Christmas - Philosophy for Everyone

Better Than a Lump of Coal

Scott C. Lowe, Fritz Allhoff

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781444330908
• eBook ISBN: 9781444341454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From Santa, elves and Ebenezer Scrooge, to the culture wars and virgin birth, Christmas - Philosophy for Everyone explores a host of philosophical issues raised by the practices and beliefs surrounding Christmas.

• Offers thoughtful and humorous philosophical insights into the most widely celebrated holiday in the Western world
• Contributions come from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, religious studies, English literature, cognitive science and moral psychology
• The essays cover a wide range of Christmas themes, from a defence of the miracle of the virgin birth to the relevance of Christmas to atheists and pagans

PART I

CHRISTMAS: IN THE BEGINNING

ZACHARY JURGENSEN AND JASON SOUTHWORTH

CHAPTER 1

JESUS, MARY, AND HUME

On the Possibility of the Virgin Birth

Some wise men, a stable, sheep, and a young virgin giving birth to the mortal son of a perfect God. Ask anyone, and they will tell you Jesus’ virgin birth is an essential part of the Christmas story. We talk about it so often there is even a shorthand way of referring to it – the Christmas miracle. Given how important this extraordinary claim is to people around the world, and how often we hear it made (almost every day for no less than a month every year), it is surprising how little attention and reflection is paid to establishing the truth of the claim. In this essay we set aside our yuletide spirit in order to evaluate the truth of the Christmas miracle.

Miracle on Definition Street

Before we get too far, we need to be clear on what we mean by a miracle and how exactly the virgin birth of Jesus is supposed to be a miracle. When we use the term “miracle” we are using the definition given by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76). Hume defines a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”¹ This definition seems to capture the commonsense meaning of the word. To put it in terms of an often used example, if God interceded and cured Grandma’s terminal cancer, that would be a miracle. If, on the other hand, Grandma gets better without God’s intervention, no miracle occurred – she was just lucky.

Essential to Hume’s account of miracles is his understanding of laws of nature. A law of nature, as Hume understands it, is formed by consistently observing a regularity in a series of experienced events. It is the goal of the sciences to discover and explain these laws of nature. Hume’s paradigm example of a law of nature is that “all men must die.”² As evidenced throughout humanity, we experience with uniform regularity that if you are mortal, then you will die at some point. Although it may be very surprising to see a young person of good health suddenly die, it is by no means a miracle, as Hume notes, because it has been observed to happen in the past. Such an event would not constitute a violation of a law of nature because it conforms to past regularities. However, Hume agrees that it would be a miracle if a mortal person were to die and then come back to life. There is uniform regularity in our experience that points to the fact that death is irreversible. So, if a person were to come back to life after being dead, this event would violate a law of nature that has been firmly established from past, uniform experience. Notice this is perfectly in keeping with how the term is normally used. Christians say that it is a miracle that Jesus rose from the dead because such events are outside regularly established natural laws.

What the Bible Says

If you ask believers why they think Jesus was born to a virgin mother, they will tell you, “It’s in the Bible.” So it seems like the Bible is a reasonable place to start our search for truth about the virgin birth. While most readers no doubt know the basics regarding the structure and organization of the Bible, let’s do a quick review. The Bible is divided into two parts: the Old and New Testaments. The dividing line is the life of Jesus. Everything about Jesus is in the New Testament. The New Testament itself is divided into four gospels, each written by a different person. The names traditionally ascribed to the gospel writers are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, although authorship was not assigned until considerably after the texts themselves were written.³ All four of the gospel writers offer what they see as the important highlights of Jesus’ life. Just like with a biography, the gospels are not complete histories, but all significant events are supposed to be covered. For example, all four gospels discuss Jesus’ death by crucifixion and his resurrection. Since all the gospels covered the miraculous rebirth of Jesus, you would think they would all also cover his birth, if it was equally miraculous. This is not the case, however. Mark and John say nothing about Jesus’ birth at all. This leaves us with only Matthew and Luke. Both of whom, we will see, say very little about the virgin birth.

