Yes, @thoughtful, but your hypothesis is that this was a “hoax”, meaning that neither Acts nor Paul are reliable.
Please try to be internally consistent.
Also neither Paul’s epistles nor Acts were written until years/decades later, and would likely not have been in wide circulation, at least initially.
Addendum: all this also assumes that all this was a single ‘hoax’, rather than a story simply growing through perfectly natural legendary accretion, as has happened with countless stories over the millennia: King Arthur, Roland, Robin Hood, Ned Ludd and John Frum, to list only a few.
Further addendum: I would also point out that not only does memory quickly become fuzzy, but it is also very malleable – hear a story often enough, and it is not uncommon to come to believe it, and even on occasion think you had been actually there.
You misunderstand me. Of course I do not think it is a hoax; I’m a Christian. I’m saying it can be falsified by showing it was a hoax.
That’s one way Christianity is falsifiable. Many have been arguing with me that there isn’t anything falsifiable about religions. I think there can be various methods used for any religion.
So I do think Acts and Paul are reliable and have decided them to be so, but I think the atheist or person of another religion has the burden of proof to show they are not.
Even by non-Christian scholars, Paul’s letters are considered to be the first Christian writings in circulation. I’m honestly not sure where Acts falls. I’ll have to go check wikipedia or other sources.
I did not state that you believed this hypothesis, but it is an incontrovertable fact that it is yours:
If you hypothesise that Christianity is a hoax, you cannot claim that within that hypothesis that Christian writings are reliable, without being grossly inconsistent.
These flaws in basic logic makes trying to have a discussion with you both very frustrating and largely unproductive.
I stated in my first post on this thread (after you had explicitly @Tim -ed me):
Nothing that you have said since has altered this opinion. In fact it has made it far worse.
You have consistently dragged me back into this cesspool of illogic and (at times willful) misunderstanding. Well no more!
We are just having all kinds of problems communicating. I apologize that I’m not being clear enough.
Yes, of course that would be inconsistent. I hold to one hypothesis - that the writings of the NT are reliable.
I was trying to say that someone else could argue another hypothesis - that the writings of the NT are unreliable because the religion was some kind of hoax.
I was trying to explain that it would be possible to argue the second position and show that this second hypothesis is more plausible.
I’d rather have someone argue that Christianity is implausible than say it is completely unfalsifiable.
I’m arguing that others should investigate Christianity on the basis of any alternate hypothesis including a hoax rather than say it’s impossible to investigate a religion.
I don’t think you’ll get many takers. If I understand you correctly, your main contention is that the NT is a reliable set of documents and confirms the divinity of Jesus. I (not speaking for anyone else) find the inclusion of implausible and reality-defying stories detracts from the main message - how to be saved via the right self-conduct. What you seem to see as a plus is a definite minus for me. Establishing whether the impossible could be plausible and the implausible could be likely is irrelevant to Jesus’ message.
Yes, but not just that, but further explains how Jesus is the Messiah and fulfillment of Old Testament scripture, and much more. But it’s not worth looking into those things unless someone first determines the writings are reliable documents.
The main message of the New Testament is that Jesus, the promised Messiah, died on the cross and rose again to save us from our sins because we’re all sinners and could not save ourselves. Reality-defining stories are there to show his divinity.
My argument is that you don’t investigate the impossible first. You investigate the historical nature of the documents first just like you would any other historical documents. Then after any plausibility about the historical timeline of Christianity is established for you, you can decide whether the “impossible” makes the religious content of more or less value.
That makes no sense to me. Establishing who actually wrote the gospels and when would be interesting from a historical point of view but it would lend no support to supernatural claims contained within the texts.
I think people generally are poor at predicting what they might do in a hypothetical situation but I’ll have a go…
Nope, can’t do it. I have no idea how I’d react faced with a supernatural event. Miracles just don’t seem to happen any more.
It would lend support to the supernatural claims because it’s harder to argue that Christianity came about through hearsay or legend evolving over time.
Some atheists say: well I would believe in God if God did something in front of me today.
But - if the texts are reliable, the texts are saying God did do something in front of all those people 2000 years ago.
Therefore, is it actually necessary that God shows himself in front of every person throughout history in order to make himself believable? Like several billion appearances?
Or is it just necessary that He did so in a dramatic way at one particular point in history?
Nothing @thoughtful has said is “grossly inconsistent” logically. She merely gave the skeptic a chance to make a meaningful overthrow of Christianity if one could show it to be a hoax.
What you did with her proposal is to try and turn it against her thinking that if you could confuse the issue enough, you might just get her confused as well, and force her to make a misstep in her argument. Then, you might have occasion to swoop in and ‘win’, that is, not really win, but just in appearance.
The reality of what happened however, is that you never confused her and she never made that misstep you were hoping for. She continued to make perfect and logical sense all the way through her argument. Now, we can only think you are frustrated and ready to walk out on an argument that you and she knew you could never win anyway.
Yes! All of this. I was arguing you or anyone could show all of these points to be likely.
I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t come to a completely different conclusion. Perhaps I am being deceived and you are more perceptive.
Obviously you are perceptive as you have conceived of all the points you’d need to investigate under such a hypothesis.
No. But it did happen to me and to you. It would be a stretch to describe either of us as miraculous, Bill.On the other hand, I’ve not heard of a new human forming from an unfertilized egg. That would be miraculous!
Why would it be a stretch calling a cell (fertilized egg) dividing into several billion differentiated cells miraculous? Can you explain how this happens?
I think you are discounting miraculous events simply because you have observed them. You are constantly observing miraculous events (animal reproduction, bird flight) and then discounting that they are indeed miraculous.
For instance if you had seen several of your friends die and come back to life would you no longer think this is miraculous?
Would you believe in Zeus if I wrote an account where Zeus did something right in front of me? If I added that 2,000 other people saw the same thing, would that lend credence to my story?
Whatever it would take for you to believe in aliens visiting Earth would probably be close to what we would need to believe in God.
As to your overall thesis, it is about the burden of proof. If someone claims that God exists then they have to provide the evidence. The beginning position, with a lack of compelling evidence, is unbelief. A lack of a belief in the absence of evidence for a claim is the most reasonable.
God of the Gaps? That’s a logical fallacy, and unreasonable. God doesn’t become true just because we don’t have an explanation for something.
Shifting the burden of proof is also unreasonable. Asking unbelievers to disprove the existence of God is a shift in the burden of proof. As Christopher Hitchens once said, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
This is all part of logic and skepticism. However, we are also human. Is it unreasonable for a human to believe in a deity through faith? I would say no. From all appearances, this is a very human thing to do. Where we seem to find the most friction is in determining if there is independent and verifiable evidence for a claim. That is, when a belief is said to be based on more than faith.
