Is belief or unbelief more reasonable?

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Of course people lie. But if they all continued to insist to you that it happened, you would have to wonder what’s wrong with you to have such friends that all conspire against you

Possibly new technology has been invented that you are unaware of, and your friends refuse to explain that to you, because you insist them must be lying and they’re annoyed by that.

There you go. I just gave you a plausible explanation that explains the events that doesn’t involve lying.

Notice any patterns here: The most terrifying cults in history What patterns are the same as Christianity? What are the same as Islam? It’s not always explainable why initially they believed it. It’s more important to know how they kept propagating it and what it led to.

No. But you’d determine why the friends would be lying to decide if he really had or not. The world record is not the point here. The point here is what you think.

Great. Explain how they didn’t make it up and they all went around using cult think after multiple decades of preaching.

I think if they weighed everything, they were open-minded. People don’t have to agree with me.

Yes, but it’s also good motivation FOR HIM to keep up a lie.

Usually the person who starts the religion or cult is the one that came up with the ideas, and acts as a leader.

It looks like one there is actually coming from the Quran itself, and is not necessarily a miracle. My point was that Muhammed is less likely to actually have done them in his lifetime if they’re not in the Quran.

First few centuries were key words here.

No, I mean he totally screwed up many references to the Bible so he did NOT know them - like thinking the Trinity was the Father, Jesus, and Mary, or messing up the name of Jesus’ mother with Miriam. If what he was saying was actually from God, he wouldn’t have made silly mistakes.

Yes, it is because it showed a lot of people had to be delusional or actually correct.

God can, but it also makes Muhammed suspect because it’d be really convenient to make up some stuff God said so he could have what he wanted.

I agree that they did believe it and they did try to spread the belief. Instead I’m arguing that it’s easy to see he’s lying (not discounting he was probably somewhat delusional too). Feel free to argue Jesus why is lying since you believe the disciples’ belief was sincere.

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I certainly would.

People still cannot fly just by flapping their arms.

Sure that’s possible. Wouldn’t be a miracle, though, would it?

It’s not very plausible that this amazing new technological breakthrough is only known to a few of my friends.

Miracles are not plausibe. If they were, they wouldn’t be miracles.

And you have not provided an answer to the “why” question.

Yes. They all involve people believing ridiculous things because of their religious faiths.

Same thing: People believing ridiculous things because of their religion.

Indeed.

Since you agree that Islam and all those cults in that story are not true, one explanation that does not seem viable is that the people’s beliefs were true. For some reason you make an exception for the single case of Christianity. By amazing coincidence, that is also the religion that you follow. Imagine that. What are the odds?

Nope. If the official body that decides official world records cannot determine why the people would be lying, it doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t endorse the record just because some people said it happened.

That’s just what people in a cult do. Why are there so many people trying to spread Scientology decades after L. Ron Hubbard died? Because Scientology is true? Is that the only explanation you can come up with?

Good. Then you should consider me open minded.

Yes. So it’d be really interesting to know who started the religion based on the belief that Jesus rose from the dead. It wasn’t Jesus, because he was, like, dead, you know? We’ll probably never know, I guess.

You don’t understand the Quran and Islam. It’s not about the life of Muhammad. It’s supposed to be the words of God himself. Why would God tell people who were following Muhammad things that Muhammad was doing right in front of them? The life of Muhammad is recorded in the Hadith.

OK, I’ll take your word for it. I don’t believe Islam is any less false than Christianity, so it makes no difference to me.

Yes. Just like with Islam or every other religion in the history of humanity.

Yup. Shows how gullible people can be when they are committed to a religion, doesn’t it?

Oops, I guess that’s not what you meant to demonstrate, is it?

I’ll just ask you to take some time to look at what you just wrote there and understand how you’re arguing against your own claim there. You’ll be so much prouder if you figure it out yourself, rather than having me tell you!

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Ok. I’m going to test your hypothesis so you can see how open-minded i am. What details do you accept? Jesus existed? He died on the cross?

Your hypotheses is the rumors of his resurrection spring up after his death and miraculous stories kept getting embellished? But no one was deliberately lying except for Jesus?

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Yes.

I don’t think Jesus was lying about being resurrected. He was dead. Dead people don’t tell lies, according to my understanding.

Early Christians believed Jesus rose from the dead. I don’t know when or why they started believing this. Neither does anyone else, though we can estimate the time line.

Other than his coming back from the dead, other rumours legends and stories were being told about him. Just like how all those stories about Muhammad were told by his followers.

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OK. So minimum how long did those rumors take to take the shape they are in today? Just your best estimate how long it would take for people to believe Jesus was alive even if he was dead.

And do those rumors also include the book of Acts? Did churches come to believe all of the history of Acts was true, did just some of it happen, or we can’t know? That factors in to how I’m testing it.

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The rumors spread to everyone in .000006 microseconds.

It was a miracle.

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You’re not supposed to be invoking miracles. :sweat_smile: This is your plausible hypothesis to EXCLUDE miracles in the formation of Christianity. I can’t really test your hypothesis unless you give me time frame that you find reasonable. :thinking:

oh well, now I’m going to try to find some skeptic books. Looks like my library has one by Bart Ehrman.

