The Double Standards in Researching Miracles-Claims

One of the most frustrating aspects of this entire issue is watching how some “liberals” interact with Christian miracle-claims versus their attitudes towards miracle-claims within the world religious traditions. Many examples could be supplied concerning how the very strictest guidelines possible are usually exacted upon Christianity, whereas much lesser criteria, or even none at all, may be applied to non-Christian claims. When the latter are complimented or even accepted without critical interaction, the biased ruse is apparent. Observing these inequities can be a truly amazing exercise. For example, influential critical theologian John A.T. Robinson uncritically repeated a Buddhist story and claim of apotheosis, where a holy man in Tibet died in 1953. The man’s body was later missing from a blanket in which it was wrapped and kept inside a house.

Sometime afterwards, a rainbow over the house was interpreted by the local Tibetan villagers to mean that the holy man had been taken up to “heaven”!2

In another of his volumes, while being fairly positive towards Jesus’ empty tomb (but not in the same context towards his virgin birth), Robinson still raised questions concerning the Christian accounts.3 Yet, no criticisms were raised regarding the details concerning the Tibetan holy man, such as the assurance of the man’s death in the first place, or the possibility of a naturally removed body that was only kept inside a private home, or the extent to which the story may have changed over the years before Robinson heard about it. Perhaps most of all, how in the world does a rainbow indicate that the man was spiritually “absorbed into the Light”4 especially when the Tibetan climate is often quite rainy and rainbows would seem to be both common as well as extraordinarily difficult to trace to a single house anyway? The levels of skepticism and critical interaction are simply not the same in these cases.

In another instance, leading critical philosopher Charles Hartshorne implied in his comments regarding a public debate on Jesus’ resurrection that he felt bound not to accept Jesus’ resurrection because it might also confront him with the miraculous events that Buddha was supposed to have performed!5 Yet, while once again raising some standard questions concerning the resurrection in this same context, no mention whatsoever was made that the events reportedly from Buddha’s life were not recorded until many hundreds of years afterwards, as if this little fact were hardly even relevant! In such a case, how could the latter reports from hundreds of years after Buddha’s life possibly eliminate the former, very early ones?6

A last instance is provided by David Levenson, who asserts rather negatively that, in the case of Jesus, “we are forced to rely on secondhand accounts” in the Gospels, as if Levenson were announcing that these four texts were regrettably too late or otherwise sub-par!7 But the four Gospels were written as early as three to less than seven decades after Jesus’ teachings! We will take a look later at how many of the world religious founders have books written this soon after their deaths?

However, when Levinson discusses the recording of Buddha’s teachings, centuries-long gaps between his teachings and their initially being recorded are glossed over quickly, without specifications!8 So one sometimes has to work out the math in order to realize this distance! But why the somewhat derogatory comment about the secondhand Gospels while not even being specific about the distance to the writings regarding Buddha?

It is precisely such an overly-critical and very specific attitude toward Christian beliefs while hardly posing any similarly tough questions at all to the frequently unevidenced, non- Christian situations that reveal the scholarly double standard. Regarding the empty tomb or the resurrection, critics typically throw the proverbial kitchen sink of major naturalistic hypotheses (and then some!) at the Christian positions. But too seldom they are not at all critical of non-Christian teachings. Granted, it could be a case of the political correctness mentioned above. Or it could be that the factual data regarding the non-Christian religions is just unknown to the commentator. But whatever the reasons, it certainly seems to occur too often to simply be a matter of coincidence.

A last matter should be remembered briefly here before we dig into the meat of this subject. One remark is perhaps heard above all others, often made in a variety of ways in this age of supreme tolerance. The popular platitude is that all major religions basically proclaim the same core message or truths, though they may be packaged a little differently. The most common rendition could well be that all religions are paths up various sides of the same mountain, of course implying that they will all reach the pinnacle together. Throughout the remainder of this short book, this idea will remain in the background in our comparison of religious ideas. Our chief conclusions will bear on the truth of these notions.

Endnotes

2 John A.T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), 139.

3 John A.T. Robinson, Exploration into God (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 112-114.

4 Robinson, The Human Face of God, 139, note 157.

5 Charles Hartshorne, “Response to the Debate,” in Gary R. Habermas and Antony G.N. Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate, ed. by Terry L. Miethe (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1987), 137, 141-143. Perhaps the issue is partly solved when Hartshorne confesses in the last sentence of his essay, “My metaphysical bias is against resurrections.” (!) (142)

6 We return to the question of the evidence for Buddha’s life later in this E-Book.

7 Cf. David Levinson, Religion: A Cross-Cultural Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38.

8 Levinson, Religion, 28-30.