Christianity, Skepticism, & Cumulative Evidence

“I shook my head. ‘Many men have been hanged on far slighter evidence,' I remarked.

‘So they have. And many men have been hanged wrongfully.'” (From “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Evidence can go wrong sometimes. This calls for a healthy amount of skepticism when the stakes are high. The evidence might point one way, but we try to be mindful of how easily it might be leading us the wrong way.

What about beliefs that could determine our eternal fate? It would be a tragedy to devote our lives to a false religion, and it would be catastrophic to spend an eternity in damnation when we could have had eternal paradise. The stakes are high when it comes to eternity. Understanding the role of cumulative evidence will help us avoid being too skeptical or not skeptical enough.

What Counts as “Evidence”

Does the world look like we would expect it to if Christianity were true, or does the world look more like we would expect it to if Christianity were false?

To answer this question, we look for clues in the world around us. In other words, we look for things that would surprise us if Christianity were either true or false, and we use them to reach a conclusion.

For example, it would surprise us if the earliest Christians claimed Jesus had risen from the dead at the expense of their lives and livelihoods if Jesus had never actually risen from the dead. Therefore, the testimony of the early Christians is evidence in favor of Christianity.

In more general terms, one hypothesis predicts the evidence, but the other hypothesis does not. If we knew for certain that Jesus rose from the dead, we could predict that the earliest Christians who knew about it would be very passionate in spreading that news. However, if Jesus had not risen from the dead, we would not predict that anybody would testify that He had (at least, not without ulterior motives).

Skeptical Responses to Evidence

We can always find ways to “save” a conclusion. When faced with evidence for the resurrection, one might suppose, for example, that the testimony attributed to the earliest Christians has been corrupted over time and we do not really know what the first Christians said or did. Since we do not have any details about the earliest Christian message, we cannot say with any confidence that they were willing to die over the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.

On the surface, this response harmonizes the clues we see in the world around us with the idea that Jesus did not rise from the dead. There are plenty of ways for this sort of thinking to go wrong, though. Sometimes we go too far to “rescue” a hypothesis.

How do we know when we are working too hard to save an idea? Sometimes we can tell by finding as many clues as we possibly can, then honestly evaluating how well they work for or against a hypothesis.

Applying Cumulative Evidence to a Skeptical Hypothesis

Suppose that the skeptic is correct and that the New Testament accounts are not really the accounts of the first Christians. It would surprise us, then, if the New Testament accounts contained references to things that someone would only know if they were really from the time and place that the author said they were from.

If the NT accounts were corrupted and changed over time, it would also be surprising for the accounts to have been recognized and quoted by the earliest Christians from all over the world, and it would be even more surprising for the references and quotations to line up with the documents as we have them today.

It would be even more surprising to find very early non-Christians quoting and citing the documents we have today as the “official” Christian accounts if they did not actually represent what the first Christians believed.

There are more clues which we could mention here, but the three pieces of evidence we mentioned above should already paint a clear picture. Of course, the skeptic could come up with additional skeptical ideas to save the skeptical hypothesis (that the NT accounts as we have them now do not accurately represent the first early Christian accounts) which they invented to save their initial hypothesis (that Jesus did not rise from the dead).

Fortunately, these three clues work together to invalidate additional skeptical hypotheses. If the skeptic replies that the NT accounts were changed later to include accurate details or omit inaccurate ones, then we still have the evidence from the early quotations and references to the NT documents. If the skeptic replies by speculating that the first Christians altered the existing accounts, then we also have early non-Christian accounts from authors who would have had to have cooperated with a generally coordinated attempt to change the earliest Christian narratives and doctrines.

The skeptic could keep going down the rabbit hole of skepticism if they wanted to, but the most reasonable way forward is to give serious thought to the hypothesis that naturally predicts all the things which a skeptic must explain away. In this case, the hypothesis that the NT accounts as we have them now are substantially identical to the accounts spread by the earliest Christians more naturally explains all the clues we have on hand.

Having considered how cumulative evidence addresses a specific objection that calls into question the authenticity of the New Testament documents, let’s think about how multiple lines of evidence could help us make the case for the resurrection itself.

The New Testament accounts did not just claim that the first Christians were willing to die for the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. Some of the first Christians were also willing to die for the claim that they had personally interacted with the resurrected Jesus. They were willing to die for the claim that the tomb was empty. They were also willing to die for the claim that Jesus had ascended into heaven.

The skeptic could reply that it was all a conspiracy, but we will set aside the conspiracy hypothesis for now (This objection runs into its own body of cumulative evidence. See William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity, part 1). For now, we will grant that the first Christians really believed everything they said.

What if a skeptic hypothesizes that Jesus never really died but was only seriously injured on the cross? Setting aside how unlikely this is, the truth of this hypothesis would not explain the fact that the first Christians thought Jesus could appear, disappear, go through closed doors, and ascend into heaven. Moreover, this would not explain how Jesus exited the grave, avoided the notice of Roman guards, and caused His disciples to think that his tattered body was resurrected and healed.

What if a skeptic suggests that some of the first Christian “eyewitnesses” suffered collective hallucinations? If several people shared an extremely powerful hallucination (powerful enough to make them think they bodily interacted with a figment of their imagination), this would not explain why they thought the tomb was empty (unless they hallucinated that too?).

What if there was an imposter? Assuming the imposter was human and capable of deceiving the first Christians, this does not explain the empty tomb or the fact that the first Christians believed Jesus ascended to heaven (unless the imposter could fly).

There are an infinite number of alternative explanations a skeptic could propose, but they only become increasingly bizarre and convoluted (aliens, anybody?).

Conclusion and Further Reading

Cumulative evidence is powerful, but we must handle it thoughtfully. We have laid out a couple of cumulative case arguments, but they only apply to specific questions. Giving a cumulative case for the authenticity of the New Testament documents does not necessarily guarantee that what they say is true. The flip side is that making a cumulative case that what the New Testament accounts say is true does not necessarily guarantee that they are authentic to begin with. We must give each question its due diligence and think of how each question is related to the other.

Christian scholars have done tremendous work laying out the effectiveness and nature of cumulative evidence. Anybody who is interested in reading more about this topic will want to read:

• Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1906), Part 2.

• Shaw, Benjamin. “The Force Imparted to the Evidence of Christianity from the Manner In Which a Number of Distinct Lines of Proof Converge In a Common Centre.” In Faith and Free Thought.

• Stearns, Lewis French. The Evidence of Christian Experience. (1893).

• Taylor, Jeremy. A Moral Demonstration of the Truth of the Christian Religion. (1660).

If you would like to see cumulative evidence in action, read William Paley’s A View of the Evidences of Christianity.

It also turns out that humans are naturally very bad at estimating the strength of cumulative evidence. For more on this, see Howard Raiffa’s Decision Analysis

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Kyle Huitt is an M.A. student in philosophy at Western Michigan University, and an incoming Ph.D. student in philosophy at Baylor University. He completed his B.A. in philosophy at Hillsdale College where he also minored in history. Kyle's primary interests are in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Kyle's non-academic interests include chess, classic literature, various entrepreneurial enterprises, and creating Christian apologetics content with a focus on important historical works.