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Why not? Am I not supposed to be open-minded?

Once again, you seem to be completely misunderstanding my position. I have consistently said all along that I do not rule out miracles a priori. I have even explained why I do not believe it is even possible to determine whether or when a miracle has taken place.

My position, rather, is that there are many far more likely explanations for the Christian belief that Jesus was resurrected than that he was actually resurrected.

That remains the case even if an omnipotent god exists, and miracles occur.

Am I finally clear?

So I’m trying to play according to rules we can both agree to, but now suddenly you are saying we cannot suggest miracles as explanations. Well, please forgive me, but I fail to see how that can possibly lead to the conclusion you favour, which is that Jesus was resurrected and this is a miracle. Why are you deliberately setting up the rules so you will lose?

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TBH, I find many of the writers who do not accept the resurrection try a bit too hard to come up with alternative explanations. Religious fanatics often believe things that cannot be true for no good reason. They are often successful in convincing others of their beliefs. That these things happen are readily observable facts. That’s really all the alternative explanation that is needed.

It can be interesting to try determine why this happened in the particular instance of Christianity, (or Mormonism or Scientology or…). But it is not necessary to do so in order to reject the claims made by any of these groups.

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I’m not sure if you’re just trying to be cute, or you think I’m trying to be cute.

Correct me where I’m wrong…

To disprove the timeline of Christianity as presented in the Bible, including that Jesus rose from the dead, we should consider a hypothesis where there was a miracle such that everyone believed Jesus rose from the dead instantly, even though Jesus did not? And…

This hypothesis should be considered because there is even the tiniest remote possibility that there IS a God who wanted to trick the world into believing Christianity, so he did a miracle whereby He implanted false memories in multiple people’s brains in an instant so that they would all believe they had experiences they never had? Even shared experience with each other?

Is that the hypothesis you want me to disprove?

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Not the hypothesis. But you have to explain how you have ruled this possibility out, in a way that would not also rule out any other equally unlikely possibilities, such as a resurrection.

So, please, go ahead…

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Here’s a start to the positive evidence for the existence of God, and the God of the Bible. Let me know what you think.

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The point isn’t to consider all possibilities. For instance we could be living in the matrix, or in a hologram, or a video game. The point would be to consider possibilities that have the potential to be more plausible that the possibility that Jesus actually rose from the dead. The most plausible possibilities would be people acting like we expect them to knowing what we know about how stories develop, what motivates people, etc. The more plausible explanation than the resurrection wouldn’t appeal to its own miracle.

I would argue possibilities of a deceptive God are ruled out anyway, as we know through logic only an eternally good God would give us the ability to actually know what deception is. But either way, I don’t think God implanting memories is a plausible possibility. You’re welcome to think that, but I doubt you actually do either.

For an example of how to consider more plausible alternatives for religious claims:

When looking at alternatives to the explanation of Islam that the Quran is the eternal word of God, after looking at the data, I think it’s actually much more plausible that Muhammed was just retelling and making up stuff. I can add up all the data I’ve described before: mistakes in understanding of Scripture from Jews and Christians, the Quran wasn’t revealed all at once, and there was time to embellish Muhammed’s record of miracles via storytelling. Muhammed’s followers gained political power in his lifetime, so even if they knew it was false, some may have been motivated to stay anyway. We have evidence that some left Islam because they knew Muhammed was making up the Quran, etc. I could keep going, but the evidence adds up so that it’s easy to make a case that the Quran is not the eternal word of God.

So the same thing should be done with Christianity to see if enough evidence can be found that makes an alternative to the resurrection more plausible than what Christians claim.

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Good.

When people die, they stay dead. They don’t come back to life. This is what we expect them to do, based on literally billions of examples.

So that Jesus did not come back to life is more plausible than that he was resurrected.

Now you’re going to go change the rules again, because you are committed to a particular outcome, not to following consistent rules and standards.

And this gets us to the point I am trying to get across: When you speak of “people acting like we expect them to”, you are exhibiting a blatant double standard, because the option you are arguing for is one that goes against what we expect to occur.

So this is the problem that arises if we try to determine what happened while keeping open the option that “miracles” could be viable explanation. A “miracle” is nothing more than something that our experience tells us is so unlikely, we would never expect it to happen. A dead person coming back to life would qualify, but so would people knowingly dying for something they knew to be true, a rumour spreading faster than seems possible or any number of other explanations one could think up. There is nothing special about the “miracle” of a resurrection, except that you and lots of other people believe it. That’s just not good enough.

But I have already given the non-miraculous explanation that I think best accounts for the belief in the resurrection of Jesus, and while that account entails an unusual event, it does not require anything so unlikely that it would require the invocation of a miracle. It is no more unusual than the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult which, though admittedly a highly unusual event, is strikingly similar in many ways to the scenario I propose for the beginning of Christianity.

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You have not tested it. You would not give me a minimum amount of time that seems reasonable for you for rumors to spread into becoming the account of Jesus and the apostles we have today.

