Ran across this by accident

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'I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason
and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.'
(Isaac Asimov)

The approach of the "I really don't care, leave me alone" platform.

What Rhett Butler said in -Gone With the Wind-. Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a damn.

ruveyn

Bump.

This is similar to the position that I've taken, that religion can not be proven or disproven by reason. The difference between me and Asimov here is that in the absence of proof, he defaulted to atheism while I defaulted to Christianity.

Yes but as I have just said in another thread your belief in Jesus as the Messiah requires that you ignore the more plausible natural explanations for possible events involving Jesus. Instead you believe explanations that if it were any other topic you would call absurd. It is one thing to argue that God must have made the universe and as such contemporary science can neither prove nor disprove this philosophy. It is something altogether different to believe in the tales from a superstitious and ignorant age.

I think this is true about the essential experience of Christianity. When I say I have a relationship with Christ, if you have not got a clue what I am talking about, unless you have the same. There are however rational reasons for believing that God provides the best explanation of why there is something instead of nothing, that truly objective moral values exist and the fine-tuning we encounter in cosmology. There is also a good rational argument to suppose that Christ rose from the dead.

To claim here are reasons for the existence of God and that Jesus rose from the dead and not exhibit them for examination has all the appearance of a scam.

Well I have argued most of those points repeatedly all over this forum. During every one of these discussion you have contributed with multiple, uncharitable responses. I see you once again, continuing this trend.

As to the one issue I have not discussed on this forum, the resurrection of Christ. Aside from the fact that many have discussed this issue previously and you have contributed to those discussions. Here are a couple of good articles for you to read.

William Lane Craig, 'Noli Me Tangere': Why John Meier Won't Touch The Risen Lord
"Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: The Presuppositions and Pressumptions of the Jesus Seminar." Faith and Mission 15 (1998): 3-15.
"Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: The Evidence for Jesus." Faith and Mission 15 (1998): 16-26.
"Visions of Jesus: A Critical Assessment of Gerd Lüdemann's Hallucination Hypothesis," Edwin Mellen Press.
"The Guard at the Tomb." New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 273-81
"The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus." New Testament Studies 31 (1985): 39-67.
"Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Truth 1 (1985): 89-95.

To claim it is uncharitable to challenge whether you have an argument when you claim you do and do not present it is rather devious, to say the least, and to chuck a library at me instead of a demonstration of a point is an obvious way to refuse to answer, which puts you at default.

Why should I argue the point with you? You have never given me any indication that you would be convinced by reasoned debate on the subject. I recommend you read those articles and think about what it would mean if it were true that Jesus was God come to earth and that he died for your sins. You will find a great deal of persuasive argument to think that in the articles I have provided.

It is precisely because I am so obdurate that you should present arguments that could possibly convince me. It seems my initial resistance is sufficient to make you retreat into the kind of obvious fakery of literary reference rather than clarification and justification of your proposals. Because nothing is so intricately complex that at least some outline of your concept cannot be presented plainly unless you are unsure yourself of the quality of your thinking and are not competent to do so. It merely substantiates my suspicions you have nothing genuine to offer.

Anything with an "ism" on the end is essentially a religion, and I do my best to avoid mere religion.


... and that is where we must go when mere reason also proves insufficient.

Such as optimism?

Precisely as I pointed out. Belief in God is unreasonable.

My apologies this will be a long post

Ok if you can be convinced...

There are four facts that support the view that Jesus rose from the dead:

Fact One: After the crucifixion Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea

a) Jesus’ burial is attested in the very old tradition quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:

. . . that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,
and that he was buried,
and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.

Paul not only uses the typical rabbinical terms “received” and “delivered” with regard to the information he is passing on to the Corinthians, but vv. 3-5 are a highly stylized four-line formula filled with non-Pauline characteristics. This has convinced all scholars that Paul is, as he says, quoting from an old tradition which he himself received after becoming a Christian. This tradition probably goes back at least to Paul’s fact-finding visit to Jerusalem around AD 36, when he spent two weeks with Cephas and James (Gal. 1.18). It is therefor highly unlikely that this fact is subject to legendary influences.

