Religion, why do you believe?

[TX-Beau]

Why should God cease if we managed to empirically describe Him? That's an a priori assumption of major proportions!

The only reason that God is (would be) "beyond evidence" is that He chooses to be so; as the Bible says, "You are a God who hides Yourself".

Please, if god is as advertised – omniscient and omnipotent, then he is defaco beyond empirical description, because there is no way to empirically define something without testable, observable boundaries, and therefore, describing him empirically means he’s not God, or at least not the one you worship.

If you were just asserting that god is simply a literary and philosophical device, that would be one thing, but that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying that God, a divine being, exists as a tangible entity, and that we know he exits because he’s beyond all evidence, and therefore divine. It’s just another religious circular argument.

A priori my ass, your argument is the a priori one.

…God exists because he says he does…

Assumption of major proportions is claiming the supernatural without any hint of evidence whatsoever, then getting discombobulated, when perfectly rational people don’t just take you at your word.

I think Bankside pretty much covered the rest.

 

[poolerboy]

Jesus claimed to forgive sins.
He knew that everyone believed that only God could forgive sins.
Therefore He was claiming to be God.

That's very plain in Mark.

John the Baptist claimed to forgive sins.
He knew that everyone believed that only God could forgive sins.
Therefore He was claiming to be God?

Be aware that different formes of Christianity (more vast than our current denominational differences) were circulating in the first century, like Adoptionism. Moreover, even if a reference of Jesus as God were made this would not prove a TRInity. See Johannine Comma for that.

My question was, given a Creator, what do we have that looks like a communication from him? The Greek gods don't cut it; they're really little different from what can be found in Marvel comics. So with the evidence of the materials themselves, one ends up with the Bible.
That's my point, no matter how much you try to stretch it to something else.

Apollonius of Tyana was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher and teacher from the first century who also purportedly performed miracles, exorcism, was an ascetic, had a miraculous birth and this laid proof to his divinity. Jesus, in Mark, our earliest Gospel, also doesn't claim to be divine and is even a secretive messiah where he would perform miracles and tell people not to say anything to anyone. People seemed to believe in his divinity anyway. The story only evolves later to that view (See Gospel of John). Many more are indisputibly attributed as a son of God if not God himself: Dionysus, Mithras, Horus, and Hercules (this last one being mentioned in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews mind you).

From what we have -- and we have with a high degree of certainty the actual words of Jesus -- he couldn't be "a moral teacher of some sort". On that, the "Lord, lunatic, or liar" crowd (I believe that trichotomy comes from C. S. Lewis, BTW) is quite right: no one who claims the things Jesus did is sufficiently sane to be considered a moral teacher.
And in fact no one else does make the claims He did: to forgive sins, to raise the dead, to return from the dead himself.
And in truth, what we would expect in a communication from a Creator would be claims no one else dared make -- indeed, claims no one else really considered before.

Emperors claimed to be Gods all the time. So what? So what if someone dares to say something out of the ordinary. You haven't presented any evidence for his claims being true outside of the belief that because you can't be creative enough to come up with other possibilities then therefore it must be that he is saying nothing but the truth (not even holding to the possibility that it might not be just liar, lunatic, or lord as the only options, but also legend). You have no evidence to support your claims and this has been made crystal clear.

Yes, it is. Witnesses go to court to "offer evidence", a term used virtually interchangeably with "give testimony".

From Wikipedia on Eyewitness Testimony:

Eyewitness testimony is generally presumed to be better than circumstantial evidence. Studies have shown, however, that individual, separate witness testimony is often flawed, and parts of it can be meaningless. This can occur because of a person's faulty observation and recollection, because of a person's bias, or because the witness is lying.

Eyewitness testimony is never enough. It is only used in court (and by the way there's a difference between proof in courts of law and the scientific method used in the natural sciences of which the latter would be used to determine miracles and not history or law) as a supplement. It is never the case that we use only witness testimony alone.

This is a matter of faith, right here, when you assert that paranormal explanations are more improbable. They may be unverifiable, but that doesn't make them more improbable -- after all, the probability of a hole in someone's roof being due to a rock falling from the sky didn't change suddenly when scientists finally realized that rocks do fall from the sky; it remained what it was before.

