I think Loftus’ hypothetical is easily answered. If Christians thought their faith passed the Outsider Test, they would develop a vast and largely irritating intellectual empire called “Christian Apologetics,” where they would use standard methods of intellectual inquiry to argue for their religious claims over and against the competition. These Christian apologists would have names like William Lane Craig, Norman Geisler, Gary Habermas, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, and J.P. Moreland. Their books would have titles like Evidence that Demands a Verdict and A Reasonable Faith.

So: What would Christians say if their faith passed the Outsider Test? They would be saying all the same things that they are saying – that Christian claims stand up to standard methods of inquiry, and competing claims do not.

Of course this doesn’t mean that Christianity does pass the Outsider Test. In fact there is very good reason to think Christianity doesn’t pass the Outsider Test – namely, it is unclear whether there is such a test to pass, as I explain in the links above. But assuming there is such a thing, whether Christianity passed it or not, apologists would be making identical arguments to the ones they are making.

Loftus summarizes a book by Cordelia Fine by saying Fine “cautions us when it comes to the conclusions of our brains.” From this fact about Cordelia Fine Loftus make two “arguments.”

Loftus says believers suggest Loftus’ brain might be deceiving him too (presumably, about his rejection of religious beliefs).

(1) In response to the suggestion that his brain is deceiving him about what the scientific data show (that religious belief should be rejected), Loftus says he’s willing to become “agnostic,” because he believes that is what the scientific data show. We’ve already descended into the pits. Lincoln Christian Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Marquette – shame on you.

(2) Loftus’ second response to the Christian who says that his brain might be deceiving him with respect to his rejection of religious belief is that he does not affirm any religious beliefs. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare and contrast the error in this response with the former. The second part of Loftus’ second response (remember, to the interlocutor who says his brain might be deceiving him with respect to his rejection of religious belief) is that he doesn’t believe there is evidence for certain Christian claims, or for any one of competing “answers to existence.”

Let’s keep the structure of the implicit argument in mind (Loftus may have been taught only how to overwhelm opponents with the rhetoric of apologetics, not argument – we need to construct it ourselves): Because there is no evidence for religious belief, Loftus knows that his brain is not deceiving him with respect to this very conclusion.

The reader needs to be careful and remember that this incredible sequence is what Loftus bills (in the original link) as an argument about “psychologizing” his religious opponents (especially Victor Reppert, most noted for giving an argument against naturalism, not for religious belief. An additional argument is required for religious belief, for which Reppert argues separately, that there aren’t viable non-naturalistic alternatives to theism).

[Background: Loftus has a tortured exchange with Victor Reppert on whether religious belief is the result of preference (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here.]

Loftus’ starting point/conclusion is characteristically overgeneralized, trivial if taken literally, or false if taken more rhetorically. For example, here’s one that he has been repeating over and over again on his blog:

People believe and defend what they prefer to be true. This is an obvious and non-controversial fact. That’s who we are as human beings. That’s what we human beings do. That’s what psychological studies have repeatedly shown us over and over.

Maybe “people” believe and defend what they prefer to be true insofar as they prefer to have what they take to be accurate beliefs. But that is trivial and probably not what Loftus means. He probably means that they/them/people/the humans believe certain things (or all things?) because they would prefer them to be true. Their counterfactual preferences are either the psychological cause or the conscious reason for their beliefs. Judging by Loftus’ citing of, evidently, “Psychology,” we can assume he thinks the preferences of the humans cause them to have certain beliefs, which are conveniently correlated to the beliefs that Loftus currently thinks are false.

So Loftus thinks this “fact” about each human or some humans and each, or some, or most, or the set of, their beliefs, is “obvious and non-controversial.” Loftus thinks he knows this partly because of worthless and probably tautological evidence like “That’s who we are as human beings,” and the reciprocally superfluous “That’s what we human beings do.” (Mother of God, the writing is so bad…). His other evidence consists in typing together the term “psychological studies.” It is impressive that Loftus has gained the expertise to conduct a literature survey of psychological research papers in his free time. It might be even more amazing that he has found any psychological research papers at all that make a claim as general as that “people believe and defend what they prefer to be true.” In my knowledgeable survey of all working scientists, done during my two-year blogging sabbatical, I have discovered that psychological and other scientific research actually makes much narrower claims than these. In fact, it is only in science tabloids like Psychology Today or Scientific American that you might get a scientist inferring, perhaps in a casual interview, something this general from studies on narrow particulars. That’s because they have to sell copies of their magazines to popular audiences, who are sold shallow but sensational content.

