I wasn’t thinking about the eternal damnation side of it as much as just the “if the gods wish to be acknowledged” side. It seems that some people think that gods wish to be acknowledged for bad reasons only, and never for good reasons: faith without evidence is okay, but recognition based upon compelling evidence is not. It’s as though the gods prefer to deal with people who are a few cards short of a deck. My suspicion, seeing the character of people who offer these arguments, is that these people find such a god tailor-made for them.
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Exactly and its because its God who should be answering for himself. However, God answering for himself doesn’t necessarily mean his answers will be watertight: take his response to Job about why he suffered as an example, wherein he totally ignored Job’s concerns and went on a bragging spree.
Furthermore,
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So you find believing biblical scholars more simply because they share your personal beliefs?
Is the scholarship from non-Christian scholars shoddy in anyway? If no, then why are picky with who you get your scholarly information from?
Peace!
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No, my experience so far is that I find helpful content and then find out it’s from a believing scholar. I’ve never googled “believing scholar”.
Alright.
You’re not wrong in general principle. If we had good evidence from available observations that people sometimes came back to life after being dead for three days, then there would be good reason to believe the Gospel accounts. But the examples you provide (Shroud of Turin, Craig Keener) are not remotely adequate to establish this.
What do you mean by “believing”? That they consider themselves to be Christian or something else?
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I was responding to the word “skeptic” with the word “believer”. “Christian” can have a fuzzy definition. In the context of the discussion about the Bible someone might consider themselves a Christian and still be skeptical about the value and purpose of the Bible and even the reality of Jesus’s resurrection.
I had in mind scholars who affirm some level of the authority or purpose of Bible and believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
Hmm, to me I’d think it would it would be less reason to believe the Gospel accounts. The whole point of the story is that Jesus’ resurrection after three days is something so out of the ordinary, so incredible, that only God could have done it. If it was something that was just rare, not impossible, then it would have been a “meh, that’s interesting I guess” instead of transforming history.
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I think you are confusing “reason to believe” with “reason to be impressed by” here. What @Faizal_Ali suggested would indeed provide “good reason to believe the Gospel accounts”, but at expense of making them considerably less impressive – in the same way that the idea that the sun will rise tomorrow is entirely believable, but for most people hardly impressive.
An outcome that rendered both good reasons to believe Gospel accounts, whilst still leaving them impressive, would be more difficult, but surely not beyond the ingenuity of an omnipotent and omniscient god.
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I was trying not to.
Sure, but if somebody tells me “the sun will rise tomorrow” is a compelling reason to reorient my life, I’m not inclined to believe them … because of course the sun will rise tomorrow. It calls into question their claim or the seriousness of what they have to say. It’s not so much about being “impressive” as being a sign of bigger things. The claim of Christianity isn’t that Jesus was resurrected as a cool trick, rather that it demonstrates that Jesus was the real deal, the Messiah, God incarnate. If dead people don’t stay dead … then the Resurrection is pretty meaningless, right?
Again, “reason to believe” is not the same thing as “compelling reason to reorient my life”. This was simply not the issue that @Faizal_Ali was addressing.
Speaking for myself, on the issue of a “compelling reason to reorient my life”, I have to ask: do people believe in Christianity because the believe in the Resurrection, or believe in the Resurrection because they believe in Christianity? The Resurrection would appear to be ‘just another ancient myth’, if you don’t already believe in the Christian God. And if you do already believe in the Christian God, then the Resurrection is a very small further step.
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@Faizal_Ali said:
If we had good evidence from available observations that people sometimes came back to life after being dead for three days, then there would be good reason to believe the Gospel accounts.
The Gospel accounts claim quite a bit (Jesus as the Messiah, king, son of God, healings, parables, Greatest Commandment, etc.) and I was saying that from my perspective that if dead people don’t stay dead then those seem less believable … because the Resurrection would be no big deal. If we’re simply taking the resurrection of random person after being dead 3 days, then of course it’s unbelievable, it’s impossible. Christians don’t dispute that. The whole point is that it’s impossible … and so if it happened, it had to be through a divine intervention into the very fabric of the universe.
I’m sure both happen. For myself personally, I have no idea which came first… maybe they are irreducibly complex beliefs… (too soon? 
)
That makes sense, though I’m thinking it’s probably just not that black-and-white for a lot of people. Perhaps some people become “open” to the idea of God for whatever reason, and then upon reading the Gospel and they find the Resurrection story so compelling it “clicks”. Perhaps some people “experience” God in some way and have confidence there and only later find the Gospel story and so naturally have no problem with the Resurrection, as you said it’s a “small further step”.
