I think it just shows whether someone understands the real limitations of history or science. The resurrection will fit depending on the rules of the game which are subject to change. In both history and science you don’t have objective truth. You have good tools to investigate certain aspects of reality.
I don’t because I see people come into faith based on rational thought. Theological beliefs can be based on evidence, evidence that may or may not fit an arbitrary standard. You have made the decision to base your worldview on arbitrary standards and as such you must categorize certain observations as “brute facts” as you cannot come up with a rational explanation for their origin.
I agree wholeheartedly. And it is certainly possible to set up a game by whose rules the “Resurrection of Jesus” qualifies as true. The same applies to any other claim one could make or conceive of.
Many of your fellow believers, however, insist that the “resurrection” qualifies according to the rules of history or science. So you should congratulate yourself for being so much smarter than they are.
Again, I agree. You set up the rules for games called “science”, “history”, “mathematics”, “theology”, or whatever, and then play by them. Certain claims will win and be true, and others not, depending on which game one is playing at the time.
If I choose not to play Theology with you, I have no reason to take the “resurrection” as a true claim.
Now you’re just being presumptuous. I don’t know that I have ever made a claim such as what you attribute to me there. But that’s probably not on topic for this discussion. We’re finding much ground for agreement here, so let’s just stick with that.
Indeed not. Just because all of the arguments for something are poor arguments, poorly evidenced, does not mean that the “something” is not so. But what it does mean is that nobody should claim that others ought to be convinced by the available evidence. It’s one thing to “believe” the resurrection – one may do that, I suppose, if one has a strange way of weighing the evidence. But it is quite another to assert that others ought to believe it; to do that would be absurd.
Well, who needs characterizations? Evidence is what’s lacking. When it is asked for, the answer invariably turns out to be so insubstantial that it either (1) isn’t really evidence for the proposition in question or (2) is so peripheral and questionable that it may as well not have even been mentioned. I raise the point of the competency of historical evidence simply because the question under discussion is whether there are good alternative explanations for the resurrection accounts, and it seems to me that that’s not actually a material point; not knowing the exact contours of the folkloric processes that brought us the resurrection stories, we can never know definitively what the causes of those stories are. All we can know is that no amount of credible attestation to them could lend them any value as fact claims at all.
There are indeed lots of “arguments based on evidence.” But these do tend to consist of about 99% argument with just a dash of evidence, usually of a type not suited to purpose. The solidity of an argument depends more often on the evidence than on the argument; and solid evidence, however characterized, is what is lacking.
In the case we are discussing we have.
-4 separate gospel accounts
-The writings of Paul
-Jude
-Peter
-Josephus
The Tanakh prophecies
Perhaps the most completely documented events in ancient times.
Oh, I thought you were suggesting that the evidence was NOT “historical” in character. Why bring these things up? There’s nothing in there competent to establish a claim that something apparently impossible happened; any workable plausibility criterion will discard any such inference. What you’d need would be to establish the plausibility of these things; for example, by demonstrating that the forces capable of doing the things described are active in the here and now. Once you’ve done that, you can move along to arguing that these particular occurrences actually happened.
Until that’s done, it doesn’t matter how much arm-waving and insisting that these are “the most completely documented events” you do. It just doesn’t matter. Stories that an impossible thing happened do not improve the likelihood that an impossible thing happened. What they do is the opposite: they diminish the credibility of the story-tellers as to the non-impossible parts of the stories.
The plausibility is establish in the existence of the documentation. Your argument stands on the evidence meeting an arbitrary standard. It may or may not. The burden of proof is in your court to establish that the criteria that these standards don’t meet affect their credibility.
Not really. Note that when people propose alternative interpretations of the evidence, the reaction of others is to evaluate those for plausibility. Questions are asked like “is it likely that so-and-so just made up these details?” This is how historical analysis works. You have the evidence, and you seek to evaluate what interpretations of that evidence are most plausible.
When you insert one-off paranormal occurrences into it, there is only one possible reaction, from the standpoint of evaluating plausibility: they must be rejected. If you don’t do that, then the only way to proceed is to relieve all other hypotheses of plausibility criticism – and that means that you no longer have any process at all for evaluation of alternatives.
If evaluating the plausibility of alternatives is an “arbitrary standard,” then there can be no standards. There’s quite literally nothing left – no way to weigh one proposition against another in the light of historical evidence. But, of course, what you seek to do is to relieve ONE hypothesis, your favorite, from the reach of plausibility criteria while not relieving the others. That sort of disparity of scrutiny is a great way to reach a foreordained conclusion, and a crummy way to weigh evidence.
Why, oh why, is it that whenever people have got no substance to argue in their favor, they want to argue procedure? Does it help? “Burden of proof” can be a useful concept in certain institutional decision-making processes, e.g., in civil litigation. It’s pretty meaningless in the world of “inquiring into what things are so, and what things are not so.”
