Johnny Skeptic

Not at all. Even though I am an agnostic, I have spent a good deal of time at the Evolution/Creation Forum, and I am now a lot closer to believing in naturalism that I was before. Even many Christian experts are theist evolutionists, so the consensus says that evolution is true, but not necessarily abiogenesis. Even many Christian experts know that a global flood did not occur, and that the earth is young, even though the Bible indicates that a global flood occured, and that the earth is young. Eternally existing energy and matter is certainly not any more unusual than an eternally existing God.

On the contrary, agnostics never claim to have facts regarding the origin of the universe, but many Christians act like it is a virtual fact that the God of the Bible created the universe.

In my post #428, I said "That is only one of literally thousands of similar events that would most likely have taken place if Jesus performed many miracles in many places for three years, or even for a month for that matter." Please note the words "most likely," which obviously do not mean "factual." Sure, I believe that it is a virtual fact (almost certain) that the God of the Bible does not exist, but I assume that you believe that it is a virtual fact that he does exist.

I also mentioned philosophy. The Bible fails the test of philosophy hands down. My favorite arguments against the Bible are philosophical arguments, and over the past three years and over 15,000 posts, I have made more philosophical arguments than any other kinds of arguments, the majority of them at the Abrahamic Religion forum. In my opinion, philosophical arguments are the most useful arguments of all against the Bible.

It is interesting to note that it is probable that under many other circumstances, you would not be a Christian today.

Johnny Skeptic

Which skeptic experts who you know of believe that Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathaea's tomb, and why do they believe that? I am not aware of any credible historical evidence at all that Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathaea's tomb. What historical evidence do you have that Joseph even existed?

The best evidence that Jesus was buried in Joseph's tomb would obviously be eyewitness evidence. We do not have that. The next best evidence would be a writer who consulted with an eyewitness. There is not any credible evidence that we have that. In fact, there is not any credible evidence that we even have third or fourth hand evidence. How, then, can any historian be reasonably certain that Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathaea's tomb?

aa5874

It appears to me that you really don't rely on experts but obey the words of Jesus.

What pearls do you have of Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary?

It seems like you are looking for sheep. Perhaps you only have pearls for sheep.

Petergdi

Thanks very much Spin. It will take me some time to digest, but that was certainly useful criticism.

Peter.

ercatli

Johnny, I think I will terminate my discussion with you after this post. You seem unable or unwilling to answer my questions, you keep saying the same things over and over again without offering any evidence to speak of, and you don't seem to understand NT scholarship very well.

I have said many times that the issue of miracles is a difficult one for scholars, because a person's metaphysical views will probably determine whether they believe in miracles or not more than the historical evidence. But here are a few well-respected scholars on miracles:

G Stanton: “Few doubt that Jesus possessed unusual gifts as a healer, though of course varied explanations are offered.”

E P Sanders: “I think we can be fairly certain that initially Jesus’ fame came as a result of healing, especially exorcism.”

Graham Twelftree (Prof of NT, Regent Uni, Virginia), "Jesus the Miracle Worker": "the vast majority of students of the historical Jesus affirm that Jesus performed mighty works"

Even the Jesus Seminar, highly sceptical in its methods, listed his fame as an exorcist and healer among the facts about Jesus that they considered to be either certain or almost certain (p566, "The Acts of Jesus")

Geza Vermes, in "The changing face of Jesus" (p222), discusses Jesus as a historical figure, as healer and exorcist.

Some of those (Jesus Seminar definitely, Vermes & Sanders to some degree) are sceptical scholars, so your statement ("Not one single skeptic expert believes that Jesus performed miracles.") is factually in error.

You seem to be under a misunderstanding. Pagels and Ehrman are very competent scholars, but they are just two among thousands. There would be scores of scholars of similar or greater eminence. And the majority of these do not agree with the scepticism of Pagels and Ehrman. That is why I try to quote those from near the middle ground or balanced around the middle. If you only base your views on Pagels and Ehrman, you have chosen to believe those who already agree with you, a circular argument. You are free to do that, but I find it pointless.

