A challenge: debate the issue of religion with yours truly

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I think that your main problem is that you are presenting yourself as merely the messenger of the "expert consensus". You're not really defending the statement "Christianity is true", you're defending the statement "there are serious thinkers who believe that Christianity is true".

Arguments from authority are not always fallacious, but I think that in this case there are a lot of reason to be suspicious of authority. There is an obvious selection effect at work here. A lot of Biblical scholars believe in the Resurrection. Similarly, a lot of historians who focus on the Holocaust are Holocaust deniers.

Try to reference primary documents more, and reference Biblical scholars less. If this means that your posts would need to be fifty pages long, then maybe this thread wasn't such a good idea.

It is ironic because why waste taste in debating about something that a non theist views as a fair tale kinda pointless really.

I see your concern, but this was a preliminary post to feel out where my interlocutor was at. He seems to have a certain idea of Christianity and the arguments that Christians have presented, an idea that doesn't represent the scholastic tradition of defending Christianity. If he is not familiar with that realm, then he won't be familiar with the technical terms and models.

As for my references to scholarship in previous posts, I was mainly debunking incorrect notions about what the scholarly consensus is. The arguments I made there were my own, even though I align with most scholars on the issue of the resurrection. Moreover, I would say that I presented quite a few arguments that have more to do with historical methodology than agreeing with other scholars.

I have to say that it pleased me to see you giving me a little check-up as to whether or not I am using the appeal to authority fallacy. And what I mean by that, is that being an autistic savant surrounded by people with interests of a less academic bent, it is not often that I engage in quality discussions like this. Most people I spend time with, don't even know the definition of a fallacy, let alone types of fallacies and the difference between formal and informal fallacies. You kind of feel useless when you've learned the Latin names of every fallacious argument type, yet you've no one to share such discussions with. It's not that I'm better. It's just hard being so fundamentally different, having to go from A+B=C type thinking to the vagueness that is the rest of life and people.

Last edited by Lukecash12 on 14 Apr 2012, 12:52 am, edited 2 times in total.

There are no historical criteria for accepting a resurrection though. The event is pretty much excluded from the realm of history, and frankly, the very question is really more of a philosophical question at that point.


Established to the point of justifying a miraculous event? The need of justification depends upon the background probabilities we're working with.


Duh.

The issue isn't the truth, it's the problems in the way of knowing a truth if it's particularly implausible.


To undermine your claim? No, I don't need evidence to undermine it because by simply pointing out a large set of possibilities, your claim can fail. The issue is that the burden of proof for anything like a miracle is pretty high.

In any case, you're referring to a set of terminology that you have not provided.

I didn't say I thought anything. Lukecash12, you're trying to tell me that a resurrection is the most reasonable thing to believe. The background probability is that resurrections never occur, but LOTS AND LOTS of hard to explain and weird s**t does occur, where it becomes very difficult to look back, and figure out where everything went wrong.


No, I really didn't say anything about that.

As for Jewish groups borrowing or inventing theological beliefs? That's not utterly implausible. Syncretism doesn't have to be explicit. Once again, you're trying to convince us that the probability of syncretism occurring is LESS than a resurrection. There are more instances of syncretism than resurrections. There are more instances of theological innovations than resurrections. I can really realistically see a small cult under stress coming up with a resurrection idea that is held to by a small group trying to suppress cognitive dissonance, and that these suppressions along with memory erosions can result in something utterly distorted from the original facts.


And the criteria aren't designed for proving a miracle. They are not actual literal cross-examinations.

I'm not sure what you're really trying to get at with ignorance, as the simple issue is 1) human memory is fallible 2) the period of time for transmission into scripture was lengthy by most scholarly accounts, and 3) the texts actually make factually erroneous claims. So, Acts vs Matthew has two different accounts for the death of Judas. This shouldn't happen if the account-keeping is all great. Matthew and Luke rely heavily on Mark, who was not from the region, and made questionable geographic claims, which should be caught if a strong eyewitness tradition exists.

