Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 57
a more straightforward fashion, though not necessarily uncritically, as the
work of many outstanding Christian New Testament scholars will testify.
Orthodox commentators will be interested in explaining the existence of
inconsistencies and other oddities in the documents, doing linguistic analyses
of style and vocabulary to shed light on authors and sources. Nevertheless
they will disagree, with those of more naturalistic bent, who will go much
further in getting behind the Gospel stories at what they conceive of as the
historical Jesus. Of course one might eliminate all the supernatural from
the Gospel stories and still remain a theist. Nevertheless I think that the
higher criticism of the New Testament is after all relevant to theism, since
belief is holistic and changes in one area can influence strength of belief in
other areas. For other theistic religions of course it is not necessary to believe
in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, though analogous problems may
exist elsewhere.
Revelation may be more plausible to one who already finds belief in the
supernatural plausible, but it should be obvious that revelation by itself cannot
without circularity be used to justify its own validity.
There are many reasons for distrusting much in the Gospel stories. The
earliest Gospel to be written was that of St Mark and is dated by scholars
many years after the crucifixion. Matthew and Luke incorporated the gist
of almost all of Mark into their Gospels, in which scholars have detected
another hypothetical documentary source, called ‘Q’. Mark also would have
depended on oral tradition. It is commonplace that oral tradition can lead to
distortions and exaggerations as words are passed from one mouth to another.
There were stories of virgin birth and resurrection elsewhere in the Middle
East, neo-Platonic influences from Greek philosophy, and historians in
ancient times were not as scrupulous about literal truth as are modern ones.
There is the puzzle of the different authorship (discovered by philological
investigation) of the final verses of Mark. Changes, both intentional and
unintentional, can also creep in as manuscripts are transcribed. These considerations
already give some latitude to a sceptical commentator, but there
are other important matters of methodology. For example, if a passage seems
to be inconsistent with the author’s evangelical purpose it is likely that it is
true: the evangelist could not omit or change it because it was so well known.
What I want to concentrate on here, however, is the sort of consideration
emphasized by Bradley, namely that of metaphysical presuppositions. Suppose
that, as I do, you regard the best touchstone of metaphysical truth to be
plausibility in the light of total science, how will the gospel stories look to
you? This attitude seems to me to be reasonable, since science tries to attain
well tested theories. There are of course areas of controversy. Nevertheless,
it is the case that there is a huge body of well tested and uncontroversial
established fact and theory.