Interesting.
Somebody rising from the dead two thousand years ago is meant to be super convincing, but somebody doing it right in front of us is not convincing at all?
Consistent argument? Not so much.
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OK, thatâs nice and succinct.
What makes you think that applies to our discussion?
And my question remains: Why should the fact that guys who thought Jesus was God also thought bad things would happen to people who disagreed with them convince me that Jesus was God?
Yes,thatâs similar to an argument I have made elsewhere: Since Christians alive today believe Jesus was resurrected without having seen it for themselves, why should we believe a Christian 2000 years ago would only believe this if he saw it for himself?
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Yeah, Iâve always been amazed by this one because what Abraham says is essentially âif bad evidence wonât convince them, surely good evidence will not convince them.â
I wouldnât hire Abraham as a lawyer, thatâs for sure. When one has a contention and only bad evidence, one seeks good evidence. One doesnât blame the judge for not believing bad evidence.
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Not true at all. It is surely true that nothing will ever convince someone who is determined not to be convinced. But âwantingâ to be convinced or not is the sign of a sloppy mind. People with better mental habits are ready to be convinced, but tend to expect evidence of a kind and character to justify it. Such people neither want to be convinced, nor want not to be convinced.
I doubt that, in all my years of litigation, I ever had a judge who âwantedâ to be convinced of anything. And yet, judges were convinced (sometimes to my advantage, and sometimes to my disadvantage). âWantingâ to be convinced had nothing to do with it.
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This is a good example of how God veils the truth from non-believers. The passage is about the fact that if the brothers donât believe from scripture, they wonât believe even if they see a miracle. Itâs about believing the unseen before you can see the miracle. I get it.
Uh, youâre probably not going to get that type of evidence without believing the scripture.
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Nor with believing it. If believing it opened one up to new evidence, surely the believers would point to that evidence, but they do not.
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Because Iâve quoted you saying God exists, the apostles believed he rose from the dead, but since it requires faith, youâre not going to believe even though he did rise from the dead.
Judges are required to be open to all evidence. People can close their minds to evidence if they want to. Itâs not a job requirement.
Thatâs not the point. The point is they had to have seen Jesus alive for themselves to be willing to die for it. Otherwise they were putting themselves in harmâs way for making up a story collectively that gained them nothing. And if they wanted to gain anything, they wouldnât have used womenâs testimonies to do. Gaining nothing and having an unbelievable story and then dying separately around the Roman empire for it doesnât make sense any other way than that they actually saw him.
Sure, they can. But I doubt that either Faizal Ali or I have done so â I know I have not. Iâm eager to hear any new evidence on the subject of the truth of Christian claims. But I am quite familiar with the state of the evidence, and so is he, and neither he nor I are likely to be convinced by that or by any YouTube commentary upon it.
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The conclusion does not follow from the premise.
Yes. I donât have to falsify origin-of-life claims in order not to accept them as true. I just have to say Iâm unconvinced by the proposed story-telling.
Since the claim of the religion is that these things are brought about by an omnipotent God, the God who created nature and can change, suspend, or break it at his pleasure, what âscienceâ says is irrelevant. Science can only deal with the regularities that occur when God leaves the universe in ânormal operating modeâ; it is intellectually powerless to draw any conclusions about what is âimpossibleâ when God chooses to operate outside of that mode.
Youâre caviling over a slip. You have faith that unguided causes can explain all events in the world not governed by human choices. You have faith that unguided causes can produce life, that they can turn a bacterium into a man. You have not done these things yourself, nor can you reconstruct even 1% of a hypothetical pathway for any of them. You believe that they are possible because you want to believe they are possible, you want to believe that design is not necessary. That is the substance of your faith, as Iâm using the term here.
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I have stated many times, that my personal experience is that I could not understand until I reached a point of brokenness and cried out to God for help. Up to that point, I did not understand scripture because I did not believe. Thatâs the point of this thread, to try and explain that phenomenon. It is written throughout the bible that the truth of scripture is veiled to those that do not believe.
As you can well understand, arguments of that character are of absolutely no use to anyone. They are evidence-free and they convince only those who are convinced â the effect is a concession that you have no evidence to offer which a reasonably objective evaluator need consider. Demanding non-objectivity suggests that your position is ill-founded.
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They are of value to those who believe.
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And I am not trying to convince anyone, I was asked to explain my experiences in an effort for others to understand. By doing so, I make myself vulnerable for the benefit of others. I gain nothing. It is not my intent to convince anyone⌠I know you cannot be swayed, so please consider that I am not trying to. I am simply trying to explain why I think the spiritual (not religious) experiences I have are valid.
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Understood. One may be convinced by all manner of things, while recognizing that they are woefully insufficient to convince others.
No, I can be swayed. I donât know where youâd get that sort of impression. But it would take evidence, and as Iâve said, Iâm aware of the state of that evidence so it would take something new.
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I have never said that God exists. I canât imagine how you could believe I had.
BTW, I just realized. If you believe this:
Then all those stories apologists love to tell about how they were committed atheists but were forced against their will to accept that Christianity was true? Those stories are all lies.