The problem is that if we can't trust eyewitnesses to control the smaller events, the larger and less plausible ones fall to pieces in terms of plausibility, as only ONE link in a chain has to fail for an idea to fail. So think of it this way, if your chain requires 12 links, and each link is independently 90% likely, then the overall chain is only 28% likely. That's kind of a problem.


Because this is a cross-cultural psychological phenomenon. The specifics really are not going to be sufficient to avoid lumping.


How do you know? It may be implausible, but LESS plausible than a miracle? Not really, people have believed crazier things. People have believed L. Ron Hubbard was a credible theological leader, I'm still shocked at that one.


Hume's argument to miracles is a well-established one in the philosophical tradition and still discussed.

Unsubstantiated?????? Now, you're just full of it. EVERYONE, except the fundamentalists, KNOWS there are issues that are clearly bizarre in scripture. I mean, once again, Judas's death Acts vs Mark. Look at the differences. One of the accounts has to be false because they contradict. "Other gross improbabilities" include all of the other magical and miraculous claims, which in most texts are considered unreasonable to take seriously. However, just issues where authors make weird geographic claims are sufficient.


And the issue is not historical criteria but rather truth. Historical criteria are a method, and some would basically claim that miracles are outside of history's scope altogether. Bart Ehrman has flatly said so more than once.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 14 Apr 2012, 1:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hunh?
1) Don't use technical terms. Avoid them like the plague. This is an online discussion. I also simply hate them as a matter of prejudice. I slip sometimes, but I still hate them.
2) Lukecash12, you're just biased out of your mind. Demons causing earthquakes is clearly a reference to Plantinga's Free Will Defense, where he speculated about natural evil being caused by demons. Skeptical theism undermining knowledge of a good God causing an evil God to be considered relatively plausible is taken straight from Stephen Law. The issues involving infinite possible worlds are really going back to the idea of Transworld manipulability, which goes to a paper written by Dean Zimmerman where he points out that there was no reason why TWP should work given that TWM appears utterly plausible. (And note, TWP really only applies to Molinism, as otherwise God doesn't have the problem)
3) I'm really just being dismissive. I think your ideas are obviously false and stuck primarily to objections from the face of how things look. I have no concerns about literally addressing every person in the Christian tradition or even really much more than brushing it aside. (Although Kierkegaard? He's not known for apologetics. I don't know why you'd actually point to him at all.)


Eh, honestly, this is not going to likely be a great experience for you. Most people on the forum are not approaching this from a significant background, most of it informal. So... that's going to be a difficulty there.

Frankly... I just don't take apologists seriously, so at some point I am likely to block you out/ignore you.

In any case, I really don't care for the Latin terms at all, so avoid using them. Actually, avoid ever using a "fallacy term", go back to the logic. Too many people misuse "ad hominem" assuming that every insult to somebody is an ad hominem, or they don't know what appeals to authority are fallacious or not, or anything else like it. I find they hinder more than help. I have a broad familiarity with most of the terms. I am not going to get into specifics for you. Not only that, but I am certainly not going to rely on memory half of the time for most of the details. Frankly, I have no interest in an overly wonk-ish debate with you on the matter, as those tend towards cleverness and quibbling. I simply find the idea ridiculous, so... there is little role for an argument. It's kind of like "Here is a hand. Here is another. Therefore there are two objects in the external universe. Therefore an external universe exists.". Never going to convince the die-hard epistemic skeptic, but... who cares about the extremist anyway? They're kind of just fooling themselves.

@Awesomelyglorious:

1. Technical terms were made specifically because they have specialized and practically useful meanings. You are essentially asking me to be vague and unprofessional, which is basically the antithesis of me.
2. And from what rule of inference did you infer that I'm biased out of my mind? A and B don't imply C, friend. My referencing different philosophers and technical terms does not mean I endorse certain views. You haven't any idea who I'm a party to yet, aside from my being a Christian theist. In debate, I am exceedingly explicit and literal, for just that reason. Such a careful and trained approach is the reason that academics make progress on difficult subjects while others don't. This is the reason we have cell phones, etc., because of patience, training, and technicality. You don't have to be a professor. But I see no purpose in composing arguments that are vague and obtuse. If we aren't connecting on a certain topic then we can just agree to disagree. Or you can very well decline to debate with me. It's no biggy, and I'm not like this when it comes to everything. You won't see me acting like a professor on subforums other than this one.
3. Yes, I noticed as much, considering how much you've presumed about me. You and I come from different worlds, it seems. I take a minimalist approach when I refer to my interlocutor's view, until I have the material I need, while you demonstrably do the opposite. You have, essentially, defined a parabola without any x-axis figures.

