A basic problem with christian apologetics when applied to the bible is that it relies on the tacit assumption you can draw reliable conclusions on the material.
An example is the resurrection story of Jesus. The most common form of apologetics start out by certain claims (the tomb was found empty, the disciples had post-crusifiction experiences of Jesus that transformed their lives, etc.), and then point out these claims are best explained by Jesus rising from the dead. There are several difficulties with the assumptions in this argument, however I would claim the most fundamental is the attempt to draw certain conclusions on the material for or against the resurrection story. I think this tendency stem from four sources: (i) Saying "we cant know" sell inherently less books than a firm conclusion (ii) psychological need for closure; we want to know the truth and so desire certainty (iii) it seem unfair to treat historical events with the same rigor we demand today since the evidence we demand today would most certainly have been lost (iv) discussing the resurrection of a historical person is so removed from our common-sense experience we easily miss how flimsy the evidence is.
I think this is best illustrated by posing a hypothetical parallel event to the resurrection story which is inherently more plausible and better attested, however it has the big disadvantage of being posed in a situation where we are familiar with evaluating the evidence. The event is the following: Did Polonius, a hypothetical roman senator in the first century, kill his wife? The evidence is in the form of historical documents which allege that Polonius killed his wife, buried her on his property and bribed the slaves and staff into silence and we can suppose the documents are of the same sort as the gospels and letters of the bible. We know how to examine evidence of this form since it is done in trials every day, this is how I imagine this might go over.
Firstly, it is very doubtful this could go to trial because without a body, murder scene, missing persons report etc. it is doubtful if the wife could be declared dead. Suppose we get around this and it goes to court, this is what the prosecutor do not have:
- A witness that can be sworn in and deliver testimony
- A witness that can be interviewed pre-trail
- A murder weapon
- A murder scene
- A body
- Any sort of forensic evidence
What the prosecutor does have is a number of documents. These documents alledge the murder took place, however they are at best hearsay: A parallel case to the documents is a person who did not hear a statement uttered himself, but heard the statement from someone else and is now reporting it. This is hearsay since the person who made the statement cannot be sworn in. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay) However it gets much worse, since we do not have any reliable way to establish the documents themselves are reliable, who made them, who transcribed them, when they were written etc. the prosecutor cannot even convince the court he has hearsay evidence but argue that he might have hearsay evidence, or double hearsay evidence, or triple hearsay evidence etc.
Lets suppose we have evidence available of the sort we will never have for the bible: We have a written confession of Polonius himself, or rather since this account would no survive in it's original form, copies of such a confession. Even this would not be enough for a conviction, since there would be no forensic tools available to prove the written confession was actually from Polonius. In a modern setting this would be something akin to a machine typed A4-page with the supposed confession of a murder but with no way to forensic or geographical tie it to the accused asides the statement contained on the page. Would this even be admitted?
The hypothetical murder would never be provable to the degree needed to secure a verdict today, not because the judge has a sudden fit of naturalism (as is the de-facto response to skepticism), but because the evidence is weak.
Naturally we are not discussing a rather every-day event like a husband murdering his wife, or an even rarer event like a complicated murder plot, but a suspension of the natural laws which inherently requires much stronger evidence than the simple murder plot.