Irrelevant Gary Habermas is just the messenger, he is just reporting that out of 1500 scholars (Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostic, Christian etc.) 75% accept the empty tomb.
His personal believes have no bearing on the validity of his poll. He could have been a flatt earher anti vaccine and a conspiracy theorists who thinks that the president is an evil reptilian alien that what’s take over the world … and that wouldn’t challenge the validity of his poll.
Besides the conclusions are testable and repeatable, any skeptic can do the same test and verify if the 75% is correct.
Plus I can’t ignore the intellectual hypocrisy of internet atheist (not talking about you personally) they say things “most scholars say that Luke was wrong with the census thing” and they don’t accept answers like “ohhhh but many of these scholars are non-christians”
His study is bias. He polled more theologians who work from the assumption that the religion is really a message from God.
He admits up front he is using more theologian type scholars:
"By far, the majority of publications on the subject of Jesus' death and resur-rection have been written by North American
authors. Interestingly, my study of these works also indicates an approximate ratio of 3,1 of moderate conservative
to skeptical publications, as with the European publications. Here again, this signals the direction of current research,^"
So the papers he's using are 3 to 1 in favor of the author being a believer. Which would mean they are some sort of theologian.
Because almost 100% of historians view the gospel stories as a mythicized version of a Jewish teachers life.
Now a real life not apologist study we have about 20% believing in a God with little doubt at the high level of scholarship. Take out the scholars who are Hindu, Islamic or another religion and you do not have remotely close to 75%. It would be somewhere under 20%.
"Research by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons done on more than 1,400 professors from 20 disciplinary fields and religiosity found that the majority of professors, even at "elite" universities were religious believers. As a whole, university professors were less religious than the general US population, but it is hardly the case that the professorial landscape is characterized by an absence of religion. In the study, 9.8% were atheists, 13.1% were agnostic, 19.2% believe in a higher power, 4.3% believe in God some of the time, 16.6% had doubts but believed in God, 34.9% believed in God and had no doubts. At "elite" doctoral universities 36.5% were either atheists or agnostics and 20.4% believed in God without any doubts. Furthermore the authors noted, "religious skepticism represents a minority position, even among professors teaching at elite research universities."
[5] They also found that professors at elite doctoral universities are much less religious than professors teaching in other kinds of institutions with more atheists and agnostics in numbers."
Again, academia is not running around trying to tell you your churches are teaching made-up stuff. They mostly respect tradition. But they usually do not believe myths. Had Habernas used only historians he would have about 1% supporting the empty tomb. This paper is meaningless. We already know theologians accept the religions teachings without questioning the evidence or accept apologetics as truth. Yet we have just seen apologetics uses illogical circular arguments.
What do historians think?
"When the question of the historicity of Jesus comes up in an honest professional context, we are not asking whether the Gospel Jesus existed. All non-fundamentalist scholars agree that
that Jesus never did exist. Christian apologetics is pseudo-history. No different than defending Atlantis. Or Moroni. Or women descending from Adam’s rib.
No. We aren’t interested in that.
When it comes to Jesus, just as with anyone else, real history is about trying to figure out what, if anything, we can
really know about the man depicted in the New Testament (his
actual life and teachings), through untold layers of distortion and mythmaking; and what, if anything, we can know about his role in starting the Christian movement that spread after his death. Consequently, I will here disregard fundamentalists and apologists as having no honest part in this debate, any more than they do on evolution or cosmology or anything else they cannot be honest about even to themselves."
Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus • Richard Carrier
So do you have any evidence besides a completely bias argument to popularity that literally says it's using a 3:1 ratio of believers of some sort over skeptics?
You probably don't. I just watched Trent Horn debate Matt Dillahunty on the resurrection and Trent's best evidence was "we can't say for sure it didn't happen"? Right. Or maybe Hercules was the one actually real demigod? Or maybe all demigods are just made-up stories?
