“Evidence is always more convincing from the inside” holds for any worldview or collection of beliefs. Of course we remember that - that’s why I made sure to qualify my argument, several times!
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I agree that’s a fallacious argument. It’s not the one I stated, nor the point I wanted to make. I have argued throughout this case that religious believers are highly willing to believe in miracle stories on bad or very little evidence. I used the word gullibility for that, and I concede this word has a certain “charged” nature to it that I actually don’t mean or intend to convey. I suspect that when you read the word you perhaps take it to communicate an idea that people who believe miracle claims on significantly less evidence than I would myself, that people who are “gullible”, are somehow stupid, or cognitively impaired in some way.
Let try to assure you that I don’t believe that. It seems obvious to me that you are all clearly intelligent, measured, mentally healthy, and normally well functioning people.
But I argue what I do in part because the evidence we have is that the vast majority of people have that same willingness to believe something on weak, or some times even no evidence at all. As humans we simply have an extremely easy time believing each other on nothing but word of mouth, especially if the people from whom we are told the stories in question are part of our “in-group”. The evidence for this is simply overwhelming. I can go on youtube and find a video recording of a bird that sorta looks like it’s kneeling, and some muslim who uploaded the video believes it’s a miracle because the bird “is praying towards Mecca”.
So in order for me to explain how it is that there is a collection of suspiciously similar sounding written stories dating to some approximate time in bronze-age Palestine asserting that some miracle took place, that is all I need. I don’t need to posit that people in the bronze age were in any way cognitively unusual compared to the people today, except perhaps that the modern scientific age has very modestly increased the frequency of skeptics. Not because human cognitive function changed since the bronze age in any measurably relevant way, but merely as a product of more literacy and education. Which we also know positively correlates with non-belief.
But exactly because we know, historically, experientially, and scientifically, that people come extremely easily and rather uncritically to their beliefs, and will disconcertingly often believe them strongly and stubbornly even in the face of good evidence against them, this very fact should massively increase our skepticism, because we know it is a cognitive bias afflicting us all, and which would also very very likely have afflicted the people who wrote the Gospels.
Scientists and anti-resurrection “skeptics” are not immune?
Perhaps surprisingly I don’t even agree with that. Even if you could show that a God exists that at least has the ability to resurrect a person, it would not significantly increase the plausibility of the resurrection. You’d have to actually first establish that the God that exists is the Christian God, or very much like it.
Of course not. I probably have lots of biased views I hold on much less and weaker evidence than I should
I don’t believe becoming an atheist, or a skeptic, somehow radically transforms a person into some sort of epistemologically infallible logical reasoning robot.
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I’d like to add that Jesus being seen die is evidence that should cause us to seriously doubt that he was later seen alive. A collection of unverifaible written accounts purporting to be from a handful of people insisting they later spoke with him cannot rationally constitute evidence sufficient to overrule our background knowledge that dead people dead for days stay dead.
Technically speaking, the stronger the case for his death by crucifixion, the less plausible does his later apparition to his followers become.
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You don’t say why. Can we agree that you don’t say why? Are you making a Bayesian argument, an argument from personal incredulity, an argument against miracles, what? Do you know what the basis is for your statement and can you explain it?
It’s a bayesian argument. Where I said “our background knowledge that dead people dead for days stay dead” should have given it away.
That’s not a bayesian argument, that is a frequentist argument. 
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Okay. I don’t think you’ve really managed to show that, if it’s intended as a generalization about all or most religious believers. (And no one really contests that it’s true about some religious believers.)
But, I should not have let the gullibility thing distract me. Because something else you haven’t shown is that the evidence for the resurrection is poor: you’ve just asserted that it is, and dismissed it.
It isn’t just religious believers who find the evidence for the resurrection to be quite strong. One example is J. Warner Wallace, who was an atheist before he was convinced by the evidence that Jesus really did rise from the dead.
And many NT scholars believe that we can conclude that the tomb was empty and the early disciples had experiences leading them to believe that Jesus was raised. But if you think the facts can be explained (in all the details) by some combination of hallucinations or body stealing or death faking conspiracy theories, I suppose that’s your call.
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Technically it is neither. It is a statement about background knowledge. You can use that in a frequentist argument too, sure. In Bayes theorem the background knowledge defines our prior.
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Christians everywhere believe a bronze-age carpenter was born of a virgin, walked on water, performed exorcisms and miraculous healings just by touching people, turned water into wine, made a loaf of bread feed thousands, and finally resurrected himself after having been fully dead for three whole days. Because it says so in an old book.
And similar things are true for pretty much all the worlds religions. Then we have absurd and dramatic stage performances we can see in things like footage from Billy Graham’s hysterical sermons where he runs around thrashing people wildly with his jacket, and colossal stadiums with tens of thousands of people are filled with feverish ecstacy because they think Billy is “healing” people he hits.
Nothing could more fully and completely demonstrate that religious people are willing to believe almost anything. Once you get into the magical-thinking mindset, almost anything goes. Combine that with a large screaming crowd and a charismatic leader of some sort and there’s no limit to what people can convince themselves of.
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I have watched videos (and attended live) a great many of the late Billy Graham’s public appearances, both in large stadiums and in smaller auditoriums, over the course of six decades and not once did I witness:
(1) anything that anyone described as “hysterical”.
(2) “feverish ecstasy”
(3) Billy “healing” people by “hitting” them in any way.
Can you please provide a link to such “Billy Graham’s hysterical sermons where he runs around thrashing people wildly with his jacket”—or at least a citation to any literature describing such behaviors on Graham’s part? (I’ll save you the effort: you can’t.)
