MJ

Couldn't have said it better myself, Jose Benardete!

I’m appalled at the lack of diversity in Black Panther.

I hate social media.

I enjoyed this interview a lot. I think Garfield gets Craig view, and Adams' DCT in particular, wrong, but Detroyer does a good job pushing back on Garfield's account of authority and bindingness and the Open Question argument applied to his own view. They're so thin. The shift from 'explaining bindingness' to 'explaining why we construct institutions that represent them as binding' is particularly telling. Garfield's arbitrariness charge is wildly misconceived. Also, Garfield makes way too much hay out of the filial metaphors in representing God's authority. I'm reminded of an essay by C.S. Lewis called The Vision of John Bunyan where Lewis properly explains the role of allegory for Bunyan. For example, when an allegory has it that an 'open green field' 'stands for' the abstraction 'the peace that faith brings', we're not supposed to see the concrete stuff as a 'cryptogram' for finding out the 'symbolic abstracta' they stand for. It's the other way around. We're supposed to think: ah! 'The peace that faith brings' IS LIKE THAT 'open green field'. Thus, we don't model God on fallible fathers and then wonder why we should obey. We understand human parental authority as a limited instantiation of a more fundamental authority structure. Garfield's genetic argument assumes the secular order of discovery (we know human authorities first, then project them onto God) is the same as the metaphysical order of explanation (God's authority grounds human authority). I think Garfield's best argument was the regress objection. But a lot of the motivation for that objection assumes that the authority of God's commands is borrowed from prior human social structures, which it isn't. youtube.com/watch?v=OyKoiDTW…

