Wayne Delia

No, He hasn't. Let's start with Prophecy Number One of the list of 300 so-called prophecies Jesus supposedly fulfilled according to Josh McDowell. Isaiah 7:14 is considered the cornerstone prophecy of Christianity - that a son would be born to a young woman, or a virgin, or whatever, and that the son will be called Immanuel. Sound familiar? Let's see if this is a fulfilled prophecy. It continues on (in verses 15 and 16) to say that the boy would eat curds and honey before he learned to choose good and reject evil. But before that eating and learning occurred, the lands ruled by Kings Rezin and Pekah (of Syria and Israel) would be desolated. This was a prophecy given to King Ahaz, who was besieged by Rezin and Pekah at the time. As it turns out, Jesus didn't come along until about 800 years later, so the prophecy is equivalent to "Don't worry, those other kings will have their lands desolated sometime between now and 800 years from now," which is pretty much useless as a prophecy. Syria and Israel never actually had their lands desolated; in fact, the Old Testament reports elsewhere that Rezin and Pekah actually defeated and killed Ahaz. There's nothing in the Gospels which indicated Jesus ever needed to choose good and refuse evil, and many Christians would be uncomfortable with Jesus portrayed as someone who needed to learn that lesson. There is nothing in the Gospels which claims that Jesus ate curds and honey at any time, so the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14-16 is unfulfilled. And that's only the first one, the cornerstone prophecy of Christianity! Since it only takes one white crow to disprove the claim "All crows are black," you are refuted. My advice is don't depend on Josh McDowell so much; he's guilty of very sloppy scholarship.

Problem is, many different people say pretty much the same thing about their wack-a-doodle cult leaders, such as David Koresh and Jim Jones.

Now you're just making shit up. Where's your reference for this? You'll find only a handful of stories established as nothing more than church tradition, but extremely few (if any) backed up with corroborated evidence.

How many other so-called deities have you given a test drive?

My first criteria of whether to submit to any claim of royal authority: Make sure the King actually exists before kissing His ass.

WMD

XOVER

JesusFollower, I do appreciate your response to my post appearing above:

PURPOSE OF POST: And certainly I do have a plan, as you suggest -- which was my original reason in asking you for guidance about the meaning of your statement:

Simply stated, my plan is to discuss your analogy and examine what logical inferences can be drawn from your analogy, since it is my firm conviction that many insights can be gleaned if one simply sits down and carefully considers what logic flows from the self-evident world around us. I first, however, needed some reinforcement that my original thoughts were those that you were talking about, or at least close to those you were talking about.

Your response has confirmed that the thoughts expressed in my post above were what you had in mind. I appreciate your response.

PALEY & THE WATCH ANALOGY: As you may or may not know, the "watch" analogy I set forth above is not mine. The watch analogy was first articulated by William Paley in 1802 in his immensely popular book, Natural Theology. Paley's belief was that the nature of God could be understood by reference to God's creation, the natural world. Living creatures, Paley argued, were even more complicated than watches, "in a degree which exceeds all computation." Only an "Intelligent Designer" -- God -- Paley concluded, could have created living creatures, just as only an intelligent watchmaker can make a watch. To this very day, Paley's argument for "natural theology" form the basis of the "modern" "intelligent design" movement popularized by the likes of Michael Behe, William Dembski, and others.

WILLIAM PALEY'S WORLD: Consider briefly the state of the world from 1688 to 1802. Modern science as the world knows it today is in its infancy, although developing swiftly. The mathematical "rules" for how "God" causes the planets to orbit the sun has been discovered by a devout and deeply religious man, Isaac Newton, in his Principia Mathematica. The design of a working steam engine has been produced by Thomas Savery in 1698, only to be revolutionized by an improved design by James Watt in 1769, spuring forth the industrial revolution in Britain that continues throughout the world to this very day.

MAN'S MIND "SEEING" INTO GOD'S MIND: The world of William Paley is confident and optimistic, producing a natural philosophy and religion as more and more of God's "secrets" are unveiled by men in dizzying succession. These discovered "secrets" benefit mankind, thus reinforcing man's confidence in the glory of God's created universe, confidence built on the belief that man's natural faculties -- his thinking mind -- opens man's mind to the manifest natural truth of God's created world, which is a reflection into the very mind of God, giving evidence that God is here, he exists, and we can know of his existence from SEEING the world around us.

We can see through nature to nature's author -- God -- and thus, literally obtain "knowledge of God." We know with confidence that we live in a wisely and lovely designed nature. And thus, from SEEING God's created world all around us, we can know that God's nature and human beings interact to the benefit of mankind through the providential designs of God.

