Jamie_L

Christian,

Once again, a post exploded before I could continue resonding, and I have little time these days to catch up on 4 pages of posts. Forgive if I'm repeating what others have said.

Again, I think you are misunderstanding the naturalist perspective. Naturalists do not rule out the supernatural before evaluating the evidence. Naturalism is not a position that people operate from, it is a conclusion that they come to (in most cases). Using science does not mean that one automatically dispenses with the concept of the supernatural. There are many religious scientists. There are scientists who believe in other supernatural phenomena.

Someone mentioned ESP. This is a good example. Scientists - many of whom may have a naturalist perspective - have done scientific studies on ESP. To my knowledge, all of the well-designed, scientifically valid studies have shown that there is no evidence that ESP is real. This is a case where science was used to try to investigate the natural-world-impacts of a suposedly supernatural phenomenon. When the evidence was observed, the conclusion was the phenomenon wasn't real.

Now, if naturalism worked the way you have proposed, no scientist would ever have done this study. They would have said "I'm a naturalist. Naturalism says there are no supernatural events. Therefore, ESP is false." But that's not what happened.

Again, most naturalists develop a naturalist conclusion because they have examined the evidence. They do not ignore evidnece because they have decided to be naturalists.

Jamie

Walross

Hello Christian,

you wrote:

But here you haven't used the bible to evaluate the truth of my claim, only what it means in the context of your christianity. My question should have been: by what criteria do you evaluate truth claims about the supernatural?

Biff the unclean

The gospels myths have Jesus on the cross for a mere 3 hours or so. The average lifespan of a crucified person was 3-4 days and some have been reported as surviving for 9 days on the cross.
Frankly I've seen Marines suffer much worse and get up fighting.
The Gospels say that Jesus didn't have a real crucifixion anyway.
There were no ropes tied around his chest to slowly suffocate him. His legs weren't even broken. There was no real reason that he should have died. Pilate ( an expert on the subject) was surprised to hear that Jesus was dead. And then the story says that they took him down from the cross. They didn't take people down from the cross, which was the whole reason behind the cross to begin with. They let the body's rot as a warning to whoever saw them to keep the law.
When they took Jesus down there was no EKG, no stethoscope, and not even a glass mirror to hold to his nose. And his wrists were in no condition to register a pulse. He looked sort of dead.
Then they put him in a tomb with a door that can be opened from the inside and the women checked on him after three days. That was the custom. The reason it was the custom was to prevent premature burial (much like the Irish wake that lasts 3 days). Three days is the length of time you can survive without water. Premature burial was rare but it happened often enough to make this expensive roll away door a worth while investment.

Then in 3 days they find the door rolled away and Jesus gone. So what, that's exactly why they went to check to begin with. They did that for everyone, it happened that the person was still alive every now and then.

I don't see any "supernatural" in this story at all. (except the darkness and the zombies)

mike_decock

Those roll-away style doors were not used until late first century, early second century. They were using square doors that could easily be pushed over from the inside.

Which weren't reported by anyone outside of the Bible, of course.

-Mike...

Volker.Doormann

The problem is, that Theism as well as Christianity has no existence.

That, what is named Theism or Christianity is a creation of the mind, as every phantom is a creation of the mind. If phantoms would be exist, so Donald Duck would also exist.

Physical existence can be measured; spiritual existence not. Spiritual existence only can be recognized as timeless and alocal, while physical existence is coupled with time and location. Color has no location and no time. Color has a spiritual existence, color has no physical dimension. White has no physical dimension, magenta has no physical dimension. It is only to perceive by the spiritual consciousness of a creature.

If there was a Jesus in a time on locations, he was physical. Thomas has reported from Jesus: "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you." This is a teaching of the alocal attribute of the spiritual as a form of immaterial existence. In the last years some forms of alocality were found by physicists, as an existing part of nature.

If Jesus was not, then he has had no physical existence and has no spiritual existence, he then were only a phantom. But this doesn't affect the existence of spiritual dimensions with its attributes of alocal and eternal properties (mentioned by an ancient writer). Spirituality doesn't need physical persons to recognize the world of spiritual order and it's laws. Persons are of no spiritual value; it is ever the recognition of the spiritual order from the single individual, which have a meaning.

Not Christianity has any existence or meaning, it is the immaterial order, which have a meaning. To study these spiritual order - linked to the Greek 'Theos' or to the China same term from philosopher Lao=Tsu 'Tao' - as a science called Theology = 'The science of god' as part of nature seems to me not only meaningful, but also necessary, because a lot of chaos, but no knowledge is present in this world, as it is present in the physical science of nature.

Spiritual nature is not to be understand by assertions taken or mistaken from ancient books; spiritual nature must be respected as it is in every each present individual through the consciousness of the individual. This consciousness can be aware about the existence of the laws of spirituality if the consciousness is able to discriminate the unreal from the real or phantoms from reality.

There is no Christianity, neither as a physical existence nor as a spiritual existence. It is a phantom, like a nation or a country. There are no scientific properties of a nation. No one ever has proved a nation physically using scientific physically dimensions. It is a phantom, an idea created by the mind, without any spiritual existence. Same is be worth to all Phantoms and Ideas as Donald Duck, Allah, Christianity, Humanism, Scepticism, Atheism, Theism, Agosticism, or any other 'ism'. Nature doesn't need support from ideas.

