Even Everything We Think We Know Requires Reasons To Believe

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith. In that case, we are also exposed as false witnesses about God.  
1 Corinthians  15:14-15

Here is the beginning of Hans Kung's handling of difficulties in coming to an honest belief in the Resurrection of Jesus in the modern era, continuing on where I started last night.

First difficulty.   What is true of the Gospels as a whole is particularly true of the Easter stories;  they are not unbiased reports by disinterested observers but depositions in favor of Jesus submitted in faith by supremely interested and committed persons. They are therefore not so much historical as theological documents;  not records of proceedings or chronicles, but testimonies of faith.   The Easter faith, which characterized the whole Jesus tradition from the very beginning, obviously determined also the Easter accounts themselves, thus creating extraordinary difficulties from the start for a historical scrutiny.  It is in the Easter stories that we must ask about the Easter message.

The reverse side of this difficulty is that this is the very way in which the central importance of the Easter faith to primitive Christendom becomes clear.  At least for primitive Christendom, Christian faith stands or falls with the evidence of Jesus' resurrection, without which there is no content to Christian preaching or even to faith.  Thus Easter appears - opportunely or inopportunely - not only as the basic unit, but also as the permanent, constitutive core of the Christian creed.  Even the earliest brief Christological formulas in Paul's letters, if they amount to more than a title, are concentrated on Jesus' death and resurrection.   

The first objection to this first difficulty, I'd guess would be that the Gospels and the accounts of the Resurrection are not in some alleged way, objective.  That they don't fulfill the modern idea of what history is supposed to be and, therefore, are not to be believed.  My objection to that would be we unadmittedly do that all the time in all other areas of life to no such objection. 

I come to my skepticism about the status of knowledge as opposed to belief through the atheist Joseph Weizenbaum, as I've stated before.  If you want to blame someone for it, blame him because what he wrote on that demolished my previous assumptions about that to the bedrock.  Thinking about his obviously true statement that even what we might claim to know about mathematics is based, not on an absolute holding of absolute knowledge but is based in a fabric of things we are persuaded of and accept on the basis of previously believed things led me to be entirely skeptical of the business of being able to actually discern a difference between knowledge and belief.  I have come to conclude that there is no such sharp line, that that distinction is, itself a belief based in the desires of those who claim there is such a distinction.  There is, though, an obvious difference in beliefs based only in what is desired to be true and what you are forced to believe in even though you might not like it.  I think that when it's honestly applied within the limits that it is really capable of producing reliable statements about things, science is a good method of coming up with both welcomed and unwelcomed things to believe in and quite often those things we would rather not believed are accepted because not accepting them would weaken or destroy belief in other things believed even more strongly.  

History, too, can be a method of coming to beliefs of enhanced reliability about far more complex events and phenomena that science is incompetent to analyze, though science can provide information and clarifications on some details that are part of the historical discourse.  There are hard facts that history is able to discern that surpass factual knowledge of science.  The date of Hitler's invasion of Poland is a fact of history that can be known with absolute precision, I would guess it is far more reliably known than even some of the laws of physics and chemistry and far more the holdings of biology.  I would dare say that virtually every holding of the social sciences is less reliably held to be known than some of the hard facts of history. 

Though none of that will lead someone who doesn't want to believe in the Shoah or in human caused global warming to believe in it, no matter how strong the evidence is.*   Clearly even those hardest of factual, massively evidenced events and phenomena are subject to the desires of those who are willing to accept them or those who are determined to deny them.   I think the desires that lead to denying both of those hard truths have far more in common with many of those who are unwilling to entertain the possibility of the teachings of Jesus than they would like to admit, on either side.  

The fact is that most of pre-modern historical narrative does not use or assume the same motives or methods or even expectations that modern history does.  While you can find reliable information in some of the historical writing and contemporary reporting of the classical period, some thematic motive, some polemic or persuasive motive was what led the historical writer to set ink down on paper.  That is still true of history, it is true of all human discourse about things that are the most real of real things in human experience.  You can only find the most reliable beliefs about things, the most universally acknowledged things that people ask other people to believe about the most abstract of all objects, non-physical ones in the objects of mathematics and the simplest and most easily described and defined entities in the physical universe.  And those are often just as much a product of human imagination as falls within human experience.  

The Gospels, the letters of Paul, those ascribed to John and Peter and James constitute a record of a Jewish peasant of no social or political status that rivals that of many of the most potent rulers and figures of that period. I think if anything, Hans Kung was downplaying the facts so as to avoid his admitted "prejudices of faith" giving an accounting biased to the side of the prejudice or unbelief.  I think he did so to ultimately persuade the reader that "these are surmountable difficulties."  I think that method even for that purpose is entirely legitimate within even entirely secular intellectual discourse.  It's what scholars, even scientists do all the time though they seldom admit it. 

I will also admit that reading Hans Kung on The Resurrection has forced me, old as I am, to finally understand the absolute importance of the belief, especially in adding persuasive power to the moral teachings of Jesus for those who are not disposed to accept those in a durable and effective strength, to make them not do what they might want to do and to do things they would rather not do.  As another respected atheist scholar, Jurgen Habermas said, nothing else feeds and nourishes egalitarian democracy and the holdings of universal rights to a decent life, even today.  I didn't want to believe that but I have come to the conclusion through the history of democracy, the history of the struggle for equaity, the abolition of slavery, the equality of Women, the civil rights struggles, that if you're willing to give up that propulsive force of religious belief, you will revert to the static, pagan world of Pharaohs and forms of violence and inequality based gangsterism, only the titles and the weapons used will be different. One of the absolute distinctions of the Jewish tradition that both Christianity and Islam come from is that God is not a material entity subject to scientific discernment, that God works in history and that history is progressive, not static.  That the arc of history bends in the direction of justice.  Even that form of materialism that most openly mimics that tradition, Marxism just claims it is progress toward a predetermined end that is a product of physical causation, not human discernment. I look at the history of Marxism in practice and believe, completely, that to remove God from history to remove moral obligations from life, making People into "masses" considered a mere physical force of materialism is not going to move anyone in any direction except one that leads to a Putin gangster regime or one led by a Xi Jinping or a member of the Kim regime. 

*  If you, as I do, want to convince those disposed to not accept the reality of even those hardest of hard facts, you had better take into account what their non-acceptance is really based in.  You had better also take into account the methods and practices of the Nazis and extraction industry shills who are the ones who succssfully dupe people into believing those things, using mass electronic media to do that.  Pretending that all you need to do is present "just the facts" might make you feel superior to those YOU NEED TO PERSUADE but it's not going to do a single thing to lessen the danger of allowing them to be lied to using all of the tools of deception developed by the advertising industry and American television.