youtube.com/watch?v=wn6uNHMP… My thoughts on the vid. I do think he gets some things right near the bottom . . . 1. The 1 Corinthians 15 "No Tomb" Argument - Paulogia's big opening move is that 1 Corinthians 15 never uses the word "tomb," so it can't be evidence for an empty tomb. On the surface this sounds compelling. Look closer and it starts to fall apart. The creed says Jesus "died, was buried, was raised, appeared." Paulogia wants to read "buried" as semantically neutral, consistent with a mass grave, an unmarked pit, or whatever. But in first-century Jewish thought, resurrection was not a vague metaphor. It meant one thing: the body that went in came back out. N.T. Wright spent about eight hundred pages of "The Resurrection of the Son of God" documenting this, and his conclusion is about as unambiguous as scholarship gets: not a single instance of the Greek word for resurrection in pre-Christian Jewish literature refers to anything other than bodily restoration. So when Paul writes "buried and raised" for a Jewish audience using Jewish categories, the inference to an empty burial place is not an inference at all. It's what the words meant. Then there's the mass grave alternative. Paulogia floats this as though it's the obvious default for crucifixion victims. But we actually have physical evidence that crucifixion victims in first-century Judaea sometimes received proper Jewish burial: the bones of a crucified man named Yehohanan (right?), complete with the nail still through his heel, were found in a burial cave in Jerusalem in 1968. Jewish law specifically required burial before sundown, especially before a major festival. To insist Jesus must have gone into a mass grave, against multiple source traditions and without a single piece of supporting evidence, is not skepticism. It just sounds like an assumption to me. And the C-3PO analogy, entertaining as it is, doesn't actually do what Paulogia needs it to do. The whole point of the analogy is that a summary can't attest to details outside its scope. But Craig's claim is that "buried and raised" in this specific Jewish conceptual universe necessarily implies a specific kind of event. The analogy only works if "buried and raised" is as content-free as "there was a Death Star." It isn't. 2. The Independence of Luke, Acts, and the Pre-Markan Passion Story - Paulogia hears Craig argue that Luke and Acts draw on independent traditions and translates this as: Craig thinks the same author wrote two independent documents. That's not what Craig is saying. At all. Craig's point is about sources, not authors: the apostolic preaching traditions preserved in Acts 2, 3, 10, and 13 are linguistically and stylistically distinct from the narrative material in Luke's gospel in ways that strongly suggest Luke was drawing on earlier material he didn't use for the gospel itself. C.H. Dodd was making this argument in 1936. It's not an apologetic invention. As for the pre-Markan passion story being "entirely speculative": Paulogia acts as though this is some fringe idea Craig cooked up. It isn't. Rudolf Pesch, one of the major Mark scholars of the twentieth century, identified that Mark's passion narrative starting around chapter 14 shows a dramatic shift in vocabulary, syntax, and internal narrative logic compared to the rest of the gospel. The passion narrative names peripheral characters by reference to people apparently known to the original audience (Simon of Cyrene is identified by his sons' names). It has a connected dramatic structure unlike the episodic character of the earlier chapters. The pre-Markan passion story isn't suppose to be mere speculation; it's a hypothesis with serious stylistic evidence behind it, and Paulogia dismisses it without engaging any of that evidence. On M and L: Paulogia asserts these are just Luke and Matthew embellishing Mark, and that this assertion settles the question. But that's precisely the question. This doesn't answer anything for me. The empty tomb accounts in Matthew and Luke have divergent details that are genuinely hard to explain as independent embellishments of the same source. Different numbers of angels. Different descriptions of them. Different recipients of the angelic message. Different geographical instructions. If Matthew and Luke were each independently embellishing Mark, it's strange that they invented different contradictory embellishments rather than just clarifying Mark's account in the same direction. Independent traditions is actually the more economical explanation. 3. John's Independence - Here Paulogia makes what might be his most straightforwardly misleading move in the entire exchange. Unless I'm just completely not following him at all. He cites Greenberg and Bauckham as though they represent a meaningful challenge to the mainstream position that John is largely independent of the Synoptics. The mainstream position since P. Gardner-Smith in 1938 and C.H. Dodd in 1963 is that John drew on independent traditions. D. Moody Smith, who spent his career on this exact question, concluded in 2001 that independence remains the most defensible position. The scholars arguing for Johannine dependence on Mark are a real minority, and presenting Craig as either ignorant of or conveniently ignoring them gets the sociology of the field exactly backwards. John's resurrection account also contains details that make no sense as derivative embellishments: the grave cloths lying in specific positions in the tomb, the distinction between the head cloth and the body wrappings, the particular sequence of Peter and the Beloved Disciple arriving. A writer copying Mark has no reason to invent these specific physical details. They look more like the kind of thing you remember than the kind of thing you make up. 4. The Legend Argument - The Elvis comparison is fun. It's also doing a lot of work it can't support. Elvis sightings were never reported by people who were present at his death, by members of his immediate household, or within a small testable community that could be questioned. Paul's creed names specific living witnesses. He explicitly says most of the five hundred are still alive (1 Corinthians 15:6), which is an invitation to go check. That's a really unusual thing to do if you're propagating a legend (maybe I need to look more into that): here are the people, go ask them. The legend propagation literature Paulogia waves at without citing deals with how true stories get distorted and embellished over time, not with how communities of named living witnesses collectively fabricate events wholesale and then invite scrutiny. These are not the same thing. Also worth noting: Paulogia keeps framing the legendary development question as being about timing. Craig, he says, keeps shifting from "late legend" to "legend" generally. But the relevant issue isn't just the timing, but the pattern, right? The empty tomb tradition has features that don't fit legendary invention: it's embarrassing (women as witnesses), unembellished compared to what a developing legend would look like (no description of the resurrection itself, no proof-text from prophecy, no glowing Jesus), and it's presupposed even by hostile sources (the Jewish stolen-body counter-claim). Legends typically elaborate toward glory, not weird awkwardness. 