Kierkegaard did work on quite a few subjects, just like Immanuel Kant.



Ah, but I've never held much hope of discussing such subjects with people who have my background, until I enter the professional world. I find it silly that you are telling me to avoid using fallacy terms and opt instead to go back to the logic. It's none of my concern whether or not other people understand the precise definition and nature of a fallacy, when I point out a fallacy (since you seem to say you know and understand fallacies, you will notice that I can, in fact, recognize them). Pointing out fallacy types is literally remedial to me, because I've been doing that since I was ten. Maybe you mean to suggest that I will pull us into a sophistical discussion, or supply you with obtuse arguments like the one you typed within quotation marks. That isn't the case either.



And who says it can't be both? One thing at a time, friend, one thing at a time. There are manuscripts to study, so historiography applies, doesn't it? This is by no means a standalone proof for the resurrection. Maybe it would be convincing to deists. There's no point in us talking past each other. If that is your sole criticism of the resurrection, then we may as well drop historiography.



Historiography has only to do with what is possible and more or less plausible, given historical data. People just happen to take more mundane things within the purview of historiography to be true, because there aren't concerns like the possibility of a miracle, when you are wondering who won the 2nd Punic War.

I agree that I've yet to prove the resurrection. I've simply pointed out twelve facts.



According to the historical data, it's more than a little plausible. Your critique pertains more to whether it's possible.



An issue with that approach: you are improperly reducing the components of the twelve facts proof. What I mean by that is that the twelve facts are cumulative and complementary. The argument doesn't fall because of one little possibility being pointed out at a time, because each piece of data made to look weaker in the argument is complemented by other data, to the point that saying that they had a hallucination involves far too much contrivation, in fact impossibly too much contrivation. Not all data complements other data in the twelve facts arguments. It's just that you are reducing down the data too far.

Also, preferring what you consider a little bit less crazy of an explanation instead of the craziest one, isn't valid in terms of historiography. Maybe there is another explanation aside from the resurrection, but it certainly isn't an explanation like that. You seriously think that everyone either shared in a rare condition, or spontaneously went against their religious background, or started believing the ravings of one of their group when that person was showing episodic symptoms and trying to convince them of contrary sounding theology?



You are just picking a lesser poison, then. If resurrection is impossible, then it is impossible. But that is also a poor explanation. One of the cornerstones of Judaism was resisting syncretism. Just because they are ancient people, doesn't mean that they are so much more likely to have such symptoms as suppression and memory erosion, and you seem to forget that two of them were skeptics. If you think that once all of the data is accumulated, that that is a good explanation, then I would think you are literally delusional.



1. Yes, it is. But in order to understand the degree of the issue of memory, one must understand Semitic oral traditions.
2. Not a problem for people using ICOT.
3. Once again, you've not substantiated that (and I mean that in the sense that you haven't proven it, not that it's not an issue), nor does it make them generally unreliable. In fact, for a classical era document to have some errors in it, helps to point out the authenticity of the text. If everyone were to have collaborated on a story, it would be suspicious.

Something as important as the resurrection, which found it's way into several creeds, wouldn't really be subject to memory and relay issues like the telephone game or forgetting your wedding anniversary. The ICOT primarily survives through socialization. There are social controls, and it is different from the rote memory that we are used to because to them it was just social interaction, not information cramming.



Or so you say, even though there are fundamental differences in thought that are involved. Just because we can give them a label does not mean we can equivocate them. You have yet to point out what it is about these groups that substantiates your views. Is it a social process that they all have in common? Do esoteric rituals have similar effects on different people from different groups? Those would be valid avenues to compare them from.



That is because people have entirely different education, religious upbringing, and standards than those found in the ancient world. That's the reason that different people have believed different crazy things throughout the past. They don't just indiscriminately think crazy thoughts.