So that epitomizes the number one reason why Loftus is so irritating to review, or engage with at all. His most basic claims are frequently outlandish or just exaggerated. Some of them are trivially true but without the implications he deduces from them. Furthermore, his presentation seems like it is conceptually sloppy and poorly organized on purpose. Almost as if his goal isn’t the acquisition and promotion of clear thinking, but something else. Perhaps “overwhelming the believer,” a non-truth-oriented goal Loftus has admitted, and I have cheerily critiqued as involving the sacrifice of basic truisms of intellectual integrity and virtue, here.

In Loftus’ most recent post on how we prefer to believe, he asserts several times, without utility, that he (and “people”) find the “Christian story” very compelling. Loftus writes things like this:

Who needs Christian apologetics with a story like this? Who needs to defend such a story at all? The story itself provides the only evidence people need to believe. Just tell the story. Claim it as a properly basic belief. Tell us the Holy Spirit testifies to this story through an inner witness. After all, it does resonate with us.

While this paragraph might have psychological pull designed to “overwhelm the believer,” consider how confused it is. The function of Christian apologetics is more or less twofold:

(1) To promote the truth of Christian belief and

(2) To defend Christian belief against objections to its truth

Except in rare cases, Christian apologetics has nothing to do with showing that the story is or is not “compelling,” which is something more relevant in the context of evangelism. So in no sense is the telling of the story even a possible replacement for Christian apologetics. In any case, many people don’t accept the story based on its emotional components – in fact, like John Loftus, many people don’t accept the story at all. So it is just irrelevant from both perspectives that the story has some happy things in it. Then Loftus says “Claim it as a properly basic belief,” apparently unaware that this claim is itself a product of Christian apologetics, linked to the sister claim, elaborated by apologists, about the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Responding to confusion such as this, while providing some psychological pull in the form of easy intellectual self-satisfaction, is ultimately boring.

Then Loftus lists several pleasing truth-claims believed by many people, some of them Christians. For example, “We want to believe there is divine help when in trouble.” Loftus could have added, “We want to believe that there is no morally significant genetic differences between races or sexes.” Or, “We want to believe that it is possible to curtail the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming.” Or, “We want to believe that knowledge is possible.” The list could go on forever. There are all sorts of things that we want to believe, yet which are also probably true.

The point is, Loftus’ statements here are uninteresting. It is so trivially true that many of our beliefs are preferable to their denial that there is nothing significant left to do with this fact. We should, perhaps, be most critical of incoming claims that sound nice to us. But “people,” as surely Pychology, Astrophysics, and Entomology have shown, are quite adept at resisting being duped by happy stories. In fact, it is commonly believed that we can’t make ourselves believe based on preference for happy stories. In fact this is one of the common attacks on one reading Pascal’s Wager, where some see Pascal as saying we should believe for practical, not epistemic, reasons, which is probably impossible (the minority position that we can choose our beliefs is called doxastic voluntarism).

It would be interesting to note which happy beliefs are worth accepting, or isolating what intellectual tools sort out happy false from happy true, but that is territory uncharted by Loftus’ excursions into this non-topic.

Then, characteristically, Loftus adds on some non-sequiturs, just listing without comment some of the Christian things he doesn’t believe. Undoubtedly, this is meant to “overwhelm the believer.” For example, he writes without utility, “Nevermind the fact that we haven’t a clue as to how a child could be 100% God and 100% human with nothing left over.” I’m not sure what this adds to discussion other than obfuscation. What does “nothing left over” even mean? Does Loftus understand the orthodox doctrine of the trinity to be a proposition in mathematics? Even if it was, what relation does this have to believing for emotional reasons? Is anyone made happy or comforted by the abstruse idea that Jesus has two 100%’s inside of him?

But there is truly no point in pursuing Loftus’ non-sequiturs, since his goal is not accurate portrayal and engagement with religious concepts, but is to “overwhelm the believer.” It is indeed overwhelming to chase down every flippant, poorly educated non-sequitur. That kind of overwhelming, no one needs.