Wow. That’s an Olympic-sized leap and gross generalization! You’ve jumped from a false claim about imagined phenomena which never happened at a Billy Graham event to a colossal generalization about “religious people”—or, more accurately, tendencies toward extreme behaviors among all sorts of humans, whether religious or not. (I’m impressed by your “athleticism”.)
“Large screaming crowds” and “charismatic leaders” have characterized all sorts of extreme events in human history which had nothing to do with religion. Yes, humans are capable of all kinds of extreme behaviors. The motivations have included virtually every imaginable cause which can be linked to tribalism including people group differences in economics, politics, ethnicity, geography, race, philosophy, social caste, language and, yes, religion!
Your “logic” is incredibly selective and myopic—as well as based on some bizarre myth you’ve developed about Billy Graham—but certainly entertaining! (I’m not a Billy Graham devotee of any sort. Indeed, I’ve been a strong critic at times. But truth does matter to me. So I’m certainly calling you out on this one.)
Thank you for reminding us that human extremes and massive leaps in logic are not restricted to “religious people.” Yes, as you yourself said, “There’s no limit to what people can convince themselves of.”—including imaginary events involving Billy Graham!
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Yeah, I’m still not seeing anything here other than “I don’t believe all that supernatural stuff, therefore people who do are gullible” and “old book = must be bad evidence” (you know, except for all those other, non-Christian old books that count as good evidence, since they don’t have miracles claims. Except when they do, in which case, we just ignore the miracle claims and count the rest as reliable.)
Also, 1st century Palestine is well past Bronze Age, if I recall.
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Thank you for your comments on Bill Graham. Readers might be interested in the following article:
Latham: The healing powers of Bill Graham.
The miracle described by author Ric Brack was not a physical healing, but rather involved an elderly woman who was instantly and permanently cured of racism, thanks to Billy Graham’s altar call. In its own way, that’s just as remarkable.
And that brings me to a subject I’d like @dga471, @swamidass and other contributors to address: the miracle of Judaism. We should always remember that Jesus was a Jew. The argument I would like to put forward is that the emergence of Judaism is just as much of a miracle as the Resurrection. Let me explain why.
The first version of the Pentateuch seems to have been put together around 300 B.C. and the final version, around 200 B.C. Prior to that, the worship of the Israelite god Yahweh seems to date back to some time before 1,300 B.C., when he was worshiped as as a lesser Canaanite god. El was theCanaanites’ supreme sky-god. Much later on, the book of Deuteronomy narrates that El allotted each of the gods authority over a separate people on earth, and Yahweh was assigned to the Israelites (Deuteronomy 32:8-9). Yahweh was also originally held to have had a wife, named Asherah. Not exactly an encouraging beginning to belief in Yahweh, you might think - especially when we recall the long and grisly history of child sacrifice in that region of the world and the longstanding practice (which is even sanctioned in certain Biblical passages) of killing the enemy’s infants in warfare (see more bloodthirsty Biblical passages here). Nevertheless, by 300 B.C. at the latest, the Israelites had come to believe in one God Who created the entire universe, Who made man in His own image, Who answered prayers, Who commanded the Israelites to take care of widows, orphans and wayfarers from distant lands, and Who abominated infanticide. That in itself is a miracle. The Greeks, Romans, Indians, Chinese and Meso-Americans never managed to give up the barbarous practice of infanticide, but somehow the Jews did. Thus the Roman historian Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children” (see here). Josephus, writing in the first century A.D., wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward” (see here). I have to ask: what wrought this change of heart? And why did the more civilized Greeks fail to make the transition? I can only posit some kind of supernatural revelation - whether a sudden or a gradual one, a single event or a series of events, I cannot say. But something happened.
Skeptical readers will be sure to bring forward the genocidal passages in the Bible. By all means do. Most if not all of them refer to battles that never happened, anyway: the Biblical story of the Israelite conquest of Canaan is almost entirely fiction. The severity of the Biblical laws described in the Torah is another obstacle brought forward by skeptics. But in both cases, what we see by the time of Jesus is that capital and corporal punishment had virtually disappeared from Israel, while the bloodthirsty commands to wipe out the Amalekites had been largely rendered moot by the Rabbis’ declaration that it was no longer possible to identify them, after Sennacherib deported and mixed the nations. How did this humanitarian revolution come about?
Let’s put the issue another way. I’d like Christian contributors to ask themselves this: prior to Jesus’ birth, was there any evidence for the intervention of God in human history? What do readers think?
Sorry I misremembered the name. It was Benny Hinn.
Look at this utter lunacy:
[@moderators: edit cussing]
That is a consequential error.
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Great that I corrected it then.
This is of course complete blather. I don’t say any books are automatically good evidence just because they don’t contain miracle claims, neither do I say books automatically are bad evidence because they contain miracle claims.
Rather, what I say is that the evidence in the books for the miracle claims is bad evidence because it is completely unverifiable, and highly implausible particularly in the light of how easy it is to explain it’s existence as the byproduct of the same kind of lunacy that make people throw themselves around at the sight of Benny Hinn thrashing his jacket at them.
Also, 1st century Palestine is well past Bronze Age, if I recall.
Iron age then.
I think you’ve made a number of claims about the history of the worship of Yahweh and the origin of the Old Testament that would be disputed by at least one Ancient Semitics scholar that I know of (i.e. those claims are either wrong or at the very least incomplete in a misleading way).
Other than that, yeah, I think there’s evidence of God’s activity in history in the Old Testament as well as the New. But I have to admit my trust in the OT is founded on my trust in Jesus as much as on its secular historical merits, if not more.
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