5. Women at the Tomb - Paulogia's response here distinguishes between courtroom testimony (where women were unreliable witnesses by law) and religious community influence (where women clearly mattered). That's a real and fair distinction. But it doesn't land on Craig's actual point. Craig isn't saying women had no religious influence. He's saying that a community in that cultural context, consciously fabricating the founding story of a movement, would not have chosen legally inadmissible witnesses as the primary attestors of its central claim. The question is what a fabricator would do, not what real women actually accomplished. And the answer is obvious to me: a fabricator would have put Peter, or James, or someone legally credible at the tomb first. The fact that the earliest tradition (Mark) has only women, with no male disciples present at all, is more consistent with embarrassing historical fact than with deliberate narrative invention. Paulogia also argues that any realistic story about tending a body would require women, since that was their cultural role, so the women's presence proves nothing. But this cuts the other way too. If a fabricator knew women were the realistic choice for body-tending, that same fabricator also knew their testimony was legally worthless and would have arranged for male confirmation. The Johannine tradition actually does this, later: Peter and the Beloved Disciple run to the tomb. The earlier Markan tradition doesn't. That progression looks more like history being tidied up than invention being introduced. 6. The Guard at the Tomb - Craig concedes the guard story may not be historical, and Paulogia treats this as a HUGE concession that opens the door to all sorts of skeptical readings. Smh. The problem is that Craig's argument never depended on the guard's historicity. His point is simpler: the existence of a Jewish counter-claim that the disciples stole the body presupposes that the body was known to be missing. You can't counter "the body disappeared" with "your disciples took it" unless the body has in fact disappeared, right? The Jewish polemic takes the empty tomb as its starting point; it doesn't create it. Paulogia's counter is that maybe the Jewish authorities were just matching a rumor with another rumor, with no independent knowledge of whether the tomb was actually empty. This requires piling up several unevidenced assumptions, dude: that the tomb's location was unknown, that no one checked, that the authorities simply accepted the disciples' empty tomb claim without investigation, and then conveniently generated a theft counter-narrative anyway. That's a more complicated story than Craig's, and it has less going for it. 7. The "Dangerous Precedent" of Matthew 27 - The argument here is: Craig allows that the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27 might be apocalyptic symbolism rather than literal history, so what stops us from reading Jesus' resurrection in Matthew 28 the same way? This sounds like a real squeeze, but it relies on treating all gospel passages as methodologically identical, which they aren't. Matthew 27's resurrection of the saints appears in a cluster of cosmic signs at the crucifixion: the curtain tears, the earth shakes, the rocks split, the dead rise. These are stock images from the Hebrew prophetic tradition for eschatological events (see Ezekiel 37, Zechariah 14). They function as a theological statement about the significance of what's happening, not as a reportorial list of observable events. The biggest tell is that not a single other New Testament text refers to this event. Paul catalogs resurrection appearances with evident care in 1 Corinthians 15 and never mentions dead saints wandering Jerusalem. If it happened, the silence is inexplicable. If it's apocalyptic imagery, the silence makes perfect sense. The resurrection of Jesus in Matthew 28 has none of these features: it has named witnesses, extended physical interactions across multiple independent sources, a community built around the claim, and enemies who acknowledge the body is gone rather than producing it. These are categorically different types of textual evidence. Paulogia's "dangerous precedent" argument works only if you refuse to make that distinction, which is not careful reading; it's forced equivalence. 8. The Exegetes/Scholars Problem - This is where Paulogia lands his clearest punch, and it's worth being honest about that. Translating "Exegeten" as "scholars" in the animated video does expand the apparent scope of the claim, and Craig conceding it was a deliberate choice for lay audiences is not a great look. That said, Paulogia's definition of what an exegete is turns out to be significantly wrong (see the fact check below), and this matters because it means the gap between "exegetes" and "scholars generally" is much narrower than Paulogia's pediatrician analogy implies. Historical-critical exegetes in the German academic tradition, which is exactly where Kremer is writing from, do engage with questions of historical authenticity and reliability as central to their work. The 75% figure is not a count of people whose job description is to find the Bible theologically meaningful; it includes critical scholars across the theological spectrum who have looked at the evidence and found the empty tomb historically defensible. Paulogia's analogy would be devastating if his definition of exegete were accurate. It isn't. 9. The Habermas Disagreement - Paulogia frames Craig publicly disagreeing with Habermas as a case of an authority figure second-guessing his own expert witness. I think this is just a misread. Habermas and Craig aren't disagreeing about what the evidence shows; they're disagreeing about what argumentative threshold to set. Habermas's "minimal facts" method is designed to work from premises even committed skeptics will grant, which is why his bar is so high. I've always seen Craig as doing something different: making a cumulative case from the best available historical evidence, which doesn't require the same threshold. These are two legitimate but different argumentative strategies, not a contradiction. The Mary Schweitzer parallel Paulogia uses actually ends up helping Craig's side. Schweitzer's soft tissue discovery was initially resisted by the mainstream and eventually vindicated. Craig's position on the empty tomb is the majority scholarly position, not a maverick claim. If anyone in this exchange resembles the young-earth creationists dismissing Schweitzer, it's Paulogia dismissing the majority scholarly view. 10. The Institutional Capture Argument - This is Paulogia's most structurally original point and probably his weakest in terms of logical validity, which is interesting because he clearly thinks it's devastating. The argument runs: most NT historians work at faith-statement institutions, so their conclusions in favor of the resurrection can't be trusted because they can't follow the evidence freely. A few problems here. First, the premise is factually wrong (see below). Many NT historians are at secular universities. Second, the argument proves too much: a committed methodological naturalist who believes a priori that miracles cannot happen is EQUALLY constrained in following resurrection evidence, just philosophically rather than contractually. Secular commitment can function as an equally powerful prior. Third, this is a straight ad hominem: it attacks the credibility of the witnesses rather than the quality of their reasoning. You can be personally biased and still construct a sound argument. The question is always whether the argument works, not what the arguer believes. I saw some factual errors as well. 1. Richard Bauckham's actual position. Paulogia calls Bauckham "a senior New Testament history and theology scholar at Ridley Hall Cambridge." Bauckham's primary career was as Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he held his chair for DECADES. Ridley Hall is a theological college in Cambridge (not the University of Cambridge itself) where Bauckham subsequently held an emeritus-style position. Leading with Ridley Hall and omitting St Andrews is like introducing someone by their current retirement activity and leaving out their professional career. 