No because your example isn't a violation of natural law. It's more probable that you're deceived than you having interpreted the data correctly (a reason why the 'I saw it with my own eyes' argument is faulty; you didn't read the article I see).

Miracles aren't reproducible, but when millions of people testify of them

All we have is testimony of them having had some experience they interpret as a miracle. People can fall prey to optical illusions, faulty reasoning (e.g. confusing correlation with causation, etc.) and so forth. Btw, miracles attested to by eye witnesses occur in rival religions and the events being in direct conflict with your ideas.

No, it isn't laboratory evidence, but it's sufficient evidence that jurists who have set out to prove that Jesus never lived, or at least couldn't have been what is said of Him, have turned 180 from that position.

There's a difference between investigating whether there was a historical person named Jesus and whether he was divine. You are conflating the two; historians cannot prove the latter or else they would have to prove all the miralce works and such from everyone else that claimed to (e.g. Honi the Circledrawer, Hanina ben Dosa, etc.).

I can see you have no evidence to offer other than anecdotes and non sequiturs from historical accounts so we're done here.

 

[TX-Beau]

You are asking the question. I presume from your easy willingness to dictate your criticisms of others, that you have the answer.

On the contrary, I make no absolute statements; I’m more agnostic than I am atheist. But neither do I have much patience with fuzzy logic and supposition masquerading as truth.

In fact, if I didn’t have to deal with the faithful, who will use their fuzzy logic and suppositions as a club to beat others, this whole subject would be entirely academic for me.

 

[Kyanimal]

Please stop confusing the Faithful with the Religious, and the "club wielding" Fanatics. They are three very different things.

One can be Faithful without being Religious.

One can be both Faithful and Religious.

And, then, there are those that are Fanatically Religious, yet constantly negate their supposed Faith, and the cannons of their own Religion, through their actions, and pronouncements.

On another note ...

Is there a Creator? Yes! And "He" is Us! Man has changed the face, and atmosphere/climate of the Planet. We have created hybrid plants, and animals. We have created artificial "intelligent" machines. We have created artificial fish, that swim deeper, faster, and are more deadly, than any of Nature's. We have created artificial birds that fly higher, faster, and are more deadly, while carrying Us, than any of Nature's. We have created weapons that have the potential to end ALL Life on Earth! We have discovered, and put to use, some of the most intricate of Nature's secrets. We can create, kill, and heal Ourselves. And, we're in the process of artificially duplicating Ourselves.

WE have accomplished more, together, than any of us could do apart. Humanity is "The Creator", in "His" own image! Our "Higher Power" is ALL of Us in Composite.

Our Faith can be found in our Hope and Trust. Our Religion can be seen in what we do, and say to each other, and how we treat the other beings on our Planet.

Keep smilin'!!
Chaz

 

[Kulindahr]

It is exactly this attitude which puts me over the edge when a Christian theist levels a charge of arrogance against an atheist.

So when someone points out that something that claims to make a difference in people's lives doesn't, and that therefore the people aren't living up to what they profess, it puts you over the edge?

How is that any more insightful than if I were to say, "There is no god." He substituted a rhetorical flourish for an answer.

It wasn't a "rhetorical flourish" -- it was a serious distinction between the concept of "being" when applied to the material realm and when applied to God.

If you wouldn't expect contemporary accounts then you cannot claim the absence of contemporary "debunkers" makes Christianity more probable. But then you do: I'm pretty sure the Mormons have not faithfully preserved all of the records of Joe Smith's early objectors. Well, I bet they have the objectors, but not the skeptics. And apart from the leadership of their nascent movement, no one else would have cared at that point. It is also so with Christianity. Who would have bothered to debunk it in the early days?

Actually early Christians did a pretty good job of preserving at least the arguments of the early debunkers. But it's interesting that those debunkers didn't attack the account of the life of Jesus as given in the Gospels, they attacked what was said about those accounts.
That, again, suggests that the Gospels are dependable accounts, since debunkers show up early on.

There no difference in the amount or quality of archæological evidence "corroborating" Christianity or Buddhism or animism or paganism. But again we're back to the periodic table - it isn't evidence for the hydrogen atom. All we know from the archæological record is that real people have worshipped different and contradictory, often mutually untenable, faiths for a very long time. We have evidence of worshippers, not of the divine!