Naturalism is only peripherally connected to evolution. The problems I was talking about were mainly related to philosophical and scientific matters like mind, consciousness, ethics, rationality, free will, etc.

So, like I said at the start, I think I will terminate our discussion there, it is not really a discussion at all, but you asking a bunch of question, my giving answers and asking you some questions, and then my response going nowhere. You have been a pleasant person to discuss with, for which I thank you.

Best wishes, and farewell.

Tharn

But I must insist. You accept that drinking bleach is probably a bad idea based on that standard of evidence. You accept that rocks fall when you drop them on that standard of evidence. You look both ways to cross the street based on that standard of evidence. You keep ice cream in the freezer and do your baking in the oven based on that standard of evidence. In fact, if you think about it, you will find yourself unable to say (with a straight face), of any case in which the evidence is so strong, that you remain unconvinced. Go ahead.

In fact, if you think about it, you will find yourself unable to say (with a straight face), of any case in which the evidence is so strong as the evidence for the effects of decomposition on the brain, that you remain unconvinced. It is a very straightforward empirical claim, unlike the disanalogously normative claims you list above.

Remember, what is also at issue is consilience of inductions. Our inductions about geology must be consilient with our theories of atomic structure which tell us about rates of decay – which in turn tell us about the age of various geological features. And our inductions about history must be consilient with our inductions about biology. If a geologist contradicts basic physics, or a historian contradicts basic biology, they are wrong. A handful of non-independent anonymous undated documents do not and cannot provide enough epistemic weight to overturn the entirety of human experience of corpses.

I notice you are already preparing an “out” for yourself with loose talk about “valid emotions” and “moving forward using other aspects of human thinking”. Once again, you never ever ever hear relativist mumbo-jumbo like this when asked whether ovens are hot, and freezers cold.

Nope, the second. When I talk epistemology, I use the relevant technical terms.

No, no, a thousand times no! I am making no metaphysical claims of any kind. You are making a purely empirical claim, and I am disputing it on purely empirical grounds.

We know what it looks like to have a mammal be alive. We know what it looks like to see that mammal suffer irreversible brain damage. And we know (as surely as we know anything on this earth) that we never see the latter followed by the former. Therefore, we know that Jesus (if he existed at all), is dead.

No metaphysics up my right sleeve, no metaphysics up my left sleeve. Just a straightforward induction from observation.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how induction works. Every event is in some sense a “one-off event”. Every rock I drop only once is a “one off event”. But just as this event is covered under the general description of how rocks behave when dropped, the alleged resurrection is covered as part of the general description of how corpses behave when dead for three days. And just as “my say-so” is not sufficient evidence to convince you that the rock did a triple flip, sang a song, and flew off into the sky when I dropped it, even sincere eyewitness testimony (which the gospels are not btw) is not sufficient to evidence to conclude an exception.

And note you’re being a bit disingenuous again with “No amount of induction (in the first sense) will be able to demonstrate it or disprove it”. You have been doing nothing but trying to demonstrate it this entire thread. And if you were attempting to be honest and consistent and you actually did believe that it could not be demonstrated, then you would not believe it.

You’re playing word-games with the concept of “proof”. Proof in history is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, not proof beyond an unreasonable doubt. Either you think it is a reasonable conclusion given the evidence, or you doubt it. (If you believe anything like mainline Western doctrine, you also believe that the conclusion is so reasonable that people who fail to draw it deserve to be tortured, infinitely and forever.)

In fact induction can and does tell us that no resurrection has occurred in this case, to a moral certainty, the same degree of certainty you accept for any other empirical claim. Certainty beyond a reasonable doubt, not certainty beyond an unreasonable doubt.

Suppose there is a God. What can we infer about his attitude toward corpses? Based on our observation, his attitude is that all of them should rot. Is it barely logically possible that he might (somehow) bring one back? Yes, but this is neither an interesting nor an honest question. Even if you believe there is a Yahweh and that he performs "miracles", that doesn't mean you accept that he performed every miracle any upright ape ever claimed he did! You are still left with weighing the strength of competing inductions, and since it is a) known to a moral certainty that upright apes (especially religious ones) lie, hallucinate, misremember, speak allegorically all the time and b) massively consilient with everything that we know about the universe + hypothetical-yahweh that dead bodies don't come back to life, the honest conclusion is that the reports are in error.

To be fair, the question I answered was the honest, reasonable version of the question, not the dishonest, unreasonable version.

And the equivocation rolls in. You are challenging whether it's Logically Impossible With Absolute Certainty Dipped In Gold And Deep Fat Fried for dead men to rise. But no one is making that assertion, and it is inconsistent of you to demand more certainty than you demand for ordinary empirical claims. To a practical certainty, dead men don't rise. Some other examples of things established to a practical certainty: Germany lost WWII, I live in North America, the Chinese are human etc. There are logically possible observations which would falsify any of these beliefs, but the inductions are so well established that one or two pieces of nonfitting data can be accommodated into your description at less computational cost than revising your whole picture.

Nope, not quite. (Did you follow my advice about doing a few mental "test runs" against a control group of noncontroversial beliefs to see if your argument proves too much? In fact the form of argument I give is the same form of argument given for any and all arguments about the way the world is, so if your parallel was legitimate, no one knows anything about anything and we are awash in fallacious ignorance when we try to predict where the sun will rise in the morning.)

Conclusions about who one's grandchildren are are conclusions about what one happens to be pointing one's finger at at the time. Nomological claims are general descriptions which output future observations. There is nothing in the inductive enumeration of pointing your finger at everyone else and saying "not my grandson" that theoretically prevents you from pointing your finger at your daughter's son and identifying him. How confident are you that your grandson (if you have one) will be less than 957 feet tall at birth? On what grounds are you so confident? Yep, induction.


I still don't know what "nature" means in any metaphysical sense. "Nomological" is a perfectly servicable term if you just talk about "actual laws" and drop the "of nature" part. And "actual laws" just means "the most general descriptions".

Please slow down and explain to me (you might be the first!) what a "natural process is" if it's at all crucial to your argument. All I am talking about is a description of a set of observations. If calling something a "not-natural process" makes it no longer be a gross parsimony violation, then explain to me what that means. If it is still a gross parsimony violation, then my point still stands.

"The" resurrection! "The"! See how you special plead?

How do you conclude that resurrections are not everyday events if not by induction from observations?

"They don't ever in our experience" + "Anonymous religious fundamentalists make shit up all the time in our experience" takes us all the way to "therefore the best description of the world concludes that in this particular case some anonymous religious fundamentalists made shit up".

And again, you are mistaken about the subject under discussion. It bodes ill at this late hour that you have yet to realize that it is: given that humans frequently in our experience say things which just ain't so, and given that in our experience X never happens, and given that 'X never happens' is just massively massively consilient with everything we know about biology, it is more reasonable to conclude that the people who claimed that X happened are mistaken.

Remember the test-run trick? Go ahead and try it. You'll be amazed at how well this pattern captures exactly how you discount all the claims of the fantastic you actually discount. It even, with a little obvious tweeking, captures how you weigh probabilities between non-fantastic claims. When the only evidence you have to go on is the testimony of serial perjurer vs. the testimony of a five-time Nobel peace prize winner, you induct that it is more likely that the person who lies all the time is more likely to be lying in a given instance.

Do you claim they can be proved in the honest, reasonable sense? In fact, if you believe in an interventionist Yahweh and are not merely a Deist, you must believe they can be proved to a reasonable extent (and note "reasonable extent" is not "Logically Impossible With Absolute Certainty Dipped In Gold And Deep Fat Fried that I Could Be Wrong"). That's part of what it means to believe your beliefs are reasonable.

Unless you are a fideist or a Kierkegaardian.

In fact, there are many such "claims". But accepting them at face value is unparsimonious.

I have demonstrated it beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond an unreasonable doubt. Try, just as an exercise, to pick just one of the following standards and live consistently by it for a day:

1. Only believe something if it is Logically Impossible With Absolute Certainty Dipped In Gold And Deep Fat Fried That I Am Wrong
2. Believe the most parsimonious consilient description.

Warning: if you pick the second, you will conclude that Jesus (if he existed) did not rise from the grave. Which is good, because, your misunderstandings to the contrary, that is the only argument I am pushing. Here it is, one more time:

You cannot formulate an epistemic standard coupled with our shared observations which makes the resurrection remotely plausible without blatant special pleading. Every time you try to go up in a balloon with "absolute cast iron metaphysical certainty", and every time you dismiss every other resurrection claim, you prove my point for me.

aa5874

Please state what historical evidence can be produced for the any of the so-called miracles in the Gospels?

1. Mark 1.40-42--Jesus talks to a leper and he is healed immediately.

2. Mark 2.12 --- Jesus talks to one sick of palsy and he is healed instantly.

3. Mark 3.5-----Jesus talks to a man with a withered hand and it is healed.

4. Mark 4.39---Jesus talks to a storm and the storm ceased.

5. Mark 5.-----Jesus, by request of devils, cause 2000 pigs to drown.

6. Mark 5.36-43--Jesus talks to a dead girl and the girl comes back to life.

7.Mark 6.35-42--Jesus talks and 5 loaves and two fish multiply to feed 5000.

8. Mark 7.31-35--Jesus used spit on a man's tongue and his speech is corrected.

9. Mark 8. ---Jesus talks and bread and fish multiply to feed 4000.

10. Mark 8.23-26--Jesus uses spit to make a blind man see.

11. Mark 9.2----Jesus transfigures with the once dead Moses and Elijah.

12. Mark 9.17-27--Jesus talks to the dumb and deaf and the boy is healed.

13. Mark 10.46-52--Jesus talks to a blind man and he begin to see.

14. Mark 11.---Jesus [u]CURSES a fig tree and the tree dies.

15. Mark 16.6--Jesus is raised from the dead.[/b]

The so-called miracles of Jesus are implausible and are clearly non-historical. Only the gullible will believe a speech by a man can produce these outrageous results.

Johnny Skeptic

That is false. In the opening post, you said "So, why should I change my belief?" Consider the following from my post #430.

There you have it. That is proof that I answered your question, and I went on to elaborate in great detail in that post.

Your argument is not valid. First of all, if Jesus did not perform any miracles, he was just an ordinary man. If Jesus did not perform any miracles, what else would there be to discuss that would be important?

Second of all, since I am an agnostic, I do not discount a reasonable possibility that a God exists, partly meaning that I do not discount a reasonable possibility that miracles can occur. However, that leaves people who claim that "particular" miracles have occured with the responsibility of reasonably proving that the miracles occured. Christians have not done that, nor have the followers of any other religion.

Third of all, the majority of the people in the world are non-Christian theists and deists, and they believe that a God exists, and can perform miracles. In order to be valid, your arguments need to also apply to those people's objections to Bible miracles.

On the contrary, no skeptic scholar believes that Jesus performed any miracles, let alone many miracles. Who is G Stanton? What is his worldview? Is he possibly a conservative Christian?

Better stated, "We can be reasonably certain that initially, unsupported allegations that Jesus performed miracles contributed to his fame, but probably not much in the first century. In "The Rise of Christianity," Rodney Stark estimates that in 100 A.D. there were 7,530 Christians in the entire world. If Stark's estimate is anywhere near accurate, and Jesus did not perform any miracles, that probably partly explains why Christianity did not grow very much in the first century since there were lots of people around who would have known that Jesus did not perform any miracles."

