(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen
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“However, political ‘secularism’ is something else. Contemporary political secularists are concerned with religious neutrality. They want the state to be neutral on matters of religion.”
That’s not how leading defenders of secularism such as Robert Audi define the term. Audi defines the position that Robert Audi argues that one should not advocate any “[policy] restrictions on human conduct unless one has, and is willing to offer an adequate secular reason for this advocacy or support”. By ‘secular reason’ he meant a reason that “does not depend on the existence of God (such as through a divine command) or on theological considerations (such as a sacred text)”. That doesn’t require neutrality regarding religious belief, it simply requires that whatever reasons refered to don’t appeal to religious belief, appealing to a controversial secular theory which opposed or rejected religious belief would meet this criteria. For example a person who appealed to Marxist philosophical ideas would meet Audi’s definition.
Moreover, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia article by Cuneo and Eberle this is the standard view referring to it as the doctrine of religious restraint:
“Third, the DRR places few restrictions on the content of the secular reasons to which citizens can appeal when supporting coercive laws. Although the required secular reasons must be “plausible” (more on this in a moment), they may make essential reference to what Rawls calls “comprehensive conceptions of the good,” such as Platonism, Kantianism, or utilitarianism. Accordingly, the standard view does not commit itself to a position according to which secular reasons must be included or otherwise grounded in a neutral source—a set of principles regarding justice and the common good such that everybody has good reason, apart from his own or any other religious or philosophical perspective, to find acceptable. Somewhat more specifically, advocates of the standard view needn't claim that secular reasons must be found in what Rawls calls “public reason,” which (roughly speaking) is a fund of shared principles about justice and the common good constructed from the shared political culture of a liberal democracy. That having been said, it is worth stressing that some prominent advocates of the standard view adopt a broadly Rawlsian account of the DRR, according to which coercive laws must be justified by appeal to public reason “
I don’t have much time for Karen Armstrong and consider some of what she write patent nonsense. But its not clear to me your conflation of secularism with neutrality or public reason is correct.