Matthew’s story starts with a lineage tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to Abraham. The narrative proper begins with Mary learning from an angel that she is going to have a baby through the Holy Spirit. From there, the account moves to Joseph, a part of the story often ignored in retellings found in books and films. When Joseph finds out about Mary’s pregnancy he tells her that he is going to set aside their marriage contract. But then Joseph also gets visited by an angel. Joseph’s angelic visitor tells him that he should marry Mary because she conceived through the Holy Spirit and, like most people who are told to do something by a supernatural being, he does so. Most importantly, Joseph is told that the baby’s birth will fulfill the Old Testament prophecy that “ ‘a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and his name will be Emmanuel,’ a name which means ‘God is with us.’ ”⁴ This quote is a reference to a passage in Isaiah (from the Old Testament).⁵ Never again in the rest of the gospel is the virgin birth mentioned.

Luke also offers an account of an angel visiting Mary. This time, the angel is given the name Gabriel, but the content of his message is the same, although more detailed. Mary asks Gabriel how it is she is going to have a baby, since she is a virgin. The angel explains that the Holy Spirit will be the cause of her pregnancy. Luke does not give Joseph’s side of things like Matthew does, but he does note that Joseph and Mary were not married (they were betrothed) when she gave birth.⁶ Just like with Matthew, after this brief account of Mary’s conversation with the angel, the miracle of Jesus’ virgin birth was not mentioned in the rest of the gospel.

Now Testify

Now that we know what the Bible says, we can evaluate how we should understand it. As rational agents, we don’t just believe everything we are told. Instead, we look for reasons to think certain things are true before we take them as fact. When we only have some reason, or our reasons aren’t great, we reserve judgment or we hold weaker claims, like something probably is true, or might be true. Consider the following example: if your little sister tells you she saw mommy kissing Santa Claus underneath the mistletoe last night, that isn’t going to be enough reason to take it to be true. But, given what you know about your mom, you might think, “That sure sounds like mom, it probably happened.”

This intuitive way of understanding the way rational people come to beliefs was put a little more concretely by David Hume when he claimed that a wise person will form and hold beliefs in proportion to the supporting evidence of the claim. It helps to think of how evidence influences belief in terms of a sliding scale, with all the available hypotheses piled on it. Every time there is a new piece of evidence to consider we will move certain theories up on the scale and others down, based on which theories the evidence supports. Sometimes, like in the case of mommy kissing Santa Claus, there are only two hypotheses – either she kissed or she didn’t. With others, like an account of quantum mechanics, there can be hundreds of hypotheses. Whichever theory is at the top is the one that we ought to believe, but we should only believe it to the extent to which it beats out the other theories.⁷

But how do we weigh evidence? With scientific data this is easy, since for the most part things are easily quantifiable, and experiments are designed specifically to test individual hypotheses. With testimony, however, whether it is from your sister or the authors of the Bible, things are a little more complicated. In these cases, the evidence needs to be evaluated on two standards: how credible is the person giving the testimony and how plausible is the purported event. So, say that you hear from your cousin in Florida that it snowed in Orlando on Christmas morning. In this case, the credibility of your cousin’s testimony is important, given that the likelihood of it actually snowing in Orlando is pretty low. If your cousin is honest, finds practical joking distasteful, has keen senses, and isn’t prone to hallucinations, then he is fairly credible, and you would have strong, but not absolute, reason to trust him. If your cousin has a deficiency in any of these areas, then you will have less of a reason to trust him. Now, consider a similar case where your cousin calls and tells you that not only is it snowing in Orlando, but that talking snowmen are falling from the sky. At this point, the credibility of your cousin’s testimony doesn’t play much of a role, no matter how trustworthy he is. This is because what he is telling you (at least the snowmen are falling from the sky part) is, though not logically impossible, so highly improbable given everything you know about the world that you can’t give it credence. In some cases, “the incredibility of a fact” is enough to invalidate even the most accredited testimony.⁸