Loftus then issues a number of mutually exclusive caricatures of supposedly apologetic responses to him (putting your brain on a shelf, finding reasons, appealing to omniscience… all at the same time?). This is another reason why Loftus, the self-proclaimed former insider, is so tedious to engage. He doesn’t even bother constructing straw men, but instead constructs single-sentence caricatures that prove their own silliness. So, to take one example, a respondent would have to go through and explain how, like any type of argument, “appealing to omniscience” is sometimes reasonable and sometimes not reasonable; this is a very tempered but accurate assessment, perhaps not suitable for online theatrics.

Loftus finishes with some happy talk about himself. The most excruciating and histrionic of these is “I have nothing more to offer but knowledge and understanding.”

For a final reason why it is annoying to engage Loftus, consider this line: “But I’m here to tell Christians their faith is a delusion. They reject and attack me for telling them this.”

Sometimes Christians read atheist books, have some corroborating set of experiences, and become atheists. Sometimes atheists do the opposites of those things. Like many of the true statements that correct for Loftus’ sloppiness, these are barely worth saying, perhaps not worth saying at all. In any case, some people disagree with Loftus and express their disagreements because they genuinely think he is incorrect, not for “telling them” they are delusional (who cares if John Loftus calls you delusional?) but in his opinions on certain topics.

Lastly #2, it is very annoying and tedious engaging Loftus when he imputes motives to his interlocutors without basis or utility. Loftus telling his opponents that they have angry-crazy motives for “attacking” him is about as useful as me saying Loftus promotes the Outsider Test because last night he had a dream about potatoes. I can’t possibly know this. But even if I did know this, it would have no relevance to evaluating the Outsider Test, or Loftus’ arguments. It would be, in function, subterfuge. Loftus has proudly admitted that his tactics are subterfuge, intended to “overwhelm the believer.”

There is at least one hypocritical element of my post. I observe that Loftus is highly disorganized (I should say, even in his published work, ostensibly overseen by editors). Yet, this post is itself somewhat disorganized. While this is partly because in responding to Loftus one has to make one’s own structure, it is also because I am not putting very much care or effort into this post. But I thought that it might be nice, even fun, to have an interim condescending critique of Loftus, while my hundreds of thousands of readers await the continuation of my highly scholarly review of his collection of other people’s aphorisms, Why I Became an Atheist. My review, I might add, is supported and corroborated by the composite literature in all academic subjects.

In this chapter Loftus exclusively takes issue with a statement made by William Lane Craig, which has been much-discussed in the blogosphere, that were he to go back in time and see Jesus not rise from the dead, he would assume he had been tricked. Craig’s reason for thinking this is twofold:

(1) Had Jesus not risen from the dead, Craig wouldn’t have the Holy Spirit within him; Craig does have the Spirit; therefore, Jesus must have risen from the dead.
(2) The inner witness of the Holy Spirit is in some way (apart from the previous syllogism) epistemically stronger than all other kinds of evidence.

Craig adds the caveat that if he knew Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, he would not be a Christian.

This fact about Craig bothers Loftus, so he spends a chapter on it. I can decipher a few separate difficulties Loftus perceives. First, Loftus “see[s] no reason why the evidence cannot trump [Craig's] belief in the witness of the Spirit. … There is no way the witness of the Holy Spirit can be more reliable than his own two eyes if he went back in time and saw for himself, but that’s what he said.”

A second problem Loftus perceives is that people in competing faiths claim to have comparable experiences. Loftus cites Craig and William Alston as holding that people in other religions may have an experience of God “as the Ground of Being on whom we creatures are dependent, or as the Moral Absolute from whom values derive, or even as the loving Father of mankind.” Loftus in response quotes Michael Martin, who says that “To accept Craig’s thesis one must believe an outrageous and outlandish hypothesis: namely, that billions of people now and in the past were not telling the truth when they claimed that they never had such an experience.” This is a most curious response, since the claim that everyone has had an experience of God is not under discussion. The issue hasn’t arisen in this chapter; why does Loftus offer a response to it?

Loftus goes on to point out, and quote others as saying, that Craig’s personal experiences don’t constitute third personal evidence. Such experiences, while perhaps constituting good evidence for the person having the experience, are limited in their ability to convince others.

Loftus then offers a dual criticism, that there’s no account of how the inner witness teaches Craig specific doctrines, and furthermore that Christians have disagreements about doctrine.