Clarification: Unsubstantiated by you. I need to know how you think about that issue in the texts to discuss it with you. How is it, specifically, that you think that they contradict one another? Can they be complementary? Do they render those NT texts basically unreliable?



And I agree with Ehrman, in that historians can't just prove the resurrection using historiography. It's a philosophical issue, too. We don't want historians to start claiming that Arjunas talked to Krishna, as if that was something they could prove, do we?

The assumption that any god exists is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (As Carl Sagan said.) The burden of proof in any god is the first order of business, in my opinion. Otherwise, you might as well debate the question of the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that he needs to establish both (a) God exists and (b) Jesus was God. But it doesn't matter which order he establishes them in. I find (a) really boring, and it's harder to establish (b) anyway, so we might as well get it out of the way.

The premise of the OP seemed to imply that we should challenge his beliefs. That seemed backwards to me until he presented some proof (or even any argument) that his beliefs had any possible merit.

Yes, those points are quite apt. But I'm working in no particular order, because as Declension pointed out by his own example, different people will be interested in different issues here. You presumably wonder what my model looks like, in terms of hierarchy and what claims are fundamental to what. So, I'll lay out the basic reasons that I am a Christian theist:

1. I align with empiricism as a philosophy, and would support it as an epistemic model using several approaches.
2. I do believe, given the physics that I have worked through, that naturalism fails to explain the nature and origin of the universe. Because our universe is most definitely inflationary, and inflationary models suffer from entropy, the lack of a well defined quantam mechanism to start the expanding and contracting parts of the cycle, and while thus failing to explain the big bang event opens up the problem of an infinite regression of causes.
3. That rules out material and efficient causes, leaving final and personal causes, for the universe. Other theoretical models have been proposed, but they fail to explain infinite regression, and they still suffer from entropy. So, material and efficient causes just don't work.
4. In order for there not to be an infinite regression of causes, whatever caused our universe must have a different relationship with time (by extension cause and effect) and matter.
5. The individual described by the texts found within the Bible fits these criteria. However, I don't simply insert Yahweh in there as an answer, because that would of course be God-of-gaps/proxy type logic. I insert Yahweh in that equation because of the resurrection. Naturalism, not seeming to me as a hindrance to such an one or thing which made the universe, seems to me to describe, explain, and set probability boundaries around events, but those lines may very probably get scrambled on a smaller than atomic level (and I would assert that quantam mechanics aren't normally explained properly in these discussions), and NDE's I also find potent when it comes to debunking naturalism. In fact, I think naturalism is an empirical plateau that merely represents our current powers of observation, which will be soon replaced by another empirical plateau.
6. Given the remote possibility, the historical plausibility, and the high historical probability, of the resurrection, I don't simply level an a priori objection to it. I took the resurrection, and traced it's implications to see if it fits well with the considerations of these previous numbers, and it seemed to do just that. The resurrection validates the teachings of Christ, thus proving theism. The teachings of Christ explicitly validate the contents of the scriptures, meaning that the purpose and nature of creation (at least in terms of what we can glean from the scriptures) has to do with the unique experience of living things, possessing both subjective and objective senses, and their relationship with the Creator.
7. Now, I ask myself, what is morality? What relationship has it with ethics? To what extent is it more descriptive or normative? What is it's relationship with intelligence? It seems to me, that from the viewpoint of a Christian theist, that morality doesn't need to be defined by descriptive or normative ethics. It can be described as contingent upon and preceded by God and His relationship with us. Intelligence seems to be the prerequisite for engaging in the relationship.
8. Lastly, I ask myself, is God an exemplar deserving/undeserving of a cooperative relationship with me, and am I an exemplar deserving/undeserving of a cooperative relationship with him? The teachings endorsed by Him, seem to be the answer key, so I study biblical scholarship to determine an answer to those questions for myself.

But there are other modes of confirmation than those listed. I have also had a subjective experience of God, as detailed in the NT.

Debating religion is a bloody waste of time.

ruveyn

Coming to WP to criticize Christianity is like going on the Christian broadcast network to criticize Atheism or Islam, you won't get much of an opposition to your position and what you do get is the same tired shite that has been proven false since the ancient greeks.