I am only interested in whether the claims are true, or not. And we know that whenever we encounter a claim of paranormal action in the here and now and are able to evaluate it, it always turns out to be the product of mistake, misinterpretation, confusion or deceit. I am not interested in “burdens of proof,” unless you and I are in civil litigation against one another. I don’t say these silly things about burden of proof to you – why do you keep saying them to me? Surely a legal-procedural concept can have no bearing upon the fact that you simply have no evidence that the things alleged in these stories are even possible, much less plausible.
You’re making the claim that the resurrection is impossible. Yes you have the responsibility to support that claim. You may want to back up to the claim that it is highly improbable but you need to support that claim also. Given we know live originated de novo on this earth life returning after a brief hiatus seems like a chip shot
Well, I stated that it was “apparently impossible.” One never demonstrates impossibility as such. But one does not see people rise from the dead, and all medical knowledge we have of the matter does seem to foreclose the possibility. If you think that people rising from the dead is a sufficiently commonplace occurrence that we should just regard it as an ordinary fact upon which accounts passed down through folklore to us are credible evidence, I hardly know what to say. It is, in fact, not a commonplace occurrence. It is so very far from being a commonplace occurrence that it is the miraculous nature of the claim which is the entire point of the accounts.
Now, as for your contentions about argumentative procedure, I cannot agree at all. Whether something is true or not does not depend upon the quality of arguments which might be made, and it even more strongly does not depend upon niggling procedural quibbles about burdens of proof and the like. But it does have a marked tendency to correspond well to the quality and character of the evidence that can be brought to bear.
Were there evidence of forces which can raise a man from the dead, one would then have to say that the possibility that those forces acted on a particular occasion was a question which history could address. Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics would remain out of order as violating any reasonable plausibility standard, while resurrections would not; so one would regard the resurrection of Jesus as an ordinary tale of ordinary types of activity upon which the testimony of witnesses, however indirect, incredible and attenuated by folkloric processes they might be, could bear. The tale that Nikola Tesla built a perpetual motion machine that really worked, on the other hand, would remain outside of plausibility, at least until somebody built a copy of the thing and showed us once and for all that the Second Law is rubbish.
Here we have no grounds at all for asserting the resurrection events to be possible. We have no demonstration that any force capable of bringing them about exists, or acts in the world. That being the case, “burdens of proof” and other courtroom devices for structuring legal processes notwithstanding, no responsible historical criterion can admit such events to the category of the plausible. Some other credible account of how the stories arose might be given, or might not. But no historical analysis can validate the claims made, whether we know how they arose or not.
Honestly, now: the character, quality and competency of the evidence involved here would not be sufficient to convict a notorious serial jaywalker and perjurer of jaywalking on National Jay-Walk And Then Lie About It Day. Surely nobody really thinks that historical evidence can validate miracle stories – the very notion is absurd.
Sure we do. We have evidence that intelligent life can originate de novo. Given this a resurrection and an intelligent being sourced by the same creator is highly credible.
Ah. NOW we get to your “solid arguments based upon evidence” that are neither historical nor scientific. I’m afraid this one isn’t a winner for you and isn’t based upon “evidence” except in a criminally loose sense of the term. In fact, we don’t know of intelligent life originating de novo – it invariably arises from less-intelligent or non-intelligent precursors, unless you’re prepared to argue that every prokaryote (and every proto-prokaryote that may ever have existed) is intelligent. Nor do we have any evidence that life was “sourced by” a “creator,” nor do we have any reason to believe that if it had been, such a creator’s particular talents and interests would have extended to yanking humans out of tombs and revivifying them, which is a bit different from sticking a primitive cell onto a planet, don’cha think?
In other words, garbage in, garbage out: make silly assumptions, and silly conclusions flow forth like the occupants of a clown car.
You went were I thought you would have to go. You need a natural evolutionary mechanism where you can explain its origin to place doubt on the resurrection stories.
No, the fact is that we simply have no examples of intelligent life arising de novo. We do, however, have a faunal succession that does show us that it arises from non-intelligent precursors.
But, again, clowns go in the car, and they come back out. If you assume silly things, you’ll get silly outcomes. Assume that intelligent life just spontaneously poofs into existence by supernatural means, and you’ve assumed a critter that can do such things must exist, and a whole line of absurdities follow.
You have to show intelligent life can have a non intelligent cause to support your case. If it requires an intelligent cause there is no reason to doubt that the same intelligent cause could be the source of the resurrection.
Ah, so among your sound-but-not-scientific, evidence-based arguments, we now are to understand that your views on the resurrection are underlain by the firm foundation of Intelligent Design Creationism. I think that makes the situation pretty clear. As Bertrand Russell humorously demonstrated, one can prove any false statement from any false premise.
As for what I “have to show,” I am content to rely upon the scientific evidence, which is devoid of the slightest suggestion that any intelligent cause underlies life.
What’s next? Do you also deny that tobacco smoking can lead to lung cancer?