Where did you go to school?
There's nothing much in Bhuddism for archaeology to corroborate, and nothing at all in animism. Paganism might have something to look for, depending on what one means by it.
In contrast, the Bible abounds in statements about actual places and people.

But then in a quick 180, you try to cover that contingency by saying that a god can opt out of leaving traces. . We're now at the point where the biblical God could be hiding away from our experience, in another dimension, taking occasional swipes at our realm from a position perpendicular to all of our dimensions, with any after-effects of that presence quickly being swept away into this "meta-perpendicular" space. The only way any god can be beyond any kind of evidence is if he is beyond any kind of existence.

You're making assertions here that don't even hold up in ordinary life:
By this argument, recon Marines, or the SAS, probably don't exist, either, out in the field: they leave no traces of their passing -- yet they complete their missions. Or its like saying that there are no hackers, since good ones can get in, change things, and get out with no evidence.

What is the difference between a god who can leave no traces, no record, no shadows of interaction with the real universe, lurking as a futile impotent shadow, and no god at all?

I can't even decide how many questions you're asking here -- it looks like a listing of at least two different options set over against "no god at all", and neither of those two has anything to do with Christianity.

 

[Kulindahr]

Please, if god is as advertised – omniscient and omnipotent, then he is defaco beyond empirical description, because there is no way to empirically define something without testable, observable boundaries, and therefore, describing him empirically means he’s not God, or at least not the one you worship.

If you were just asserting that god is simply a literary and philosophical device, that would be one thing, but that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying that God, a divine being, exists as a tangible entity, and that we know he exits because he’s beyond all evidence, and therefore divine. It’s just another religious circular argument.

A priori my ass, your argument is the a priori one.

…God exists because he says he does…

Assumption of major proportions is claiming the supernatural without any hint of evidence whatsoever, then getting discombobulated, when perfectly rational people don’t just take you at your word.

I think Bankside pretty much covered the rest.

I'd answer this, but you spent more time making stuff up than responding to anything I said.

 

[bankside]

Oxford English Dictionary:
homonym
SECOND EDITION 1989
(hmnm) Also homonyme. [ad. late L. homnym-um (Quintilian), a. Gr. -, neut. of HOMONYMOUS. Cf. F. homonyme ‘an equiuocation, or word of diuers significations’ (Cotgr.).]

1. a. The same name or word used to denote different things.

On another note ...

Is there a Creator? Yes! And "He" is Us! Man has changed the face, and atmosphere/climate of the Planet. We have created hybrid plants, and animals. We have created artificial "intelligent" machines. We have created artificial fish, that swim deeper, faster, and are more deadly, than any of Nature's. We have created artificial birds that fly higher, faster, and are more deadly, while carrying Us, than any of Nature's. We have created weapons that have the potential to end ALL Life on Earth! We have discovered, and put to use, some of the most intricate of Nature's secrets. We can create, kill, and heal Ourselves. And, we're in the process of artificially duplicating Ourselves.

WE have accomplished more, together, than any of us could do apart. Humanity is "The Creator", in "His" own image! Our "Higher Power" is ALL of Us in Composite.

Our Faith can be found in our Hope and Trust. Our Religion can be seen in what we do, and say to each other, and how we treat the other beings on our Planet.

Keep smilin'!!
Chaz

Kyanimal, if that is what you mean by believing in a creator, then sign me up to work the bake sale at your church. I'm in! But you must recognize that the vast majority of people who would call themselves believers are not talking about having faith in "human potential" or that hope springs from "working together." They actually think there is a divine person out there somewhere who can cause things to exist, who wrote the laws of physics as a matter of his own will, who set everything going, who could, and possibly does, intervene in our lives, who will judge something called an "eternal soul" for which our bodies are only disposable vehicles..

There are two entirely different, almost opposite, meanings of the word "creator" and it is only one of those two definitions that makes no sense to Atheists.

 

[Kulindahr]

John the Baptist claimed to forgive sins.
He knew that everyone believed that only God could forgive sins.
Therefore He was claiming to be God?

He made no such claim.

Be aware that different forms of Christianity (more vast than our current denominational differences) were circulating in the first century, like Adoptionism. Moreover, even if a reference of Jesus as God were made this would not prove a TRInity. See Johannine Comma for that.

