M-M-M-Miiiiike Licona

Question from Violeta:
I am wondering if you have heard about Mike Licona? He is a Bible scholar who claims he has absolute proof that Jesus rose from the dead. He claims thousands of people saw him, and that group hallucinations of thousands is impossible. He debated Matt Dillahunty a few years ago and used those arguments. He is very highly respected in the Christian world. He also has rebuttals to all these atheist articles saying “Jesus never existed”. He claims there is tons of proof of his existence, and that he had to rise from the dead. What are your thoughts on this?

Answer by SmartLX:
I wasn’t familiar with Licona before your question, but that debate with Dillahunty is online. From it we can tell a few things:

– Licona has poor standards of evidence. Unsupported anecdotes count for him, for instance, while not convincing anyone new.
– Licona is perfectly content with a blatant argument from ignorance as his central theme: if there is no current natural explanation for an event (even a supposed event), he’s happy to not only posit but assert a supernatural cause.
– Licona only wants the idea that Jesus’ appearance to the large crowd after his death was real to be measured against the idea that it was an impossible mass hallucination. Two responses to this from me. Firstly, since I’ve been covering the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fátima a great deal in the last several months, I know that a phenomenon that only some people present even claimed to see can be claimed as a more universal experience after the fact. Secondly, we do not have accounts by the hundreds of people claimed to have seen Jesus, only one account that says they were there, and that account is subject to suspicion.

This is all very familiar, to me at least. If you search this site by keywords for any of Licona’s major arguments I think you’ll find they’re already covered. He has redefined “absolute proof” in order to claim he has it, when by the standards of others he has nothing of the sort.

4 thoughts on “M-M-M-Miiiiike Licona”

  1. …or, CHRIST DID N O T DIE ON THE CROSS, none of his vital organs was wounded, not did he suffer excessive bleeding, nor could he have died form hunger or thirst, it was too short a time for that to happen, so he had survived the cross and was taken and ‘buried’ in the cave alive, so when he recovered, in the night his folks took him out very alive, he continued to preach in spite of the Romans, so they finally killed him for serious this time, but he DID NOT RESURRECT EITHER, because, among many other scientific reasons against it, a coffin containing 5 skeletons, withe 5 names and surnames identical of him, his both parents and wife Magdalene was found relatively recently. It highly improbably, one in millions that there had been there and then another family with 5 members identical with Christ’s family. And finally, CHRIST’S MOTHER DID NOT CONCEIVE HIM WITH ‘GOD’, because, god or not, this simply cannot happen and only proves, being present in many religions, ‘virgin birth’, what idiocy human males have in their patriarchal brains, and what hate of women. Disgusting, as if having sex is a bad thing for a women, one she has conceived YOU, with YOUR FATHER, in which case she was not a whore, she becomes a whore if she does that, your mother, I mean, with other men. All this is easily explained, Engels did it, by men’s wish to make sure his money and assets will go to his son’s and not someone else’s sons, something the man in question can make sure will happen only if his wife was a virgin when she married him and stayed faithful to him thereafter. So, she has sex only with him. So, his children are his and not of the postman or neighbor, so his assets go to his sons when he dies. This is why, because of his money, but surely there might be another, instinctive, reason, projection of only his genes and not of the postman or neighbor and this can, again, be made sure only by virginity before marriage and faithfulness of women to their husbands. Male virginity and faithfulness is of much less importance because of the nature of birth of children, but then again, if the husband is not faithful he may easily stride away together with his resources…

  2. Marry, Christ’s mother conceived in the monastery where she worked by a priest but not god. He told her it was from god, but she nevertheless went into psychoses and started telling everybody who would listen that god is the father of her baby, not a priest with a penis. Then a good soul, Joseph, took pity on her and married her and they had another son, not godly at all. But our little Christ believed what his crazy mummy told him and become psychotic himself too or not in which case he was a liar an cheat. Con man. Why did he not ‘save’ more invalids and sick poor people, just a few, because he was not god and he couldn’t. All his ‘miracles’ were PLACEBO EFFECTS. He never grew a MISSING LIMB, because placebo cannot do THAT.

  3. Violeta – if Mike Licona is well respected in the Christian world, that bothers me. Because it tells me that people in the Christian world have no real idea what constitutes empirical evidence. Mike Licota certainly doesn’t. That entire debate was filled with unsupported claims. He never presented any actual evidence that could be validated by you or me or any other human being.

    He talks about his friend who investigates paranormal stuff. Any video of this trash can lid that supposedly moved by itself? No. We never seem to get that kind of documentation, do we…

    The apologetics movement is full of people like Licona, who tell believers looking for confirmation bias that what they think is right, and makes claims of evidence that don’t actually exist. But to believers who want to think that they are right, and who aren’t interested in critically examining their worldview, he sounds like a real intellectual.

    But he isn’t.

Comments are closed.