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Arguments for the Resurrection of Jesus

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In honor of Easter Sunday, the ever dwindling seperation of church & state via executive orders like "Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias", and the state sanctioned violence against alleged domestic terrorists who exhibit "...anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity", as elaborated in NSPM-7, I will be addressing the most central claim in Christianity: that Jesus was resurrected. In this post, we will look at various forms of arguments for the resurrection, addressing why they're extremely weak, showing various counter-arguments, and proposing explanations as to why it persists. Contrary to what some may think, I have no problem with people celebrating religious holidays. What I have a problem with, are bad arguments propagated by the apologetic-industrial complex. Bad arguments deserve scrutiny, regardless of the now federal insulation of the religion from critics. Pseudo-intellectual arguments need to be called out.

Steelman of the Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus

In this section, I present a steelman of the standard Christian apologetic argument for the resurrection of Jesus, reconstructed in a way that fits Walton-style argumentation theory: as a defeasible argument scheme, embedded in a dialogue context, with explicit assumptions and critical questions.

The modern apologetic version is usually something like this:

Given a small set of historical claims that are allegedly better supported than their rivals, the resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation of those claims; therefore we should accept, or at least seriously credit, that Jesus rose from the dead.

So the core form is usually an Inference to the Best Explanation argument, often supplemented by testimony, sign reasoning, argument from consequences for belief formation, and sometimes argument from authority. In Waltonian terms, this is not a deductively valid proof. It is a defeasible presumptive argument: strong if its premises and background conditions hold, but open to defeat by undercutters and rebuttals.

This argument usually occurs in a fairly specific dialogue environment. Most often it is presented as a persuasion dialogue: One party wants to persuade a doubter, skeptic, or non-Christian. The aim is not merely to explore but to shift commitment. But it often presents itself as an inquiry dialogue: “Let’s just look at the historical evidence.” “What hypothesis best explains the facts?” That matters, because rhetorically the apologetic often gains force by framing a persuasion dialogue as if it were a neutral inquiry.

The argument often works by selecting a restricted data set (“minimal facts”), inviting agreement on those facts from a broad audience, shifting the burden from “prove the resurrection directly” to “explain these facts better than resurrection”, presenting competitors as ad hoc or strained, leveraging the audience’s willingness to accept singular historical explanations on testimonial grounds, and sometimes relying on asymmetries in standards: demanding very high specificity from naturalistic alternatives while allowing the resurrection hypothesis to remain comparatively coarse-grained.

The apologetic is often tailored to secular skeptics, agnostics who respect historical method, lapsed Christians, and people already open to theism. The force of the argument changes sharply depending on the audience’s prior commitments about miracles, divine agency, biblical reliability, ancient testimony, and how much uncertainty is tolerable in historical claims. So pragmatically, the argument is rarely just about evidence. It is also about what evidential threshold should govern extraordinary historical-religious claims.

A fairly strong, representative version goes like this:

  1. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and died.
  2. Soon after his death, various followers sincerely believed that they had experiences of him alive again.
  3. The early Christian movement rapidly formed around proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection.
  4. The tomb tradition, and perhaps the empty tomb itself, is historically credible.
  5. Alternative naturalistic explanations each fail to explain the relevant facts as well as the resurrection hypothesis does.
  6. Therefore the resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation of the available historical evidence.
  7. Therefore we are justified in believing, or taking seriously, that Jesus rose from the dead.

This is the argument in ordinary prose. Now let’s formalize it.

  • Scheme A: Resurrection as Best Explanation of Historical Data

    • Major Premise: If a hypothesis explains a body of historical data better than competing hypotheses, and no rival explains the data equally well with fewer costs, then there is a defeasible presumption in favor of accepting that hypothesis.
    • Minor Premise 1: The relevant historical data include at least; Jesus’ death by crucifixion, postmortem experiences interpreted by followers as appearances, the origin and persistence of resurrection proclamation, the transformation and missionary activity of key disciples, and possibly the empty tomb tradition.
    • Minor Premise 2: The hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead explains these data better than rival hypotheses such as legend development, hallucination, conspiracy, wrong tomb, apparent death, or unknown natural causes.
    • Conclusion: Therefore, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of accepting the resurrection hypothesis.

This is the broad abductive scheme. But apologetic arguments usually rely on sub-schemes. They are usually used as a sub-argument supporting one of the premises in the main argument.

  • Scheme B: Argument from Witness Testimony

    • Premise 1: Early sources report that certain persons and groups claimed to have encountered the risen Jesus.
    • Premise 2: These reports are sufficiently early, multiple, and close to the originating events to carry testimonial weight.
    • Premise 3: The witnesses were sincere, and insincerity or wholesale fabrication is less plausible than sincerity.
    • Conclusion: Therefore, there is presumptive reason to accept that these witnesses had experiences they took to be encounters with the risen Jesus.

    Notice the conclusion is usually not yet “Jesus really rose,” but rather “they had such experiences” or “they sincerely reported such experiences.”

  • Scheme C: Argument from Effects to Cause

    • Premise 1: A striking historical effect needs explanation: the rise of the resurrection-centered Christian movement, including willingness to suffer for the proclamation.
    • Premise 2: Such effects are best explained by a powerful originating cause.
    • Premise 3: The resurrection of Jesus is the best candidate for that cause.
    • Conclusion: Therefore, the resurrection is presumptively supported as the cause of those historical effects.

    This is stronger as an explanatory argument than as a direct causal proof.

  • Scheme D: Argument from Sign

    This is less “historical” and more theological, but it often appears implicitly.

    • Premise 1: If God vindicated Jesus’ message and identity, a decisive sign such as resurrection would be fitting evidence of that vindication.
    • Premise 2: The historical evidence points to such a sign.
    • Conclusion: Therefore, the evidence supports the claim that God vindicated Jesus by raising him.

    This scheme depends much more heavily on prior theism and christological background.

To make the argument work, a surprisingly large number of assumptions must be in place. Some are explicit; many are hidden.

A. Source-critical assumptions

  1. The relevant New Testament and extra-New Testament sources preserve at least some historically trustworthy information.
  2. The traditions used are early enough that legendary accretion has not overwhelmed the core claims.
  3. Multiple attestation, enemy attestation, embarrassment, or similar historical criteria are reliable enough to be probative here.
  4. The sources are sufficiently independent in the relevant respects.
  5. The texts are not so theologically shaped that historical reconstruction becomes too underdetermined.
  6. The reports of appearances are not merely literary tropes, scriptural rereadings, or communal theological constructions.

B. Assumptions about testimony

  1. The witnesses, or the tradition bearers behind the reports, were generally sincere.
  2. Sincerity is evidentially relevant even when the content is extraordinary.
  3. Collective sincerity is more plausible than coordinated fabrication.
  4. The transmission process did not significantly distort the core content.
  5. Martyrdom willingness, suffering, or conviction is evidence of sincerity rather than truth, but sincerity is still relevant to truth assessment.

C. Historical assumptions about the data set

  1. Jesus’ death by crucifixion is historically secure.
  2. The postmortem experience reports are historically secure enough to explain.
  3. The resurrection proclamation was very early, not a late development.
  4. The disciples’ transformation requires a special explanation.
  5. The empty tomb is historically probable, or at least not too weak to include.
  6. The chosen “facts” are the right facts; omitted counterevidence is not equally important.

D. Explanatory-method assumptions

  1. Historical reasoning can legitimately compare supernatural and natural hypotheses.
  2. “Best explanation” is an appropriate standard for singular ancient events.
  3. Explanatory virtues such as scope, coherence, simplicity, plausibility, and non-ad-hocness apply to miracle claims.
  4. A miracle hypothesis is not automatically disqualified by methodological naturalism.
  5. Competing naturalistic explanations must explain the whole cluster, not just one element.
  6. The best explanation of the evidence is at least some reason to believe the event actually occurred.

E. Metaphysical and theological assumptions

  1. God exists, or at least divine action is a live possibility.
  2. God could raise the dead.
  3. God would have reason to vindicate Jesus in this way.
  4. Jesus’ life and claims make resurrection antecedently fitting.
  5. The world is not closed under ordinary natural causes.
  6. A miracle explanation can be specific enough to count as explanation rather than promissory labeling.

F. Probabilistic assumptions

  1. The prior improbability of resurrection is not so overwhelming that the historical evidence cannot overcome it.
  2. Ancient testimonial evidence can, in principle, establish a miracle.
  3. The argument’s posterior probability is not destroyed by underdetermination.
  4. It is legitimate to reason from comparative explanatory failure of rivals to positive support for resurrection.

G. Pragmatic and dialectical assumptions

  1. The audience shares enough common ground to grant the selected premises.
  2. The burden of proof can shift to the critic once the minimal facts are granted.
  3. It is fair to demand a unified rival explanation.
  4. Rational acceptance need not wait for certainty.
  5. The standards used to reject naturalistic alternatives are not selectively harsher than those used to accept resurrection.

These assumptions are not all equally necessary for every version, but some fairly large subset is. Some assumptions do the real work and should be highlighted.

  1. Hidden assumption 1: Testimony can support miracles - If one denies that ancient testimony can ever establish a miracle, the apologetic largely fails before it starts.
  2. Hidden assumption 2: Resurrection is explanatory, not merely terminological- Saying “God raised Jesus” must do more than rename the phenomenon. It must explain why there were appearance reports, why proclamation arose, why the movement persisted, and so on.
  3. Hidden assumption 3: The rivals must be itemized and comparative - The argument only works if the resurrection does better than realistic alternatives, not straw men.
  4. Hidden assumption 4: Prior worldview does not settle the case in advance- If a hearer treats miracles as impossible, the argument cannot move them. If a hearer treats divine vindication as antecedently likely, the argument becomes much easier. So worldview priors are not incidental; they are structurally central.

In Waltonian style, the scheme should be tested by critical questions. I’ll organize them by level.

A. Critical questions for the historical data set

  1. Are the alleged “minimal facts” really minimal in the scholarly sense, or are they selectively curated?
  2. Which claims are truly well supported, and which are merely often repeated in apologetic literature?
  3. How strong is the evidence for each fact separately?
  4. Are some premises much weaker than others, especially the empty tomb?
  5. Are there relevant counter-data omitted from the set?
  6. How dependent are the sources on each other?
  7. How much weight should be given to sources written by committed insiders?

B. Critical questions for testimony

  1. What exactly do the earliest sources claim: bodily encounters, visionary experiences, liturgical experiences, or later narrativized appearances?
  2. How close are the sources to direct eyewitness testimony?
  3. What is the chain of transmission between event and text?
  4. Does sincerity support truth here, or only belief?
  5. Could grief, expectancy, religious ecstasy, cognitive dissonance reduction, or social contagion explain the experiences?
  6. Are group appearance reports sufficiently specific to assess psychologically and historically?
  7. How common are sincere but false religious experience reports across traditions?