Loftus ends by claiming that Craig can’t distinguish between emotional feelings and the Spirit, and furthermore that there are better explanations of religious experience, such as “wish fulfillment.”

Some criticisms:

(1) The chapter’s main project is pointless, because no one in apologetics or philosophy generally seeks to convince other people based on their personal experiences, however veridical. Craig certainly doesn’t do this – why spend time attacking his psychological disposition?

(2) Loftus’ non-sequitur regarding other religions was noted above. In any case, competing religious experiences do not provide defeaters for someone without additional premises, such as reason to think the experiences are equally credible, comparably strong corroborating evidence, etc.

(3) The point about specific doctrines and characteristics of God seems like a non-starter to me. First, there are plenty of other items which motivate specific doctrines and other beliefs – e.g., philosophical considerations, historical facts, etc. Second, there aren’t any conceptual grounds for thinking that God could not reveal specific doctrines to someone directly. I certainly don’t think Christian doctrines have been revealed to me, but autobiography is not relevant.

(4) Loftus’ point about better explanations for religious experience at least goes beyond the irrelevant topic of the chapter. But unfortunately it also constitutes a non-starter. Unreliable mechanisms can generate any number of experiences and beliefs (e.g. visual hallucinations, feelings of paranoia, etc.). But this is not evidence that our visual apparatus, or reasoning, is generally unreliable. The same observation applies to any cognitive faculty, including faculties involved in religious experience. The widespread confusion on this issue annoys me.

(5) A general point here is needed: So-called “Holy Spirit epistemology” plausibly takes two contemporary philosophical forms. The first is “presuppositional apologetics.” I have nothing favorable to say about this philosophical method, as it is weirdly postmodernist in its allowing personal perspective and narrative to dominate our critique of outside ideas. Maybe interesting worldviews can be constructed on the basis of presupposed theological resources (e.g. the Bible), but usually that is not the question of interest. A second, more substantive form of “Holy Spirit epistemology” really just involves what would be true if the Holy Spirit were active. In Plantinga’s application of his epistemology to Christian belief, for example, he argues that, in virtue of epistemological mechanisms including the Holy Spirit, Christian belief, if true, is very likely warranted, warrant being that quality enough of which turns true belief into knowledge. A warranted belief is produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties in a congenial epistemic environment with a design plan successfully aimed at truth. Because Christian theism (specifically the so-called “Aquinas/Calvin model”) posits, among other things, the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit,” its truth will very likely result in the corresponding beliefs being warranted. Loftus either misunderstands the use of the Holy Spirit in Christian epistemology, or deliberately distorts it. Very likely he actually has no interest in it, nor should he, given his non-truth-oriented goal to merely “overwhelm the believer.” But it seems to me to be a matter of course that if the spirit of God is present within a person, other forms of evidence will and should be unconvincing. Yet Loftus arbitrarily limits the theoretical ability of God to provide a self-authenticating witness.

This chapter seeks to develop a couple of arguments, mostly inspired by David Hume and J.L. Mackie. Loftus begins by giving four prima facie motivations for finding certain Biblical miracle claims implausible: the miracle narratives sometimes represent (1) an “outmoded cosmological viewpoint,” (2) sometimes violate “natural science,” (3) sometimes violate “biological sciences,” and (4) sometimes “just seem strange.” These four reasons collapse into one reason, that miracles seem out of place given our general understanding of the universe, supported by natural science.

Loftus repeats a view he attributes to Hume, that even if a miracle occurred, it wouldn’t be rational to accept, since it is always more likely that a miracle has not occurred. This is an epistemological argument about rationality, but Hume also presents arguments particular to empirical knowledge of history. Along these lines Loftus approvingly cites Ronald Nash as saying that the strongest such argument from Hume is that competing miracle claims of different religions cancel each other out.

In addressing objections to what he takes to be Hume’s argument, Loftus’ own discussion reduces to a claim he relies on throughout the chapter and book, that what one does here depends on whether or not one already accepts Christian (or Hindu, or Muslim…) theism.

Loftus describes Mackie’s similar view that one might address miracles in two different “contexts.” The first is where divine intervention is “on the cards” – say, in a discussion between two theists. The second is where the discussion is really about “the truth of theism itself.” Loftus criticizes Plantinga’s response to Mackie on the basis that Plantinga “ignores” this distinction by “debating Mackie from within a viewpoint Mackie doesn’t accept.”