If there is no God yes. We are testing whether Jesus is God. THAT IS THE POINT.

Historical record is historical record. I’m changing no rules.

There is nothing special about the miracle of the resurrection EXCEPT it’s the claim on which an ENTIRE religion rests.

Just the same, we can test people dying for something they believed to be true if that’s the claim to truth for the religion (Heaven’s Gate), or hypothetically if the claim of the “Religion of Atheism” is that rumors spread faster than possible we can test that TOO. We can test each of these separately for their particular claims to see whether or not the “miracle” of each makes the religion and its claims more plausible or not.

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Hi David @ProfBravus
I believe my off-hand comment there was in relation to this thread. Below were some reasons I came up with quickly. I was looking for an atheist/agnostic to give a similar list why we can determine that God does not exist or that we’re unable to determine it.

Happy to hear your thoughts as well.

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OK, thanks, that’s great! I’ll do it as a ‘quote-and-respond’.

Most likely, yes. This is not, in itself, evidence for God’s existence, since there are also naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) explanations for that event.

This is a statement about what you find plausible, rather than a statement of fact. Other people do not find supernatural explanations plausible. It is quite true that abiogenesis - the move from non-life to life - is very difficult to explain scientifically. There are long and interesting discussions to be had about it. There are also plausible naturalistic candidate theories.

Again, this is a statement of what you find plausible. What about the explanation that Jesus lived - like Buddha, like Mohammad - and started a religion, but the claim that he rose from the dead was added later? Religions have been started by human beings who did not rise from the dead.

I’m writing on article on this right now, but here’s one from a couple of months ago that shows plausible (heh) explanations for morality from both theistic and non-theistic perspectives: Can Atheists Be Moral People? – Adventist Today I think it establishes that morality can plausibly have arisen from human processes.

I would argue that there are also inconsistencies, but I think those are largely irrelevant. Some historical details have been verified, others have not. Most scholars in the field would say that there is no credible extra-Biblical evidence for a Hebrew slave period in Egypt and the Exodus, for example.

I don’t make these points to debunk your faith, but to try to explain why forms of evidence that you find plausible have very often already been considered and rejected by non-believers. (For what it’s worth, I don’t identify as an atheist.) So, when you bring them up and they are dismissed, it is likely because people have discussed them before, possibly dozens of times.

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I’ve studied cosmology just for fun the last few months via YouTube and never once heard a scientist give a natural explanation for this. So I’m curious what the naturalist explanation is.

Correct. I didn’t state it well.

Difficult to explain? Or difficult to prove? or both?

Hence my view that there’s not a plausible explanation of how life began other than God. Show me that all of this could and did happen by accident rather than with purpose.

Fine. Show me that it was added later.

Thank you for stating it that way :grinning: Why is it MORE plausible than God as a standard of good?

I have some comments on your article. This may be better for separate thread.

Since there clearly exist moral codes in the world, they must have arisen through human processes.

This is circular reasoning / begging the question.

I got stuck at your level 1.

doing bad things can lead to arrest or fines from the authorities, divorce from our partners, ostracism from our friends and so on. Doing good things can lead to opportunities, positive rewards, esteem and so on.

How did human beings imagine and implement the concepts of authorities, marriage/divorce, friendships? Why did they come about? Why did we care? Why do we still care? Why are creatures (not just humans) social at all? Why are there two sexes?

The moral reasoning that underlies this position, though, seems to me to come from the “gaining reward/avoiding punishment” level of moral reasoning. There is the related issue of absolute versus relative morality, but the key thing seems to be the claim that, without the promise of reward for virtue and punishment for vice, morality has no other meaning.

A belief in God, and particularly in an afterlife, is a belief that the scales of justice can be corrected, that vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded in this life will be balanced in the next. Without such belief in an afterlife, we have to come to some accommodation with the idea that the world simply is unfair.

Neither of these are true about Christianity. Instead it is that evil MUST be punished for God to be good. God is our standard of good because He eternally exists as good.

That’s fine. Then they should explain why the evidence I give is less plausible than the evidence they have.

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Lest we get seven layers deep into quote-and-respond, let me just very briefly reiterate my main point:

You say “they should explain”, but the point is that they have and do, but if the time you ask is the 318th time, perhaps don’t be surprised if they don’t have the time and energy to go through it again.

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On a couple of the points you raise.

In one sense, it is impossible to find a causal explanation for the Big Bang/origin of the universe, because space-time itself did not exist in this universe prior to a particular point in that process, and it makes no sense to talk about ‘when’ or ‘where’ when there is no space or time. It also means that, if there is a ‘whom’, it is in-principle unknowable that that was the cause of the event.

I imagine (but correct me if I’m wrong) that your response to this is effectively “I know God, and He told me”. But that evidence, while I don’t reject it, is not cosmological evidence, so you are thrown back on other evidences of your knowledge of and relationship with God. Or of the veracity of (particular interpretations of) Scripture as reliable cosmology.

To be brief: this apparent cosmological argument is not a cosmological argument.

On abiogenesis, I’m afraid I’m gonna self-cite again: Bravus » Cosmogenesis, abiogenesis and evolution

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