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Response to Stephen J. Bedard

I thank Stephen Bedard for reading my article. Bedard opens by claiming I have misrepresented for rhetorical effect those who hold a supernaturalist worldview. To illustrate the way supernaturalists operate in their scholarship, he offers the analogy of a family that strives to budget responsibly while at the same time being open to the possibility of a windfall arriving in the mail (p. 322). It is not that the family is banking on the windfall, but neither have they discounted the possibility. His point is that there is nothing contradictory about being open to the possibility of the supernatural while at the same time undertaking one’s work naturalistically. The analogy is entirely reasonable, but it addresses a claim I never made. The analogy imagines that I criticized the personal beliefs of these scholars. On the contrary, my target was not what people believe in their personal lives. Rather, it was scholars who decry the imposition of naturalism in the study of Christian Origins as prejudicial and narrow-minded, yet quite happily (I assume) embrace the unquestioned superiority of naturalism when they choose anesthesia over a prayer circle during surgery. What makes naturalism prejudicial in the first instance and unquestioned in the second? Answer: the subject matter. And that was precisely my point. A closer analogy might have been the married man who publicly condemns homosexuality while privately engaging in homosexual (and by extension adulterous) acts. My article addresses the self-serving double standard, not the content of people’s private lives. But then I said that pretty clearly in the original article: ‘‘My point, to repeat, is not to attack Christian belief in the miraculous; my point is to draw attention to the highly selective nature and the self-serving function of faithful arguments against methodological naturalism disguised as academic arguments’’ (2011: 464). From here, Bedard objects that ‘‘Supernaturalism . . . does not necessarily lead to the chaos of police being required to investigate supernatural causes for criminal acts’’