That's not too bad an article about adoptionism, though it's rather brief.
What it fails to tell is that adoptionism was one effort at reconciling the various statements about Jesus. Even from the Synoptics, though, it stands on weak legs.

Apollonius of Tyana was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher and teacher from the first century who also purportedly performed miracles, exorcism, was an ascetic, had a miraculous birth and this laid proof to his divinity. Jesus, in Mark, our earliest Gospel, also doesn't claim to be divine and is even a secretive messiah where he would perform miracles and tell people not to say anything to anyone. People seemed to believe in his divinity anyway. The story only evolves later to that view (See Gospel of John). Many more are indisputibly attributed as a son of God if not God himself: Dionysus, Mithras, Horus, and Hercules (this last one being mentioned in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews mind you).

Well, since the tales about him weren't put down till more than a century after his death, and the circumstances of their composition suggest the purpose was more entertainment than information, Apollonius has to be taken with a couple of grains of salt.
People in Mark "believe in his divinity" because He is proclaiming it, indirectly.
We've already been through the business of the Greek gods; they're not even on the same playing field.

Emperors claimed to be Gods all the time. So what?

So what, indeed? That was in a culture where hardly anyone took gods seriously; they were a dime a dozen, they came and went, so if an emperor wanted to call himself a god, no one much cared -- because it didn't mean much.
That you can raise that tells me you're grasping at things which appear to have similarities but don't: it's an entirely different culture.

So what if someone dares to say something out of the ordinary. You haven't presented any evidence for his claims being true outside of the belief that because you can't be creative enough to come up with other possibilities then therefore it must be that he is saying nothing but the truth (not even holding to the possibility that it might not be just liar, lunatic, or lord as the only options, but also legend). You have no evidence to support your claims and this has been made crystal clear.

Ad hominem.
Oh, yay.

I considered "legend", and it doesn't hold up; it doesn't fit the evidence.
I know you deny that there's evidence, but that doesn't make it go away; the evidence in the case of the "legend" claim is the synoptic Gospels and the fact that they were set down when there were eyewitnesses still around.

Eyewitness testimony is never enough. It is only used in court (and by the way there's a difference between proof in courts of law and the scientific method used in the natural sciences of which the latter would be used to determine miracles and not history or law) as a supplement. It is never the case that we use only witness testimony alone.

So what you want is a "god" who is really a puppet, who will produce "miracles" on demand, for measurement in laboratories.
Such a being wouldn't be believable as a candidate for Creator.

"Never use only witness testimony alone"? Odd -- I sat on a jury where that was all we had.

The crazy thing here is that instead of considering what might be expected if there really were a Creator and looking for it, you're picking the sort of evidence you want, and demanding that things conform to it. That's bad reasoning; it's bad science, even. If it were possible to discover if my friend's dog really did sit in the pond yesterday afternoon put putting him in a laboratory for technicians to make measurements, I might go along with that -- but it isn't, and any Creator would be far less subject to such things than a mere dog.

It strikes me as though you're asking the question whether some sort of elementary particle might exist, but limiting yourself ahead of time to using detectors that can only indicate the activities of particles with an electric charge, without asking whether they're even appropriate.

No because your example isn't a violation of natural law. It's more probable that you're deceived than you having interpreted the data correctly (a reason why the 'I saw it with my own eyes' argument is faulty; you didn't read the article I see).

What does violating natural law have to do with it?
Yes, I read the article -- but you making assertions drawn from it doesn't establish anything. The point was that just because people think a certain kind of explanation is improbable doesn't make it so. That boils down to arrogance, which has been one of the biggest roadbocks to the advancement of science.

There's a difference between investigating whether there was a historical person named Jesus and whether he was divine. You are conflating the two; historians cannot prove the latter or else they would have to prove all the miralce works and such from everyone else that claimed to (e.g. Honi the Circledrawer, Hanina ben Dosa, etc.).

I can see you have no evidence to offer other than anecdotes and non sequiturs from historical accounts so we're done here.

I'm not conflating anything -- I'm laying out steps in a process, evaluating things in a logical fashion. But you keep insisting that investigation can only be done one way -- and not the way that's appropriate to answering the question.

An investigation for a Creator cannot, by any sensible measure, be conducted in a laboratory -- any more than an investigation into whether I built a two-meter radius, one-meter tall sandcastle on the beach below the high tide line three days ago. All your probing with instruments won't find traces of the castle, and all your insistence on using only such probings will serve only to blind you to the fact that you're doing it wrong: the kind of evidence you're demanding is not the kind that should be expected.

