like quite simply this.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_11: At this point, Paul, why don't you just come on the channel?
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_11: Why don't you just come on the channel and talk to us directly?
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_11: Let's have to do this back and forth.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_11: We'll do this, and then after that, if you want to have a conversation, we're ready.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_11: If you don't, that's on you.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_04: First, I'd be very happy to have a good faith conversation with Dr.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_04: Nick anytime on my Pology Alive channel or elsewhere, though I don't think that's what was on offer.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_04: In my most recent video in the Gospel Reliability Side Quest, I closed with this.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_04: Paul wants to call in, we will put him to the front of the line.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_04: I'd rather have a dedicated conversation time, like I've done with Mike before, and many other apologists on Apology Alive, Unbelievable, and other channels.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_04: I also offer an open invitation to move Fan or Mike to the top of the queue when I'm hosting call-in shows on the line.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_04: Would love to have you.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_04: But here's the thing a claim takes 10 seconds to make and 15 minutes to check.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_04: And checking is the entire job.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_04: This format is where the checking happens.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_04: Now, before Mike even watched the video, and therefore before he heard me say that, he left a comment.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_11: Did you see Paolo Gia's new response?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_11: Yes, um, I've not watched it yet.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_11: I saw that it was up.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_11: Actually, let me go look at that right now.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_11: Because I saw that it was up, and I said, This is ridiculous.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_11: Let's just have a debate.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_11: So I posted below and he responded.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_11: Let's see what he said here.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_11: The answer to that question is in the video.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_11: Should you decide to watch, which you're not obligated to, debates are performative, not arbiters, but good faith conversations are always welcome.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_11: Are you kidding me?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_08: Oh my gosh, let's just call it a wait, maybe, wait, wait, wait.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_02: Wait, wait, before we assume, maybe he's saying he's inviting you to a good faith discussion instead of like a debate.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's a debate.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_08: That's a that's a debate, bro.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_08: What are we talking about are we not gonna be like discussing oppositional topics?
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_08: That is a debate.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_08: Well, matter of fact, what's the definition of a debate?
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_08: I'm kind of curious.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_11: An argument is a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_11: No, it isn't?
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_11: Yes, it is.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_11: You're right.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it's it would be the same thing because I'm gonna push my case, and I'm not gonna be like I'm not gonna be like going easy, like you know, we can have I just had a good faith conversation with rationality rules when I was in London.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_11: It was a debate.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_11: That's what debates app are.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_11: We have call in shows.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_11: People call out call in and debate us.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_11: They're conversations.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_11: This just seems like we're just but the other thing, Sam.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_11: This is the other thing.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_11: We've been going back and forth with Polo Gia for years on this issue.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_11: Have we not been basically doing a very slow debate?
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, in that those back and forth videos, has he been, dare I say, performative at all?
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, so he's okay being performative in that kind of setting, but in an actual setting where I go on a press him on his ad hoc theory of how the gospels got their titles.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_11: No, no, I don't want to do that.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_11: That's being performative, bro.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_11: You've been performative this whole time with your comments where you try to make jokes, you make passive aggressive remarks.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_11: That's not being that's not being performative, but now all of a sudden you don't want to do a debate because it's performative?
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_11: That don't give me that.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_11: This is the lamest excuse I've ever heard.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_11: What do you mean?
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_11: You're you half of your videos are performative.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_11: All right, maybe not half, but you were obviously performative and throughout your videos.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_11: Like you're making you're making rhetorical jests, just jests at us.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_11: Which we take.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_11: It's like the same thing back.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_11: Like, uh, but now you don't want to debate because it's performative.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_04: For reference, I find formal debates to be tests of debating skill and rhetoric, and utterly irrelevant as arbiters of truth.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_04: On the other hand, while certainly not universally true, I have found that more productive understanding can come from good faith conversations, like those I've had with apologists and scholars like Sean McDowell, Frank Turek, Trent Horn, and Mike Lacona.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_04: I even once had such a conversation with one Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_04: I think we were when I read your blog, I think I realized we were talking past each other a little bit.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um, in that you and I didn't define reasonable the same way.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_04: Does that make sense to you?
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_04: We're we're agreeing.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_04: I've I've never thought divine hiddenness was a great argument to tell a believer that they're wrong.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_04: I've never thought that.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_04: So I think we agree.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, then I misunderstood you because I thought that's what you were saying.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_11: I admit it.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_11: I'm not gonna deny it.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_11: I am part of the problem.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_11: Two, realize that we need to have conversations like what we're having now to open us up to new evidence, to new insights, because I ain't gonna figure everything out on my own.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_11: And I'm always willing to have these types of conversations with reasonable, respectful people.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_11: Some people I won't because I'm not respectful.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_10: That's why he's not addressing me, because I'm an enemy man.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_04: I was on your channel last year.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_04: You are uh now at this point, it might take a bit for me to believe that an offer is in good faith, but I'm open, you know where to find me.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_04: Will this be the final chapter in the Dr.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_04: Nick Resurrection Psychology series?
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_13: Are the sands of time really running out for Batman and Robin?
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_04: Only time will tell.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much for watching.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_04: For more of this former Christian taking a look at the claims of Christians, tap on the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_04: Until next time.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_04: Later.