Loftus refers to John Earman’s book Hume’s Abject Failure. However, in this section he addresses not Earman but William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland. Loftus repeats the accusation that how one evaluates the evidence depends on background knowledge, and that for Christian apologists this includes the existence of God.

Loftus then wonders how an immaterial God could interact with a material world. He says that Christians “need to show how it is possible for two different types of, for lack of a better word, ‘substances,’ can interact.”

Loftus ends the chapter by presenting a dilemma: if Christians show how miracles can happen, then they aren’t miracles; if they can’t show how miracles can happen, then skeptics won’t be convinced.

Here are a few comments:

(1)  Two different miracle claims cancel each other out only if they are equally credible and mutually exclusive. I suspect this is almost never the case. Competing claims in general are just about never equally credible, even if both are ridiculous. Loftus compares the miracle claim that God inspired Muhammad’s writing of the Koran with the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. On plausible readings of the Koran, these two miracles can’t have both occurred, because the Koran claims Jesus did not rise from the dead. But I take it that there are well-developed historical arguments for the resurrection, and I assume there are arguments for the inspiration of the Koran. These arguments can be compared, and then we can decide which claim is more credible. Until we do this sort of analysis, we can’t say they cancel each other out merely in virtue of their mutual exclusivity.

(2) For some reason Loftus almost invariably ends up relying on the claim that belief in miracles depends on belief about theism. Of course there is technically an entailment, namely miracles entail a supernatural agent; likewise, atheism entails there being no miraculous events. But there is not necessarily an epistemological dependency in one direction. As Loftus knows, apologetics for miracle claims mostly do not assume theism. Apologists Loftus cites (e.g. William Craig and Gary Habermas) offer such arguments. The claim in non-presuppositional apologetics is that these arguments are compelling even if one does not assume theism. The hodgepodge of excerpts Loftus gathers in his chapter obscure this aspect of the most common defenses of miracles.

(3) Loftus’ dismissal of Plantinga is characteristic of his apparently poor education in philosophy. Plantinga’s point, here and elsewhere, is that because one’s belief about theism is so crucially connected to evaluating miracles, one cannot dismiss miracle claims without first addressing theism. If the atheologian fails to do this, then, in light of this fact, he has failed to offer a defeater for Christian belief in miracle claims. Loftus is apparently oblivious to this subtlety in Plantinga and, it seems, in the whole issue itself. Thus Plantinga isn’t debating Mackie “from within” some presupposed viewpoint.

(4) It is plainly false that Christians (or anyone else) must first show how a phenomenon occurs before showing that the phenomenon occurs. Generally, the exact opposite is true. We usually have to be aware that phenomena occur before we start investigating mechanisms. I take this to be a relatively trivial methodological principle, even in the natural sciences.

(5) Loftus’ closing dilemma is confused. The way he characterizes it is highly equivocal. Trivially, if a Christian offers a “natural” explanation of a miracle yet has a definition of miracle stipulating violation of natural law, then the event will no longer be miraculous. Thus Loftus has pointlessly refuted the television documentary he takes as his esteemed target (“Mysteries of the Ancient World,” 1993). I’ll unnecessarily make two points. First, apologists don’t stupidly offer natural explanations for miracles while maintaining a definition of them that stipulates violation of natural laws. Even if they did offer natural explanations, Loftus himself shows brief awareness of alternative definitions of miracles near the beginning of his discussion of Hume, and then proceeds to ignore them. Second, Loftus ignores the important distinction between demonstrating how and demonstrating that. The usual apologetical method is to show that something has occurred which is best explained by divine agency. This explains the miracle non-naturally and fails to give some detailed “how” account, yet is a perfectly respectable method, glossed over by Loftus’ purported dilemma.

This chapter includes interesting discussion of historical knowledge and problems of historical religious knowledge, using Gotthold Lessing as a departure point. Lessing objected that the uncertain nature of historical knowledge was ill-fitted to the certainty required by Christian belief; yet, Christianity it a uniquely historical religion. Lessing asks of beliefs about Alexander the Great, “But who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great permanent worth, the loss of which would be irreparable?”