C. Critical questions for explanatory comparison

  1. What are the candidate rival explanations?
  2. Must one rival explain all the data alone, or may several ordinary causes jointly explain the data?
  3. Does the resurrection hypothesis have greater explanatory scope, or merely greater rhetorical force?
  4. Is it genuinely simpler, or is it less simple because it invokes divine agency plus many theological background commitments?
  5. Is it less ad hoc than the rivals, or more so?
  6. Does it predict the evidence, or merely accommodate it after the fact?
  7. Are apologetic critiques of rival explanations attacking weak versions rather than the best current alternatives?
  8. Could the movement’s origin be explained by a combination of bereavement visions, scriptural reinterpretation, charismatic leadership, and memory development?

D. Critical questions for miracle claims

  1. Can a miracle ever be the best historical explanation, given the ordinary aims of historical method?
  2. How should priors enter the analysis of resurrection?
  3. What would count as enough evidence to overcome the extreme antecedent improbability of a dead person returning to life?
  4. Does invoking God explain anything unless independent evidence supports divine intention in this case?
  5. Why this miracle claim rather than many rival miracle claims from other religions?
  6. If miracle reports exist in many traditions, what principle discriminates this one?

E. Critical questions about theological fit

  1. Even if something extraordinary happened, why conclude “God raised Jesus” rather than “unknown anomaly”?
  2. Does the argument depend on prior acceptance of theism?
  3. Does it also depend on prior acceptance of Jesus’ special status?
  4. If so, is the resurrection argument really independent evidence, or only confirmatory within an existing worldview?

F. Critical questions about pragmatic fairness

  1. Is the apologist requiring a complete and detailed naturalistic scenario while allowing the resurrection hypothesis to remain comparatively schematic?
  2. Is the argument shifting from “best among available options” to “probably true” too quickly?
  3. Is the burden of proof being shifted fairly?
  4. Are standards of uncertainty applied symmetrically to all hypotheses?
  5. Is the hearer being asked to grant more worldview background than the argument openly acknowledges?

Here are Walton-style critical questions attached directly to the main scheme.

For Scheme A: Best Explanation

  1. How well established is the data to be explained?
  2. Are there alternative explanations not considered?
  3. By what criteria is “best” being judged?
  4. Does the favored hypothesis explain more with fewer assumptions?
  5. Is the hypothesis independently plausible?
  6. Does it rely on controversial background commitments?
  7. Does it explain the evidence, or merely restate it?
  8. Is the conclusion stronger than the premises warrant?

For Scheme B: Witness Testimony

  1. Are the witnesses credible and competent?
  2. Are the reports firsthand or secondhand?
  3. Were the witnesses in a position to know?
  4. Could they have been mistaken despite sincerity?
  5. Was the transmission reliable?
  6. Are there motives, pressures, or interpretive lenses that distort the reports?

For Scheme C: Effects to Cause

  1. Is the effect accurately characterized?
  2. Does it really require a singular extraordinary cause?
  3. Are there ordinary sociological or psychological causes available?
  4. Could several modest causes jointly produce the same effect?
  5. Is the alleged cause proportionate to the effect?

There are many pragmatic aspects to consider when approaching this argument. The argument is usually audience-relative. The same historical package functions differently for committed Christians, open theists, secular historians, and hard naturalists. So the practical force of the argument depends heavily on prior commitments. In argumentation theory terms, that means the argument’s success depends on what is already in the commitment store of the dialogue participants. “Minimal facts” is a strategic maneuver. This is a powerful rhetorical move. Reduce the dispute to premises likely to be granted, appear methodologically modest, then argue that denial of resurrection becomes irrational. But the strategy can be challenged: Are these really the minimal agreed facts? What is the evidence there is a consensus among the relevant experts? Are they framed neutrally? Does the selected basket already privilege a resurrection-friendly narrative? The argument often mixes dialogue types. It begins as inquiry: “Let’s examine the evidence.” Then shifts to persuasion: “You now need to explain why you reject the best explanation.” Sometimes it further shifts toward commitment pressure: “If you accept these facts, intellectual honesty requires accepting resurrection.” That last move is often stronger rhetorically than it is logically. The argument is presumptive, not demonstrative. In Walton’s general style, this matters a lot. The apologetic often gains force by sounding like a near-proof, but structurally it is a defeasible presumptive case. Once understood that way, critical questioning is not special pleading; it is exactly how the scheme is supposed to be tested.

The strongest form of the apologetic is not that resurrection is directly observed, but that something historically striking does seem to need explanation, sincere postmortem belief among followers is hard to deny, and simple fraud theories are usually too crude. But more often than not, the argument goes from “followers had powerful experiences and formed resurrection belief" to “therefore God actually raised Jesus.” That leap requires heavy background assumptions about miracles, divine action, and what counts as explanation in history.

Advanced Objections

In a critical dialogue, you normally just have to probe at a few of the critical questions. If they are not answered sufficiently, you have no obligation to accept the conclusion because the argument is undercut. Various scholars have proposed more advanced objections to the argument. First, I want to look at philosopher Arif Ahmeds case against the resurrection. I find his to be one of the most compelling counter-arguments. Second, I want to look at philosopher Matt Mccormicks "The Salem Witchcraft Argument Against the Resurrection of Jesus". This argument essentially points out that the argument relies on double standards, and if applied consistently, would lead to absurd and incompatible conclusions. Third, I want to look at James Fodor's RBHS model. This is essentially an alternative explanation of the "facts". Lastly, I want to look at Dr. Richard C. Millers Mythic explanation of the resurrection. While not being an explicit counter-argument, it shows that we should not be treating the gospels as histories.

Arif Ahmed

Arif Ahmed’s case is best understood as a layered undercutting argument. He is not mainly trying to prove a particular alternative story about what happened to Jesus. He is trying to show that the standard apologetic route from “there are reports / appearances / early belief” to “therefore Jesus was bodily raised by God” breaks at several points. In the Habermas debate, Ahmed presents three lines of attack: a modified Humean argument about testimony, an argument that we should prefer suspended judgment to supernatural explanation when natural explanation is incomplete, and an argument that once supernatural explanation is allowed, the resurrection hypothesis loses any special privilege because too many unconstrained supernatural alternatives become available.

The background target here is the familiar apologetic structure: treat a set of resurrection-related claims as historically grounded, reject naturalistic rivals, and then infer that “God raised Jesus bodily from the dead” is the best explanation. Ahmed explicitly frames the apologetic target this way, and Ahmed’s own work on miracles reinforces the first part of the critique by arguing that even multiple non-collusive witnesses do not provide the kind of independence needed to overturn Hume-style skepticism about miracle testimony.

  1. Ahmed’s first move: a modified Humean argument against resurrection testimony

    Ahmed’s first point attacks the evidential transition from testimony to miracle. In the debate notes linked below, he illustrates it with thermometers: if several instruments give a reading that clashes sharply enough with what we otherwise know, the right conclusion may be that the instruments are misleading us, not that the extreme reading is true. Applied to resurrection, the analogy is that we have many cases of witnesses being mistaken or unreliable, but no ordinary experience of dead people returning bodily to life. So when testimony supports such an event, it is still more reasonable to think the testimony is in error than that the miracle occurred. Danaher reconstructs Ahmed’s thought as: if X-type sources are often unreliable, and Y-type events are never observed, then when X supports Y, error is likelier than Y. He then applies this to eyewitness testimony and bodily resurrection.

    This is closely aligned with Ahmed’s own published work. In the abstract of “Hume and the Independent Witnesses,” Ahmed says the standard objection to Hume is that many non-collusive witnesses should make belief in a miracle rational, but he argues instead that “even multiple reports from non-collusive witnesses lack the sort of independence that could make trouble for Hume.” The Stanford Encyclopedia’s discussion of Ahmed makes the same point in more technical terms: the anti-Humean move depends on a strong independence assumption among testimonies, and Ahmed argues that this assumption is plausibly violated.

    How does that undermine apologetics? It cuts directly against one of the central apologetic moves: “there were many witnesses,” or “the testimony is cumulative.” Ahmed’s point is that piling up testimonies does not automatically solve the problem, because multiple reports can still be dependent in the relevant epistemic sense. They may share the same background culture, expectations, interpretive framework, rumor network, or originating cause of error. So the apologetic cannot simply move from plurality of testimony to adequacy of evidence. On Ahmed’s view, the miracle claim starts with such a low prior probability that testimony has to do extraordinary work, and ordinary appeals to multiple attestation do not obviously do that work.

    Put another way, Ahmed is not saying “there were no witnesses” or even necessarily “the witnesses lied.” He is saying something more philosophically targeted: the reliability profile of testimony, even plural testimony, is not strong enough by itself to justify belief in a bodily resurrection. That undercuts the apologetic before the best-explanation stage really gets started, because if the testimonial base is not strong enough, the historical “facts” on which the resurrection inference depends are already weakened.

  2. Ahmed’s second move: historical inadequacy of supernatural explanation

    Ahmed’s second line of attack is more methodological. Ahmed grants, for the sake of argument, that the resurrection narrative is historically established in some strong sense: ancient people believed Jesus died and was then seen again. Even granting that much, Ahmed argues, we still would not be justified in preferring a supernatural explanation over a natural one. His reason is inductive and historical: when people have lacked natural explanations in the past, they have often reached for supernatural explanations, and later those supernatural explanations have been displaced by natural ones. Ahmed’s point is that the claim that in cases where there is currently no good natural explanation, it is still more likely that one will eventually emerge than that a supernatural explanation is true.

    This is important because it targets the apologetic move from “natural explanations fail” to “therefore resurrection.” Ahmed says that failure of current naturalistic rivals does not license a supernatural conclusion. At most, it licenses suspension of judgment. The argument is effectively anti-god-of-the-gaps: explanatory failure on the natural side is not positive confirmation of a miracle. Danaher’s reconstruction makes this explicit, and his summary notes Ahmed’s example of mass hallucination claims: even if we currently do not understand some such mechanism, that epistemic gap still does not make divine resurrection the most reasonable conclusion.

    So this undermines apologetics by attacking the structure of inference to the best explanation. Many resurrection defenses work by running through naturalistic rivals—fraud, hallucination, wrong tomb, legend, and so on—and arguing that all are inadequate. Ahmed’s reply is that “none of the current naturalistic stories is fully satisfying” does not imply “the miracle happened.” It implies only that the evidential situation is unresolved. His challenge is methodological: why should historians or philosophers move from unresolved anomaly to supernatural explanation, when the broader history of inquiry teaches the opposite lesson?

