Added A Lawyer Evaluates the Minimal Facts Approach (2024) by Robert G. Miller to the Resurrection page under Christianity and the Gary Habermas page under Christian Apologetics and Apologists in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
Gary Habermas pioneered the “minimal facts approach” (MFA) to proving the resurrection of Jesus. Habermas asserts that a few facts accepted by even skeptical scholars are enough to substantiate the Resurrection’s occurrence. Retired attorney Robert G. Miller argues that the “facts” cited by Habermas are actually opinions, and that Habermas misrepresents those opinions. Miller argues that commonsense rules of evidence developed by courts over centuries of deciding real-world issues provide a better way of evaluating the evidence claimed for the Resurrection.
New in the Truth, the Fall, and Hominins (2024) by G. P. Denken
The Jewish Tanakh (or Christian Old Testament) includes a creation myth in Genesis chapters 2 and 3. The story describes Adam and Eve’s famous sojourn in the Garden of Eden, which ended abruptly after they disobeyed God. Though only a handful of verses, Christians consider this narrative an essential truth of the faith and call it the Fall of Man story. In “Truth, the Fall, and Hominins,” G. P. Denken questions whether there can be any historical truth to the Fall in light of human evolution. He focuses on the Catholic Church’s current accommodationist approach to the subject, seeing the Fall story as symbolic and allowing scholarly speculation on how evolution fits into the narrative. He concludes that the Church has failed to extract the Fall’s historical truth from our hominin history, and its speculations on evolution raise more problems for its complicated theology than they resolve. Once the Church recognizes that it can accept either human evolution or the Fall story, but not both, Denken predicts that it will abandon evolution and return to an irrational, literalist reading of the Fall.
Recommended reading: The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (1997) by Rodney Stark
In his classic The Rise of Christianity, the late sociologist of religion Rodney Stark outlines the historical forces between 40 and 300 CE that turned a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire into the dominant faith of Western civilization. Accessibly weaving together social science methods with insights into why people convert and how new religious groups recruit members, Stark notes parallels with the formation of successful new religious movements today: reaching educated, cosmopolitan converts, proposing new perspectives on familiar concepts that transcend ethnicity, pressure to assimilate into the dominant culture of the time, intermarriage with nonbelievers ripe for conversion, and the formation of mutual aid networks providing members with greater social support networks than they would otherwise have.