EARLY SKEPTICISM: The earliest critics of this natural religion espoused by Paley, and others, was, oddly, evangelical Christians. The evangelicals believed that an emphasis on natural religion, which is nothing short of an attempt to "prove" the existence of God empirically and scientifically, undermined the province of faith, believed by the evangelicals to be the unassailable redoubt of the religious. Hence, evangelical Christains deemphased natural religion for decades, until quite recently in fact, as philosophical questioning in the minds of evangelicals has become seriously eroded.

THE WATCH ANALOGY RESTATED: Consider again that "natural religion" is nothing less than the attempt to "prove" by "empirical" processes -- logic -- that God can be inferred from man's experience in the world around him, from God's "creations."

If the existence of the watch demands there be a creator, given its intricacies and precise workings, then, by analogy, an infinitely more complex thing than a watch, such as a person, so designed, so adapted, function and form related, harmoniously, by analogy, the existence of a person must necessarily also demand there be a creator.

And given the profound complexity of a living, breathing, thinking person, then the creator of the person would self-evidently be infinitely intelligent, infinitely wise, omnipotent, infinitely good, loving, and powerful.

Understand that this analogy lies at the very heart of the argument for "natural religion."

FOUR CONSIDERATIONS PERTINENT TO THE ANALOGY: Consider the following inferences that flow from the argument from natural religion.

1. EXPERIENCE IS ONLY PROBABILISTIC: First, the analogy leaves the existence of God merely probable, at best. Give all the force you want to the analogy, it makes it a question of inference from experience, which can only be probabilistic. No knowledge from experience is logically necessary, but any knowledge gleaned from experience is always open to revision based upon further experience.

For example, consider a person from the tropics who has never seen ice, and doesn't believe there could be water one could walk across. The person revises his sense of the world on the basis of a new experience of encountering a frozen lake. Thus, anything the person believes is merely probable, and his old belief is replaced by a new belief based on his further experiences with water and ice.

Hence, God is only, at best, merely probable, if the argument from natural religion forms the basis of evidence for God, since it is always subject to revision based upon new experiences.

2. VERY WEAK ANALOGY: Second, natural religion proceeds on the basis of a very weak analogy. The dissimilarities between the things of universe and the works of men (such as a watch) are far more striking than any similarities between them.

Suppose you had experience with the circulation of blood of animals, and now you see a tree, and you see it has sap. You might say, "Oh, there must be a beating heart inside that tree circulating the sap." But in fact, there are far more dissimilarities than similarities between an animal and a tree.

Likewise, there are far more dissimilarities than similarities between the universe and any work that man has ever made. And yet natural religion asks us to infer a cause of the universe analogous to the cause of a work done by man? It would be foolish to draw inferences from the causes of the one from knowledge of causes of the other.

3. WE KNOW ONLY ONE UNIVERSE: Third, the analogy is further weakened by the fact that the universe is the only universe that we know. We know many works of man, such as watches, and can easily identify human designed machines. We know of many man-made products, and so we can draw inferences about human creations -- often weak, but nonetheless significant analogies.

But we don't know of many universes -- we know only the one universe in which we live. If we had experience of the cause of a large number of universes, we might be able to infer something about the cause of another universe, by weak analogy, but at least by plausible analogy.

Furthermore, not only do we know of only one universe, but we know this universe only very partially indeed. The universe is vast, and yet we're going to draw inferences from nature as to what the cause of the universe must be based upon man's extremely limited knowledge of the universe? How reliable can such an inference be?

Remember: The issue here is not the existence or non-existence of God. That issue is not being addressed at all. The issue here is whether we know that God exists by inference from natural phenomenon -- whether looking at the universe we must infer that its cause is "God"; wise, omnipotent, designing, loving, and benevolent.

4. THE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVE EVIDENCE: Fourth, in all matters of inference from natural phenomena, negative evidence counts even more than positive evidence in confirming or disconfirming a hypothesis.

It is just fine to look at the positive evidence for God, such as, for example, citing the magnificient "order of the universe." But if you are going to consider the positive inferences for God in the "order of the universe," you must also consider the inferences against God in the "disorder of the universe," as well. And negative inferences count even more than positive inferences.

If you walk through the front door of a house, and the first room you walk into is grand and well-appointed, but then you walk into all the other rooms in the house, and they are literally falling down all around you, you don't say, "What a wonderful house! -- It must have been built by a master architect!" You count the negative evidence even more than the positive evidence.

So many times I hear a religious person say something like, "That car wreck made that car look like a crushed can -- the roof was torn off, and the 18-wheeler wound up on top of the whole passenger side. But Sally walked away without injuries! If you don't know there is a God after an accident like that, then you're ignoring God talking to your heart!" But this very same person ignores the car wreck in the parking lot with no visible damage, but the driver had a heart attack from irrational fright and died. And for every "miracle" car wreck without injuries, there are so many more without the "miracle" attached.

And so it is with the universe. Suns are born. And suns are extinguished. Creatures are born, and creatures die, they decompose, and species go extinct. You cannot just say, "look at the miracle of birth!" without also looking at the tragedy of still-born babies and death during childbirth.

You can't just say, "Look at God's wonderful system! -- it rains and crops grow!" without also looking at drought, crop failure, and starvation. You can't just look at the positive inferences in the real world without looking at the negative inferences -- you must look at all the evidence -- and negative inferences count even more than the positives ones do.

And so, with its flaws, its defects, its imperfections, there is certainly sufficient evidence to infer that this universe arranged itself by chance without design. In fact, is there any reasonable inference otherwise when one takes into account the negative evidence as well as the positive evidence that manifests itself to us everywhere we look?

CONCEDING THE ANALOGY: But let's stop undermining the analogy for natural religion. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the analogy for natural religion is correct -- that like causes must be inferred by like effects. Put another way, let's simply assume that the works of man and the things of universe are sufficiently similar that we must infer a similar cause for both.

If we assume that like causes infer like effects, then we would not logically infer from the universe, by such an analogy, the God of natural religion. The evidence of the universe would conclude against all of the essential attributes of God.

INFINITY CANNOT EXIST: For example, natural religion wants to say that God is infinite. But the universe has only finite effects. By analogy, the cause of the universe must be finite.

You see a finite work by a human being, you don't say, "This book must have been written by an infinite author! -- It's very good!" No, not at all -- if the effect is finite, you infer a finite cause. Everything in the universe is finite, so why would we infer an infinity of the cause?

PERFECTION CANNOT EXIST: There are so many flaws in the world. So many things that go wrong, things that don't work. So, by analogy, this universe might be a botched and rejected work by some child deity that couldn't do it right, whose parents said, "Get rid of this one! -- It's a loser!" And we find ourselves inhabiting it, living in the midst of the failure, from which we are supposed to infer the perfection of its cause?

UNITY CANNOT EXIST: We cannot infer the unity of God, or the unity of the cause of the universe, from the analogy, because of the diversity of the effects that we see all around us in the world. From the size and diversity of the universe, if we make an analogy to human production, we would infer that many Gods created the universe.

For example, if we come across a building that has many different components involving a remarkable diversity of skills, arts, and crafts, we do not infer that one man built the building. No, we infer that many men built the building, that woodworkers built the cabinets, bricklayers laid the brick, roofers installed the roof, tile setters set the tile, and so forth.

We know when we glance at such a building that there's been a mutiplicity of workers. If we're going to follow the analogy through, there must be many Gods who created the universe, not a single God.

NO SPIRITUALITY CAN EXIST: In all of our experience, we have never seen a human work made by a mind without the interposition of a body. Of material agencies. Hands, fingers, feet.

By analogy, then, the cause of the universe must have a body. Thus, inferring the need for a body, God is not incorporeal, and spirituality does not exist.

INTELLIGENCE NOT INFERRED: If one examines the world, in fact the world is not like a human "machine" at all, requiring an intelligent designer. The world is about decay and growth. Birth and death.

That's not what a machine is all about. By following the analogy, we would assume the world resembles a vegetable much more than it resembles a watch or some other human machine. Perhaps the cause of the universe is just a big seed?

Or, much about the world appears to be plants or animals. It resembles a living entity more than a machine. Should we therefore conclude by analogy that the cause of the world is a supreme egg?

These analogies are certainly no less far-fetched than assuming the cause of the world is a single all-powerful God, if the basis of the inference flows from the works of man, such as a watch.

NO INFINITE WISDOM: If we follow the analogy, we can never infer infinite wisdom because people improve on the designs of nature -- of God -- all the time.

That's what we do in medicine, in our care of the young, and the elderly. It's what we do in agriculture, computers, automobiles. And watches. People make countless improvements and rearrangements of things to make things work differently, and for the most part, better.

If we can improve on nature's works, the last thing we would infer from man's improvements is infinite wisdom. Change, in fact, is constant. It's what life is all about. Things relate well for while, then they don't, then things die.

Is that like a machine made by a perfect and infinitely wise God? How infer a perfect God from that?

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: If our experience of nature proves the infinite goodness of its cause, then why does such a large bulk of human expression talk about man's misery, pain, and the uncertainty of life?

If a good and wise parent could save his child from injury, earthquate, or plague, that parent would do so because if the parent did not do so, we would call that parent neither good nor wise. What does this do to the analogy?

SURVIVAL OF SPECIES: In Paley's day, the adherents of natural religion cited the survival of species as empirical proof of God's loving and divine nature. God created the species and Adam gave names to all God's animals.

But today we know that species do not survive, they can and do go extinct. All the time. We are told that we are in the midst of a mass extinction at this very time. And negative evidence counts even more.

But aside from extinction, how do the species survive? They survive by a mutual war, by a kind of brute and blind force, that involves the misery and death of countless individual beings. Is this what one would expect of an infinitely perfert being?

To know that the world is not what one would predict of an infinitely perfect, loving, omnipotent being, walk into any children's ward in a hospital. And then talk about the need to infer an infinitely loving, infinitely powerful cause of the universe.

IMPERFECTION OF THE UNIVERSE: If I were asked how to improve upon God's universe, I would have many answers. First, eliminate pain. Second, proceed by particular law, not general law -- Let the good live longer, let the wicked die young. Third, expand the powers and faculties of human life -- Make us wiser, let us see better, take away the pain in our backs. Fourth, correct the inaccurate workmanship that gives us catastrophic floods from rain and catastrophic heat from drought. Among many other similar suggestions.

FOUR LOGICAL CAUSES OF THE UNIVERSE: If we follow the analogy of natural religion, there are really only four logical possibilities for the cause of the universe:

1. Infinite goodness;
2. Infinite evil;
3. Warring opposites of good and evil;
4. Neither good nor evil.

Number one is disproved by death and suffering and pain. Perfect evil is disproven by pleasure and well-being. Warring opposites is disproven by the uniformity of nature's general laws.

This leaves choice number four as the most logical explanation for the cause of the universe. That is, the cause of the universe is indifferent to good and evil, and is neither good nor evil.

NO IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL: If we assume the argument of natural religion, and conclude the universe to be designed by a wise, and good, and loving God, then the religious infer that we can know there is an afterlife because we see that oftentimes the wicked prosper and the good suffer. And since God is good and loving, there must be an afterlife where the good are rewarded and the evil punished.

But does this inference really make any sense? From the first evidence -- that the wicked can prosper and the good can suffer -- one should infer that God is not all good and loving. If you go to the grocery store, and there you see the top row of apples all black and rotten, you don't say, "Well, I see from this, this is a fantastic grocery store! -- The apples on the bottom row must be truly magnificent!"

THE FAILURE OF NATURAL RELIGION: One might choose to believe in God through faith, but it is not through nature that one's natural faculties can come to know God, and God's goodness. Hence, one cannot use nature as one's moral guide.

CONCLUSION: If any of you got this far, thanks for reading. I hope that JesusFollower has read all or part of this post so as to get a better grasp of the argument for and against natural religion, so that he might better understand the importance of faith, instead of empiricism, in his walk with his God. Finally, as many of you are aware, all of the foregoing arguments are those of David Hume via Alan Kors.

EthnAlln

That's the tired old CS Lewis false trichotomy. In the context of first-century Palestine, there was widespread expectation that a Messiah might come any time. I doubt strongly if Jesus was the only claimant to appear. In that context, it wasn't insane to think you might be the Messiah and be honestly mistaken. In other words, one could easily be none of those three.

I don't doubt that there was a real person named Jesus (oddly, not named Emmanuel, as the "prophecies" would lead one to expect), around whom the legends of the Gospels were clustered like chocolate around almonds. But there is no verifiable historical fact anywhere in there. Even the trial under Pontius Pilate, which is the most likely of all the events depicted, could have been invented. Almost certainly, the details of it were invented. As for other first-century historians mentioning him, there is none that I know of who mentions the person of Jesus himself, except indirectly, as someone talked about by others.

EthnAlln

Oh, why didn't you say you were a follower of Muhammed or Joseph Smith or Jim Jones or David Koresh? That would have changed the entire nature of the debate, and I wouldn't have posted half of what I wrote.

EthnAlln

Dunno who wrote that. The Russian translation is excellent, obviously the work of a native.