Define 'intelligent'. Biologists are still debating how to compare the intelligence of different spices of animals. Good luck of assessing the 'intelligence' of 'the creator'.

Define 'creator'. Do you have a scientific theory of creation? Otherwise your 'creator' is just nonsense gibberish.

This is an online forum. It's not a professional context. Not only that, but the essence of a claim often doesn't need the most technical language anyway in a large set of circumstances. So, while philosophers use highly technical terms among themselves, they often use the other terms when trying to explain the information to their undergraduate classes and things like that. Not only that, but not even every philosophical paper is written in highly technical language.

I really don't care what's the antithesis of you is.


Lukecash12, the issue is that you're claiming to infer a lack of information on my part, when I know the allusions. The problem is that fallacious understatement of an opponent's knowledge does suggest heavy bias.

I really don't have a lot of reason to care who you are a party to anyway. You could be Catholic. You could be liberal Protestant. You could be doing your own thing. Some kinds of argument will not work for some that will work for others. However, if you're too off in doing your own thing, you'll create other dilemma for yourself anyway.

Lukecash12, 1) Philosophy doesn't make great progress. It just gets itself wrapped up in interminable debates, so it can't really work as an example. 2) The issue with refinement is that the demand for refinement really appears variable among intellectual types, which is noted by William James in Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking "Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy's dust off their feet and following the call of the wild." (Lecture 1) 3) Claims on the reasons why academics make progress are inherently difficult, as truth be told, we don't really have a deep understanding of the matter where a philosopher like Thomas Kuhn points to arbitrary paradigm shifts, where Michael Polanyi believes science is driven by intuitions that scientists develop about science, and where the philosophers are really working back over the mess that scientists have already created in their puzzle solving. However, the simple issue is that patience, training, and technicality never get anywhere if one loses tough with reality, and that criticism goes on to the present towards economics, as economists have all 3 of those earlier traits in abundance, but a lot of people think that the neoclassical school is a "monument of artificiality".

The reason to compose an argument in a discussion is to make good discussion. Rigorous arguments can actually fail to do that, and many many books are written in a manner to eschew the most rigorous presentation to make for better discussion, including a lot of popular works.(Even those with a good academic bent) However, sometimes the apparent rigor of an argument is just a mask for how out of touch it is with reality, as sometimes outright folly is buried in apparent rigor.


Eh, the issue is that Christianity is relatively pre-known. The issue is that while you can vary from the basic model of the Christian faith, these variations themselves create problems. So, why would God let people be so wrong? Why would Paul or some other figure in the history of the faith be wrong on the matter? Etc.


Kierkegaard isn't an Immanuel Kant though, and he didn't incline to work in the same rigorous terms as Kant and his approach is not influential in epistemology or any subject of that sort. He's practically ignored in many ways and relegated to continental philosophy.


Most people, even ones with philosophical training and background, are so terrible at misidentifying something as a fallacy that the mere usage evokes distrust in me at this point. I mean, "Ad Hominem" is probably called out MORE OFTEN fallaciously, than it is correctly. The issue is that an ad hominem informal fallacy can be pointed out without actually needing the term, and quite easily in fact.

The argument in the quotes:
"Here is a hand.
Here is another.
Therefore there are two objects in the external universe.
Therefore an external universe exists."

Is actually a reference to a very highly influential argument by GE Moore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_a_hand


The problem is that you're treating a resurrection claim as actually on the same burden of proof as a more mundane claim. That's simply bad methodology.

I doubt it'd be convincing to Deists either, as it's simply just bad methodology. The problem is we have a LOT of erroneous miracle claims, each of which with prima facie evidence. If proving them was a matter like proving I went to the grocery store yesterday, that'd be one thing, but this is a miracle. Almost any speculation is sufficient.


The issue is that we don't enter the discussion with all probabilities as equal. So, historiography is a method with a concern for a certain set of questions, and where it's success is based upon it's ability to answer those questions well. The problem with methodology is that there is no reason why a particular method should be equally successful across every domain. So, physics has a methodology, but this method probably should not be imported to social sciences where background knowledge on human psychology and social structure already exists, and is practically necessary as a short-hand. And so on and so forth.


