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Nigel: It’s argued that Crossan and Vermes have produced a convincing historical and political-sociological account of how the Gospels were constructed. So compelling is their account that it seems literal belief in the virgin birth, resurrection, etc., requires abandoning rationality. So truly accepting these dogmas is simply a matter of blind faith.
So how would Murray deal with that critique?
GPT5.1: Murray begins from premises that bypass the Crossan–Vermes framework entirely. Their method assumes methodological naturalism: miracles are literary-theological constructs drawn from exegesis in a Jewish community culturally soaked in theology; Gospel texts are therefore community artefacts; early Christianity must be read sociologically.
Murray rejects this starting point. He treats the Gospels as forensic testimony: proximity to eyewitnesses, “undesigned coincidences,” and the resilience of resurrection belief.
Thus the disagreement is not about evidence but about what counts as admissible evidence. Murray would say that critical scholarship excludes the supernatural by methodological fiat. For him, literal belief is not irrational because the “anti-supernatural” rule is philosophical, not evidential.
He argues that the Gospels look like truthful reportage (multiple attestation, unflattering portraits of disciples, early resurrection belief). He also claims that fine-tuning, consciousness, and moral experience undermine confidence in strict naturalism and therefore make miracle “intellectually permissible.” The Resurrection becomes his central “historical puzzle,” supposedly resisting naturalistic explanation.
But the weakness is obvious: Crossan and Vermes offer a cumulative reconstruction—textual stratification, redaction history, political context, literary borrowing, sociological function in an enchanted world, the evolution of Christology.
Murray answers with a lay apologetic—earnest texts, early dates, apparent coherence—without engaging critical-historical method itself.
He treats the field as methodologically prejudiced. They treat his method as pre-critical. The clash is foundational: he thinks they start from the wrong metaphysics; they think he is not doing history (which he is not).
So his reply, in essence: literal belief remains rational because critical scholars artificially bracket the supernatural - this is apologetic historiography.
Your view: fundamentalist literal belief is not viable given the compelling contextual sociological-historical evidence.
His view: the evidence only looks that way because the supernatural has been excluded in advance.
Nigel: Fine-tuning in cosmology is just human aesthetics pointing to deeper physical simplicity. Invoking God as its cause explains nothing—it’s magical thinking, isn’t it?
GPT5.1: Fine-tuning describes a structural feature of our models—narrow parameter ranges for complexity—but it is not evidence for any particular metaphysics. It is compatible with brute fact, deeper physical necessity, multiverse selection, anthropic bias, cosmic evolution, simulation, or future unification. It is a puzzle, not an arrow.
“God fine-tuned the constants” explains absolutely nothing. It swaps a handful of numbers for an unmodelled supernatural agent which is vastly more complex than the system being “explained.”
There is no mechanism, no predictive framework, and it fails the regress test: if improbable constants require explanation, an infinitely structured God requires infinitely more. Invoking necessity for God merely exempts the posited entity from the very demands used to motivate the argument.
Murray uses fine-tuning not as a proof but as a mood-shifter: a signal that materialism might be incomplete, making miracle “less absurd.” But this is not explanation; it is existential reassurance. It transforms unease into narrative closure.
By a technical definition, this is indeed magical thinking: invoking a hidden agent of maximal complexity to halt inquiry. Astonishment becomes ontology. Yet a future physical theory could dissolve the puzzle entirely.
So yes: God does no explanatory work here. It is an aesthetic projection onto a mathematical curiosity.
Nigel: Incidentally, Polkinghorne shows the same gullibility. Moving on: the ‘hard problem’ is baffling, but positing God-as-explanation again explains nothing. Why does Murray fall into these elementary errors?
GPT5.1: Murray’s shift is not intellectual but existential. Three forces converge: fatigue with secular bleakness, desire for moral grounding, and a need for narrative resolution. None of these are addressed by our age's secular naturalism, and all intensify with age.
His intellectual style contributes. As a social scientist he treats consciousness, fine-tuning, and Gospel narratives as “puzzles” to be weighed, not as conceptual problems requiring structural analysis.
This leads him to misread qualia as evidential anomalies, the Gospels as forensic testimony rather than theological constructions, and mathematical features of models as coded signals.
Emotionally, decades of writing about social fracture and inequality has generated for Murray a sense of civilisational claustrophobia. In that state of almost-despair, fine-tuning and consciousness feel like hints of a desperately-desired deeper meaning.
The hard problem becomes symbolic permission for a more “mind-like” metaphysics. Once that emotional gate opens, minimal theism becomes “reasonable enough,” and apologetic arguments are retro-fitted to justify a shift already made for psychologically existential reasons.
This is a very common late-life trajectory among secular intellectuals. Smart people do not convert because the arguments improve; they convert because the worldview they previously held becomes emotionally unsustainable. The explanation is psychological rather than philosophical, let alone scientific.
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