2. The Bauckham essay thesis. This one matters quite a bit. Paulogia says Bauckham's essay "John for Readers of Mark" argues that "the Gospel of Mark served as a template for the author of John." That is not what the essay argues at all. I re-read it and maybe I'm missing something. Bauckham's thesis is that John was written for readers who were already familiar with Mark, presupposing that familiarity in the audience. This is fundamentally different from saying Mark was a compositional template John's author copied from. A work can presuppose its readers know another work without the author having that work open on his desk while writing. Bauckham is actually a defender of Johannine independence in the sense that matters for Craig's argument. Paulogia is citing him as evidence against Craig's position when Bauckham's actual thesis supports it. 3. "The wide majority of New Testament historians work for institutions that require them to sign statements of faith." This is just false as a general claim. Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago, Tubingen, Heidelberg, and dozens of other major research universities employ NT scholars under no faith requirement whatsoever. Paulogia asserts this without evidence and it doesn't survive basic scrutiny. Again, maybe I'm missing something? 4. The Matthew 27-28 "one verse apart" claim. Paulogia says the resurrection of the saints and the resurrection of Jesus are "separated by only a single verse," using this to argue that if one can be read non-literally, so can the other. The saints rise in Matthew 27:51-53. Between that and the start of chapter 28 there are the centurion's confession (27:54), the women at the cross (27:55-56), the burial by Joseph of Arimathea (27:57-61), and the setting of the guard (27:62-66). That's a minimum of thirteen verses of separate narrative content, not one verse. The rhetorical point about proximity depends on a factual claim that is just wrong by a significant margin. 5. The definition of exegesis. Paulogia defines exegesis as "specifically about internal theological interpretation" and explicitly contrasts it with historical investigation, comparing the relationship to "astrology is to astronomy." This is just inaccurate for the academic context where Kremer is writing. "Historical-critical exegesis" (Historisch-kritische Exegese) is the dominant method in German-language biblical scholarship and it explicitly combines textual interpretation with historical investigation of sources, authorship, dating, and reliability. Bultmann, who was one of the greatest skeptics about the historical Jesus, was an exegete in this tradition. The method was designed precisely to apply historical scrutiny to biblical texts. Paulogia's definition excludes not just Craig's allies but Craig's critics, which should be a signal that something is off with the definition. 6. Philo "knowing" Peter. Paulogia says Eusebius claimed Philo "actually knew Peter." What Eusebius actually does in Ecclesiastical History 2.17 is discuss Philo's account of the Therapeutae and speculate that these may have been early Christians, with a further inference that Philo's visit to Rome may have brought him into some contact with the early church. Eusebius does not clearly claim Philo knew Peter as a personal acquaintance. The claim Paulogia makes is a stronger version of a much vaguer Eusebian speculation. 7. The Tractate Semachot as "our oldest known rabbinic text" on death and burial. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE (I think), addresses mourning and burial practices and preserves Tannaitic teaching from the first and second centuries. The Tractate Semachot's final compilation date is disputed but many scholars place it in the Talmudic period, making it post-Mishnaic rather than the earliest such text. Using it as direct evidence for first-century Jewish customs is methodologically defensible but requires more argument than Paulogia provides. 8. Elvis sightings spreading "mere days" after his death. lol The date of Elvis's death (August 16, 1977) is correct. The "mere days" claim is not sourced and appears to be an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. The documented Elvis sightings phenomenon became a cultural pattern over weeks and months following his death, not days. This doesn't sink Paulogia's broader point about legend propagation speed, but it's an unsupported specific claim being used as supporting evidence. I'd be interested in being corrected here though, haha. 9. Gary Greenberg's affiliation. Paulogia identifies Greenberg as "president of the Biblical Archaeology Society of New York." The major organization in the field, the one that publishes Biblical Archaeology Review, is the Biblical Archaeology Society, headquartered in Washington D.C. The Biblical Archaeology Society of New York is a distinct and much smaller local organization. Presenting Greenberg's presidency of the New York organization without distinguishing it from the larger BAS inflates the apparent institutional weight of his scholarship to me. 10. John as "the most embellished" account. Paulogia argues that because John uniquely includes Jesus' appearance in the empty tomb scene, it must be the most embellished despite Craig calling it the most primitive. "Primitive" in form-critical usage doesn't mean "fewest total elements"; it means lacking the apologetical and theological overlays characteristic of later development. Matthew's empty tomb account has an earthquake, an angel descending from heaven, guards fainting, and a specific anti-theft apologetic. Those are legendary elaboration markers. John's account has physical details about grave cloths lying in specific positions, which look more like preserved visual memory than theological invention. More content is not the same as more legendary. Here is some stuff I think Paulogia gets right, though. The synoptic gospels are not independent of each other. Craig concedes this directly, and it's accurate. Q, as Craig himself describes it, is a sayings source unconnected to the empty tomb narrative. Craig brings it up only to illustrate the existence of independent underlying sources; Paulogia is right that it's irrelevant to the tomb question specifically. The animated video's language ("scholars" rather than "exegetes") does expand the Kremer claim beyond what the original German licenses, and Craig concedes the translation was deliberate. Habermas does not include the empty tomb in his minimal facts approach. Accurate. No extrabiblical source corroborates the empty tomb. Craig doesn't dispute this. It's simply true. John uniquely includes the risen Jesus' appearance within the tomb sequence, while the Synoptics do not. Accurate. No chapter divisions existed in the original manuscripts. Accurate, though as shown above, the narrative distance between Matthew 27's saints and Matthew 28's resurrection is still substantial regardless of chapter breaks. Tim Keller does confirm in the cited clip that preparing bodies was the role of women and slaves in first-century culture, which cuts against Craig's countercultural argument as Paulogia applies it. So, I'd have to think about that . . . Cheers!