    Notice also that this criticism is stronger than a mere preference for naturalism. It is an argument about the track record of explanatory practice. Supernatural explanations, Ahmed suggests, have not won the long game in inquiry. Because of that, when the apologist says “I have ruled out the ordinary explanations,” Ahmed’s answer is not “then I accept a different ordinary explanation today,” but rather “you still have not earned the right to claim a miracle.”

  3. Ahmed’s third move: unconstrained supernatural explanations

    Ahmed’s third line is, in some ways, the sharpest. Ahmed grants even more to the apologist: suppose there is no possible naturalistic explanation of the resurrection narrative. Even then, he argues, it still does not follow that the Christian resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation. Why not? Because once you permit supernatural explanation, you lose the empirical constraints that had been used to rule out the naturalistic alternatives. Then a wide range of supernatural alternatives become available: a divinely induced hallucination, deception by a supernatural being, or some other paranormal scenario. Ahmed’s conclusion: if there are no probabilistic constraints on good supernatural explanations, then there is no reason to prefer bodily resurrection over rival supernatural stories that fit the same reported facts.

    This is a devastating point against a certain apologetic style. Often the apologist says: mass hallucination is implausible because we know too much about minds and bodies for that to be realistic; therefore something supernatural must have happened; therefore resurrection. Ahmed’s response is that this reasoning quietly relies on naturalistic constraints to reject the rivals, but then abandons those same constraints when introducing the favored supernatural hypothesis. If supernatural causes are allowed, then a supernatural hallucination, supernatural deception, or other paranormal interference should also be live options. The resurrection hypothesis no longer wins by default.

    In argument-theory terms, this is an undercut of the “best explanation” criterion itself. Ahmed is saying that the explanatory space is no longer well-regulated once supernatural hypotheses are admitted. If the space is unconstrained, then appeals to explanatory superiority become unstable. The apologist cannot simply say “natural explanations are impossible, so resurrection is best,” because “best” presupposes a field of competitors governed by shared standards. Ahmed’s point is that supernatural competitors are too plastic unless one brings in additional theological premises not supplied by the bare historical evidence.

  4. How Ahmed’s case maps onto the standard apologetic argument

    First, he undercuts the move from sources and reports to a strong evidential base for a miracle, by arguing that testimony—even multiple testimony—does not have the right kind of independence or force for an event this extraordinary. That targets the apologetic reliance on witness reports, postmortem appearances, and cumulative attestation.

    Second, he undercuts the move from “no good natural explanation currently available” to “therefore miracle.” That targets the apologist’s elimination strategy. Ahmed thinks the proper conclusion from explanatory failure is usually agnosticism, not supernatural affirmation.

    Third, he undercuts the move from “some supernatural explanation” to “the Christian resurrection explanation.” That targets the apologist’s final narrowing step. Even if the discussion somehow got past the first two hurdles, Ahmed argues that the resurrection hypothesis would still not uniquely emerge without further background theology.

    So the overall shape of Ahmed’s case is not primarily rebutting one premise but dismantling the inferential pipeline:

    • testimony does not get you far enough,
    • lack of natural explanation does not entitle supernatural conclusion,
    • and even a supernatural conclusion would not single out resurrection without extra assumptions.

A further theme, made explicit in the Stanford Encyclopedia discussion, is that miracle evaluation is highly sensitive to background beliefs, especially about whether God exists and whether miracles are the sort of thing that would occur. The SEP notes that evaluation of miracle claims depends heavily on broader evidence about theism and atheological arguments. That is relevant to Ahmed because it shows why he resists the apologetic presentation of resurrection as a self-contained historical argument. On his view, you do not get to bracket worldview so easily. The prior improbability of resurrection matters, and the evidential force of testimony must be assessed against that backdrop.

That is one reason Ahmed’s debate strategy was so effective against a “minimal facts” style approach. Minimal-facts apologetics often tries to make the case look like a neutral historical inference from a limited agreed data set. Ahmed’s philosophy of miracles pushes back: the question is not merely whether some first-century people reported extraordinary things, but whether such reports can rationally overcome the background improbability of a miracle. His answer is largely no, or at least not by the sort of evidence apologists usually offer.

Therefore, even if you grant the apologist a surprisingly large amount—sincere witnesses, multiple reports, a puzzling historical origin for resurrection belief, maybe even the inadequacy of current naturalistic stories—you still have not crossed the epistemic gap to “God raised Jesus bodily from the dead,” because testimonial evidence for miracles is weak relative to the prior improbability, absence of current natural explanation supports suspension rather than miracle, and once supernatural explanation is permitted, the resurrection hypothesis is not uniquely selected.

Ahmed is especially strong against apologists who argue in this pattern:

  1. many witnesses reported appearances,
  2. the witnesses were sincere,
  3. known natural explanations fail,
  4. therefore resurrection is the best explanation.

Ahmed has a targeted objection at each stage. Sincerity is compatible with error; many witnesses are not automatically evidentially independent; failure of current natural explanations does not support miracle; and “supernatural” is too unconstrained to yield Christian resurrection specifically.

McCormick’s Salem Witchcraft Argument

McCormick’s Salem Witchcraft Argument is not mainly an attempt to prove what happened in Salem. It is a parity argument about evidential standards: if a Christian accepts the resurrection on historical grounds, then—McCormick argues—they are under pressure to accept other supernatural claims, including Salem witchcraft, on comparably or even better evidence. His book frames the challenge exactly this way, asking: “How can we accept the resurrection but reject magic at the Salem witch trials?” and devoting a chapter to “You Already Don’t Believe in Jesus: The Salem Witch Trials.”

The core of the argument is usually reconstructed in four steps.

(1) the evidence for real witches at Salem is better than the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection; (2) that Salem evidence is still not enough to justify belief that there really were witches; (3) if stronger evidence does not justify belief in one supernatural claim, then weaker evidence does not justify belief in another; (4) therefore, the evidence is not sufficient to justify belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Rauser also quotes McCormick’s own wording that “the evidence we have that there were real witches in Salem is vastly better than the evidence we have for the magical return from the dead by Jesus.”

So the deepest point is this: McCormick is accusing resurrection apologists of a double standard. In ordinary life, most Christians reject claims about witches, curses, magic, apparitions, demonic affliction, and related supernatural stories from other historical settings. But when they turn to the resurrection, they treat ancient testimony, communal conviction, reports of extraordinary events, and religious interpretation as sufficient. McCormick’s claim is that this asymmetry is not rationally defensible if the resurrection is being defended as a historical inference rather than accepted by faith or revelation.

To see how the argument works, you have to notice what McCormick thinks is true about Salem. Salem is not a flimsy anecdote. It is a heavily documented historical episode with indictments, examinations, confessions, courtroom proceedings, named accusers, named accused, official actions, and a dense record compared with the sparse and partisan textual evidence available for the resurrection. The Library of Congress notes that more than 150 people were indicted, 20 were executed, and courts admitted “spectral evidence,” meaning testimony that the accused appeared in visions or apparitions and harmed victims from a distance. Smithsonian likewise describes the social panic, confessions, accusations, and intense religious background that fueled the trials.

That documentary richness is crucial for McCormick. He is not saying Salem witchcraft is true. He is saying that if one were merely counting quantity and immediacy of historical data, Salem looks at least superficially better placed than the resurrection: more records, more witnesses, more institutional documentation, more contemporaneous social uptake, more concrete named participants, and more visible public consequences. Yet almost no modern Christian concludes that Salem provides good reason to believe that women were actually flying, casting spells, or afflicting victims by supernatural means. That discrepancy is the lever of his argument.

McCormick’s argument therefore targets a specific apologetic move: “the evidence is good enough for a miracle.” He asks whether apologists would apply the same evidential threshold outside Christianity. If they would not accept Salem witchcraft on the basis of witness reports, confessions, social transformation, and a rich documentary record, why should they accept the resurrection on evidence that is in some ways thinner, later, and more theologically mediated? His point is not “Salem and Easter are identical,” but “you need one principled standard for both.”

This undermines apologetic arguments in several ways.

First, it attacks the apologetic appeal to multiple testimony. Resurrection apologists often emphasize that many people believed they saw the risen Jesus, that traditions of appearances emerged early, and that the movement formed around those claims. McCormick’s Salem comparison replies: many people in Salem also testified, accused, confessed, and interpreted events through a live supernatural framework. But modern people usually treat that as a cautionary example of error, panic, suggestion, and bad evidential practice rather than as confirmation that witchcraft really occurred. So mere multiplicity of testimony is not enough.

Second, it attacks the apologetic appeal to sincerity. Apologists often say the disciples were sincere, transformed, and willing to suffer, so fraud is implausible. McCormick’s Salem analogy shows that sincerity does not settle truth. People at Salem were sincere too: accusers, confessors, magistrates, clergy, and community members often appear genuinely convinced. But sincerity plus intensity plus public consequence did not make witchcraft real. So sincerity may distinguish fraud from honest belief, but it does not carry one from honest belief to actual miracle.

Third, it attacks the apologetic use of historical best explanation. A resurrection defender might say, “I am not naïvely trusting testimony; I am inferring the best explanation of the available facts.” McCormick’s reply is that Salem is exactly the sort of case that should make us suspicious of that move. Salem also had a body of data that, within its original worldview, seemed to call for a supernatural explanation. The afflicted reported attacks; Tituba confessed; accusations spread; courts acted; ministers debated. Yet we now think the better explanation lies in social tension, suggestibility, fear, religious zeal, coercion, and institutional failure—not in actual witches. That is meant to show that supernatural “best explanations” can look compelling inside a credulous culture and still be false.

Fourth, it attacks the apologetic attempt to isolate Christianity from the broader class of miracle and paranormal claims. McCormick’s book explicitly broadens the challenge to include questions about the paranormal, miracles, and the reliability of supernatural belief generally. The Salem argument functions as a bridge case: it is close enough to home culturally that Christians readily reject it, but close enough in structure to the resurrection case that rejecting one while accepting the other demands a non-ad-hoc explanation.

In argumentation-theory terms, McCormick is using something like an argument from consistency / parity of standards. The scheme is: you reject supernatural claim A despite strong historical testimony; claim B is supported by evidence no better, and perhaps worse; therefore you should also reject B unless you can show a relevant disanalogy. The burden then shifts to the resurrection apologist to identify a principled difference between the cases that is not just special pleading for Christianity.

A steelmanned version of McCormick’s challenge would say that the relevant parallel is not “witches are just like resurrections.” It is this narrower point: both involve communities already disposed to supernatural interpretation, testimonial and confessional evidence, high emotional and religious salience, and public claims of extraordinary agency. Salem shows that even abundant testimony in a charged religious environment can produce false supernatural conclusions. Therefore the Christian apologist must do more than simply point to testimony, conviction, and community effects.

What assumptions does McCormick rely on? The biggest is that evidential standards should be uniform across cases. Another is that the Salem case is indeed at least as well documented, in the relevant historical sense, as the resurrection case. A third is that most rational people agree the Salem evidence is insufficient for belief in real witchcraft. If those three assumptions hold, the anti-resurrection conclusion follows with considerable force.