 

[kallipolis]

On the contrary, I make no absolute statements; I’m more agnostic than I am atheist. But neither do I have much patience with fuzzy logic and supposition masquerading as truth.

In fact, if I didn’t have to deal with the faithful, who will use their fuzzy logic and suppositions as a club to beat others, this whole subject would be entirely academic for me.

Clearly it is much too academic for you.

 

[bankside]

So when someone points out that something that claims to make a difference in people's lives doesn't, and that therefore the people aren't living up to what they profess, it puts you over the edge?

No, that's not it. You gave an example of admonishing a Christian who felt that wallowing at the level of ordinary humanity would be sufficient, when, in your view, Christianity should at once compel and empower someone to be better than everyone else. That is, I suspect, arrogant. But I am prepared to view it charitably not as arrogance, but merely confidence in your only Help. What puts me over the edge is the accusation of arrogance levelled against Atheists when they are equally confident in their views that the universe is unfolding as it should, quite without any divinity.

It wasn't a "rhetorical flourish" -- it was a serious distinction between the concept of "being" when applied to the material realm and when applied to God.

"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

I can't believe we are actually debating this. Well, maybe I can believe it. You might call me an agnostic as to the existence of this debate.

Fortunately there is Oxford:

be, v
B. Signification and uses.
[The primary sense appears to have been that of branch II below, ‘to occupy a place’ (i.e. to sit, stand, lie, etc.) in some specified place; thence the more abstract branch I was derived by abstracting the notion of particular place, so as to emphasize that of actual existence, ‘to be somewhere, no matter where, to be in the universe, or realm of fact, to have a place among existing things, to exist.’ Branch III was derived from II by weakening the idea of actual presence, into the merely intellectual conception of ‘having a place’ in a class of notions, or ‘being identical with’ another notion: ‘centaurs are imaginary creatures’ = ‘centaurs have their place in the class of creatures of the imagination.’ Branch IV is an obvious extension of III: cf. ‘it was annoying to me,’ with ‘it was annoying me.’]

I. absolutely: To have or take place in the world of fact, to exist, occur, happen.

1. To have place in the objective universe or realm of fact, to exist; also, to exist in life, to live.
2. To come into existence, come about, happen, occur, take place, be acted or done.
3. To be the case or the fact, esp. in the phrases so be, be it that = if it be the case that, suppose that, and the arch. or dial. being, being that = it being the case that, seeing that, since. Hence the adverb HOWBEIT.
4. To remain or go on in its existing condition; in the archaic phrase let be = let alone, leave as it is; leave off, cease; Sc. omit, leave out.​

II. With adverb or prepositional phrase: stating where or how, i.e. in what place or state a thing is. [= Sp., Pg. estar as distinct from ser.]

5. To have or occupy a place (i.e. to sit, stand, lie, hang, etc.the posture not being specified or regarded) somewhere, the ‘where’ being expressed either by an adverb or a preposition with object. Expressing the most general relation of a thing to its place: To have one's personality, substance, or presence, to be present, so as to find oneself, or be to be found (in, at, or near a place, with an object, etc.).
6. Idiomatically, in past, now only in perfect and pluperfect tenses, with to, and a substantive, or infinitive of purpose: To have been (at the proper place) in order to, or for the purpose of. Cf. Sp. and Pg. fué ‘I was’ in sense of ‘I went.’
7. To sit, stand, remain, etc. in a defined circumstantial position, e.g. to be in debt, at one's ease; to have one's existence in a certain state or condition.
8. To belong, pertain, befall: with dat. or to, = have. Cf. L. est mihi, Fr. c'est à moi. Now only in exclamations or wishes (where, also, be is often omitted), as Wo is me! Wo be to the transgressor! Success (be) to your efforts!​

III. With adjective, substantive, or adjective phrase; acting as simple copula: stating of what sort or what a thing is. [= Sp., Pg. ser, as distinct from estar.]