The earth’s husband, all-beholding, Arch-chemic eye. But other country Dark with discord dins beyond him, With noise of nakers, neighing of horses, Hammering of harness. A haughty god MARS mercenary, makes there his camp And flies his flag; flaunts laughingly The graceless beauty, grey-eyed and keen, Blond insolence – of his blithe visage Which is hard and happy. He hews the act, The indifferent deed with dint of his mallet And his chisel of choice; achievement comes not Unhelped by him – hired gladiator Of evil and good. All’s one to Mars, The wrong righted, rescued meekness, Or trouble in trenches, with trees splintered And birds banished, banks fill’d with gold And the liar made lord. Like handiwork He offers to all – earns his wages And whistles the while. White-feathered dread Mars has mastered. His metal’s iron That was hammered through hands into holy cross, Cruel carpentry. He is cold and strong, Necessity’s song. CS Lewis - The Planets

Imagine you're a quiet, contentious scholar doing your due diligence, quietly addressing all known objections to your views and ideas over the decades, and after the end of your long, productive career, some upstart dissertation dismisses your entire life's work as hopelessly futile, and provides a footnote listing all the authors critical of your work that you already spent decades carefully addressing. Imagine that and imagine how fantastically obtuse your upstart has to be. Imagine you retiring from your academic career in your 80's and that your upstart was probably playing Play Station 5 while you were in your 60's, working on your 30th published, labor of love in, say, the Bodleian Library, and that you were probably falling in love, getting married, raising a family, and working on your career before that upstart's parents were even aware that they existed.

One of my heroes. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 LOVE THIS GUY!!!

Why did you passionately pursue philosophy? There’s no $ in it, loser.

Wait a minute. Why is Joe Schmid allowed to retract something he accused Craig of doing and Phil Halper has no issue with that, but when Craig retracted something based on his consideration of Sean Carroll's argument, Halper leaps right to mendacity and deceit?

If Anthony Joshua did what he did to Jake Paul's jaw, I can't imagine what prime Mike Tyson would have done to him.

Welcome to Hilbert's Hotel! Your room number is 326,345,234,254,865,345,264,274,275,121,664,788. Don't worry. There's a bathroom in the elevator. Here's your key!

How it feels reading critiques of the Kalam

Me seeing Morriston inside one of his thought experiments closing in on the foundation of nearly all of his objections.