The main way it undermines resurrection apologetics, then, is not by supplying a complete naturalistic alternative to Easter. It undercuts the epistemic entitlement of the apologetic. McCormick is saying: before you get to “best explanation,” “minimal facts,” or “the disciples wouldn’t die for a lie,” show that your standards would not also commit you to believing in other rejected supernatural claims. Salem is the test case meant to expose selective skepticism.

RBHS Model

Fodor’s RBHS/RHBS model is a composite naturalistic explanation designed to undercut the apologetic claim that the resurrection is the best explanation of the “minimal facts.” In his own debate notes, he says his goal is not to prove Jesus did not rise, but to show that the historical evidence does not by itself warrant belief in the resurrection, because his model is a better explanatory framework than the standard apologetic hypothesis.

The name stands for Reburial, Hallucination, Biases, and Socialisation. Fodor describes the four main assumptions this way: Jesus’ body was removed from the tomb before the women discovered it; some followers had individual hallucinations of Jesus; reports of the empty tomb plus those early appearances triggered collective experiences among the disciples; and memory plus interpretation were later reshaped by psychological and social forces into more impressive and more consistent resurrection traditions.

That structure matters because Fodor thinks apologists often attack naturalistic hypotheses unfairly, one piece at a time. A hallucination theory alone will not explain the empty tomb; a body-removal theory alone will not explain the appearances. His response is: that is exactly why a multi-factor model is needed. The model is meant to explain the rise of resurrection belief through several interacting ordinary processes rather than a single neat substitute miracle.

  1. Reburial

    The R in the model is reburial. Fodor’s idea is that Jesus’ body was removed from the original tomb before its later discovery by his followers. In his debate notes he presents this as one of the central assumptions needed to explain the empty tomb without appealing to resurrection. The point is not necessarily that we can now recover exactly who moved the body and why, but that body relocation is a familiar human event and therefore a lower-cost assumption than divine intervention.

    This first component targets the apologetic use of the empty tomb. Apologists often argue that any adequate theory must explain why the tomb was empty. Fodor grants that, but denies that an empty tomb points strongly toward resurrection. Reburial is meant to detach “empty tomb” from “miracle.” If there are ordinary ways a body could have left the tomb, then the empty tomb ceases to be a uniquely resurrection-friendly datum.

    Notice how this functions dialectically. Fodor does not need to prove a specific reburial story beyond doubt. He only needs to show that body disappearance is not such an extraordinary fact that resurrection is the best explanation by default. That weakens one of the main apologetic pillars without yet saying anything about the appearances.

  2. Hallucination

    The H is hallucination, though “visionary or hallucinatory experiences” is the broader point. In his earlier HBS formulation, Fodor says he is trying to explain why followers honestly believed they had seen the risen Jesus, using documented psychological and sociological processes rather than fraud. He explicitly says the appearances do not need to be dismissed as lies; the disciples may really have believed they saw Jesus.

    This is central to how his model undermines apologetics. Many resurrection defenses rely heavily on the disciples’ sincerity: they were convinced, transformed, and proclaimed that Jesus appeared to them. Fodor’s answer is that sincerity is compatible with non-veridical experience. If grief, religious expectation, trauma, guilt, and related factors can produce vivid experiences interpreted as encounters with the dead, then the disciples’ conviction no longer points straightforwardly to a bodily resurrection.

    He also argues that the apologetic emphasis on eyewitness testimony is overstated. In “Why Eyewitness Testimony is not Enough,” Fodor says the core issue is not whether some disciples believed they saw Jesus, but what we can infer from emotionally charged testimony about anomalous events. His claim is that such testimony is not reliable enough to justify the miracle conclusion.

  3. Biases

    The B is biases. Fodor means cognitive and memory-shaping processes that affect how experiences are encoded, recalled, interpreted, repeated, and harmonized over time. In his debate notes he says the memories and understanding of the experiences were reshaped by psychological and sociological forces so as to become more consistent and impressive. In the HBS summary he similarly emphasizes that reconstructive memory, rehearsal, and interpretive framing can alter how anomalous experiences are later described.

    This component is especially aimed at the apologetic move from “there were appearance experiences” to “the later gospel descriptions accurately preserve bodily, public, concrete encounters.” Fodor does not need to deny that there was an experiential core. His point is that the form of the reports may have evolved. An initially ambiguous visionary experience can, through retelling and schema-driven recall, become narratively richer and more physically concrete.

    That matters because many apologetic arguments quietly rely not just on the fact of belief, but on the supposedly robust content of that belief: bodily meetings, group appearances, tactile encounters, meals, extended conversations. Fodor’s bias component is meant to loosen the inference from later detailed narratives back to the earliest experiences themselves.

  4. Socialisation

    The S is socialisation: group dynamics, mutual reinforcement, communal expectation, scriptural interpretation, storytelling, and the social consolidation of belief. Fodor says that reports of the empty tomb and the first appearances triggered a series of collective experiences among the disciples, after which broader psychological and social forces reinforced and reshaped the tradition. In the HBS summary he also argues that the same broad processes can account for many miracle and paranormal claims across religions.

    This is how he addresses the apologetic emphasis on the origin of resurrection belief and the emergence of the Christian movement. Apologists often present the movement’s explosive rise as requiring a dramatic cause. Fodor’s response is that new religious movements do not need a genuine miracle to form around sincere, socially amplified experiences. Group reinforcement, shared interpretation, and escalating testimony can produce stable conviction and durable tradition without anyone deliberately deceiving anyone else.

    Socialisation is also how he handles collective appearances. Apologists frequently object that hallucinations are private and cannot explain group experiences. Fodor’s answer is not a crude “mass hallucination” claim in isolation. It is that individual experiences, expectation, contagion, storytelling, ritual reinforcement, and social convergence can together generate a tradition of shared appearances. The model is cumulative, not one-step.

Fodor’s central comparative claim is that RBHS is superior because it relies on assumptions drawn from shared background knowledge in history, psychology, and sociology, whereas the resurrection hypothesis needs controversial theological assumptions. In his debate notes he says the resurrection hypothesis, if it is to explain all the facts, requires at least that God exists, that God had reason to raise Jesus, and that Jesus had reason to appear to his disciples afterward. He says those assumptions are not part of our common background knowledge and cannot be evaluated non-question-beggingly.

That is one of Fodor’s most important moves. He is not just offering a rival story; he is contesting the rules of explanatory comparison. Apologists sometimes say resurrection is “simpler” because it is one sentence: God raised Jesus. Fodor replies that explanatory simplicity is not about verbal shortness. It is about how many new and controversial assumptions the explanation imports. By that standard, he argues, a naturalistic multi-part model can still be preferable if its parts are independently familiar and well-attested in ordinary human life.

He also argues that his model has broader explanatory scope because the same kinds of processes can explain many miracle and paranormal reports in many religions, whereas the resurrection hypothesis only explains this one case if one already grants a Christian theological framework. In his HBS summary, he explicitly says the model’s scope is broader and its assumptions less controversial.

How RBHS undermines the apologetic case point by point:

  • Against the empty tomb, RBHS says: even if the tomb was empty, ordinary body removal is a live possibility, so emptiness is not strong evidence of resurrection.
  • Against the appearance reports, RBHS says: sincere postmortem experiences are psychologically plausible without requiring that Jesus was bodily alive.
  • Against the appeal to eyewitnesses, RBHS says: testimony about emotionally intense anomalous events is less reliable than apologists imply, especially once memory distortion and rehearsal are considered.
  • Against the origin of resurrection belief, RBHS says: movements can arise from an interaction of visionary experiences, social reinforcement, scriptural re-interpretation, and communal memory shaping. A miracle is not required to explain belief formation.
  • Against the best-explanation claim, RBHS says: the resurrection hypothesis only looks better if one discounts ordinary psychological and social mechanisms and quietly grants theological premises about God’s intentions. Once those are made explicit, the apologetic - comparison is less favorable to resurrection.

What makes Fodor different from simpler skeptical objections is that he is not satisfied with saying only “hallucinations” or only “legend.” His model is deliberately hybrid. He thinks the resurrection narratives are too historically complex to be explained by one natural factor alone. That is why he combines body removal, individual experiences, group dynamics, memory distortion, and social development. That makes the model more resilient against a common apologetic tactic: isolating one naturalistic proposal and showing that it does not explain everything. Fodor’s answer is that historical events often have multi-causal explanations, and the rise of Christianity should not be expected to reduce to a single elegant natural cause.

The heart of Fodor’s case is this: the historical evidence may well support that Jesus died, that his followers came to believe he appeared to them, and that resurrection belief arose early. But those facts do not force the resurrection conclusion, because a naturalistic package drawing on known human processes can explain them at least as well, and with less controversial background commitments than “God raised Jesus from the dead.”

So RBHS is best seen as a direct challenge to the apologetic inference, not necessarily a claim to final certainty about exactly what happened. Fodor says this explicitly: even if his model is a superior explanatory framework, that does not by itself mean it describes precisely what occurred. Its role is to show that the resurrection argument is weaker than apologists claim.

Richard C. Miller: The Gospels are not Histories

Richard C. Miller’s case is quite different from Ahmed’s or Fodor’s. He is not mainly arguing, “Here is the most likely natural chain of events that produced resurrection belief.” Instead, he argues that the resurrection narratives themselves belong to a known ancient literary-mythic pattern: the pattern of divine translation, exaltation, disappearance, heavenly assumption, and post-mortem vindication that appears across Greco-Roman and Mediterranean literature. In Miller’s own summary of the thesis, the earliest Christians would not have regarded the resurrection stories as straightforwardly literal history; they would have recognized them as instances of a widespread trope of divine translation.

That is the heart of his model. The issue is not merely whether there were some parallels in antiquity. Miller’s stronger claim is that the gospel resurrection-and-ascension accounts make use of “extensive and unmistakable structural and symbolic language” from Mediterranean “translation fables,” especially patterns associated with figures like Heracles and Romulus. In his framing, these story forms were used to elevate Jesus to the level of heroes, demigods, and emperors in the symbolic world of the Roman Mediterranean.

So Miller’s explanation of the resurrection is best described as a mythic-literary explanation, not primarily a psychological one. He is saying that early Christian authors wrote Jesus into a culturally available narrative form. M. David Litwa’s review usefully captures Miller’s own scholarly framing here: early Christians adapted the “semiotic and literary tropes and conventions of deification” already widespread in Mediterranean culture, and this should be understood through literary mimesis rather than crude one-to-one borrowing.

  1. Miller’s core thesis

    Miller’s thesis has three linked parts.

    First, the ancient Mediterranean world already had a recognizable stock of stories about remarkable persons who were taken up, exalted, translated, or otherwise moved into divine status. Miller explicitly calls these “translation fables,” and his work argues that early Christian resurrection accounts should be read within that broader literary world.

    Second, the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension are not just superficially similar to those stories. Miller argues that they reproduce the same kinds of narrative structures and symbolic moves seen in stories of heroes, rulers, and divinized figures. The book description specifically says the Jesus narratives apply structural and symbolic language common to such fables, especially those of Heracles and Romulus.

    Third, because these literary patterns were widely intelligible in the ancient world, the resurrection narratives were meant to signal Jesus’ exalted status, not to function primarily as modern-style historical reportage. On Miller’s view, the stories exalt Jesus by situating him in the same symbolic register as divinized heroes and emperors.

    That is why his position is more radical than many ordinary skeptical reconstructions. He is not merely saying “the disciples had visions” or “legends developed later.” He is saying that the resurrection narratives are mythic compositions in a recognizable ancient mode.

  2. What “divine translation” means in Miller’s model

    For Miller, “translation” does not just mean “going somewhere.” It is the ancient trope in which a figure is removed from ordinary mortal status and relocated into divine or immortal status. The figure may disappear, be taken up, leave no ordinary corpse behind, appear afterward, receive cultic recognition, or be re-described as vindicated and enthroned. Miller’s earlier article, “Mark’s Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity,” shows that this framework was already central to his work well before the 2015 book.

    In that framework, the resurrection is not best understood as a literal biological event to be verified by historical method. It is a culturally intelligible exaltation narrative. Miller’s abstract states this directly: early Christians would have recognized the resurrection story as fictitious rather than historical in nature, because it belonged to the common mythic tradition of divine translation.

    That word “fictitious” is important and easy to misread. Miller is not necessarily saying the authors were simply inventing random falsehoods with no relation to any underlying movement, death, or experience. His claim is that the narrative form itself is mythic-literary, and that this is how ancient audiences should be expected to read it. Litwa’s review highlights that Miller’s model is about the use of a shared Mediterranean symbolic system, not simplistic copying.

  3. The role of Greco-Roman parallels

    A central plank in Miller’s case is the comparative argument. He gathers a large field of ancient parallels and says that Jesus’ resurrection and ascension belong in the same literary ecosystem. The book’s own description singles out Heracles and Romulus as especially important archetypes. Litwa’s review likewise emphasizes that Miller’s project is comparative and semiotic: Christian and Hellenic “translation fables” are being compared through the common symbolic grammar of Mediterranean literary culture.

    This is meant to undermine apologetics in a very specific way. Apologists often present the resurrection stories as sui generis—a unique eruption of divine action into history. Miller replies that they are not narratively unique at all. They look like the kinds of stories ancient people already told when they wanted to mark someone as divinely vindicated, immortalized, or exalted. If that is right, then the gospel narratives lose a lot of their force as evidence of a one-off historical miracle. Instead, they begin to look like genre-shaped sacred narratives.

    So his comparative work is not just ornament. It is the mechanism by which he undercuts the apologetic inference from text to event. If a text strongly resembles a recognized mythic form, then the evidential burden shifts: why should we read it as literal history instead of as another example of that form?

  4. How Miller thinks early Christians would have understood the stories

    One of Miller’s most provocative claims is not only that modern scholars should see these stories as mythic, but that earliest Christians themselves would not have treated them as literal history in the modern sense. The abstract and publisher descriptions both state this plainly: the earliest Christians would have recognized the resurrection accounts as divine-translation narratives rather than literal historical accounts.

    This is a strong claim, and it matters because it blocks a common apologetic retreat to “well, whatever later Christians thought, the earliest community meant these literally.” Miller is saying the opposite: the literary code itself would have signaled a different mode of reading. Within that ancient symbolic environment, such stories functioned to articulate identity, status, and legitimacy rather than to satisfy later positivist demands for eyewitness historiography. Litwa’s review supports this framing by saying Miller treats these narratives as products of a shared cultural discourse and literary mimesis.

The standard apologetic argument tends to proceed like this: there are early reports of resurrection, postmortem appearances, perhaps an empty tomb, and the rise of a movement centered on resurrection belief; the best explanation is that Jesus really rose bodily. Miller attacks that argument at the level of genre and narrative classification.

He is saying: before you ever get to “best explanation,” you need to ask what kind of texts these are. If they are instances of a known mythic-literary trope, then treating them as straightforward historical evidence for a miracle is already a category mistake. On his view, the resurrection narratives were shaped from the outset by a literary program of exaltation, imitation, and symbolic competition within the ancient Mediterranean world.

So Miller undercuts apologetics in at least four ways. First, he attacks the assumption that the resurrection stories are historical reports first and theological interpretation second. For him, the theological-literary shaping is not secondary embellishment but constitutive of the stories themselves. Second, he attacks the apologetic use of uniqueness. If Jesus’ resurrection stories belong to a broad family of translation fables, then their extraordinary features no longer point uniquely to a miracle. They may instead indicate membership in a recognized literary pattern. Third, he attacks the apologetic appeal to the empty tomb and appearances as though these were neutral brute facts. His earlier article title alone shows that he reads Mark’s empty tomb through the lens of translation fables; that means the empty tomb motif itself may be literary-symbolic rather than straightforwardly evidential. Fourth, he attacks the apologetic claim that resurrection belief must have arisen from some astonishing empirical event. Miller’s alternative is that resurrection discourse could arise from cultural, literary, and symbolic resources already at hand. The movement did not need a literal bodily return to life in order to produce exaltation stories of this kind.

What makes Miller especially important in debates like this is that he is pressing a methodological priority question: Do we first ask, “What event best explains these reports?" Or do we first ask, “What sort of narratives are these?”

Apologists often begin with the first question. Miller insists on the second. If the texts are mythic-exaltation narratives, then the apologetic inference is weakened before explanatory comparison even begins. In that respect, Miller is not primarily offering a rival event-hypothesis like Fodor’s. He is offering a reclassification of the evidence.

That makes his case especially disruptive to “minimal facts” apologetics. Minimal-facts approaches often bracket literary questions and focus on allegedly recoverable historical claims. Miller suggests that this bracketing is illegitimate, because the very narratives from which those “facts” are extracted are already deeply coded by mythic conventions.

It would be a mistake to reduce Miller to the old internet-level claim that Christians just “copied pagan myths.” That is not his scholarly framing. Litwa’s review stresses that Miller rejects simplistic borrowing models and instead uses a more sophisticated account of mimesis, emulation, and shared symbolic systems in Mediterranean culture. That difference matters because it makes his argument stronger. He does not need to show direct plagiarism or one-to-one dependence. He only needs to show that early Christian authors were composing within a widely shared mythic-linguistic world, where stories of divine vindication and heavenly translation already had established forms and meanings. If that is right, then Jesus’ resurrection stories can be explained as culturally conventional compositions, even without direct copying from one single source.

So in conclusion:

Ancient Mediterranean cultures already possessed well-known story patterns for divinized heroes, rulers, and extraordinary figures who disappeared, were translated, appeared afterward, or were exalted. Early Christian authors used those same narrative conventions to portray Jesus as divinely vindicated and elevated. Therefore the resurrection narratives are best interpreted not as transparent reports of a miraculous event, but as mythic-literary constructions designed to proclaim Jesus’ divine status.

That is how his model undermines the apologetic argument. It says the resurrection stories are poor candidates for historical miracle evidence precisely because they bear the marks of a known exaltation genre.

Miller is most damaging to apologists who rely on:

  • the supposed narrative uniqueness of the resurrection stories,
  • the empty tomb as a straightforward historical datum,
  • the assumption that the gospel accounts are basically reporting what happened,
  • and the assumption that the rise of exalted Christology required a literal bodily resurrection.

His work pressures all four. If the empty tomb itself belongs to a family of translation fable motifs, if postmortem appearance scenes resemble known exaltation narratives, and if ancient audiences would have recognized these codes, then the apologetic use of the narratives as near-journalistic evidence becomes much harder to sustain. ([JSTOR][2])

The Fallacy of Understated Evidence

Here is my not-so-novel contribution to the debate.

The apologetic case for the resurrection is not just weak, but epistemically malformed: it violates something like the principle of total evidence by magnifying a small, low-quality evidential subset while minimizing or omitting counterevidence and evidence that fits rival explanations better. The principle of total evidence is a standard idea in confirmation theory: rational assessment should be based on the relevant evidence one has, not a hand-picked subset. The "fallacy of understated evidence” is not a standard label; it was presented by Paul Draper to diagnose scenarios where there is some form of selective evidence, suppressed evidence, cherry-picking, or violating total evidence.

My main thesis: the resurrection apologetic should not be treated as a strong inference from decisive evidence to a miraculous conclusion. The evidence typically cited is too sparse, too indirect, too theologically mediated, too textually unstable, and too vulnerable to ordinary error sources to have substantial probative force for a bodily resurrection. At the same time, apologists routinely understate evidence that fits non-resurrectional explanations better: bereavement experiences, memory distortion, group reinforcement, literary shaping, source dependence, and major narrative instability across the traditions. Given the total evidence, either suspension of belief is required, or—if one assigns any substantial antecedent improbability to miracles—positive disbelief is rationally warranted.

The governing norm: total evidence, not curated evidence

Any serious historical or philosophical argument has to be judged on the total relevant evidence, not on a rhetorically selected subset. That matters here because resurrection apologetics often presents a narrow package of “facts” as though those facts alone determine the conclusion. But that is exactly what the total-evidence norm forbids. If there is substantial evidence about source unreliability, textual instability, rival causal mechanisms, literary convention, or background improbability, that evidence belongs in the assessment too.

So the first argument is methodological:

  1. Rational assessment of a hypothesis must use the total relevant evidence.
  2. Standard resurrection apologetics typically relies on a curated subset of allegedly favorable evidence.
  3. It often omits or downplays evidence that weakens the resurrection hypothesis or strengthens rival explanations.
  4. Therefore standard resurrection apologetics violates the total-evidence requirement and overstates its conclusion.

That alone does not prove the resurrection false. But it does block the apologetic claim that the case is strong or decisive.

Why the alleged evidence has little probative force

The key point here is not that the evidence has literally zero logical relevance. The stronger and more defensible claim is that it has very little positive force for the specific conclusion “God bodily raised Jesus from the dead,” because the evidence is poor in the ways that matter most for a miracle claim.