It is also important to note that you can have multiple people giving testimony about something. When this happens you have to evaluate the testimony of all parties in the way we have just laid out. It will often be the case that some witnesses will be more credible than others. The addition of testimony of a more credible witness will bolster the claims of a less credible individual when they agree, but several meritless witnesses will not make the testimony much more believable. So, if your cousin who tells you about the snow in Orlando is a liar, but his story is confirmed by his honest mother, then it is more likely to be true. If that whole side of the family tends to be loose with the truth, then you still shouldn’t believe them, even if everyone in the house tells you about the snow. Given this, you can always look for more credible witnesses to confirm or deny what you have been told through testimony. You can also search for first hand or scientific evidence. So, if you’re skeptical about your cousin’s testimony that it’s snowing in Orlando, you could try to confirm it by watching a meteorologist’s weather report of Orlando, as well as seeking out visual confirmation of the snowfall. Comparatively, if you sought verification in the case where your cousin tells you talking snowmen are falling from the sky, you would most likely end up disconfirming the testimony in light of the scientific evidence. In cases where testimony by itself is not convincing, attempting to verify the testimony by scientific authority can be very helpful.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Gospels But Were Afraid to Ask

So, are Matthew and Luke credible sources of testimony regarding the virgin birth? To answer this question, we need to know a little more about these gospel writers, and unfortunately, we don’t have a lot to go on. Tradition has it that Luke the gospel writer is the Luke mentioned in two of Paul’s letters as his physician traveling companion. Historians and biblical scholars have reason to doubt the accuracy of this tradition, however. First, there is no extra-textual evidence of this claim – no other document of historical record says that this is true. In fact, Luke himself does not make this claim, either in his gospel or in the Book of Acts, which is believed to be a continuation of the narrative by the same author. The second reason is that Luke’s writings do not demonstrate much knowledge about Paul, which is strange if they were companions. Although Paul’s letters were written much earlier than Luke or Acts, the author does not seem to have access to the information contained in them. That is strange if you consider how much you know about people in your life that you don’t even like, let alone your friends. Those problems aside, Paul didn’t know Jesus, so the absolute best case is that Luke is getting his information third hand (from the disciples and others who knew Jesus, to Paul, to Luke). Luke also claims to have conducted interviews and that he used these interviews to write his gospel. While Luke sees these interviews as making his account more scholarly, he doesn’t tell us who he interviewed. We can assume, however, that none of the interviews gave him anything closer than third hand information, or he probably would have told us about it. Another reason to think Luke’s information could not have been better than third hand is that his gospel wasn’t written until about 90 ce. By this time Jesus had been dead for about sixty years. Most of his contemporaries would have been dead, or extremely old.⁹

In addition to interviews, scholars believe Luke relied on three sources when writing his gospel. The first is the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels. The second source is lost to us now, but is referred to as “Q.” This source is believed to predate the gospels, taking the form not of a narrative, but of a collection of sayings or quotations from Jesus. Matthew and Luke contain many of the same quotations (not included in Mark), and the only way this could have happened is if these two gospel writers had access to a shared source unavailable to Mark. The likelihood that there was a common source is what leads to the belief that there was a text (of which no copies are extant) that Matthew and Luke were both drawing from. There is also additional material, unique to Luke (dubbed “L”), which is believed to stem from either a written or an oral source available only to Luke, probably coming from the church community where he lived. Again, none of these sources are very close to the events discussed in the gospel. Mark, being written earlier, is a more reliable source, but Luke apparently found Mark’s gospel to be lacking, as he chose to rewrite it. We can’t say very much about the credibility of Q or L, since we don’t know anything about them (nor can we be certain that they existed).¹⁰

We know even less about Matthew than we do about Luke. Since he tells us nothing about himself or his sources, we are left reconstructing things as best we can. Just as in Luke, it is clear that Matthew relied on Mark and Q, and he also had a third source, “M,” which was not available to the other gospel writers. We can be pretty sure about these things, given the similarities between the synoptic gosp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword: Joining the Manger to the Sleigh? Stephen Nissenbaum
• Introduction Scott C. Lowe
• Part I Christmas: In the Beginning
• Part II Is Celebrating Christmas Really a Good Idea?
• Part III Santa: A Deeper Look
• Part IV The Morality of Christmas
• Part V Christmas Through Others’ Eyes
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors