Roy ~ I’ve named scholars who have done substantial scholarly work in the area of Biblical history.
Now you say that Bill Craig’s work is not convincing to you, which tells me that you think you already know what it is. Further, you claim to have found flaws in his reasoning. That is very specific. I didn’t raise that. YOU did. So I’m asking you to talk about the specific problems you say you’ve found.
All I see here is that you allow for exceptions to your thesis when it is convenient. God doesn’t want to impose himself on us, except when he does. What kind of thesis is that?
Why can’t I escape the thought that this kind of reasoning is precisely what we would expect when an old myth fails to apply to the modern world?
But despite claiming to have evidence, you haven’t pointed to any evidence or even given the vaguest description of any evidence.
I and others have been asking you to talk about the specific evidence you say you’ve got, which you raised - but you wouldn’t say a word about it, you just kept repeating apologists’ names.
Now you’re trying to change the subject.
I see no reason to follow that rabbit-trail. Either say what evidence you have for the resurrection - noting that apologists’ names are not evidence - or I’ll conclude that you haven’t got any and that attempting to discuss anything with you is a waste of time.
P.S. One flaw in Craig’s arguments is that his Kalam cosmological argument is circular - the premise “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” isn’t based on any independent logic, but extrapolation from observed examples, and hence is dependent on the conclusion that “The universe has a cause”. Thus the argument is circular. He also smuggles in various attributes of the cause (personal, uncaused) and assumes others (unique, extant) without adequate justification. I have no expectation whatsoever that you will reply to this meaningfully, I’m including it only so that others can see you fail.
Nice try. I’ve already given you Jesus’ answer, but just to be clear …
“Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:6)
He’s brought it up in debates, of which I have seen probably too many. Not to mention numerous of his articles written on his website, podcasts he has done, interviews, and so on.
To make it as succinct as I can, I say again: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The claim is the following: The almighty creator of the universe took a human form, got himself crucified to being fully and completely bodily dead for at least two whole days, then supernaturallly resurrected himself back to being alive despite still having mortal wounds in his body.
The evidence is, essentially, that it says so in some ancient texts. Now to be clear, and to provide a bit more detail, the evidence really only is that there is some text which can be interpreted to mean that some people are of the belief that a man was once crucified, and then was later seen alive.
That evidence just isn’t good enough to substantiate the claim. In fact one problem is that the greater the evidence for the death by crucifixion, the more evidence do we require for the resurrection. As in the more sure we are that a man really did die, the less believable does it become that he was later seen alive. Because generally speaking, dead men stay dead.
And even if(big if) we could amass enough evidence to justify belief that the man who was crucified really was later seen alive, we still don’t have any good evidence to justify belief that there is an omnipotent divine being that made it happen. It might be the case that such an event would raise the plausibility of that claim, though I’m not sure of even that, it is not at all clear it would suffice to justify belief in that proposition.
If this is true, you certainly have not shown it to be the case.
It is related to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. And it is taken to be self-evident. Something does not come from nothing. That doesn’t even happen in a quantum vacuum. (edited) If you want to complain that it’s not self-evident to you, then go ahead and shoot yourself in the foot.
Even if it is only the result of an inductive inference, that doesn’t mean it is not more likely true than its contradiction. And it in no way depends on the premise, “the universe has a cause.” It only depends on those cases of origin for which there is knowledge. And thus it’s based on what we DO know, and not what we don’t. I understand this point is endlessly debated.
Now, Bill Craig’s argument, if taken as a deductive argument depends on the truth of the premises. But it does not require us to be certain about the premises. If we say we are 90% sure the premise is true, then that certainty propagates to the deductive conclusion. So I don’t have to prove the premises with certainty to have an argument that establishes with high certainty the conclusion.
I don’t think that’s helpful. Three reasons:
(1) You have to understand that I am not looking specifically for the Christian god. I think it’s quite improbable that the god which happens to be dominant in my culture would just also happen to be the one (or one of the ones) that actually exists. So I am not interested in theological speculations that purport to generate excuses for why the Christian god, particularly, should be inscrutable. My search is broader than that: I am looking for ANY paranormal entity, whether it corresponds to some faith tradition or not. Obviously such a search cannot be prejudiced by the injection of Christian assumptions about the nature of gods.
(2) Views which are so constructed as to recede from scrutiny are inherently suspect. My sense is that the intellectual history of these things is that they are constructed post hoc for the purpose of EXCUSING the lack of evidence. There’s nothing inherent in the idea of a large and powerful paranormal entity that requires that its presence be destructive.
(3) If indeed there is a large paranormal being of unbelievable power, but the evidence for its existence is insufficient, all this tells me is that its existence cannot be confirmed and nothing at all can be known about it. This puts it squarely into Huxley’s remarks about “lunar politics”:
“If a man asks me what the politics of the inhabitants of the moon are, and I reply that I do not know; that neither I, nor any one else, has any means of knowing; and that, under these circumstances, I decline to trouble myself about the subject at all, I do not think he has any right to call me a sceptic. On the contrary, in replying thus, I conceive that I am simply honest and truthful, and show a proper regard for the economy of time. So Hume’s strong and subtle intellect takes up a great many problems about which we are naturally curious, and shows us that they are essentially questions of lunar politics, in their essence incapable of being answered, and therefore not worth the attention of men who have work to do in the world.”