First, The evidence is mostly testimonial, late, and mediated. The evidence for the resurrection is not a body, not a video, not a contemporaneous neutral record, not forensic data, and not a set of independent archival reports. It is mainly testimony and traditions preserved in religious texts. The Stanford Encyclopedia explicitly notes that the evidence for the Christian miracles is testimony, which is exactly why miracle debates focus so heavily on the reliability and limits of testimony. That matters because testimony is not all equal. For ordinary events, decent testimony may be enough. For an event as extraordinary as a bodily resurrection, the quality threshold rises sharply. If the event is antecedently very improbable, then weak or medium-strength testimony will not do much epistemic work. That is the basic Humean point, and even critics of Hume generally agree that miracle claims require unusually strong evidence. So the first substantive anti-apologetic premise is: Testimony of this kind is not strong enough to bear the evidential burden of a miracle claim.

Secondly, the source base is internally unstable. Even within the canonical tradition, the resurrection narratives are not stable. Britannica notes that the locations and occasions of the appearances differ across the Gospels. It also notes that Mark’s Gospel runs through 16:8 as its main structure, and there is longstanding text-critical recognition that the longer ending is disputed and absent from early manuscript evidence. That is important because apologetics often speaks as though there were a single clean historical report of Easter. There is not. There is a developing and non-uniform set of narratives:

  • different appearance settings,
  • different sequencing,
  • different emphasis on Jerusalem vs. Galilee,
  • and a textually disputed ending to Mark, the earliest Gospel by mainstream scholarship.

Internal instability does not automatically falsify an event. But it reduces the precision and reliability of the evidential base. And for miracle claims, evidential degradation matters a lot.

Third, the evidence is not independent in the way apologists often imply. A common apologetic move is to pile up reports as though each were an independent witness stream. But source dependence and common tradition reduce the force of simple counting. Ahmed’s published work specifically argues that even multiple non-collusive reports can lack the kind of independence needed to overcome skepticism about miracle testimony. So “many reports” is not equivalent to “many independent confirmations.” If multiple reports derive from overlapping traditions, shared communities, common expectations, or literary reuse, the cumulative force is much less than apologists suggest.

Lastly, The evidence is heavily theory-laden and theologically mediated. The texts are not neutral observation logs. They are confessional documents written from within a movement already committed to Jesus’ significance. That does not make them worthless. But it does mean the evidential question is not just “what was reported?” but “how much independent access do these reports give us to the event itself?” Miller’s work presses this point by arguing that the resurrection narratives participate in known ancient exaltation and translation motifs, which weakens their value as transparent historical reportage. The more a report is shaped by theological and literary aims, the less directly it can function as decisive evidence for a unique miracle.

Why apologists understate disconfirming evidence

Not only is the favorable evidence overstated, but contrary evidence is understated.

A major omission in popular apologetics is the psychological literature on post-bereavement experiences. Reviews report that experiences of the deceased are not rare, and some studies find striking prevalence ranges. One critical review reports post-bereavement hallucinatory or quasi-hallucinatory experiences in widowed populations in the range of roughly 30% to 60%, while older studies found many bereaved individuals reporting felt presence, visual, auditory, or conversational experiences of the dead. That does not prove the disciples had bereavement hallucinations. But it does something important: it shows that sincere postmortem experiences are not rare enough to be evidentially miraculous by default. Once that is granted, appearance reports lose a great deal of their supposed uniqueness. The apologetic claim “they saw him, therefore resurrection” is weakened because “they sincerely experienced him as present” is no longer highly diagnostic of bodily resurrection. This is exactly the sort of evidence that supports alternatives like Fodor’s model and is routinely minimized in apologetic presentation.

Modern research on eyewitness memory also cuts against the apologetic reliance on witness conviction and detail. Reviews note that eyewitness memory is fragile and susceptible to distortion; stress can impair accuracy, and memory is reconstructive rather than archival. Scientific reviews emphasize that eyewitness recollection failures and distortions are common and influenced by stress and attention. That matters because the events surrounding Jesus’ death, grief, fear, and subsequent proclamation would have been emotionally intense. If stress and emotional salience tend to reduce accuracy or increase distortion, then high conviction among disciples does not translate cleanly into high reliability. Again, this does not prove the reports false. But it materially lowers their probative value, and apologetics often does not reckon fairly with that.

When accounts differ in major details, this is evidence of tradition development, selective narration, or instability in the transmission. Britannica explicitly notes differences in the locations and occasions of the appearance accounts. Mark’s ending at 16:8 in the earliest form also means the earliest Gospel does not contain the later-style appearance sequence found elsewhere. This supports alternative hypotheses better than resurrection does, because narrative divergence is exactly what we would expect if stories developed in different communities under theological and pastoral pressures. It is not what we would most hope for if we were dealing with a single, clear, public, bodily event documented in a stable way.

The broader miracle literature matters too. The SEP discussion of miracles highlights why testimony for miracles is especially contested: miracle claims run headlong into the background regularities that make them extraordinary in the first place. So the apologetic often understates a crucial point: the evidence is not being asked to support a moderately unusual event. It is being asked to support a maximally unusual event. That dramatically changes how much force the evidence can rationally have.

Even if the apologetic evidence had some relevance, much of it is non-distinctive. It does not favor resurrection over several rivals. For example:

  • “The disciples sincerely believed” supports resurrection, bereavement visions, grief-induced misperception, religious ecstasy, memory inflation, or later narrative concretization. So sincerity is not discriminating evidence.
  • “The movement began early” supports resurrection, visionary-experience interpretation, charismatic group formation, scriptural reinterpretation after traumatic loss, and ordinary sectarian consolidation. So early movement formation is also not discriminating evidence.
  • “There were appearance traditions” supports resurrection, visions, revelatory experiences, communal memory development, or literary-theological elaboration. Again, not discriminating.
  • “The tomb was empty”. Even if granted, that supports resurrection, body removal, reburial, confusion about the burial location, or later narrative construction. So the empty tomb is not uniquely probative either.

The standard evidence is mostly underdetermining. It does not select resurrection strongly enough to justify high confidence.

Rather than saying only that the resurrection hypothesis is insufficiently supported, the point is that there is also specific evidence that positively favors rival explanations. In other words, the case is not simply that the traditional apologetic conclusion fails to carry the burden of proof, but that the available evidence more naturally points in alternative directions.

Psychological evidence provides positive support for visionary or bereavement-based hypotheses. Because bereavement experiences are common enough to be well documented, reports of appearances of Jesus fit an ordinary and recognizable human pattern more closely than apologists often acknowledge. This means there is affirmative reason to think that some followers may have had grief-related experiences, or experiences they interpreted in religious terms, after Jesus’ death. These experiences may well have been entirely sincere, yet still non-miraculous, and they could plausibly have become the nucleus from which resurrection proclamation emerged.

Memory science likewise provides positive support for hypotheses involving development and embellishment. Eyewitness memory is known to be malleable, especially under conditions of stress and through repeated retelling over time. As a result, later and more detailed accounts are positively easier to explain through processes of memory reconstruction than through the idea of pristine, unchanged transmission of a singular extraordinary event. This gives support to alternatives involving memory reshaping, harmonization across retellings, narrative intensification, and an increasing concreteness in the tradition as time passed.

Narrative divergence across the Gospel accounts also positively supports tradition-development hypotheses. The differences among the resurrection narratives, together with Mark’s abrupt ending in what is widely regarded as its earliest recoverable form, suggest that the resurrection tradition developed and diversified as it was transmitted. This does not require the conclusion that the entire tradition was wholesale invention, but it does support the idea of story growth, the presence of differing community emphases, and the influence of theological framing in shaping how the narratives were told and retold.

Literary and genre evidence further supports mythic-exaltation hypotheses. If Richard C. Miller is even partly correct that resurrection and ascension narratives participate in broader ancient conventions of exaltation and translation, then these texts become positively more expected on a literary-religious model than on a bare historical-report model. This does not mean the authors were consciously fabricating their stories, but it does support the claim that the narratives were shaped by the sacred literary genres and religious conventions available to them. Taken together, then, the evidence works not only against the apologetic conclusion, but also in favor of alternative explanations.

Argument from total evidence against resurrection apologetics

So given all of that preamble, here is my argument against the resurrection.

  1. A hypothesis about a past event should be evaluated on the total relevant evidence, including evidence bearing on source quality, transmission, rival causal mechanisms, and background probability.
  2. The evidence for the resurrection is mainly testimonial and preserved in confessional, literarily shaped texts rather than neutral, contemporaneous, independent records.
  3. The resurrection narratives are internally unstable: appearance settings differ across Gospels, and the earliest form of Mark ends at 16:8, with later ending material text-critically disputed.
  4. Eyewitness testimony, especially under stress and in emotionally charged settings, is vulnerable to distortion and reconstruction.
  5. Post-bereavement experiences of the dead are common enough that sincere reports of seeing or sensing a deceased person are not strongly diagnostic of a miracle.
  6. The main apologetic data points—sincere belief, appearance claims, early proclamation, and even an empty tomb if granted—are not distinctive evidence for resurrection, because each is also compatible with multiple non-miraculous explanations.
  7. Several bodies of evidence positively support rival explanations better than apologists admit: bereavement experiences support visionary hypotheses; memory science supports development and embellishment; narrative divergence supports tradition-development; and genre/literary considerations support mythic-exaltation readings.
  8. Therefore the apologetic case substantially overstates the probative force of its evidence and understates contrary evidence, in violation of the total-evidence requirement.
  9. Therefore we should not have confidence that the resurrection hypothesis carries substantial evidential weight.
  10. And if one additionally thinks miracles are antecedently very improbable, then the total evidence provides enough reason to disbelieve the resurrection rather than merely suspend judgment.

This argument can support suspension of belief or positive disbelief. Suspension of belief is warranted if you think miracle priors are low but not crushing, you think the evidence is too poor to decide, and you think several ordinary alternatives remain live. That yields the resurrection hypothesis has little or no positive evidential weight. Positive disbelief is warranted if you think bodily resurrection is an extremely improbable event, you think testimony of this quality cannot overcome that improbability, and you think the omitted evidence positively favors non-miraculous alternatives. That yields the resurrection is probably false, not just unproven. So the stronger conclusion is conditional on your background epistemology of miracles. But either way, the apologetic claim to strong evidential support fails.

The apologetic case for the resurrection is not defeated merely because it lacks certainty. It is defeated because it misrepresents the evidential situation. It presents a narrow subset of weak, indirect, internally unstable, theologically mediated testimony as though it were decisive, while downplaying or omitting the wider body of evidence that reduces that testimony’s force and positively supports non-miraculous explanations. Once the total evidence is considered, the cited evidence has little distinctive probative force for resurrection, and rational confidence should collapse into agnosticism or, given sufficiently low antecedent probability for miracles, outright disbelief.

The Evidence Game

This unresponsiveness to evidence isn’t just an accident. It’s a phenomenon of what cognitive scientists frequently identify in religious apologetics.

