Andrew Loke v Paulogia: Written debate on the resurrection of Jesus

Oh, dearie me. I had purposely gone for the Sasquatch because nobody who is a reasonably good judge of evidence regards the existence of actual Sasquatches as remotely probable. I see that I have misjudged you.

The point, of course, is that ancient tales are terrible evidence for Sasquatches, and that the absence of other evidence is no excuse for turning to ancient tales. Since you evidently do accept Sasquatches as part of your capacious reality, I’d suggest substituting some other thing you don’t accept into that analogy.

It would have been nice if at least one of the things which followed that was actually evidence for the existence of the gods. I think that you do not understand the basic difference between evidence for a fact and feelings about a version of the facts. One of the nice things about actual evidence for a proposition is that it doesn’t depend upon others sharing your presuppositions about that proposition.

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I thought Faisal’s typo was deliberate! I was just being a pedant. Surely, I reasoned, he couldn’t have spoken in modern English but in Latin. “Alea iacta est” (the die is thrown). Luckily I checked first and the rumour is, according to Plutarch (or Wikipedia on Plutarch):

He [Caesar] declared in Greek with loud voice to those who were present ‘Let a die be cast’ and led the army across.

And that the Latin is a typo and should be “Alea iacta esto” - “Let the die be thrown” which makes more sense.

Confession, when I first heard “the die is cast” I thought it related to this.

No, it was a real error. OTOH, I did learn a new word (woad) out of the deal.

Interestingly, both meanings work in context. Though I doubt the same homonyms exists in the Latin. Or do they?

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Hi @Faizal_Ali,

Thank you for your comments.

That is to say, the point he [Paul] is gong to great pains to emphasize, is that he did not arrive at his beliefs thru the sort of exhaustive interrogation of facts and eyewitnesses that you are implying. Rather, his conviction is based on the personal revelation he believes he received from Jesus himself.

That’s true, as regards Paul’s conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead. Paul believed he had seen the risen Jesus, so naturally, he felt no need to interrogate other witnesses in order to verify this fact. However, in Galatians 2, Paul continues his story:

“Then after fourteen years, I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. I went in response to a revelation and, meeting privately with those esteemed as leaders, I presented to them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. I wanted to be sure I was not running and had not been running my race in vain… As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised. For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostle to the Gentiles. James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised.” (Galatians 2:1-2, 6-9)

Paul evidently spent some time with James, Peter [Cephas] and John, conferring with them about the content of the Christian message, and checking that he and they were on the same page. It would have been entirely natural for them to begin at the beginning, and compare their experiences of the risen Jesus.

I can appreciate the importance the Christian believer would attach to efforts to establish the resurrection as an historical fact. But history is just not up to the task of demonstrating that physically impossible things happened in the distant past, even under the most favourable circumstances. And in this case the circumstances are far from the most favourable.

I wasn’t attempting to argue that the Resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact. I’m all too familiar with the holes in the apologists’ arguments. However, I do think a reasonable person would concede that post-mortem apparitions of Jesus to groups probably occurred, whatever they might choose to make of those apparitions.

Even if we could know with 90% certainty that 500 people claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus at the same time, that 10% uncertainty is far higher than the odds that a resurrection actually occurred, so it remains far more probable that this event with 500 people never happened.

The prior probability of a resurrection from the dead is indeed vanishingly small: certainly less than 1 in 100 billion (the number of humans who have ever lived), but no lower than 1 in 100 quintillion (the maximum number of events that humans could have observed, during their history). However, the prior probability of a group apparition is not vanishingly small, as it involves no miracle.

@SlightlyOddGuy

If the person I trusted most in the world came to me and told me she had seen someone rise from the dead, I would not believe her. I would be concerned for her mental health. If I had good reason to believe there were 500 other people who claimed the same thing, I would not believe them, either.

What would you say if all 500 people closely (and independently) agreed in their reports of what the allegedly resurrected individual had said and done, in his/her appearances to them? (Please note that I am not arguing that that’s what happened, in the case of Jesus. I’m just asking, to see whether or not any evidence would convince you.)

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Funny! I thought that, for decades. I figured he was saying, in effect, that by this act I establish the pattern of the future; I cast the die from which future events are stamped. And then one day it occurred to me that “die” is the singular of “dice,” and I examined the Latin, and – oh, gosh. I’d had that completely wrong.

