Standards of Evidence in Religion

Sorry to bog down the blog with another anti-apologetic posting. But I have been thinking about an issue which I think is serious, and I would like to hear some critical thought on the matter. Let's put down issues of the extent to which someone should doubt or be critical of what has been given them on any absolute scale. Let's have a relative standard of evidence: the evidence we ask from history should be comparable to the evidence we ask from our daily lives.

Ask yourself this: what would it take to convince you that someone was genuinely God incarnate, here and now? What would make you leave your religion, as people left their families and ways of life, and eventually Judaism or paganism to follow Jesus? Take this standard of evidence, and apply it to the historical record. If you had four texts claiming to be eyewitness accounts, and reports about people having seen someone rising from the dead, would you go and follow that person? If not, why do you accept the Biblical account?

Note that you cannot simply imagine yourself as someone who was an eyewitness, or receiving secondhand reports. This is not the relation we have to the historical data. It has been mediated to us; at very best, we may have some books of the NT written by eyewitnesses to a significant portion of Jesus' life, and that even is not indisputable. You can't go ask eyewitnesses yourself, because you cannot go ask ask the eyewitnesses whom Paul references. You would have the same distance from the evidence for the person here and now, as you currently have from the life of Jesus. Would you then believe the claims of the next religious leader?

Also, you must compare like cases with like. You can't say, "Well, the evidence claims that Jesus rose from the dead, but this other person only did significant miracles/got reincarnated/etc.", unless you can give a very strong reason why being resurrected is categorically different from the others. I'm not sure that it's even the oddest miracle out there; being both God and man seems to be infinitely greater, if it even makes sense, and I'm not sure what counts as good evidence for that in any time period. At any rate, miracles need to be judged insofar as they are miracles, religious claims need to be judged insofar as they are religious, and so on. If you can't accept some miracle-worker who claims to be a Boddhisattva, then would you really accept claims that some guy got resurrected, showed up to a few people, and alone was identical with the single, categorically-different-from-creation God? The former would seem to require much less evidence, even though its truth would at least be a significant problem for Christianity.

At this point some people may say, "But Scripture tells us to watch out for miracle workers and such," or "Scripture tells us that Christ was it. There is no new revelation." Or related things; fill them in as you like. But, you can't assume what you want to prove. We are weighing the evidence for Christianity here, and so we cannot assume that the Christian story/Scripture/our pastors are correct before looking at the evidence.

Finally, I have heard one concern a few times (worded almost eerily the same; maybe it's coming from some common source?), and it absolutely puzzles me. It goes along of the lines of this: "We don't have any more evidence to give, what do you expect? Why should non-Christians have paid attention to what was going on at the time of the Resurrection, in order to provide an alternative perspective?" But I don't see how this is relevant. I'm asking about whether the evidence we have is sufficient to establish truth, and that has nothing to do (or very little) with what evidence I can expect. Let's take the Riemann Hypothesis in mathematics. It has not yet been proven. Even if it could not be proven, this does not mean that I then can expect to get anywhere by picking the side that seems to have the most evidence. That evidence does not meet the standards for mathematical argument, and becomes completely null and void (unless, perhaps, I am a practiced mathematician with an excellent grasp on related issues, in which case I may have intuitions which would raise my opinion slightly above random guessing). Although history is more complicated and admits of degrees of evidence (as well as corresponding degrees of assent), even if we can't expect more evidence, this doesn't make the evidence we have any more conducive to a decision. Arguing merely from what we can expect, or from what is available, is simply fideism.

So, if you truly and honestly would go and follow some contemporary religious teacher under the same standards of evidence upon which you base your current faith, then I simply ask that you have that integrity. If not, then stop claiming any evidence for your faith: you are a fideist, or a pragmatist, but you do not have the support of rational argument.