Living in a world of atoms and energies, physical forces creates impressions of a world of pictures to the mind and physical causality. Each claimed reality beyond physical forces only can be taken as phantom, if there is no absolute reference to proof. It seems, that no one really can show which elements beyond physical forces have any existence of reality. The only reality is the own spiritual self. It is the only reality in this world to discriminate existence from nonexistence. But only a few are interested in reality. Created Ideas, Illusions and Assertions of busy brains as phantoms seems to of more importance as reality and that , what is.

Volker

MortalWombat

Not to derail the thread, but the use of the phrase "who will roll away the stone for us?" in Mark is interesting in its own right with regard to the discussion on the dating of that gospel. Perhaps someone might care to discuss that in another thread.

Autonemesis

"On demand" is not the right choice of words, because some phenomena are not able to be induced at a time or place of human choosing.

If I look in my telescope, and see a new comet, I will telegraph Brian Marsden at the Minor Planet Center to report my discovery. Brian will issue an alert to other astronomers, some of whom will point their telescopes to the location where I found the comet (modulo its reported orbital motion). If no one but me and my telescope can see the comet, it's likely nearly to the point of certainty that my "comet" isn't real. Who knows what it is, a blemish on my lens, or someone hung a paper cut-out inside my telescope tube. But if no one else can see it, the best explanation is that it isn't there. It might be that gremlins are projecting an image of a comet into my telescope when I look in it, but no one will take such a claim seriously, even though it's logically possible. Furthermore, if gremlins actually *were* the cause, we are no wiser about the source of the projected comet image, because we know nothing about gremlins and the projection itself - our only evidence - offers no insights about them, other than that they project comet images into telescopes.

Because if I only saw it once, there's no way to tell if I saw what I saw because of (a) fatigue, delusion, or honest mistake (b) faulty equipment (c) supernatural causes.

And what does an attribution to supernatural causes tell us about the phenomena anyway? How do we know more about it after recognizing a supernatural cause, than before we recognized such a cause? Science is concerned with advancing knowledge. How does a supernatural attribution contribute to this quest?

Christian

Thor,

But this is a false dichotomy. Either the supernatural is ruled out, or it has to be the explaination for everything not yet explained.

I reject both of those extremes. There are many other options.

Respectfully,

Christian

Christian

Mike,

OK, I understand your definition.

Sweeping unprovable assertions. Why have you concluded such things? Why have you chosen to embrace that particular bias?

How about the example from C.S. Lewis? Do you think that the mice are the most rational explanation?

Respectfully,

Christian

Christian

Mike,

Before trivializing Jesus' torture and death, please consider what He went through:

First, in the garden the night before He experienced a great deal of psychological stress. So much psychological stress that it produced hematidrosis … where severe anxiety causes the release of chemicals that break down the capillaries in the sweat glands. A small amount of blood is mixed with the sweat, but it also sets the skin up to be extremely fragile and very sensitive.

After staying up all night he was flogged by Roman soldiers. Floggings were usually 39 lashes, but often more at the whim of the soldier applying the blows. The whip was braided leather thongs with metal balls woven into them. The balls would cause deep bruises which would break open on later blows. The whip also had pieces of sharp bone woven in, which would cut the flesh severely. Often in Roman floggings the back would become so shredded that parts of the spine would become exposed. The beating would have shredded the flesh all the way from the shoulders down to the backs of the legs. History tells us that many people died from this type of beating before they could be crucified. At the very least the victim would experience tremendous pain and go into shock from loss of blood (hypovolemic shock). In this state of shock the heart races to pump blood that isn’t there, the blood pressure drops causes fainting or collapse, the kidneys shut down, and the person becomes very thirsty.

He carried the horizontal beam of the cross as far as He could before collapsing. Once they got to the execution site He was laid down with His hands outstretched on the horizontal beam. The horizontal beam was not yet attached to the vertical beam, which remained permanently in the ground. Pointed spikes that were 5-7 inches long were driven through His wrists onto the cross. The spikes went through the place where the median nerve runs, the largest nerve going into the hand. That nerve would have been crushed by the spike as it was pounded in. This would have been excruciatingly painful. It also would have rendered the hands useless. He was hoisted as the crossbar was attached to the vertical stake. Then the same type of spikes were driven through His feet into the vertical beam. The nerves in His feet would have been crushed and He would have experienced a similar type of pain. Then His arms would have immediately become stretched, probably about 6 inches, and both shoulders would have become dislocated.

Once hanging in the vertical position, crucifixion was an excruciatingly slow death by suffocation. The stresses on the muscles and the diaphragm put His chest in the inhaled position. In order to exhale He would have to push up on His feet so that the tension on the muscles would be eased for a moment. By doing so the spikes would tear through His feet, eventually locking up against the tarsal bones. After exhaling He could relax down and take another breath in. Then back up to exhale again. Every time He pushed Himself up He would scrape His bloodied back up and down the course wood of the cross. Eventually complete exhaustion would take over and He would not be able to push up and breath any more. As His breathing slowed down the carbon dioxide in His blood dissolved as carbonic acid, causing the acidity of the blood to increase. This led to an irregular heart beat, and then He died of cardiac arrest.

And all of this, every second of it, purely voluntary. He could have cried “uncle” at any point and ended it, but He willed Himself to endure it.

Is that exactly the same experience as someone who hung on a cross for 9 days? No. But that's an odd reason to dismiss Jesus' torture and pain as trivial. He chose to experience first hand that category of things commonly known as "the worst this world has to offer."

Respectfully,

Christian