Thanks FTL for responding here. My comments in this post are in response to Geo.
geo wrote:Michael Shermer discusses the concept of burden of proof in his book, Why People Believe Weird Things. The title is telling in this case because either a historical or a mythical Jesus may seem weird, depending on your perspective. Ultimately, we have to determine where the evidence lies.
Many thanks Geo for these constructive comments. You are absolutely right that questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ as described in the Bible seems mind-bending to people who have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea of Jesus as the best man ever. It is a scientific question of historical evidence.
So who has the burden of proof in this mythicism/historicism debate? It appears to me that the mythicists do for no other reason than that the historical Jesus is firmly established traditionally. It's the de facto position taken by in the vast majority of scholars and by professors at universities and colleges. It is embedded in our culture. It's easy to see how this came to be. For many hundreds of years our scholars were also deeply religious. They were not only heavily vested in a historical Jesus, but a divine one as well. Now that we've pared away the divine Jesus, it won't be easy to divest ourselves of the historical one. A historical Jesus is established and normal, despite a lack of evidence. So to overthrow the idea of a historical Jesus will require a paradigm shift which has to be driven by evidence.
Yes, correct, mythicism has the burden of proof, as indicated in the dismissive attitude of mainstream scholars in the James McGrath blog I cited above.
Thomas Kuhn defined "paradigm shift" as it pertained to scientific theory. The paradigm defines the normal science of an age as it is traditionally accepted by a majority of practicing scientists in a field. A shift will occur when enough renegade and heretical scientists gain enough evidence and power to overthrow the existing paradigm.
So for mythicists to address the burden of proof, they need a new paradigm that explains how the historical story arose, and presents a new explanation that explains all the facts in a coherent and parsimonious theory. This is where the question of a scientific basis of mythic ideation becomes critical. Murdock argues that astrotheology, the idea that myth originates in explanation of observation of the cosmos, is the basis of this new paradigm. This is an idea that I have supported since writing my BA Honours thesis in 1985 on the topic of messianic visions of precession of the equinox. At that time I was only 22 years old, and was relying more on intuition and logic than a fully worked out scientific theory. My readers at the time found the ideas incomprehensible, and almost failed me for it. Since then I have been avidly reading a wide range of supporting material, and now consider we are at the cusp of a breakthrough, with a new scientific explanation of religion about to emerge into public debate. Discovering Murdock's work through Booktalk, and seeing how she is comprehensively ignored, showed me that this new paradigm touches deep emotional questions, and requires a sound scientific framework in order to obtain traction.
The key to seeing precession as the framework of mythology is recognising that the observed shift of the spring point at the time of Christ matches exactly to Christian theology of Christ as a turning point of time, as reflected in our BC/AD calendar. The big idea is that the time of Christ was seen as a moment of cosmic harmony, when the seasons matched the stars, but that later interpreters could not understand this vision. The Biblical idea of the second coming of Jesus Christ fits into this paradigm, as a prediction of a future situation where Christianity will be reconciled with science through astrotheology.
Shermer points out that evolutionists had the burden of proof for a half a century after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, but now the burden of proof is on the creationists. Likewise, the burden of proof is on Holocaust deniers to prove that the Holocaust didn't really happen.
Murdock recently endorsed my comparison of her to climate scientists who have faced a "bewildering brick wall of ignorance and indifference." We see that ideas initially ignored and mocked have entered mainstream knowledge, such as orbital cycles for climate, plate tectonics and the theory of ice ages. Religion is a much more personal question for people, so a similar paradigm shift in the core ideas of Christian theology faces an even stronger burden of proof, introducing the need to explain the possibility of intentional mass delusion, than these objective mechanical questions such as evolution and climate.
Though historical events can't be repeated, they can be tested and validated. According to Shermer, "each of us may have a different view of history, but they are not all equally valid. Some are historical, and some are pseudohistorical, namely without supporting evidence and plausibility and presented primarily for political or ideological purposes."
The mythicist argument is that the historical record provides no evidence for a literal Christ, and abundant evidence for the syndrome of invention of convenient religious myths. It becomes a question of the balance of probability, with abundant scientific evidence cohering with the mythicist explanation, and only traditional authority supporting the conventional view.
The mythicist position seems increasingly plausible to me. I'm not saying I'm there yet, but I'm at least more open to the position. I'm new to this debate and I haven't read CiE yet, but I would agree that the traditional view is corrupt and promoted over the centuries by religiously-motivated ideologists. But it's also interesting to see that historicists are saying the same thing about the mythicists: they are motivated by a secular ideology. No matter what, there's going to be stiff resistance to the idea that Jesus never existed.
Historicists are actually getting more desperate. Earl Doherty's massive new book on the topic
Jesus, Neither God Nor Man - the case for a mythical Jesus has moved the debate on from the earlier attitude that this material could be ignored into a situation where apologists are responding through ridicule and fallacious assertions, such as threadbare comparisons with creationism.
The question you raise Geo of secular ideology is critical here. Philosophers often hold unquestioned assumptions on this topic, seeing intellectual progress as a steady evolutionary march from the sacred to the secular, from faith to reason, from religion to science. However, the mythicist argument does not fit so easily against this equally dominant modern paradigm, as it also involves a challenge to the enlightenment atheist view that religion is bunk. If religion is actually allegory for a deeper hidden natural truth, as claimed by astrotheology, then the secular psychological wiring of modernity also comes under challenge, open to critical scrutiny just as much as the supernatural sacred brain wiring of Christian ideology.