Some More Comments on Undesigned Coincidences

In #religion

An "undesigned coincidence" is used in an argument for the reliability of the Gospels, notable by Jonathan McLatchie, Tim McGrew and Lydia McGrew, and is defined as

When you have multiple (at least two) accounts that report an event where one account answers in passing a natural question raised incidentally by the other. Such features are evidence that a real event lies behind the reports found in the gospels — that is to say, the presence of an undesigned coincidence is more probable given the hypothesis of historicism than given the annulment of that hypothesis.

I've written about one undesigned coincidence (UC) here but it has come up in discussions on YouTube so I felt I needed to talk about them a bit more. Some of these UC are:

  • the grass being green is mentioned in Mark at the time, and it's Passover time mentioned in John, and each of these is mentioned only in one Gospel.
  • Jesus turned to Philip to ask what is to eat when they were near Bethsaida
  • How did they know the exact number of people there (i.e. 5000)
  • Why did Jesus warn the blind man not to say anything to anyone?

The list might go on, but these are the sorts of pieces of evidence that the apologists are using. Each of these have reasonable plausible explanations in literary or oral tradition relationships. With the green grass example why couldn't the oral tradition have had the events around passover (with or without green grass) and Mark adds green grass as a literary flourish or John drops it? It'd be like a common story around Christmas, and one author mentions Christmas and the other snow. It doesn't seem to require, or even hint at, eyewitness testimony. It's so indirect -- like all of these undesigned coincidences -- when it would have been much more straightforward for Mark to have said "My name is Mark and I was there when...."

As for the Philip-Bethsaida "coincidences", couldn't there have been a tradition that Philip was from Bethsaida? He could easily have been known as "Philip from Bethsaida" in the oral tradition, to keep him straight from other Philips. If there was such a tradition, then any event that took place in Bethsaida, or was claimed to take place in or near Bethsaida, might have had Philip inserted as a primary character. This seems pretty natural, and wouldn't require any eyewitnesses, or the truth of any of those events.

Another example -- counting the 5000. What if the number has nothing to do with the count, and is a reference to the Old Testament, like 2 Chronicles or Joshua where they refer to "5000 from the flocks" or "5000 men"? or perhaps because it's a nice round number (like the 500 eyewitnesses in Paul) and could have been chosen for that reason. I see no strong reason to think this number was an actual count, so this "undesigned coincidence" doesn't seem to be a coincidence at all, but (like many of these, I suspect) may be due to overactive pattern seeking.

But, we're told, this is a cumulative case -- explaining one is ok, but having to have separate explanations for all of them, the apologists claim, strains credulity. However, we have the following problems. Now, this is like the third "undesigned coincidence" that I've looked at, and come up with a plausible reason for it in about 5 seconds of thinking. What does that do to the probability I'd assign to the next three I look at? Especially given 1) how trivial finding plausible alternatives is and 2) the entire mode of argument would be made moot if the Gospels followed the standards of ancient history and cited their sources, were clear about their authorship, and gave some specifics about the events. One can find some cases of ancient historians not doing this, but it seems to be incredibly uncommon and frowned upon even in ancient times.

I don't have time nor the expertise to go through each and every one of the so-called "coincidences", but they all strike me initially as being completely -- and trivially -- understood as being produced by a common process and are not strong evidence that the events actually happened. Even in theory, I don't see how one can use these UC to rule out literary or oral tradition sources for them when they exist at all. This entire approach seems to me to be a combination of cherry picking and seeing patterns in random data, both of which are common cognitive fallacies.

What if I'm wrong?

Ok, so what if I'm wrong, and 1) UC actually exist in the Gospels and 2) one can use UC to establish eyewitness reporting? This isn't an issue, because I could easily be convinced. What apologists are proposing is that,

  1. UC are well-defined
  2. We can observe them in ancient texts
  3. Their existence is strong evidence of eye-witness testimony

What I am proposing is,

  1. UC are not well-defined as a category, but may be argued individually
  2. We might be able to see some UC in the Gospels and other ancient texts
  3. In addition to the apologists claim of possible eyewitness testimony, UC can also be explained with mostly mundane explanations, including (but not limited to):
    1. literary dependence
    2. oral tradition dependence
    3. actual coincidence
    4. legendary development
    5. overactive pattern finding
    6. multiple ways the "coincidence" could occur

One should be able to easily make a test to distinguish between these two possibilities. One should be able to establish, perhaps with modern texts, perhaps with ancient texts, that

  1. one can define UC in such a way that they can be unambiguously identified in any text
  2. use UC to unambiguously distinguish between fictional and non-fictional sources
  3. use UC to unambiguously distinguish between eyewitness accounts and those accounts which rely only on 2nd, 3rd, 4th-hand accounts

The fact that a search for the topic of undesigned coincidences only comes up with Christian apologetics sources points to the fact that this study has not been done, and I see no indication in the apologetics literature that Christians think this is a worthwhile endeavor. It's like the faith-healing literature -- they don't want to do the hard work of actually establishing that their method does the job they claim it does, and would rather just stick with their claims and think that the skeptics are being unreasonable. This is not how any scientist thinks, and I await the study I describe to be done. In the meantime, I feel completely comfortable not taking undesigned coincidences seriously, because Christian apologists are clearly not taking it seriously either.