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I agree. We’ve already been there to no avail:

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Dies are used to stamp coins and I originally, years ago, assumed the idea was that once the coin is struck, destiny is unavoidable. But the Latin word for coin die is “typus”.

Feel free to enlighten me. I listed observations that are more consistent with the God of Christianity than no God.

Great minds…

Isn’t one of the major points of Christ’s teachings that we expand our love for others beyond our family and our tribe?

If that’s evidence for God, wouldn’t that necessarily make the indisputable fact that Christianity is not embedded in many other cultures (India, where I have lived, comes to mind) evidence against the existence of the Christian God?

Aren’t you clearly making @Puck_Mendelssohn’s point for him with that one?

What about all of the modern US Christians who whine that wearing a mask in public to protect others represents persecution?

I don’t see that you did. Some of them are simply false, and others don’t even suggest it.

What about the gods in which billions of humans believe that are not the God of Christianity? It seems that you are promoting a false dichotomy between Christianity and atheism.

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But, are they?

Several of the things you describe as somehow being particularly Christian, Christianity has no particular claim on any more than innumerable other religions and systems of thought, not to mention the fact that several(if not all) of them are equally well if not better explained on naturalism.

You’ve listed a number of things you like, but have done no work to actually show are “more consistent with” Christianity. I doubt you could do that even if you wanted to. Some of them aren’t even observations, nor facts.

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I don’t see any such observations. What you have are a melange of vacuous statements like the notion that “the beauty of sunsets and the sunrises” somehow supports the existence of gods, plus some non sequiturs like the notion that Christianity being embedded in our culture (or making unusual claims) somehow suggests that its factual claims are true, plus some assumptions that the stories in the Bible are true.

But, evidence? Evidence that the entity(ies?) in question actually exists and operates in the world? None of that. Not one word. There’s nothing in your paragraph that a reasoning person, not already in agreement with you, could in any way employ to support an inference that your god exists.

When people say that the beauty of a sunset convinces them that there’s a god, they are either horribly dim or speaking metaphorically. Obviously nobody can actually think that that’s evidence for a god. I suspect that if you examine your own thinking there you’ll realize that you, too, are thinking metaphorically. It has a kind of poetic resonance to it. But while I enjoy a bit of Shelley now and then, I don’t mistake poetic force for evidence.

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Fourteen years later. Plenty of time for people to be convinced they saw something the actually did not.

Maybe. Or maybe not. In any event, what do you think Paul would have been likely to have heard from them that would convince him he had been making a fool of himself for the past decade and a half proclaiming a resurrection that did not happen? As you say yourself, he was convinced of the resurrection long ago.

OK, I can go with that. I would personally say “possibly” rather than “probably.”

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People will confabulate, subconsciously, in the very moment following the purported event, that they saw something they didn’t, simply to fit in. And they will believe it with great conviction. No internal battle, no skepticism, no checking. Nothing. They will stand there, see one thing, hear from someone else that something different from what they saw occurred, then their own memory of the event will change to fit this new description, and they will continue to believe this new thing they didn’t actually see until the day they die.

Should they encounter the tiniest amount of resistance or skepticism from others when re-telling this involuntarily confabulated re-imagination of events, they will entrench in their belief and believe it even stronger.

These are not some strange outlier phenomena that rarely happens. This is the default state for the human mind. We are all laboring under excessive cognitive biases that have evolved because they result in group cohesion.

The tendency is for those on the outside to force themselves inside by becoming more like the group. They will, without knowing it, rewrite their own memories of events to become part of the group. Add to this a charismatic and inspirational leader-figure who can speak naturally with both authority and empathy and all bets are off. People can and will convince themselves of anything. Anything.

They happen to be particularly good at exploiting group-biases in the military, just to pick an example. The kind of loyalty and comradeship you feel coming out of even a few months of bootcamp is difficult to even describe. And this is without there being any clear enemy threatening you. Now imagine being part of a group that really does get persecuted.

It is not uncommon for people to even feel compelled to defend things they know are factually incorrect when attacked from the outside (and even some times when from the inside), out of some combination of fear of causing an internal rift in their own group, and to advertise their own group’s strength of cohesion (a very basic “look at how strong we are together” animalistic display). Don’t question the leader, or members of the group, while in public, and now while we are under attack from the outside, preferably not at all.