Thatâs just dumb. Most scientific advances have arisen because someone saw something he did not expect, and which could not be explained by the existing theories and models. No one could have foreseen the results of the double slit experiment. But once it was seen, it had to be believed.
Now, I realize I am talking about science, and not âmiraclesâ. You need to convince me that we need to lower the bar when talking about the latter before I agree to do so.
Thatâs not true at all. Religious fanatics who have been indoctrinated into a cult are well known to willingly die for something they could not have known to be true. Here is just one example from living memory:
The didnât use womenâs testimony. They used menâs testimony that some women had found an empty tomb. If I understand correctly, that would only make sense because it was a womanâs duty to clean the body after death. A man wouldnât do it. So it could only have been women who found the empty tomb. A different story would not have been believable.
And, to be clear, I am not saying anyone knowingly fabricated the story of the resurrection. The empty tomb episode was likely just an embellishment that became part of the standard story over time, just like how any story gains details as it is told and re-told.
Wrong. I accept the scientific evidence that this is the case, and have no religious motivations to believe in any âguidedâ processes that are completely bereft of any scientific support. That is no more a faith position than not believing in the existence of unicorns.
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This is why I say that you cannot be swayed. According to Solomon in Ecclesiastes there is nothing new under the sun, everything you need to know is available. There will be no new evidence until it is too late. That was the point of the passage that @thoughtful posted. By the time you are fully made aware with the exact evidence that you seek, it will be too late. Faith is the key, but must come before understanding. So, again, an evidentiary impasse.
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Really?!? So your standard of scholarly research is a wikipedia site and a website created by a Bahrt Ehrman fan who quote mines and lists people to reflect his own perspective? And then declare victory a couple hours after posting a couple of links? Good to see the level of the standard you set. Would you reduce debated topics in other scholarly areas, such as your field of physiology or perhaps economics to that level of discourse? There are always nuanced topics on which different scholars have opposing views. Why should we think that a couple website links could sum up such areas of scholarship?
Here are a couple quotes from a few books in our modest home library:
Howard Marshall (Professor of NT Exegesis at University of Aberdeen) in the NIGTC commentary notes âIn short, the best hypothesis is still that the Gospel was composed by Lukeâ
Joel Green (Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Ashbury Theological), notes that âthe most likely candidate for the authorship of Luke-Acts is Luke the physicians and sometime companion of Paulâ
William Hendriksen and Simon Kistemaker in their New Testament Commentary date Matt to 63-66, Mark to 50-65, Luke to 61-63 and John to 80-98 and even Wikipedia dates Mark 66-70, Matthew and Luke 85â90 and John AD 90â110. Thus, even if other authors wrote the gospels, they would be writing them at the same general time period that the traditional authors would have been alive. The gospels themselves do not state an author so you are free in imagine someone else who lived the same time as the traditional authors actually wrote them, but I donât see how that helps. The early sources all identify the gospel authors as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and there are no early sources ascribing them to anyone else.
From other threads on this forum, I know that the two of you are not a fan of William Lane Craig, but he is a New Testament scholar and makes some good points in response to these types of questions:
Other scholars who would likely disagree with your synthesis, would include people like:
D.A Carson
R.T. France
John Stott
Wayne Grudem
William L. Lane
Morna D. Hooker
Thomas R Schreiner
Hans F Bayer
Andreas J. Koestenberger
Michael Wilkins
Craig A. Evans
David W. Gooding
Leon Morris
I. Howard Marshall
F.F. Bruce
Lewis Foster
Ralph Earle Jr.
Walter W. Wessel
Iâd imagine that @jongarvey, @Eddie and @AllenWitmerMiller would agree with me, here, too. (But of course, they should speak for themselves)
Even NT Wright who was quote mined on that website you shared would believe in the reliability of the gospels.
Interestingly, around 2:30 he talks about a nonhistorical view of Jesus coming out of church corruption around 100 years ago and at minute 3:30 the use of that view for anti-Semitic reasons.
And related back to the topic of this thread (personal experience), around minute 9:00 of this video, NT Wright also says that he has personally seen things happen that he would describe as miracles Then around minute 11:00 he has an interesting musing about historical knowledge (pointing to the resurrection of Jesus) and the limitations of scientific rationalism, and again at minute 18:00 the convergent evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. At minute 24:40 the interviewer asks NT Wright, âCould the disciples have just hallucinated?â NT Wrights reply is worth listening to. Also related to points made earlier in this thread, at minute 28:00 NT Wright talks about how one should neither hold to strict rationalism nor the romanticism of personal experience, because faith makes sense within the synthesis of a larger whole of information.
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Well, I am of course aware of all the warnings of dreadful consequences, and I take them at their full evidentiary value.
Note, though, how clearly these things indicate falsity: (1) insistence that one must believe before considering the evidence, and (2) use of fear as a tactic. No clearer indicators of fraudulent intent â or, alternatively, of the most ridiculously poor intellectual habits â could be offered. While those who find such things convincing have my sympathy, their positions do not have my respect.
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