arnoldo

Dogmatic materialism would be a more apt response

bacht

Please. The last several centuries of scientific investigation were supposed to put superstition in its place, but modern people still want to fantasize about breaking nature's 'rules'.

There's nothing dogmatic about predicting the sun will rise tomorrow or that your body will decay in the grave. There are literally millions of examples of these things happening all the time. Dogma is for people who insist on going against the flow of empirical evidence.

arnoldo

There are empirical studies on the results of prayer. For example;

and

Mind-Body Medicine: State of the Science, Implications for Practice John A. Astin, PhD, Shauna L. Shapiro, PhD, David M. Eisenberg, MD and Kelly L. Forys, MA

Since it is not self evident that the immaterial cannot exist it is sheer dogmatism to deny a transempirical reality.

Toto

The latest, most careful study, showed no result from distance prayer. The issue is dead, inspite of all of the money the Templeton Foundation put into it.

If you want to discuss this, try the psuedoscience forum.

bacht

It's self-evident to me that this universe is all that my primate senses and brain can take in. There may be other dimensions or whatever that are invisible to us, but presuming such things exist is unjustified.

Maybe science will continue expanding the range of our natural senses to the point of detecting other levels of existence, but we're not there yet, and may never be.

If people feel that this life is not satisfying enough without supernaturalism then that's a psychological or emotional issue, not a metaphysical one imo.

aa5874

But, you statement is not logical.

Even if it was actually true that the universe is a miracle that does not in any way prove or establish that Jesus must have or was likely to perform miracles.

And further a miraculous universe doe not even establish that Jesus did exist either as a miracle, a man, or a Phantom.

French Prometheus

We have thousands of coins dating back to Alexander's reign with his name on it (I personally own a few). We have an eyewitness account of his and his father's conquests in Greece (see Demosthenes' Philippics). And we also have a contemporary Babylonian record of his death.

And of course we have the obvious fact that there was a king of Macedon that succeeded Philip II and conquered the Persian Empire between 334 and 323 BCE. Following that king's death, what had been for 200 years the most powerful empire of the ancient world was replaced by hellenistic kingdoms. Therefore the myths surrounding his birth (and life) are irrelevant.

At best, Jesus was a local preacher who had no impact outside the Levant during his lifetime. And the only reason he's remembered nowadays is because of the myths surrounding him and in which a large number of people still believe. IOW, if you erase all supernatural claims about Alexander, you are left with one of the major leaders in history. And if you do away with Alexander himself, you have a hard time explaining what happened in the late 330's-early 320's BCE. If you do the same with Jesus, you have no obvious difficulty explaining the events of the early first century CE.

For the record, I tend to think that the HJ hypothesis is slightly more likely than the MJ. But the comparison between the historicity of jesus and that of Alexander is preposterous. From a secular perspective (i.e. one acceptable by anyone without having to resort to a particular faith), the former is open to debate while questioning the latter is completely ridiculous.

arnoldo

You have a point there, compared to Alexander the Great, Jesus only started a revolutionary movement which has spread throughout the entire world and lasted over two thousand years. Not bad for a fictional character . . .

spamandham

Not directly, but a main subheading is:

Authorship and date are important; but equally important, if not more so, is whether what is in the Gospels is true.

...and we all know they are full of the supernatural and miracles. I do agree with Holding on this, in the sense that we can determine the truth independent of knowing who the authors are. We know these claims are not true because they are absurd, and it doesn't matter whether the authors are eyewitnesses or not.

Of course, Holding wants to show the Gospels are eyewitness accounts. In his eyes, this somehow gives credence to the absurdities. To him and his fellow believers, that works. But to the skeptics he addresses, it does not. It's just fodder for dismissal of the entire thing as delusional nonsense. Sadly, this tends to prohibit an honest quest for Christian origins.

spamandham

He's almost as popular as Santa.