9. To exist as the subject of some predicate, i.e. to have a place among the things distinguished by a specified quality or name.
10. with n. To exist as the thing known by a certain name; to be identical with.
11. To be the same in purport as; to signify, amount to, mean.
12. To amount to (something) of moment or importance, to ‘signify’ to a person; to concern.
13. ellipt. To be good for, to be at the expense of, ‘stand.’ Obs. or dial.​

IV. With participles and infinitives, serving as an auxiliary and forming periphrastic tenses.

14. With pa. pple.: a. in trans. vbs., forming the passive voice.
15. With the present participle, forming continuous varieties of the tenses. a. with active signification. In OE. only wæs was so used, forming a kind of imperfect; the present was in use by the 13th c. In later times this was confused with a formation upon the vbl. n., of which see examples under A prep.1 13; the OE. he wæs feohtende, and ME. ‘he was a-fighting,’ meet in the modern ‘he was fighting.’
16. With the dative infinitive, making a future of appointment or arrangement; hence of necessity, obligation, or duty; in which sense have is now commonly substituted.
17. The same construction is used in the sense of ‘to be proper or fit (to).’
18. The past subjunctive were with the infinitive makes an emphatically hypothetical condition: cf. the degrees of uncertainty in If I went, If I should go, If I were to go.​

V. Phraseological combinations.

19. In I were better (best, as good), the nominative pronoun took catachrestically the place of an earlier dative (me were better = it were better to or for me): modern usage substitutes had better, after the analogy of had liefer, rather, etc.
20. In clauses measuring time: as ‘he came here Monday was a week,’ i.e. he came here on the Monday a week before Monday last: the phrase became a mere adjective clause, whence arose remarkable constructions, as ‘on the evening of Saturday was sennight before the day fixed’ = on the evening of the Saturday a week earlier than the Saturday before the day fixed. Was is now generally omitted: I was in London Monday (was) three weeks.
21. to be about to: see ABOUT A11, 12.
22. what one would be at: what one aims at; what one means, wishes, or would have.
23. to be for
24. Many parts of the verb and its tenses are used substantively, adjectively, or adverbially.​

exist, v
1. To have place in the domain of reality, have objective being.
2. To have being in a specified place or under specified conditions. With advb. phrase or as; formerly with simple complement. Of relations, circumstances, etc.: To subsist, be found, occur.
3. To have life or animation; to live.
4. To continue in being, maintain an existence.

So, reviewing the actual words, it was all rhetorical bombast. The man didn't say anything when he spoke so theatrically and so mystically about the supposed distinction between "be" and "exist." If anyone in our studio audience has a chicken, I shall now, for my second act, pull its teeth.

Actually early Christians did a pretty good job of preserving at least the arguments of the early debunkers. But it's interesting that those debunkers didn't attack the account of the life of Jesus as given in the Gospels, they attacked what was said about those accounts.
That, again, suggests that the Gospels are dependable accounts, since debunkers show up early on.

I'll come back to this one. I want to reread what you wrote the first time because you might have intended a different meaning than how I read it but it's too late to figure out tonight. I can't tell if you are changing the terms of the argument or if you said this in the first place in a way that was unclear to me. Anyway, not your problem; I owe it a read with fresh eyes in the morning.

Where did you go to school?
There's nothing much in Bhuddism for archaeology to corroborate, and nothing at all in animism. Paganism might have something to look for, depending on what one means by it.
In contrast, the Bible abounds in statements about actual places and people.

There are any number of fictional works that abound in statements about actual places and people. (incidentally I think the Chronicles of Narnia gives a more plausible account of Christianity than the Bible. Unfortunately I think C.S. Lewis would demure if offered the title of Prophet - he paradoxically would have claimed quite firmly to be a writer of fiction.) What at all do you mean by corroboration then? And I think you are confusing archæology and history. All of those beliefs are attested to by places of worship, names or histories of prominent believers, relics, etc.

You're making assertions here that don't even hold up in ordinary life:
By this argument, recon Marines, or the SAS, probably don't exist, either, out in the field: they leave no traces of their passing -- yet they complete their missions. Or its like saying that there are no hackers, since good ones can get in, change things, and get out with no evidence.

See discussion above re meaning of "exist." I'm saying if nothing has been changed or viewed, then nothing has been hacked. Any change would constitute evidence. I'm saying if nobody shouts "Whose that trip-trapping over my bridge" then a troll is not under it. Any shouting at billy goats would constitute evidence. See? If an airplane drops a bomb on al-Gaddafi's daughter and two sons and then flies away before anyone gets a fix on it, then you have evidence. The last-ditch effort of so many theists, historically and now, is to claim that god exists but is beyond interacting with us. This is tantamount to proclaiming an inexistent god.