No, it actually doesn't. This is an utter failure to understand the issue. Do you really just not understand the problem of background probability?? Hannibal crossed the alps, and Hannibal cast a fireball spell carry very different background probabilities. We'd need more to prove the latter than the former just based upon the basic nature of the claims.


I didn't do anything improper. The issue is that you have to actually get above background probability for an utterly implausible claim.

Frankly, I don't need for a hallucination to be true. I have no interest in actually explaining what happened. The issue is simple: miraculous claims carry a very very high burden of proof by their outright contradiction to our background knowledge where miracles do not happen. Any speculation, regardless of how bad it looks on the face of it, can still be sufficient to knock down a miracle, as at least with the speculation uses pre-known methods.


And historiography isn't valid in terms of miraculous claims.

I think that explanation is MORE plausible than a resurrection. I am not committing to whether it happened though. Do you simply not actually grasp the strategy used?


Ummm..... I didn't pick anything. I'm pointing out that lesser poisons are possible.

I also have said nothing to date about impossibility.

Resurrections are the poorest explanation. They utterly contradict our existing background knowledge about events, and have no parallel to any existing event.

Judaism resisting syncretism doesn't mean that the Christian sub-group was doing equally well. It doesn't mean that every Jew avoided it.

I didn't say anything about "more likely" at all. These problems are actually incredibly common to this day. Living people have lots of memory alteration, and this is simply because of how memory works. Suppression of cognitive dissonance is also a very common issue for sub-groups, and it also can go to extremes.

You're mentioning two skeptics. The problem is that we can't cross examine these two skeptics, so if Paul had pre-existing psychological issues, and if James started having emotional distress over the death of his brother, those issues can easily change how the entire framework works out. The simple issue is that we don't have the kind of data we need to evaluate the psychology of either person, and the probability that either or both of them erroneously changed their mind is high enough that it fails to be forceful in a situation like a miraculous claim.


No, I actually do not. The issue is that we don't have a strong reason to claim that this cultic sub-group was using the best of oral tradition. They weren't the rhetorically trained rabbis. Also a lot of our information is from non-semitic sources, like Mark. Mark appears to be Latin in origin, and so Mark wouldn't be based upon Semitic Oral tradition, and the traditions based upon Mark also have their own weak link.


Which is itself a speculative answer. You're talking about a small sub-group of people who may not have actually had the overall degree of control over the message to use an ICOT effectively.


And the use of an ICOT is itself speculative. The problem is that if we have a small group that later goes on to convert the larger group, the ICOT really only applies to that original smaller group. The issue is that a smaller group could have developed all sorts of memory corruptions, such as the suppression of cognitive dissonance, or the claims of some people becoming dominant across all of them.


Honestly, I'm lumping all miraculous claims together as they have that similarity in terms of their background information.

Frankly, there are some distinctions, but there are some distinctions between married couples. The issue is that still we have a similar kind of issue(miracle), which is going to have a lot of common epistemic issues with other miracles, such that the rational SPR is to lump and discount.

So, here's the issue with the book of Mormon. There is actually a book of witnesses. So, we have 3 witnesses who claim to have seen an angel. 8 witnesses who claimed to have seen the golden plates of Joseph Smith. They were willing to sign the documents. The 3 witnesses who saw an angel were all excommunicated, and yet despite every reason to seek to disconfirm their earlier claims, they either rejoined the church later in life, or one actually formed a denomination of it. Now, the claim that these people ALL hallucinated an angel is absurd. They couldn't ALL have shared the same miraculous event for reasons you've already outlined for the resurrection. They would all have reason to disconfirm their earlier beliefs, but stuck true to them. Their story isn't JUST a third hand account either, but rather they all signed a document for posterity expressing their clarity of mind(something that we can't get for NT witnesses). So, for the same kinds of reasons you bring up for a resurrection, if those are reliable, we ought to believe that the three witnesses saw the Angel Gabriel. The 8 witnesses claimed to see golden plates, even handled them, and claimed to recognize them as having curious workmanship and apparent age. Now, we can argue that they were hallucinating, etc, etc, but the issue is that these people's soundness as witnesses is in many ways better attested to than NT witnesses, especially given that none of these people would have much reason to be under significant psychological distress, unlike NT witnesses. Their signatures are more explicitly eyewitness than the NT documents.