In “Religious credence is not factual belief”, Neil Van Leeuwen argues that religious beliefs are “evidentially vulnerable”, meaning they’re distinct forms of credence that do not respond to evidence. And in his “Do religious “beliefs” respond to evidence?”, he introduces the notion of “The Evidence Game”, in which the religious usage of evidence appears like it’s evidentially vulnerable, but it’s actually resembles more of a game of make believe.

Van Leeuwen’s framework is highly applicable to resurrection apologetics, and the resurrection case is one of the clearest examples of what he is trying to diagnose.

The core idea is this: on Van Leeuwen’s view, many religious attitudes are not best modeled as ordinary factual beliefs. Ordinary factual beliefs are supposed to be evidentially vulnerable: when enough contrary evidence accumulates, they weaken or disappear. In contrast, religious credences often behave differently. In his 2014 paper, Van Leeuwen argues that factual beliefs are practical-setting independent, cognitively governing, and evidentially vulnerable, whereas religious credences tend instead to have perceived normative orientation, allow free elaboration, and be vulnerable to special authority. In his 2017 paper, he argues that religious “beliefs” are characteristically not extinguished by contrary evidence and introduces the “Evidence Game” to explain why they can still seem evidence-responsive in limited settings.

That distinction maps unusually well onto resurrection apologetics because resurrection apologetics often looks like an evidence-driven historical inquiry while functioning more like a rule-governed practice of identity maintenance, where “evidence” is selectively used inside a pre-structured theological game. Van Leeuwen’s model helps explain why the resurrection case can appear evidential while remaining strikingly resistant to normal evidential defeat.

Van Leeuwen’s 2014 thesis is not that religious people never believe anything factual, nor that all religion is mere pretense. His narrower claim is that many paradigmatic religious attitudes differ psychologically from ordinary factual belief. Factual beliefs are supposed to guide action across contexts, interact broadly with other beliefs, and update under pressure from evidence. Religious credences, by contrast, often function in a more compartmentalized, identity-laden, normatively governed way. They are tied to ritual, community, moral orientation, and authority, and they can tolerate tensions with ordinary evidence in a way everyday factual beliefs typically do not.

In the 2017 paper, Van Leeuwen refines this by addressing an obvious objection: religious people do sometimes talk as if their beliefs respond to evidence. He says that this does happen, but often within what he calls the Evidence Game—a socially bounded practice in which evidence-talk is used, but not in the same way it is used for ordinary factual beliefs. The “game” explains why religious discourse can mimic evidential reasoning without being fully governed by it. Religious credences can therefore appear evidentially answerable while remaining, in the decisive sense, not evidentially vulnerable.

The resurrection case is an exemplar because it is one of the few religious claims that apologists routinely present as a public historical hypothesis supposedly supported by neutral evidence. They often say, in effect let us bracket theology, look only at the historical facts, compare rival explanations, and conclude that resurrection is the best explanation.

That presentation makes the case look like ordinary factual inquiry. But what Van Leeuwen’s theory predicts is that, if resurrection commitment is really a religious credence rather than an ordinary factual belief, then the apparent evidential posture will be only partial and strategic. The belief will not genuinely be open to revision in proportion to the total evidence. Instead, evidence will be recruited, framed, and interpreted within a protected theological practice. And that is exactly what we see in many apologetic treatments of the resurrection.

If the resurrection were held as an ordinary factual belief, one would expect the following. First, the belief should be sensitive to source quality. Weak sources, dependent testimony, theological mediation, and narrative instability should significantly reduce confidence. Second, it should be sensitive to counterevidence. Evidence of literary shaping, memory distortion, bereavement experience, doctrinal motivation, narrative contradiction, and parallel miracle traditions elsewhere should noticeably lower credence. Third, it should be sensitive to evidential asymmetry across domains. A person using the same standards should treat comparable miracle claims in other religions similarly. Fourth, it should be cross-context governing. The same person should reason with the resurrection as they would with any other historical claim of comparable strangeness.

But resurrection apologetics often behaves differently. Counterevidence rarely lowers confidence much. The same people who demand strong naturalistic detail from critics are satisfied with a very coarse supernatural explanation for their own side. Parallel miracle claims from other traditions are dismissed quickly. And historical uncertainty that would devastate an ordinary factual claim is treated as compatible with very high confidence here. That pattern is exactly what one would expect if the attitude in play were not an ordinary factual belief but a religious credence with low evidential vulnerability.

Van Leeuwen’s “Evidence Game” is especially useful here. The idea is not that believers are consciously pretending. It is that the discourse of evidence can function in a way more like a structured social practice than like open-ended inquiry. Evidence is invoked, but the surrounding norms differ from those of ordinary factual assessment. Applied to the resurrection, the Evidence Game has several recognizable features.

  1. Curated inputs: Only certain evidential items are admitted as central: early proclamation, appearance reports, empty tomb traditions, martyrdom rhetoric, and movement growth. Other relevant evidence is downgraded: source dependence, contradiction, literary tropes, grief experiences, and comparative miracle traditions. That is evidence-talk, but not total-evidence reasoning.

  2. Immunized outputs: The conclusion is framed as if proportioned to the evidence, but in practice it is highly resistant to adverse findings. The belief survives major concessions that would normally collapse a factual claim: uncertainty about authorship, dependence among sources, disputed textual endings, and disagreement among accounts. That is a hallmark of low evidential vulnerability.

  3. Asymmetric standards: Naturalistic rivals are often required to be detailed, unified, and psychologically complete. The resurrection hypothesis, by contrast, can remain broad: “God raised Jesus.” In ordinary inquiry, explanatory competition is not fair when one side may stay schematic and the other must supply mechanism.

  4. Authority-sensitive repair: When contrary evidence appears, believers often do not proportionally reduce confidence; instead they consult trusted clergy, apologists, or doctrinal authorities who reinterpret the evidence. Van Leeuwen identifies special authority as a key feature of religious credence. That fits resurrection apologetics closely.

So the resurrection case does not merely contain evidential mistakes. It often displays the deeper structure Van Leeuwen predicts: evidence is used performatively, within a bounded practice, not as a genuinely sovereign norm of belief revision.

Resurrection apologetics presents itself as a historical argument, but in practice it often functions like a theologically constrained pseudo-history. A real historical inquiry into whether a dead man literally returned bodily to life would be dominated by questions like:

  • How good are the sources?
  • How independent are they?
  • How late are they?
  • How literary are they?
  • How often do sincere people misperceive extraordinary things?
  • How common are post-bereavement experiences?
  • How much divergence is there across the tradition?
  • What are the base rates for miracle claims across religions?

But in apologetics, these questions are often treated as secondary obstacles to be managed rather than as central determinants of rational confidence. The discussion quickly turns into:

  • which “minimal facts” can be isolated,
  • which naturalistic rivals can be portrayed as weak,
  • and how to preserve the resurrection as “best explanation.”

That is not quite inquiry; it is much closer to a protected evidence-game. The structure is less “follow the evidence where it leads” and more “show that the accepted sacred conclusion can survive evidential challenge.” Van Leeuwen’s framework explains why this happens. Religious credence is not organized to be extinguished by evidence in the way ordinary factual belief is.

Another major strength of Van Leeuwen’s model is that it explains compartmentalization. Many believers do not use resurrection-style reasoning elsewhere. They do not accept miracle claims from Hinduism, Islam, Mormonism, Marian apparitions, spiritualism, or folk magic on similar evidential grounds. They become stringent skeptics outside their own tradition.

That selective deployment is exactly what one would expect if resurrection commitment is embedded in group identity and special authority rather than held as a uniformly applied factual belief. A factual historian’s standards should generalize across similar cases. Religious credence often does not generalize that way. Van Leeuwen’s broader make-believe framework explicitly ties religious cognition to group identity and socially scaffolded imaginative practice. The resurrection case is therefore doubly revealing. It looks historical enough to claim public rationality, but behaves religiously enough to remain insulated from the normal comparative demands of public rationality.

Evidential unresponsiveness here is not incidental. This unresponsiveness is not just an accident or a few bad apologetic habits. On Van Leeuwen’s account, it is often a feature of the attitude type itself. Religious credence is structured differently. It is often identity-linked, normatively loaded, socially reinforced, authority-mediated, and only selectively evidence-responsive. That means the resurrection case is not just a historical debate with occasional motivated reasoning layered on top. It is a case where the very psychological mode of commitment can explain why the evidential discourse remains shallow or asymmetric. In that sense, the resurrection is an exemplar because it combines all the features Van Leeuwen predicts very high sacred importance, ritual centrality, identity centrality, doctrinal authority, selective evidence use, and resistance to defeat by counterevidence.

A more precise application to the apologetic pattern looks something like this:

  1. If a claim is held as an ordinary factual belief, then substantial contrary evidence should significantly reduce confidence in it.
  2. The resurrection claim is often defended in public as if it were an ordinary factual belief supported by historical evidence.
  3. But in practice, many defenders of the resurrection remain highly confident despite major contrary considerations: sparse and dependent sources, internal narrative divergence, literary shaping, rival psychological explanations, and analogous miracle claims in other traditions.
  4. This pattern suggests the resurrection claim is often not functioning psychologically as an ordinary factual belief.
  5. Van Leeuwen’s theory explains this by treating it as a religious credence embedded in an Evidence Game rather than as a standard factual belief.
  6. Therefore the apologetic posture of historical neutrality is often misleading: the discourse looks evidential, but the underlying commitment is not evidentially vulnerable in the normal sense.

If Van Leeuwen is right, then the problem with resurrection apologetics is not only that particular premises are weak. The deeper problem is that the discourse can be structurally insulated from defeat. And when a putatively factual claim is insulated from the kinds of evidence that should matter most, that is a reason to distrust the entire argumentative enterprise. In other words, the theory helps explain why resurrection apologetics often feels evidentially unserious even when it is rhetorically sophisticated. It borrows the language of history and evidence, but the governing norms are closer to identity preservation, sacred rehearsal, and bounded imaginative commitment than to open factual inquiry.

The apologetic argument for the resurrection is a paradigmatic case of what Van Leeuwen calls religious credence masquerading as factual belief. It presents itself as a historical inference responsive to evidence, but its actual pattern of use is evidentially vulnerable only in appearance. In practice it behaves like an Evidence Game: selectively admitting favorable considerations, downgrading counterevidence, deferring to special authority, and preserving commitment across evidential conditions that would normally defeat an ordinary factual belief. That is why the resurrection case is so revealing. It is not merely a bad historical argument. It is a case in which the psychology of religious credence helps explain why the argument remains persuasive to insiders despite persistent evidential weakness.

Prior Driven Arguments

The resurrection debate is prior-driven under conditions of severe evidential scarcity. In this regime, the real epistemic question becomes: where did the priors come from, and are they truth-tracking?