 

[TX-Beau]

I'd answer this, but you spent more time making stuff up than responding to anything I said.

Oh please Kuli this goes firmly into the whatever category.

If you weren’t going to answer then why did you? Pique, that’s why.

Honestly I don’t see why some people who have faith attempt to jump through these extraordinary hoops of fire in order to try and establish something that by its nature is beyond proof. If you just said, "there is no proof, no evidence, but I believe in God," well, there’s no argument with that, and isn’t that the function of faith anyway.

Even if there were incontrovertible proof that the bible was authored and produced when and where it was supposed to have been, by the people who supposedly wrote it, and it remained unchanged for all these centuries:

That would not take you one step further towards evidence of the divine.

You’d just have a well documented classical text that made some improbable assertions.

Which is why I said upthread that the back-story of the bible is moot; it doesn’t matter who wrote it or when. What matters are the assertions is makes, and whatever those assertions meant to some people two thousand years ago, the only relevant thing is what that text means to people now.

All this blather about who was a credible classical figure and what not, is just so much red herring.

 

[poolerboy]

He made no such claim.

"John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark 1:1-16).

So what, indeed? That was in a culture where hardly anyone took gods seriously; they were a dime a dozen, they came and went, so if an emperor wanted to call himself a god, no one much cared -- because it didn't mean much.
That you can raise that tells me you're grasping at things which appear to have similarities but don't: it's an entirely different culture.

Perhaps the Jews had recently morphed (after the Babylonian exile) to become strict monotheists, but they had a history (as even mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures) that they worshipped other deities and incorporating (not circumventing as the Tanakh assumes) them with their belief in Yahweh: Molech, Asherah, Chemosh, etc.

Is the fact that they evolved from polytheists to monotheists evidence of discovering the veracity of the claim of there being only one true God? If so, the same could be claimed for Islam (n.b. while both Christianity and Islam are Abrahamic religions, their holy texts' claims are incompatible on many fronts, such as the divinity of Jesus).

Ad hominem.
Oh, yay.

Sorry if you took the lack of creativity bit as a personal attack, but please note the difference between an ad hominem and an ad hominem fallacy.

I considered "legend", and it doesn't hold up; it doesn't fit the evidence.
I know you deny that there's evidence, but that doesn't make it go away; the evidence in the case of the "legend" claim is the synoptic Gospels and the fact that they were set down when there were eyewitnesses still around.

I'm not denying historical evidence only dissenting from the conclusions you draw from them.

Instead of asserting that I'm wrong (since this is getting nowhere) how about you finally reveal to us what your strong link is from the fact that Jesus asserts supernatural things to them actually being true. I assume you have more than speculation about such things?

So what you want is a "god" who is really a puppet, who will produce "miracles" on demand, for measurement in laboratories.

I didn't say anything about miracles having to be produced on demand. I was simply noting the limits of eyewitness testimony and why they don't suffice on its own.

"Never use only witness testimony alone"? Odd -- I sat on a jury where that was all we had.

That's the problem: that you use things like history or standards used in courts of law judged by a jury panel of citizens. Imagine if science in its pursuit of knowledge about the natural world were to lower its standards to those of history or our adjudication system's protocols, we could conclude lots of things on the basis of eyewitness testimony alone: vaccines cause autism, common colds are caused by cold temperature, acne is a result of a poor diet, bleeding a person can cure them of certain (any?) ailments, the earth is flat, etc.

The crazy thing here is that instead of considering what might be expected if there really were a Creator and looking for it, you're picking the sort of evidence you want, and demanding that things conform to it. That's bad reasoning; it's bad science, even. If it were possible to discover if my friend's dog really did sit in the pond yesterday afternoon put putting him in a laboratory for technicians to make measurements, I might go along with that -- but it isn't, and any Creator would be far less subject to such things than a mere dog.

I'm not confining it to sorts of evidence but merely showing the problems of eyewitness testimony for demonstrating something as true, particularly something extraordinary. If some supernatural entity (be it a "Creator" or something else) interferes in the natural world in some way then those things can be tested. If there is another method of testability that is reliable then that would be welcomed.

