spin

One day ApostateAbe will wake up and realize best explanation requires external confirmation. That you are wondering puts you in the same class of historyless enquiry. History works on confirming facts.

This is pretty warped. Plato and Xenophon may have been biased but you know that they existed and both claimed to know Socrates themselves. The gospels are unprovenanced, undated and anonymous. none of which can be said about Plato or Xenophon. The analogy is utterly bogus. And why do you omit the contemporary antagonistic portrayal of Socrates by Aristophanes??

Atheos

Great point Steve! Let's say that hypothetically 2000 years in the future a historian uncovers a copy of Gone With the Wind. This historian has access to nearly limitless resources, scholars and methodology to dig back and discover whether or not the impressive war described in the book actually took place.

In the process he and his crack team of researchers are unable to find any independent verification that this war ever occurred. They can't find any medals, tombstones, letters written to or from soldiers, uniforms, currency or military records of the event in question. Even though they rigorously look in exactly the places where one would expect to find evidence of this war they find none.

In that case, absolutely. The rational and reasonable (albeit tentative) conclusion would be one of skepticism. In all likelihood this war did not occur. This conclusion would be imminently reasonable because one would expect a war of that magnitude to leave behind some physical evidence apart from a narrative in a book that could easily have been fiction.

Is that the point you were trying to make?

David B

So what is the fuss about then? All I am saying is that many myths have some historical background, and I see no reason why that should not apply to Jesus.

Depends what you mean by inspiration, I suppose. In a sense, how could he or they not be? In another sense, it is hard to imagine that any historical Jesus would have anticipated or desired Christianity as it has become in its many forms.

David B

Doug Shaver

No, it would not. The book's mere existence would prove nothing at all.

Doug Shaver

The fact that the Sally Bowles character "was loosely based on Jean Ross" does not make Cabaret a story about Jean Ross.

JonA

I don't think there is any point debating this.

No matter what historical phenomenon we seek to understand, our accepted explanation should always be the best one available. We measure the quality of an explanation based both on its probability and on its explanatory power. Ideally, the explanation that we accept should have the highest available ratings in both categories; this isn't always possible, though, and some good intellectual judgement is required to figure out how much of each we might be able to sacrifice in exchange for more of the other.

For example, there are many ways to explain the appearance of the revolutionary—Christian—understanding of the Jewish Messiah around the first century ᴀ.ᴅ. The hypothesis that 'every single aspect of it was entirely fabricated with no basis in reality' has a high degree of explanatory power (it can, literally, explain every aspect as a human invention), but it is severely lacking when it comes to probability, primarily because people don't change their views overnight with no reason, and the 'it was all invented' hypothesis, therefore, only pushes the questions further to 'why was it invented?'.

Likewise, we can explain this change in thinking as a result of 'the Messiah really came to earth, told everyone what his actual properties were, lived up to them, etc.'. This explanation, while explaining every aspect of the Messianic-mindset revolution by declaring it factual and actual, is as horribly improbable as the explanation that the whole thing was made up.

And so we seek a balance for optimization: maximum explanatory power with maximum probability. Weighting these factors allows us to determine the cost-benefit analysis of trading one for the other, and thus we're able to achieve an optimal explanation given whatever data we have available.

This is the approach that should be applied to every attempt to explain historical phenomena—Biblical or otherwise. Granted, it doesn't guarantee our explanations to be true (no approach has this effect), but it does assure us that our arguments will be as strong as possible with any given data set; and this is how we decide which explanation to accept: based on the strength of its accompanying argument. Thus an explanation with a high probability and impressive explanatory power will succeed in giving us the most convincing premises possible, and as many premises as possible to necessitate the conclusion: it will be the strongest.

And this is where the rational sit. Sit elsewhere and your claims are no longer relevant in the realms of logic, reason, or reality.

Jon

Doug Shaver

Toto, I think I'm disagreeing more about semantics than substance, but I for one would most certainly dispute that.

Doug Shaver

Fine with me. My perspective is that there was no historical Jesus, and I base that on probability, not on prejudice.

Thank you, Abe, for making it so easy.

ApostateAbe

I agree with you completely. When we find only silence and lack of evidence where we would otherwise very much expect to find something, then I think it would be reasonable to conclude that the American civil war was just a creative invention of the author. Supposing that we had no inquisitive access to the American continent, and it was sunken to the bottom of the sea by outerspace alien technology, and the only thing that survived was a copy of Gone with the Wind, then it really would not be unreasonable to conclude that there was an American civil war, based on the plausibility that an author would not invent such excessive needless and fictionally unexpected (but historically expected) details of the political/social context of the war. In such a case, silence would not be much of an argument, and we can readily point to other historical examples or hypotheticals where silence (or lack of multiple attestation) likewise would not be much of an argument for ahistoricity (i.e. John the Baptist). If silence is your justification for taking Perspective #2, then that's fine--just be sure to make sure it is legit. For a fuller explanation of my theory of arguments from silence, see this thread:

How to judge an argument from silence

ApostateAbe

I am glad to help. A lot of us argue as though relevant evidence simply doesn't exist, one way or the other, and I think your position is superior to that. I would love to know where you have made your arguments (I might have seen them before, but remind me anyway, maybe, thanks).