Now, we can argue that Joseph Smith found a way to trick these people, however, this makes no rational sense either. Joseph Smith wasn't just the prophet, he was also a martyr for the faith. There is almost no rational reason why a person would take these legal risks, and even basically become a martyr, for a cause they knew to be false. So, if we hold to the resurrection, we certainly ought to hold to the Golden Tablets, and if we reject the Golden Tablets, we surely ought to reject the resurrection.

Now, that's just going into Mormonism, but the problem is that most of these other claims, whether UFOs, or whatever have you, have similar attestation. We don't even NEED to worry about the ICOT in a lot of circumstances. Philosopher Matt McCormick's favorite example isn't Joseph Smith, but rather the Salem Witch trials, as he argues that the documentation is significantly better than a resurrection, but that the claim of witches is still false. http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2008/12 ... ns_10.html

I mean, the simple issue is that we need to assess probability in light of other similar claims. Not only does the resurrection not really seem to stand head and shoulders above the rest, but quite simply, it exists within a category of claims that we have experience with and have historically put low weight on. Our best statistical prediction rule is going to predict that the resurrection is false.


I didn't say anything about indiscriminate, but the people today are more educated than those in the past, and have more experience with things to be skeptical about. I mean, the standards are just going to be higher in these circumstances, or at least, there is little reason for them to be much lower.

As for "different" the similarities are downright obvious.


............... How?? Every detail. In one Judas dies by hanging himself. In the other, Judas's fate is just that he's explained as just falling down and having his guts burst open in the middle of a field. In one fate Judas buys a field with his money, but in the other, he throws the money back to the priests. In one story the field is known as the field of blood because Judas died in that field. In the other the field is known as the field of blood because of how the priests handled the blood money thrown back at them.

Mat 27:3-8 Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, (4) saying, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." They said, "What is that to us? See to it yourself." (5) And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself. (6) But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money." (7) So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field as a burial place for strangers. (8 ) Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.

Act 1:16-19 "Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus. (17) For he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry." (18 ) (Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. (19) And it became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their own language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.)

The problem is pretty clear though. The two texts, however, clearly make claims that by the most reasonable reading contradict each other, where efforts to make the texts complement each other distort the stories, and make no sense as a presentation of a situation.

So, does this make the NT texts utterly unreliable? No. However, if we have something we have background reason to feel skeptical towards, then this shows that the texts are not sufficient to overcome that skepticism, because fact-checking was not prioritized. The issue is that if one digs, one will find a lot of examples of oddness where one loses reason to think of the texts as overly reliable. So, in Matthew, "out of Egypt I call my son" from Hosea 11:1 is taken as a Christ-fulfilled prophecy, but in Hosea 11:1, the reference is clearly to Israel being called out of Egypt in Exodus. The issue is that this is something that could easily be called out, but the author just didn't fact-check that well, and nobody else did it either even though by that time, Hosea wasn't an oral tradition any more and so fact checking would be easier than with the ICOT.


Well, pretty much yeah. Not that the Bhagavad Gita is ideal as a historical text.

The issue is that you seem to be seeking to do that.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 14 Apr 2012, 12:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So, the problem ends up being that if the individual described by the texts of the Bible is not considered plausible, then you really wouldn't have a cosmologically oriented issue towards Christianity. In short, this is at most a supplement, not a stand alone.

The issue I see is that while I agree that origins is not an easily answered question, I don't think it's reasonable to need a theory about origins of the universe. The simple issue is that any pre-big bang idea is just going to be speculation at most. I would generally urge you away from the use of a specific event as a lynchpin in your intellectual system though. The problem is that there ends up being a lot of room for cognitive bias when one makes the focus on a specific theory for how the world works, and with the nuts and bolts of a highly complicated reality.


