What is the discipline that determines whether something is possible simpliciter. Please cite me the journal articles where it was determined that resurrections are possible, but 11 guys getting back together after their leader was executed is not.
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So you accept that the Gospels are not primary eyewitness accounts. Good. That puts you several steps above the usual standard of Christian apologists.
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I’m not talking about your personal opinion of NT Wright and Richard Bauckham. I’m talking about whether you accept that it’s a fact that Wright and Bauckham are respected NT scholars whose views are not considered fringe, in contrast to Jesus mythicists like Acharya S and DM Murdock. Do you accept this?
I have no idea.
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No it doesn’t. A non-reproducible event 2000 years ago cannot be subjected to scientific investigation. And that is a methodological conclusion, not a metaphysical one. Where did you study your science? Mine was at Cambridge.
Again, you have a way of projecting motives on to quite clear statements: history using the local cultural methodology is simply not equipped to do the supernatural. I have no beef with that, as long as historians (and those who consult them) recognise their methodological limitations. As i clearly said, many historians accept the truth of the resurrection - but they’re honest enough not to try and pass it off as “history” in the modern, methodological, sense. If you read someone like N T Wright on that, you’d see he deals with it extensively.
Sure it can. We know thru science that humans and chimps arose from a common ancestor about six million years ago.
Not to mention the Big Bang.
That would be philosophy.
God’s existence is possible, therefore miracles are possible, therefore the resurrection is possible. Some inferences are obvious enough to not need journal articles - but the articles are there if you care to look for them. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on miracles could point you in the right direction.
And I never claimed naturalistic explanations of the evidence for the resurrection are impossible - just unlikely. See the article by the McGrews that I linked.
You may be misunderstanding both me and most Christian apologists. The Gospels are not solely primary eyewitness accounts, as anyone who has bothered to read the introduction to Luke can tell you. That does not mean they do not have a basis in eyewitness testimony - see Bauckham’s work, for example.
Very good.
Then please cite the articles from peer-reviewed philosophy journals where it was calculated that 11 guys getting back together after their leader was executed is so improbable that it could only have happened if the leader came back from the dead.
That does not go far enough. It would be more accurate to say “God’s existence is possible, therefore miracles are possible, therefore anything is possible (with the possible exception of that which is logically impossible).”
So, then, how do we determine which of these is more probable:
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Jesus came back from the dead.
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The disciples all had temporal lobe seizures that caused them to have identical hallucinations of a resurrected Jesus at the same time.
Remember, we are assuming that the existence of God is possible, therefore anything is possible ie science cannot be used to determine that something is so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.
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Maybe I have been exposed to a non-representative sample of these apologists. That could well be.
Regardless, from this discussion it appears most of my positions have been confirmed by Christians. The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, and by the standards of academic history the Resurrection did not happen. So this discussion has been helpful in reassuring me that my positions are held by Christians as well.
You’re really obtuse, aren’t you? There have been lots of chimps, lots of people, and lots of genomes to study. That is not a non-reproducible event 2000 years ago. If you really think you’ve made a serious point, you can give me the scientific evidence that Julius Caesar really was the son of Gaius and Aurelia.
Hint: chimps will not help you.
Why is it that you guys never discuss anything in good faith? That’s why I usually avoid sites where this kind of time-wasting happens. Bye.
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Way to misrepresent what we are saying in order to confirm your own presuppositions, @Faizal_Ali.
It would be more accurate to say that the Gospels are not solely, primary, eyewitness accounts - not that they are devoid of eyewitness accounts - and that academic history as academic history isn’t able to say that the Resurrection happened nor that it did not happen, though it is perfectly able to furnish evidence for a rational argument that it did happen.
Scope of negation is important.
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No, it’s a non-reproducible event from 6 million years ago. I don’t see how that helps things for you.
That is a claim that depends on the scientific evidence that human males and females can have human children together. If scientific evidence showed that this was not possible, then there would be no reason to accept the claim.
That’s not true @Faizal_Ali.
Science did not exist 2000 years ago, and it does not have a way of studying one off events in the distant past that do not follow natural laws in operation today. Even Jerry Coyne agrees there is no scientific evidence against the Resurrection.
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well, that is true, but was not the original claim.
There is no way to study such events. Nor is there any good evidence for their existence, of the sort that we usually need to determine whether something happened (i.e. science in the broad sense).
You’ve reached epistemic closure. Congratulations. Prior Probability of the Resurrection is Zero?.
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I don’t see how that follows. For example:
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The Chicago Cubs play their home games in Wrigley Field.
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The Sun rises in the East.
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Clouds are made of water vapor.
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Leprechauns are real.
If we verify that 1-3 are correct, does that lend credence to 4? It would seem to me that each claim needs to be assessed independently.
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But given the propensity of people to have children out of wedlock, there is no scientific way to verify not the generalization [humans have offspring], but the actual proposition I named, that is, [Gais and Aurelia were the parents of Julius Caesar]. History can, at least, establish the latter as plausible. Science, your conceptual acrobatics, has nothing to say about it.
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I will repeat: Science tells us that human beings come into existence by being borne of other human beings. So science is indispensable to assessing the claim that Gais and Aurelia were the parents of Julius Caesar.
You seem to think I am claiming that history is not a means of obtaining knowledge. I certainly accept it is, but only within the constraints of what is known to be possible thru science. You have admitted that this is the way history is done. You just don’t like it. Historians have no reason to care what you like.
If the claim was that Julius Caesar had sprung fully grown from the skull of Zeus, then someone who insisted on believing this would have to use some as-yet undetermined method, other than history, to demonstrate that it occurred. Any suggestions on what that method should be?
This is your assertion. Why is it true? It’s simply a materialist assertion that is not widely accepted. The problem is that the universe alone cannot explain itself.