Loftus spends time questioning the possibility of objective historical knowledge in light of the subjectivity of both authors of primary documents and historians themselves. Loftus then moves on to address specifically Christian claims of miracles. He sets out three reasons to not take seriously miracle claims in the New Testament:

(1) The Jesus stories come mostly from believers
(2) Similar miracle stories in other places are contemporary to the Jesus movement
(3) In the modern world, which is the setting of the historian, miracles don’t happen.

Loftus then has a section which points out that if the Christian “worldview” is accepted, then Christian miracle claims become more plausible. Loftus claims Christian thinkers are circular here, i.e. the only reason why they have a Christian worldview in the first place is because of belief in historical miracles.

Loftus ends his presentation with the claim that it would be unfair of God to subject humans to eternal torment on account of false historical beliefs.

Loftus considers five objections, none of which are my own. Incidentally, I agree with  some of his answers to these objections. For example Loftus invents the objection that even considerable present evidence, such as “a glowing cross in the sky,” still wouldn’t convince people. I agree with Loftus that many more people would believe various Christian propositions “if the evidence was overwhelming.” (However, this claim is in danger of triviality. Surely “overwhelming” evidence just is what would convince nearly every observer of that evidence).

After the objections Loftus has a brief section arguing that crimes done by the church in history constitute historical evidence against Christianity. This parallels his personal discussion at the beginning of the book, where the lovelessness Loftus perceived in his church was taken as evidence that the spirit of God is not within Christians.

That’s a summary of the chapter; here are a few comments:

(1) It is not clear to me that historical certainty is necessary for Christian believers. I don’t know what set of beliefs is supposed to be sufficient to make someone a Christian, but no matter what constitutes the set, I can’t see a quantitative requirement of some degree of confidence. Christian authors haven’t provided reasons to have this requirement and neither has Loftus. Therefore, I can’t see that general considerations of historical uncertainty undermine religious belief.

(2) Sometimes Loftus’ statements of historical subjectivity are overblown, e.g. he says about the discovery of America: “Another claim is that [Colombus] “discovered” the Americas. Did he? Well it depends upon your perspective, doesn’t it?” Try to ignore the juvenile prose and just notice that the truth about such matters does not depend on anyone’s “perspective.” There aren’t multiple histories happening at once in the actual world, so of course historical truth doesn’t depend on perspective. Just like in any other field of empirical inquiry, we apply whatever rational methods have the best epistemic fit with our theoretical goals. Lofuts conflates issues of historical certainty, relativism, and broader skepticism.

(3) When convenient, Loftus will pull out certain alleged goals of his and claim his intellectual obligations are historically limited. One of those claims is that he is addressing fundamentalist Christians, which is contradicted when he says he is addressing college students (an overlapping but different set of people). Both are contradicted when he claims to be attacking something called “Christianity.” But another goal Loftus pulls out when convenient is that he is addressing the Christianity thing “as a whole.” But at the beginning of this chapter he says, “I’ll examine whether or not the historical evidence for Christianity is enough to lead someone in today’s world to believe” [emphasis mine]. What’s fishy here is that “Christianity,” however plausibly construed, is not just a set of historical statements, much less a set only supported by historical reasons. As Loftus claims to believe at the beginning of his book, a host of items collect to form religious belief. So the fact that historical belief can’t yield complete certainty, or that historical miracle claims are especially dubious, does not itself defeat a cognitively and experientially broader religious belief or set of beliefs and practices. Of course many apologists, like William Lane Craig, argue that on purely secular grounds the main elements of Christian belief, including historical elements, can be established with assent-compelling rationality. But even if this is not the case, the cumulative, web-like model of religious knowledge can remain intact.

The premise of this chapter is that if the Exodus narrative is historical, then “there should be some archaeological evidence for the Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea, the Israelites’ camping at Sinai, their wilderness wanderings, and their Canaanite conquest.” This brief chapter relies primarily on two scholars, William Dever and Israel Finkelstein. Loftus raises the following objections:

(1) It is hard to date the Exodus
(2) It is hard to identify the Red Sea
(3) The number of Israelites leaving Egypt is problematic on many grounds
(4) Archaeology dis-confirms the conquest narrative

The strangest part of this chapter is the first section, titled, “If God Actually Did Do What The Book of Exodus Claims, Then Why Is It So Hard To Even Date The Exodus?” All Loftus does in this section is briefly summarize Kenneth Kitchen’s plausible attempts to do just that. Only if he had followed the same pattern in the remaining three sections, we’d have a nicely packaged apologetic for the Exodus.