I am a bit confused by it. I'm going to guess that the resurrection is the only one of these events you've really looked into the apologetics for though, and the reason that is, is because most miracles and bizarre claims of this sort, have a ready-made apologetic literature, and there is a similar reliance on eyewitnesses. The simple issue is that the skeptical position is in some ways partly a posteriori, in that most skeptics find that miraculous claims exist as a set of implausible ones, where there are a lot of clear similarities between these issues.

In any case, the problem is that even if a resurrection of Jesus occurred, what's really theologically entailed? I mean, Jesus claimed to be building from the OT, and the NT claims to just be working from the revelation. But, the problem is that if we run into some obviously false, or obviously absurd claim within the overall theological structure, like the trinity, or the atonement, etc, how do we untangle the mess? Could Jesus really just be a fraud, even if the resurrection is true? (So, think of it this way: Jesus could be a puppet for malicious fairies. These fairies want to deceive people, so they have a supposed man claim to be the son of God, die and then come back. In this, we have a theory that avoids all of the theological problems of Christianity, but maintains a supernatural resurrection.) And the issue is that if one looks, there really is a lot of baggage, so I cited Deut 28:16-68 as something obviously ethically false. We can quibble on this, but even if we accept that God is a loving God, the idea that he'd give a threat like this is pretty close to absurd.


Ethics is the relationship between God and man? I'd still think that would entail some things about normative ethics. The additional issue is that descriptive ethics can't be outright thrown out, because if God created man, then God would create the neurological underpinnings for human ethical claims, which would mean that if descriptive ethics really don't work well with a notion of God, then on the face of it, we have an ethical problem. Not only that, but Christian texts do affirm descriptive ethics to some degree

Rom 2:14-15 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. (15) They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them


Interesting.... because a lot of the stories are bizarre, and hard to really swallow if one maintains basic ethical intuitions. I mean, if one reads a textbook on ethics, some of the things taken as a basic starting point seem to outright be problematic with Christian theism.


The problem is that given the background rates of hallucination within the population, this actually ends up being relatively unreliable. http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(00)00227-4/abstract I mean, the simple issue is that various subjective experiences are reported by lots of people for lots of religions. Explaining this appears difficult, particularly explaining this within Christian theism, because there is little reason why a God would want all sorts of people to get so deluded about this. Naturalism will just claim that delusion rates are high, and that the issue is a complicated mess. A trickster fairy theory will maintain that the fairies like deluding people, so that's why we have these inconsistent revelations. But, a Christian God? I don't see the point, and yet, it isn't as if Christianity is the only religion to put a lot of emphasis on religious experiences.

Your arguments are still ridiculous. Even if we don't have the final definition of the term "intelligent" we still have various experiences with things that display the trait that we label "intelligent" using our language. It's not invalid for Lukecash12 to make an inference from behavior to intelligence if he believes that cognitive processing, learning, competence, etc, are displayed by a certain entity. We'd do the same if we saw a really smart ape out there, or a robot, or anything else, without having an analytical definition. We can argue that the inference may be fallible, or that existing use of intelligence fails to arrive at very good specificity, but that's nitpickery.


A scientific theory of creation really isn't necessary at all. And given that many details are made-up whole cloth in a theological system, it's pretty fine. Not only that, but his use of "creator" is going to go very much in line with pre-existing definitions.

Binary, the long-story-short is that your very approach fundamentally misunderstands how language works. Human language and human cognition simply don't work in clear-cut analytical frameworks, but rather human beings are naturally sloppy in their uses, and precision and formalism simply arise in response to the need for precision and formalism. This whole "You can't define something well analytically, therefore your position fails" technique is just mind-numbingly bad, and doesn't really address the problems with a theory, but rather the inherent difficulties in analytical definitions. His uses of the terms are absolutely fine UNTIL you bring up a real philosophical issue that causes a problem.

Or how about this:
Define "Define" define "Biologists" define "are" define "still" define "debating" define "how" define "to" define "compare" define "the" define "of" define "different" define "spices" define "animals" define "Good" define "luck" define "assessing".

I'm going to keep on asking this for every single sodding word you ever use until you finally realize how stupid the technique is and that words only need definition if there is real confusion or real controversy.