What does violating natural law have to do with it?

That I am posting this very message may be divinely inspired, right? It may be the result of the supernatural. And so might all other events. How can we separate them? But we do have a basic grasp of how the natural world works. We have a basic set of expectations. We don't expect the supernatural to be involved in my post. We can safely hold it to a lower possibility. Can we ever say it is 0%? Not really if we want to be totally honest and admit there is no test for the supernatural allowing us to rule it out but at the same time there is no test allowing us to admit it either. Miracles are by their very natural violations of natural laws. If they happened every so often they wouldn't be miralces.

I'm not conflating anything -- I'm laying out steps in a process, evaluating things in a logical fashion.

And I've been waiting for you to do this clearly. Please lay out not only your evidence but why the conclusion that you draw is the correct one. Go.

An investigation for a Creator cannot, by any sensible measure, be conducted in a laboratory -- any more than an investigation into whether I built a two-meter radius, one-meter tall sandcastle on the beach below the high tide line three days ago. All your probing with instruments won't find traces of the castle, and all your insistence on using only such probings will serve only to blind you to the fact that you're doing it wrong: the kind of evidence you're demanding is not the kind that should be expected.

What is the kind that should be expected? Eyewitness testimony alone? Eyewintess testimony plus assertions by Jesus that have to be true (yet to be proven)? Is that what we're confined to?

 

[TX-Beau]

I can't believe we are actually debating this. Well, maybe I can believe it. You might call me an agnostic as to the existence of this debate.

O.K this made me laugh.

 

[TX-Beau]

Clearly it is much too academic for you.

Why would that be? I have no stake in evaluating this subject any differently than any other.

Or did you just intend that to be an insult? Very Christian of you.

When it come to people however, and how they behave, I'm a firm believer that religions exists - not gods mind, just religions.

 

[TX-Beau]

"John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark 1:1-16).

You could also interpret that to mean that John was just calling people to baptism, in order that God could forgive them. That way John isn’t actually doing any forgiving, it’s the sacrament. Which does somewhat contradict my old Sunday School lessons about Christ dying so we could be forgiven in the first place - but, whatever, that's not the issue here.

 

[kallipolis]

Why would that be? I have no stake in evaluating this subject any differently than any other.

Or did you just intend that to be an insult? Very Christian of you.

When it come to people however, and how they behave, I'm a firm believer that religions exists - not gods mind, just religions.

Your opinions and assumptions are well noted.

 

[TX-Beau]

Your opinions and assumptions are well noted.

LOL, well, whatever that means, how very nice of you to say so.

 

[poolerboy]

You could also interpret that to mean that John was just calling people to baptism, in order that God could forgive them. That way John isn’t actually doing any forgiving, it’s the sacrament. Which does somewhat contradict my old Sunday School lessons about Christ dying so we could be forgiven in the first place - but, whatever, that's not the issue here.

Indeed, it can be interpreted in that way and is probably the most reasonable conclusion we could draw. My smaller point was that Christ bringing salvation does not necessarily lead us to the conclusion of his claiming to be God. He could just be the conduit to God's "grace" which is what the Adoptionist Christians believed -- that Christ was "adopted" at the moment of his baptism. Orthodox Christians believe that it isn't simply believing in Jesus that gets you saved (since Muslims believe in Jesus, even as a Messiah mind you) but that his death brings about atonement for sin. My larger point was in how he draws conclusions that aren't necessarily the case.

 

[AsianDream]

I'm not denying historical evidence only dissenting from the conclusions you draw from them.

Instead of asserting that I'm wrong (since this is getting nowhere) how about you finally reveal to us what your strong link is from the fact that Jesus asserts supernatural things to them actually being true. I assume you have more than speculation about such things?

These points come back to the main debate about Religion and why people believe.

Most religions have some very attractive ideas (not least that the faithful are immortal) - their weakness is having no proof that they are true.

In this context I'd treat religious "eye-witness" accounts and personal revelations with the same skeptism I'd treat those from the thousands of people that genuinely believe they've been abducted by aliens.

In both cases there is probably a million to one chance that they're right - but people do seem to build their whole life around these unproven concepts - whether this is a belief in abduction by aliens or the equally improbable ideas of religions conceived by pre-scientific age early societies.