In accord with that view, I declare unreservedly that a god that is inscrutable is of no interest to me whatsoever; nor can I accept, from any source which asserts its inscrutability, any representation ABOUT such a god. If it is scrutable to you, it is scrutable to me; if it is inscrutable to me, it is inscrutable to you.
That’s true, and I have eagerly read most of the Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library. But it is historical evidence, and incompetent to establish the existence of a paranormal being. What it DOES establish, though, is that religion has always had a bit of the neurologically-atypical about it.
I recall a hilarious, but highly apt, remark by one fellow in a forum, some years ago: he said that he believed that any religion was possibly true, except for the obviously made-up ones like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism and Christianity.
It’s not self-evident to me.
My foot is still intact, change my mind.
We get the evidence we have.
Although science reveals more and more evidence as we go.
To wit, cosmic fine-tuning, and biological information.
What counts as an “extraordinary claim” depends on your “logical priors” in a Bayesian inference. If God exists, and if God has already predicted resurrection, then it is not exactly a brute “extraordinary claim.” It is actually to be expected in some sense.
SO … if you consider the resurrection of the son of God to be an “extraordinary claim”, it is because you do not grant the prior conditions that exist, and are unable to make the correct inference.
I would find it interesting to learn how Christians explain away the teachings of the LDS Church. What about the golden plates that no longer exist because Joseph Smith handed them back to the angel? Isn’t that a rather convenient way to explain away their absence? What about the 11 witnesses who have sworn that they have seen the plates? Were they lying, or deluded, or did they really see the plates? How did the LDS Church manage to get established and grow to its current impressive size of 16 million members, if it is all based on a falsehood? Why do all these people believe all this stuff if very little of it is actually true?
What arguments do Chrisitans marshall when they try to demonstrate that the LDS Church is basically founded on a myth rather than on historical facts?
I can follow you so far: that if one assumes the existence of a god of the sort prone to do things like the resurrection, one can then consider whether the resurrection happened. The difficulty is that when it is claimed that the evidence for god is the resurrection, the whole thing becomes circular. And such things as “fine tuning” and “biological information,” even if they were good arguments for the existence of a huge paranormal being of extraordinary power, would not be good arguments for the existence of a specifically Christian version of that being, so could never render support for the resurrection.
It depends on your relevant background knowledge, where you have some.
In the case of resurrections by God(the case we are trying to assess the probability of), we have relevant background knowledge: It appears God, if he exists, generally wants dead people to stay dead.
That means the claim that a dead person was raised back to life by God is a priori highly unlikely given our background knowledge. It is an extraordinary claim given what we know about the tendency for dead people to stay dead.
LOL, well but of course. If God exists and wants X to happen, then X is expected to happen. But should we believe that God exists and wanted X to happen? To believe that, we need good evidence that overcomes the low intrinsic priors given the background knowledge that God generally doesn’t will dead people back alive: How do we know that God generally doesn’t will dead people back alive? Well because if God did will them back alive, they’d come back alive. By definition, God’s will obtains.
Hence the continuing death of dead people tells us God, should he exist, is a priori against resurrections. Hence the claim that a man was once resurrected is a priori unlikely.
That it is necessary to point this out is a sad, sad thing. But it is necessary.
No, the problem here is “the resurrection of the son of God” contains numerous distinct claims all of which would have to be assessed on their own terms. That a person was the son of God, for example, is itself an extraordinary claim.
You seem to have forgotten that you are trying to show that God exists. Then you are trying to use the purported resurrection of his son as evidence in an argument to convince a non-believer to believe that God exists. But if we start by granting that a man was the son of God, then we’ve already conceded that God exists before having had the chance to assess the probability of that claim given the evidence. That’s putting the cart before the horse.
By insisting that a man once existed who was resurrected, was also the son of god, and that God is the one who resurrected him, you are just adding more extraordinary claims on top.
Apart from the historical evidence provided in the biographies of Jesus, yes I agree.
But in view of my stated priors, the a priori improbability is much much less prohibitive, and does not justify the need for “extraordinary evidence” at this point.
The “historical evidence” doesn’t raise the priors, it is supposed to raise the posterior.
The historical evidence is supposed to be so extraordinary that it overcomes the low prior, and makes the existence of God a plausible hypothesis. That’s how this argument from the resurrection is intended to function.
A priori the claim that I own an intergalactic spaceship has a low probability. It is an extraordinary claim. My say-so should’t convince anyone, nor should it if we found that it said so in some book. But if I could amass evidence of a sufficient quality and quantity, I could overcome this prior in principle.
That doesn’t make any sense. A claim with an extremely low intrinsic prior (which the claim that a man was raised back to life by God is, given that we know that even if God exists he wills that dead people generally stay dead), must then require extraordinary evidence to overcome this intrinsic low prior.
And I’m sorry to say, that a handful of unverifiable accounts in ancient religious texts, is just not extraordinary evidence. It is mundane.
I have forgotten nothing. I am not trying to show anything of the sort.
I am showing that a historical resurrection can be used to adjudicate between the various mythologies. And that is possible if God exists. Other evidence could be adduced for that claim.
That does seem to by the context of you bringing up Craig’s work on the resurrection. But alright, fair enough.