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Well put. The resurrection can’t be a decent basis for belief – it’s just not adequately substantiated, and historical evidence can do nothing worthwhile on that point. Once one accepts that there is a particular deity around whom lots of paranormal occurrences happen, one can then accept the resurrection, but then that’s a doddle. One has to find confirmation of the deity’s existence somewhere else if one’s going to ask for any evidentiary basis at all.
Of course, one needn’t ask for evidence, but one who doesn’t ask for evidence shouldn’t expect that others will find his conclusions very persuasive.
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I’m sure if you saw it happen (crucified person, stabbed in the side, put in a tomb … who stands in front of you talking three days later) you’d have a pretty decent basis for belief. Maybe some would still not believe, but I sure would think it would be pretty compelling. Of course we’re two thousand years on so it’s different now.
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Yes, but that is a theological point, not the evidential point that @Faizal_Ali was addressing.
Yes, but most Christians were raised Christian rather than converting from unbelief or a non-Christian religion. As such, I would suspect Christianity, as a package, is entrenched in their worldview long before they have the maturity to evaluate the specific issue of whether they believe specific Bible stories.
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Hmm, but what I see is equating “good evidence from available observations that people sometimes came back to life after being dead for three days” with “good reason to believe the Gospel accounts”, which to me seems more like an epistemological or theo-philosophical point. It just seems to me that saying “there’s no good reason to believe the Gospel accounts because dead people stay dead” is a straw man argument. The Gospel accounts themselves indicated that “dead people stay dead”, they aren’t arguing otherwise. It would be different if somebody claimed “You probably have thought all this time that dead people just stay dead forever, but it turns out that they often don’t.”
That’s probably true, but since “deconversion” is common enough (several examples here at PS) wouldn’t it make sense that even if somebody has been raised as a Christian that they may take a serious look at the believability, rationale, or evidence for Christian beliefs? I’ve been a Christian for longer than I have memory, and no doubt I am greatly impacted by that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think “does this make sense?” or “is any of the believable?”. I think belief is very complex. It’s hard to pick apart why people believe many things. Humans seem to have a tendency to have irrational beliefs and certainly don’t usually believe things based on overwhelmingly persuasive evidence. We have to work really hard to do that.
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Not at all. If we now know that people occasionally come back to life after being dead for three days, but the followers of Jesus did not know this, then it would provide a succinct explanation for the Gospel accounts and the rise of Christianity: A thing happened that has a natural explanation but which the followers of Jesus would have thought was a miracle. It would then not be unreasonable that his followers reoriented their life in response to this (to them) miracle.
Of course, Christians today would have a hard time justifying their belief.
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I get that if we have a natural explanation that ancients didn’t have access to then it would be reasonable for them to believe something to be a miracle that would be harder to justify now. However, that doesn’t seem to apply here. We and those first century people do agree that dead people stay dead if they’ve been dead three days.
I think that means that “dead people stay dead” or “if we had good evidence from available observations that people sometimes came back to life after being dead for three days” is irrelevant to the claim of the Gospels. The claim is that this one specific person was resurrected, contrary to all expectations and experience of nature, as an act of divine intervention. You can’t use “resurrection violates natural law” to argue against a claim of a violation of natural law.
To “prove” the Gospel account wrong you would want to either demonstrate that this one violation of natural didn’t happen (he wasn’t really dead, he didn’t appear to witness after he died, didn’t exist, etc.) or demonstrate that dead people sometimes don’t stay dead so it’s no big deal. That’s why I said that that if we observed that people sometimes came back to life after three days would actually be a mark against the Gospel account. I would think “there’s no good evidence outside the Gospels themselves that the resurrection actually happened” is a much more logical argument against the Gospel account than “dead people stay dead”.
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Also, we’re getting a bit off-topic from the OP. My bad for a bit of a tangent there, I’ll probably wrap it up or move it to a new topic. I do want to get back to @ho_idiotes’s questions around the use of “compositional devices”. I’m not exactly a theology nerd but I would like to hear more from the Christians here.
Not at all. If that were the case, then we would have less reason to believe that Jesus actually told the parable of the mote and he beam, since it is included in only one Gospel, than that he rose from the dead, which is at least attested in more than one source.
“Dead people stay dead” is the most logical argument against the resurrection. Arguing that maybe it did happen because it was supernatural means throwing logic entirely out of the discussion.
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