Everyone will recognize these emotions and know they have felt them to some degree at different times in their life. If you’ve been with friends while going out and meeting other groups that were hostile or aggressive, if you’ve been on a sports team, or in the military. There is NOTHING in Christianity that can’t be perfectly easily explained as just another naturally evolved religion.

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Some obsessive Loke-fan quoting Loke’s post and book so authoritatively it seems odd, is posting replies both to Paulogia’s opening and other posters, containing these statement:

Don’t be cheated of your eternal life by your own misunderstandings.

Don’t be cheated of your eternal life by Paulogia’s fallacious arguments!

I guess there is no point continuing a conversation with someone who is closed-minded and refuses to look at the arguments but would rather be cheated of eternal life.

Disregarding for a moment the strange morality of a being that would rob someone of eternal life for getting fooled or misunderstanding something, I wonder how common this view is among Christians.

It’s not clear in what sense one is to be “cheated” out of eternal life here. Is he saying that when you die as a non-believer, you just die and then that’s the end? That seems unusual to me. Assuming that is what he is saying, are there other Christians around here who have come across such views before?

What I usually encounter is the belief that either non-believers go to hell and then suffer there for an eternity(with different views on what exactly this suffering consists of, often depending on the percieved severity of one’s crimes), or they just live some sad and boring eternal life separated from God.

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Later Greek thinkers such as Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 CE) expanded Plato’s argument to support the existence of a totally transcendent “One”, containing no parts. Plotinus identified this “One” with the concept of “Good” and the principle of “Beauty”. Christianity adopted this Neo-Platonic conception and saw it as a strong argument for the existence of a supreme God. In the early fifth century, for example, Augustine of Hippo discusses the many beautiful things in nature and asks “Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not one who is beautiful and unchangeable?”[1] This second aspect is what most people today understand as the argument from beauty.

I do love metaphors too though…

Why do humans insist on marriage? I can infer its a created norm, rather than having to write paragraphs to discuss it. I can infer relationships of family, friends, authority structures are part of God’s nature so it is easy to explain them as good and desirable. Those are why I gave some of the observations I gave - they are easily consistent with the God of Christianity.

No, we just don’t have many forum members who are not Christian or atheist. I also don’t find other religious options to fit many of my observations very well.

My point was that I think secularists tend to think Western values would still exist had Christianity never existed. I’ve heard enough snippets of arguments that that’s not the case that I think it’s very unlikely as well. To what cultural values then, would society rather hold to? If people hold basic Christian ideals to be the greatest good for society, my observation is that would be more consistent with the God of that religion existing more than not existing. Anyway I need to do my own research. Dominion is next on my reading list. If someone has a book to recommend with the opposite conclusion I’ll try to pick it up. I watched this video today - it seemed to emphasize the point that secularists don’t quite get that nations that are culturally Christian give rise to ideals of freedom of speech. https://youtu.be/VRhdh2Y9vVw

I don’t think this has any bearing on the question of whether there is a god, but yesterday I observed in my backyard a male sparrow his beak full of fluffy material that I assumed was meant for a nest, except he was just hopping around like he was looking for something. Finally he spied a female and flew over to her, seeming to make a big deal of the stuff he was carrying. It seemed to have the desired effect, because a few moments later they were copulating. It just caused me to reflect on how much of tradictional human dating behaviour is just a more elaborate version of that brief interaction.

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Come to think of it, there is a scene addressing this very scenario in The Last Temptation of Christ.

How well have you actually tried? When you use this turn of phrase “very well” you appear to have some sort of criterion for determining a degree of fit, or degree of compatibility between different ideas. I’m willing to bet that you actually don’t, and that this whole thing operates on a sort of emotional/feeling level for you. That you have done no actual work to find out how well anything fits with competing religions, or non-theism, and wouldn’t even know how to begin to do this.

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Yep. A purely philosophical “argument in the air,” a pure argument from feeling. That’s very far from being an evidence-based position.

Yes, but “consistent with” is not “evidence for.” The existence of squirrels is consistent with the existence of mole-people who secretly rule the world from their deep-earth realm. It is, however, not evidence for the existence of the mole-people.

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