My primary frustration is that although Loftus shows an awareness of Kitchen, he thinks that Dever represents the “maximalist” perspective. Loftus doesn’t explain the terms minimalist and maximalist. Generally speaking a minimalist with respect to “Biblical Archeology” is someone who understands the biblical texts as minimally historical and therefore not a good source of (testimonial) information, whereas a maximalist is someone who generally takes the texts at face value, barring extra-biblical disconfirmation (frequently a legal analogy is invoked – “innocent until proven guilty”). Although Loftus says Dever is “known as a maximalist,” Dever is in no sense a maximalist. That’s according to Dever.

Israel Finkelstein, however, is an okay placeholder for minimalism, although I would have chosen someone more obvious like Dever’s interlocutor in the link above, Philip Davies. There are various candidates for a maximalist perspective on the Exodus narrative. Loftus cites Kenneth Kitchen without showing awareness that he is the probably the most credible advocate for the historicity of the Exodus. For an up-to-date statement of Kitchen’s views, see chapter 6 of his On The Reliability of the Old Testament. Another obvious example, impossible to miss for someone genuinely interested in this topic, is evangelical scholar James Hoffmeier, who writes books with titles like Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition. Finally, one might look at chapters 6 and 7 of the somewhat cumbersome book A Biblical History of Israel, co-written by Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman. Unlike the previous two books, I wouldn’t recommend reading this third one in its entirety. Much of it is just a retelling of the Biblical narratives. Plus, the first hundred or so pages are dedicated to philosophy of history, which although supremely relevant, is boring. For an exchange on the Exodus and Conquest narratives between Finkelstein and the relatively conservative secular scholar Amihai Mazar, see Part 2 the wonderful volume edited with commentary by Brian Schmidt, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel.

Apologetics with respect to the biblical Exodus have a few common elements:

(1) Attempts to show that the lack of evidence would be expected
(2) Attempts to show that the book of Exodus contains marks of authenticity, relative to its various historical referents and context.
(3) Attempts to show that the particularly historical claims of Exodus have good fit with the evidence we do have from the time.

If these three projects are successful, then, combined with at least a moderate view about how we should treat written (and oral) testimony, the exodus story is vindicated. Granted, vindication of this sort is subject to further archeological and literary investigation.

As for the conquest narratives, Loftus demonstrates similar negligence with respect to scholarship. For example, literary analysis of the so-called conquest accounts, exhibited especially in the book of Joshua, has yielded the observation that the text distinguishes between instances of destruction with occupation (which can leave archeological traces), occupation without destruction (trace less likely), and defeat of armies perhaps without destruction or occupation (no trace). Actual destruction and burning of cities occurs arguably only three times, and in each case destruction layers have been revealed by archeology. The caveat here is that the dating and identity of the destroyers is disputed. The real debate lies in these particular cases, and probably Loftus has insufficient knowledge of them to engage in any interesting way beyond pithy quotation from pop archeology books.

Because Loftus is so lazy and uninformed, I am not motivated to type up several excerpts from other people’s research. After all, I am not writing a book for Prometheus press. Furthermore, I don’t see what the point would be, since this chapter is so non-substantive and intellectually irresponsible. Sadly Loftus’ chapter might bother some readers, who have neither thought nor cared about this issue very much before. If anybody wants examples from the literature I cite above, ask in the comments and I’d be happy to provide some.

In this chapter Loftus discusses issues surrounding the authorship of biblical texts. Loftus’ targets are evidently his Christian readers who have traditional (and Protestant) views about the authorship and the general literary nature of the Bible.

Those who have some familiarity with biblical criticism will not be surprised by the couple of other people’s scholarly views cited in this chapter. In some cases, such as the so-called first five books of Moses, there is significant scholarly consensus, religious and secular, that Moses is probably not the author (that is, not even a principal or original author). Loftus spends considerable time going over similar issues, such as the theoretical division of the book of Isaiah into two or three authors. He moves on to New Testament territory, discussing such scholarly morsels as Jude’s citation of 1 Enoch. Loftus is at least hazily aware of divisions in intellectual history regarding these points. For example, he says regarding Isaiah:

The main reason why the unity of Isaiah was accepted for so long despite the problems with the different historical contexts was because of a predisposition to believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible as a whole, modeled on the prophetic paradigm. But eventually, with the rise of historical consciousness, scholars challenged this assumption with the facts of Isaiah itself (Loftus, 169).