For reader information, E P Sanders is a Christian Protestant.

As I said previously, "no skeptic scholar believes that Jesus performed any miracles, let alone many miracles."

For reader information, Graham Twelftree is a professor at Pat Robertson's Regent University, and is probably a fundamentalist Christian.

But did the Jesus Seminar say when Jesus had fame? I suspect that Jesus had very little fame in the first century, which is the century when his fame should have been the greatest if he actually performed miracles. I refer back to Rodney Stark's estimate of 7,530 Christians in the entire world in 100 A.D.

What non-biblical evidence suggests to you that Jesus became famous in the first century? None? If so, I thought that that was the case.

Please quote the entire paragraph from "The Acts of Jesus."

I doubt that the Jesus Seminar would claim that Jesus became famous during his lifetime based soley or primarily on the Gospels. I also doubt that the Jesus Seminar would use Josephus or Tactitus in order to try to make a case that Jesus became famous because he performed miracles.

The more famous that Jesus became, the more likely it would have been that his miracles would have attracted the attention of Pontius Pilate, which gets back to some of the arguments that I used in my post #430. In that post, I provided a lot of support for my arguments, but you did not reply to any of them.

Please quote the entire paragraph.

Consider the following:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...me-572315.html

Of particular note is "He's not much impressed by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John either - or at least by the standard Christian interpretation of who they were. 'We have no solid evidence,' he writes, 'to prove that any.......was a close associate of Jesus.'"

Obviously, you will not get any support from Vermes regarding the claim that Jesus performed miracles. Thus, Vermes is a much more valuable source for me than he is for you, especially since he has such a prestigious reputation as a Bible scholar.

You said that Vermes "discusses Jesus as a historical figure, as healer and exorcist." I never said that Jesus was not a historical figure. Considering what I just quoted about Vermes, there is no way that he considers Jesus to have been a healer and an exorcist. At best he considers that Jesus was falsely alleged to have been a healer and an exorcist.

On the contrary, you have not provided any evidence at all that one single skeptic scholar in the world believes that Jesus performed miracles, let alone a consensus of skeptic scholars. The Jesus Seminar certainly does not believe that Jesus performed miracles, and I just showed that Vermes doesn't either. Since Sanders is a Christian Protestant, how is he a skeptical scholar?

If you go back to the first paragraph in this post, you will see that I said "It is probable that Jesus did not perform any miracles." That was one of my answers to your question "So, why should I change my belief?" The evidence shows that in my post #430, I answered your question in great detail, and that you refused to reply to my comments on miracles. For reader convenience, here are those arguments again:

Common sense, logic, and reason indicate that if Jesus performed many miracles in many places for three years that it is very probable that Pontius Pilate would have been aware of the claims, and would have conducted investigations. If Jesus became famous during his lifetime, you ought to be able to provide credible non-bibilical, first century evidence that that was the case, but you have not done that.

Johnny Skeptic

The only reason that I debate Christianity is because conservative Christians typically try to legislate their religious views. That is wrong and immoral. If Muslims were to one day become the largest group in the U.S., and legislated the Koran, you can bet that conservative Christians would object.

Christians in Western Europe are generally way ahead of the U.S. regarding the separation of chuch and state, and in realizing that the Bible is probably not inerrant.

I do not know whether or not you are going to make any more replies to my posts, but if you are, please state whether or not you believe that a global flood occured, the earth is young, and that theistic evolution is true.

Pardon me for digressing for a moment.

Johnny Skeptic

One case? My word, are you not aware that past and contemporary history contain numerous claims of dead people coming back to life. I personally know a Christian woman who claims that she knows of contemporary dead people who have come back to life.

Obviously, you do not have any scientific evidence that any contemporary person died and came back to life. Some if not most such cases involve a person who supposedly died and came back to life within a few minutes. That will not do. I am not aware of any claims that resemble the story of Lazarus. Do you?