But, you know, if you’d like to continue to import concepts from the law that have no actual application to reality, such as “burden of proof,” I’d be happy to explain to you why, once we’ve imported the rules of evidence, there’s not a shred of admissible evidence of the resurrection – not just of its being possible, but of it having happened, even if it were.
If I thought you had some idea what you were doing, I would at least think there was some sort of interesting chutzpah in your constant references to “burden of proof” on a question where you literally have no evidence at all. But I’m not sure you have any idea.
This assumes you know all of the possible evidence for the resurrection at this point. This is the burden you carry with the claim you made. You are also not in a court of law so there is no restriction on the evidence you will have to deal with. Some will most likely be out of your area of expertise.
Also, part of your audience believes in the resurrection for reasons you may not understand.
You can if you choose modify your claim to match the issues you face with this definitive assertion you have made.
Well, you still don’t get it at all, and cannot even formulate a post which is in any way responsive. I shall just slap my forehead, curse my foolishness for once again thinking I could explain something to you with the result being that you actually understand it, and move on.
I think the conflict here is that if God exists, and of course is omnipotent, nothing is impossible. So it would first have to be established whether God exists before we would be able to evaluate the evidence.
But if we have “established whether God exists”, most (all?) of these sorts of arguments become moot. And if God were established to exist, I think we might see historiography undergo considerable change to accommodate the fact.
Yes, and here is an instance where Bill repeats an error made by supposedly more sophisticated scholars and thinkers. He, and they, conflate two different senses of the term “impossible.” When non-believers in the resurrection state that such a thing is impossible, they are speaking in terms of either physical or metaphysical possibility. Whereas the believer is speaking of logical possibility. It is true that there is nothing logically impossible about the idea of an omnipotent god who can, and does, bring dead people back to life.
But the apologists try to have their cake and eat it, too. Because it is also logically possible that all the disciples knew Jesus was not resurrected and just made up a story that they continued to maintain even when threatened with death. Or that they all had identical hallucinations of the resurrected Jesus at the same time. Or that Jesus merely swooned and then regained consciousness three days later, looking hale and hearty as ever. Or any of a number of other potential naturalistic explanations for the resurrection story that believers will dismiss as too improbable to be believed.
Part of the difficulty, as I see it, is that the believer wants to use the occurrence of miracles to support the idea that there are gods. But the occurrence of the impossible isn’t something you can demonstrate through the methods of history. Rather, the process needs to go the other way: without the existence of gods who do the sort of miracle claimed being demonstrated, one can’t really entertain the historical claim at all.
Trying to show that gods exist by showing that there are cases of folk magic in the lore of one’s religion is just so terribly bass-ackwards. I do understand why believers never want to address the primary problem of the existence of their gods through evidence – it’s futile – but there is something really dreadful about the various sideways attempts to get there, ranging from appeals to atrociously-done pure philosophy to appeals to the credibility of folk tales of magic.