Loftus does his readers a disservice by leaving out of his intellectual histories what early Christians and Jews themselves took Scripture to be. Scholars, e.g. William Abraham, have done excellent work demonstrating the diversity of scriptural views present in the days of early Christianity. Aside from taking some shots at particular Protestant and American Evangelical anachronistic understandings of  the Bible, it is difficult to discern a main point in this chapter. Loftus appears to think it is a problem that “not even the inspired writers themselves knew what a true prophetic voice from God was!” He presumably has in mind differences of opinion expressed within the Bible, and the presence in the Bible of extra-Biblical Jewish traditions, again for some reason assuming a Protestant or American Evangelical understanding. But there is some scholarly consensus on another matter as well: that the process of “canonization” was much more organic than is popularly believed. The texts that are canonical usually are so because that’s how they were already being used. Canonization was probably a matter of affirming, just as much or more than a matter of deciding. Furthermore, from a theological point of view, it seems to me that the function of much of scripture is not figuring out who is a prophet, but proclaiming something about God. Indeed much of the pseudepigraphal literature evidences disputes about those matters. Theologically-inclined readers are encouraged to comment on this point.

As I’ve said elsewhere, of course the importance of these issues will be partly proportional to how “high” a view of scripture the reader has (note: few Christians with “low” views of scripture are happy with the choice of spatial metaphors). Verbal inspiration is one issue, but another is what inspiration even means, how we should read an inspired text anyway, and so on. I suspect that Christians similar to the younger John Loftus (by his own description) are especially in trouble in light of biblical scholarship. For example, young Loftus took the creation account to be in the same literary genre and mode as Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which resulted in one of the three pillars of his de-conversion. But if Loftus really aspires to be the “undoing of Christianity” he will have to stop thinking about his young self, focus on less idiosyncratic opposing views, and stop presenting Christian positions at their weakest.

I want to say publicly that these mercifully tempered observations and criticisms are correct. I would desperately prefer to read something far more intellectually challenging, such as The Tao of Pooh or The God Delusion. But, because of pride, I want to finish the dreadful task I set for myself.

In my defense I was tricked by the padded list of compliments that Loftus regularly collects for himself, plus his claim that he was taking an approach inspired by theologian William Abraham, who I am now convinced Loftus hasn’t read (or worse, understood).

D’Souza had an apologetics career before this Christian touring – namely, he has been an apologist for state violence. I have been suspicious of him ever since reading the horrid and self-deprecating chapter, “Two Cheers for Colonialism” from the first installment of his silly brand, What’s so Great about America? I have never understood what’s great about Dinesh D’Souza – hopefully the title of his (inevitable) memoir. Dinesh just wrote another book, diverging from the brand, which will probably compete with the shoddiness of the previous two, Life After Death: The Evidence.

Anyway, leading up to the debate, during it, and after it, Loftus has obsessed over the event on his blog, as he is his own favorite topic. Apparently everyone, including atheists, think he “lost” (whatever that means), and Loftus sort of admits it. Here Loftus says “I am NOT making excuses,” even though that post and others are littered with them. Some of the excuses are amazing: “Dinesh arrived just in time for the debate while I was overdosing on sinus medications.” Loftus at first has a hard time accepting that he “lost” the debate here, with this funny statement: “So here I am still wondering why my perceptions of the debate are different than the young skeptics in attendance.” Indeed – how could it be that Loftus’ inflated view of himself is found exclusively within himself?

Here I watched a couple of annoyingly edited minutes, and was amused that D’Souza expressed one of my own observations of Loftus, which is that Loftus says we can’t look at his initial reasons for becoming an atheist, but that we should only look at a Christian’s original and primitive reasons for becoming a Christian (especially in his unoriginal or incoherent or trivial “outsider test” and anthropological explanations of belief).

Also, uninhibited by the rigors of intellectual honesty, Loftus has been quoting people with non-substantive criticisms of his debate, and then dismissing them as non-substantive.

I do not look forward to this debate being available online and will not watch it. Loftus is even less impressive, and less coherent, in person than he is in writing. Truly, even without God all things are possible!