All the more reason to be skeptical about people’s judgement in cases where the subject is very emotionally charged, like in religion and politics.
Combine this tendency towards tribalism and in-group loyalties with the belief that magical abilities are real, and some charismatic frontman, and there’s no limit to what people will completely blindly accept, or submit themselves to.
All this completely undermines the case for the resurrection. It is entirely possible people simply dreamt half of it up while in reality something totally mundane happened.
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!
The phenomenon is real, I just got the name of the man wrong. Sorry to puncture this out for you. Ironically, had I really somehow confabulated this thing about Billy Graham(Benny Hinn) and it never took place, it would actually have supported my overall argument. People really can through weird neurological quirks come to believe and vividly “remember” something that never took place.
Also, are you telling me you don’t believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, performed exorcisms and miraculous healings, turned water into wine, and made a fish and a bread feed thousands of people?
No, but unless you have a high degree of skepticism towards a substantial portion of what we know about the history of that time, you have to admit that other books do count as good evidence, and the Gospels have plenty of same indications of historical reliability as other ancient texts, if not more. There’s nothing about the miracle accounts that sets then apart in that regard, except that they report miracles. And (see for example the article by the McGrews that @dga471 references) the reliability of just the non-miraculous details goes a significant way towards demonstrating the Resurrection as the best explanation.
Again, the evidence that we have is a lot stronger than you are giving it credit for.
What makes you ask that? I have no problem believing the supernatural if there is good reason to for it. In this case, the Gospels provide good reason to believe the Resurrection. My faith in Jesus because of the resurrection (plus the overall indications of historical reliability for the gospels) leads me to trust in these other miracle claims as well.
The corollary is that mundane claims require mundane evidence. But all claims require their own evidence.
The claim that some city existed, or that some man was mayor of some village, or that Asrahim had seven goats and lived on some hill aren’t extraordinacy claims, because they’re all consistent with our background knowledge. There’s nothing unusual or extraordinary about the existence of a town or city, a man being mayor of a village, or a goat herder owning goats. For claims like that, it takes little more than someone’s say-so. But they don’t support each other. The fact that the book is right about Adnan being mayor of the village isn’t evidence that Asrahim had seven goats.
There’s nothing about the miracle accounts that sets then apart in that regard, except that they report miracles.
Yes, and it is the miracle claims which are extraordinary, and therefor those for which the evidential burden is extraordinary.
And (see for example the article by the McGrews that @dga471 references) the reliability of just the non-miraculous details goes a significant way towards demonstrating the Resurrection as the best explanation.
No, it really doesn’t. The fact that Babylon really existed, and the Bible refers to Babylon, does not constitute evidence that the Bible is also correct about a man being born of a virgin, or resurrecting himself. Each individual claim requires it’s own evidence. Evidence for one is not evidence for the other.
Because I suspect you’re uncomfortable answering yes, when they are not supported by the same kind of evidence you believe supports the resurrection. Yet you probably believe them anyway. Which you probably have now recognized goes to my point: You believe extraordinary things on little to no evidence at all. Primarily because you’re already religious.
And even mundane claims are tentative. Historical data has to be interpreted and doesn’t give us a snapshot of what exactly occurred in a particular situation. In most cases we don’t need to rely on the interpretations to any great degree. We’re happy to have a general picture of what happened and don’t need to place any existential value on particular details. We know that biases exist and people write history based on imperfect information and make mistakes, etc.
This is definitely true, and I don’t think any Christian here is trying to hide or deny that. This is why we start with the Resurrection of Jesus, which is better supported by evidence from a skeptical viewpoint. We don’t start by pointing to the gospels and saying “Look at this guy who healed people! This book says so!” (Although of course, there are many people who are first drawn to Jesus because of his life and moral teachings).
Yes, we do believe in the Virgin Birth and Jesus’ miracles. But that’s because as Christians, we have a very different epistemological structure compared to you as a non-Christian and skeptic. This structure isn’t simply reducible to “because we’re already religious and we’re also gullible”. Rather, it is necessary to maintain the overall coherency of the Christian worldview. It would take some time to explain and is not within the scope of the original article. From your replies so far on this thread it seems that you do not yet have a good idea of how it works. Instead, you’re trying to assess our beliefs using your epistemological structure (which seems to be influenced by a form of positivism) and trying to present that as normative for everyone. Of course, it doesn’t work. It looks ridiculous. As Paul himself says, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18, ESV).
In writing this article, my point is not to force you to adapt our epistemological structure. Rather, my aim is to show how that structure has points of intersection with the epistemological structures that are commonly used in science, ancient history, and other religiously neutral subjects. These points of intersection are meant to establish common ground so that you can understand a little bit why we believe as we do.
Your reiteration of “Hume’s dictum” here simply is false if you imagine it to mean that evidence for miraculous occurrences can’t be provided in the same way as evidence for mundane occurrences.
Nobody is claiming that miracles occur naturally, @Rumraket. So to the extent that our background knowledge is familiar with natural goings-on but unfamiliar with supernatural goings-on, we can’t say with certainty that miracles are inconsistent with that knowledge. At best we can say that miracles are improbable - but even that doesn’t quite work, because the inference that miracles are improbable in any specific case relies in part on the assumption that miracles must be randomly distributed throughout history, when there’s no reason for that to be the case. The context of miracle claims matters for assessing their prior probability.
Except it does. If certain non-miraculous claims are true - such as facts that many NT scholars concede about what the apostles believed and proclaimed - and the best explanation for those facts is the resurrection, then the historical reliability in the non-miraculous supports the reliability in the miraculous.
And in assessing whether the resurrection is the best explanation, you don’t have a strong case against it just by saying “oh, people will believe anything!” There are reasons that the disciples would not have been predisposed to believe in the resurrection. You have to wade into the details.
As @dga471 expressed well: you don’t yet understand why we believe these things. Your assertion that religious people believe miracles with no evidence, and that’s what’s going on with belief in Jesus’ miracles, is no stronger of an argument than me saying “you only disbelieve the resurrection because you’re dogmatically opposed to belief in the supernatural - just look at everything you’ve said in this thread”.
But I’m going to bow out of this conversation, as the thread is closing soon. @Rumraket - I do hope we come to understand each other better through future discussions!
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swamidass
(S. Joshua Swamidass)
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Some mocked, and some came later with questions and believed. I’m not deterred by the mocking, though I’m not sure that “mocking” is the right way to describe what is going on here. I think that many of the atheists are genuinely puzzled by @dga471’s confession.
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