Here I will adopt David Schum's evidential framework. In it, relevance is not automatic. Evidence only matters relative to hypotheses, background assumptions, and inferential links. Schum’s work is widely associated with analyzing how evidence supports conclusions through chains of relevance, likelihoods, and ancillary assumptions rather than by brute “fact counting.” So in a case like the resurrection, where the evidence is sparse, indirect, contested, and difficult to calibrate, priors do a huge amount of the work. They influence which pieces of data are treated as salient, which inferential links are accepted as strong, which alternative explanations are judged plausible, and even what counts as relevant evidence in the first place. That means the debate is not just over evidence. It is over the social formation and epistemic legitimacy of the priors that govern evidential uptake.

  1. Why priors dominate in resurrection arguments

    In an ordinary historical case with abundant, independent, high-quality evidence, priors matter less because the evidence itself can do most of the discriminating work. But resurrection apologetics operates under the opposite conditions. There are no contemporaneous neutral documentation, there is dependence and theological mediation in the source base, severe underdetermination, and weak assessability of robustness.

    Under those conditions, the posterior judgment is strongly shaped by what one already thinks about miracles, divine agency, scripture, religious testimony, the reliability of ancient communities, and the fittingness of resurrection as a divine act. That is one reason miracle debates, in the philosophical literature, so often turn on background worldview and prior probability rather than on the surface content of the reports alone.

    This is exactly why apologetic arguments often feel as though they “discover” what they were primed to find. The evidence is too weakly constraining to force convergence, so prior commitments do most of the inferential labor.

  2. Schum-style relevance: priors shape relevance itself

    In evidential reasoning, evidence does not arrive pre-labeled with its significance. Relevance depends on a network of assumptions: what hypothesis space is being used, what causal stories are live, what source-reliability assumptions are accepted, and what ancillary propositions connect an item of evidence to the conclusion.

    So in resurrection apologetics, priors do not merely color the final conclusion. They also shape relevance establishment upstream. For example, If one starts with a strong prior that God exists, acts in history, and had reason to vindicate Jesus, then postmortem appearance reports may seem highly relevant to resurrection. If one starts with a strong prior that bereavement visions, memory distortion, literary shaping, and sectarian reinterpretation are common features of religious movements, those same reports may seem only weakly relevant to resurrection and more relevant to ordinary social-psychological explanations. So the same datum can enter entirely different inferential roles depending on prior structure. That is exactly the kind of thing Schum’s approach helps illuminate: evidence is not self-interpreting; its force depends on inferential architecture.

    That means apologetic claims like “these facts cry out for resurrection” are misleading. Facts do not cry out on their own. They are made to “speak” through prior-governed inferential frameworks.

  3. Prior contamination and plausibility

    Plausibility judgments are often presented as though they were direct perceptions of explanatory fit, but in contested religious arguments they are usually heavily conditioned by prior enculturation.

    For instance, many apologists say things like: resurrection is the most natural explanation, it best fits the facts, rival explanations are strained, or the disciples’ experiences are hard to explain otherwise. But those assessments are not neutral outputs of evidence. They are already downstream of a prior-loaded cognitive environment in which divine agency is live, Christian scripture is treated as unusually privileged, martyrdom and sincerity are granted unusual significance, and alternative explanations are often pre-framed as reductionist or hostile.

    So “plausibility” here is often not an evidentially clean measure. It is a socially conditioned appearance of fit.

  4. Why the genealogy of priors matters

    Once priors are doing the heavy lifting, the next question is unavoidable: how were those priors formed?

    This is where social epistemology becomes central. Social epistemology studies how truth-seeking is affected by testimony, trust, institutions, authority, group practices, and social structure. The Stanford Encyclopedia emphasizes that social epistemology is concerned with how people pursue truth with the help of—or sometimes in the face of—other people and social practices, and that testimony and trust are central problems in this field.

    That matters because resurrection-friendly priors are rarely formed in a vacuum by independent examination of the ancient evidence. More commonly, they are formed through childhood enculturation, liturgy, sacred narrative repetition, trusted religious authority, selective testimonial environments, apologetic education, and community reward structures for orthodoxy.

    Those are not automatically irrational sources. But they are not obviously strong truth-trackers either, especially when the belief in question is sacred, identity-defining, and socially costly to reject. So the genealogy of the priors becomes directly relevant to whether the inference deserves acceptance.

  5. Van Leeuwen: why this matters even more for religious credence

    Van Leeuwen’s work strengthens this point substantially. In his 2014 paper, he argues that religious credence and factual belief are psychologically distinct attitudes with different characteristic etiologies and downstream effects. In the 2017 paper, he argues that religious “beliefs” often appear to respond to evidence while in fact operating within the “Evidence Game,” where evidence-talk is bounded and does not function like ordinary factual inquiry.

    Applied here, that means the formation of resurrection-friendly priors is not just socially mediated; it may be mediated in a way characteristic of religious credence, not ordinary empirical belief. That matters because if the priors themselves arise from practices that are identity-laden, authority-sensitive, and not fully evidentially vulnerable, then those priors cannot simply be treated as neutral background assumptions for historical inference.

    They are part of the very phenomenon under investigation. In other words: if the priors are socially produced by non-truth-tracking religious mechanisms, then an inference resting heavily on those priors is epistemically suspect from the start.

  6. The social production of resurrection-plausibility

    Now we can make the point more concretely. In many Christian communities, belief in the resurrection is not arrived at by first studying source criticism and then cautiously updating. It is introduced as sacred truth, communal identity marker, salvation-relevant doctrine, liturgical centerpiece, and often the criterion of fidelity to Christianity itself. Only after that does apologetics often enter, not as the origin of belief, but as a retrospective rationalization system. Its function is often to stabilize commitment, answer doubt, and preserve confidence.

    That matters because it shows that the apologetic argument usually does not generate the prior; it services it. This is exactly the kind of socially distributed epistemic structure social epistemology studies: institutions, authorities, practices, and trust networks shape what agents find credible.

    So when apologists say, “look at the evidence and draw the best conclusion,” that often misdescribes the actual order of explanation. The real process is often: a resurrection-friendly prior is formed through enculturation and authority, apologetic frameworks teach which facts matter, those facts are interpreted through the prior; the resulting conclusion is then experienced as evidence-driven. That is a very different epistemic picture.

  7. The apologetic industrial complex

    Apologetics is not just a set of arguments but an institutional ecosystem. It includes publishers, ministries, conference circuits, seminaries, podcasts, YouTube channels, donor-supported organizations, church curricula, and debate culture. These structures create incentives for confident presentation, rhetorically powerful simplification, selective framing of scholarship, repeated use of “minimal facts” style packages, and community reassurance rather than genuinely open inquiry. I am using “incentives” here as a sociological inference rather than a claim about bad faith in every case. But from a social-epistemic perspective, these institutions often function as credence-maintenance systems. Their role is not simply to discover what is true; it is to preserve a sacred proposition under challenge. That matters because when an inferential environment is institutionally organized around a preferred outcome, the priors sustained within it are less trustworthy than priors formed in adversarial, error-correcting, and institutionally pluralistic settings.

When a conclusion depends heavily on priors, the justification of the conclusion depends heavily on whether those priors were formed in truth-conducive ways.That is the fulcrum. If the priors behind resurrection apologetics were formed mainly through asymmetrical testimony, sacred authority, identity pressure, ritual reinforcement, selective exposure, and institutions oriented toward preservation of belief, then the posterior confidence yielded by those priors is compromised. The inference cannot be accepted merely because it is coherent relative to those priors. A prior can make an inference look compelling without itself being well-formed.

Given all of this, i think we can infer something about the truth of the resurrection proposition from the broader social system:

  1. The evidential base for the resurrection is weak and underdetermining.
  2. Therefore priors drive much of the inferential outcome.
  3. Those priors are often formed and sustained by socially structured processes that are not clearly truth-tracking and may be systematically biasing.
  4. Apologetic institutions often function more to preserve confidence than to expose belief to genuine defeat conditions.
  5. Therefore high confidence in the resurrection, as socially produced in these environments, is epistemically discredited.
  6. And because the proposition depends for much of its plausibility on those compromised prior-forming processes, this gives us some reason to discount the proposition itself, not merely the arguments for it.

That is not a deductive refutation. But it is a serious defeater of warranted confidence, and in a case where the direct evidence is already weak, such a defeater pushes toward non-belief.

An obvious objection is that this sounds genetic: you are attacking the origins of the belief rather than its truth. But in a prior-dominated case, the genealogy of the priors is not irrelevant. It is part of the epistemic evaluation. If the evidence were overwhelming, the origins of belief would matter less. But where the evidence is thin and the posterior is largely being driven by antecedent commitments, the formation of those commitments is squarely relevant. So this is not a crude genetic fallacy. It is a legitimate social-epistemic point: when priors dominate, and priors are socially formed, the epistemic quality of the social formation process bears directly on justification.

An Argument Against the Resurrection based on Degenerate Priors

  1. In domains where evidence is sparse, unreliable, and weakly constraining, priors exert major influence on posterior judgment.
  2. The resurrection is such a domain: the available evidence is limited, contested, testimonial, and difficult to assess robustly.
  3. Therefore judgments about the resurrection are strongly prior-driven.
  4. Priors do not merely affect final confidence; they shape relevance establishment, source weighting, explanatory plausibility, and what counts as a serious alternative hypothesis in the first place.
  5. In many religious communities, resurrection-friendly priors are formed and sustained through testimony, authority, ritual, enculturation, and institutions of apologetic maintenance rather than through neutral confrontation with the historical evidence.
  6. Van Leeuwen’s work gives a psychological model for this: religious credences often differ from factual beliefs in their etiology and in their limited evidential vulnerability, and “evidence” can function within an Evidence Game rather than as a fully sovereign norm of revision.
  7. Therefore the priors driving resurrection apologetics are often epistemically contaminated by social processes that are not clearly truth-tracking and are often structured to preserve the belief.
  8. Therefore inferences generated under those priors deserve reduced confidence.
  9. Since the direct evidence is already weak, once the priors are discounted, the resurrection hypothesis loses much of its apparent plausibility.
  10. Therefore we have strong reason to reject high-confidence resurrection apologetics, and some reason to disbelieve the resurrection itself.

The deepest problem with resurrection apologetics is not merely that its evidence is sparse. It is that sparse evidence leaves the field open for priors to dominate, and those priors are themselves socially manufactured within systems of authority, ritual, identity, and apologetic reinforcement. In a Schum-like evidential framework, that matters because priors shape not only conclusion but relevance, linkage, and inferential force. In a Van Leeuwen-style framework, it matters because the attitudes involved may not be functioning as ordinary factual beliefs at all, but as religious credences only selectively answerable to evidence. Once that social-epistemic background is brought into view, the apparent plausibility of the resurrection looks less like the result of strong evidence and more like the output of a prior-maintenance system. And in a case where the direct evidence is already weak, that is enough to undercut confidence severely and to shift rationality toward disbelief.

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