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What better way to celebrate the holiday season? For our Dec 2009 speaker, AOF is delighted to host Prof. Matt McCormick, Associate Professor of Philosophy at CSUS. Dr. McCormick will treat us to a peek at his new book, “The Case Against Christ.” We will learn how belief in a divine Jesus is inconsistent with sense and rationality (never mind that a pretty good pic of him appeared on my pancake this morning). Prepare to be challenged, uplifted and enlightened. An abstract of Dr. McCormick’s book follows.
The book makes the case that the average, educated 21st century American should not believe that Jesus was a divine being who was resurrected from the dead 2,000 years ago. Believing that Jesus was resurrected from the dead on the basis of the evidence available to us—primarily a small group of testimonial stories recorded in the Gospels—is inconsistent with our other conventions concerning belief and evidence. There are numerous other ordinary cases where we have a body of comparable evidence, yet we would reject the analogous conclusion for a supernatural claim like the resurrection. In fact, there are numerous cases where we have better evidence—both in terms of quantity and quality—and we reject the conclusion, so accepting the Jesus story is grossly out of synch with our other beliefs. The Salem Witch trials and a hypothetical alien abduction cases illustrate the point. I give several other considerations that fortify the doubts; problems with the transmission and reliability of the Jesus story made clear by probability theory, modern developments in epistemology and recent empirical research psychology all undermine our accepting the Jesus story as communicated to us by the early Christians through the Bible. I then turn to several additional discussions that complete the case against Christ: the existence of so many other religions and “dead” gods presents a problem for Christianity, performing miracles cannot be reconciled with the characterization of God as the all powerful, all knowing creator of the universe, several problems arise from the faith response and from a non-literal approach to Christian doctrines.
Dr. McCormick is also a contributing author to “The Impossibility of God,” edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier. At CSUS, Dr. McCormick teaches a philosophy seminar on atheism, the only seminar of its kind in the nation. He stands as the academic advisor to ASO, the Atheist Student Organization. His professional web page is http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mccormickm/.