b) The burial story is part of very old source material used by Mark in writing his gospel. The gospels tend to consist of brief snapshots of Jesus’ life which are loosely connected and not always chronologically arranged. But when we come to the passion story we do have one, smooth, continuously-running narrative. This suggests that the passion story was one of Mark’s sources of information in writing his gospel. Now most scholars think Mark is already the earliest gospel, and Mark’s source for Jesus’ passion is, of course, even older. Comparison of the narratives of the four gospels shows that their accounts do not diverge from one another until after the burial. This implies that the burial account was part of the passion story. Again, its great age militates against its being legendary.

c) As a member of the Jewish court that condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention. There was strong resentment against the Jewish leadership for their role in the condemnation of Jesus (I Thess. 2.15). It is therefore highly improbable that Christians would invent a member of the court that condemned Jesus who honors Jesus by giving him a proper burial instead of allowing him to be dispatched as a common criminal.

d) There is no other competing burial story. John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”

Fact 2: On the Sunday following the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers.

a) The empty tomb story is also part of the old passion source used by Mark

b) The old tradition cited by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5 implies the fact of the empty tomb. For any first century Jew, to say that of a dead man “that he was buried and that he was raised” is to imply that a vacant grave was left behind. Moreover, the expression “on the third day” probably derives from the women’s visit to the tomb on the third day, in Jewish reckoning, after the crucifixion. The four-line tradition cited by Paul summarizes both the gospel accounts and the early apostolic preaching (Acts 13. 28-31); significantly, the third line of the tradition corresponds to the empty tomb story.

c) The story is simple and lacks signs of legendary embellishment. All one has to do to appreciate this point is to compare Mark’s account with the wild legendary stories found in the second-century apocryphal gospels, in which Jesus is seen coming out of the tomb with his head reaching up above the clouds and followed by a talking cross!

d) The fact that women’s testimony was discounted in first century Palestine stands in favor of the women’s role in discovering the empty tomb. According to Josephus, the testimony of women was regarded as so worthless that it could not even be admitted into a Jewish court of law. Any later legendary story would certainly have made male disciples discover the empty tomb.

e) The earliest Jewish allegation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body (Matt. 28.15) shows that the body was in fact missing from the tomb. The earliest Jewish response to the disciples’ proclamation, “He is risen from the dead!” was not to point to his occupied tomb and to laugh them off as fanatics, but to claim that they had taken away Jesus’ body. Thus, we have evidence of the empty tomb from the very opponents of the early Christians.

Fact 3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.

a) The list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances which is quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15. 5-7 guarantees that such appearances occurred. These included appearances to Peter (Cephas), the Twelve, the 500 brethren, and James.

b) The appearance traditions in the gospels provide multiple, independent attestation of these appearances. This is one of the most important marks of historicity. The appearance to Peter is independently attested by Luke, and the appearance to the Twelve by Luke and John. We also have independent witness to Galilean appearances in Mark, Matthew, and John, as well as to the women in Matthew and John.

Certain appearances have earmarks of historicity. For example, we have good evidence from the gospels that neither James nor any of Jesus’ younger brothers believed in him during his lifetime. There is no reason to think that the early church would generate fictitious stories concerning the unbelief of Jesus’ family had they been faithful followers all along. But it is indisputable that James and his brothers did become active Christian believers following Jesus’ death. James was considered an apostle and eventually rose to the position of leadership of the Jerusalem church. According to the first century Jewish historian Josephus, James was martyred for his faith in Christ in the late AD 60s. Now most of us have brothers. What would it take to convince you that your brother is the Lord, such that you would be ready to die for that belief? Can there be any doubt that this remarkable transformation in Jesus’ younger brother took place because, in Paul’s words, “then he appeared to James”?

Even Gert Lüdemann, the leading German critic of the resurrection, himself admits, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”

Fact 4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary. Think of the situation the disciples faced after Jesus’ crucifixion:


a) Their leader was dead. And Jews had no belief in a dying, much less rising, Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to throw off Israel’s enemies (= Rome) and re-establish a Davidic reign—not suffer the ignominious death of criminal.

b) According to Jewish law, Jesus’ execution as a criminal showed him out to be a heretic, a man literally under the curse of God (Deut. 21.23). The catastrophe of the crucifixion for the disciples was not simply that their Master was gone, but that the crucifixion showed, in effect, that the Pharisees had been right all along, that for three years they had been following a heretic, a man accursed by God!

c) Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection at the end of the world (the few other instances where this occurs the dead returns only to live mortally). All the disciples could do was to preserve their Master’s tomb as a shrine where his bones could reside until that day when all of Israel’s righteous dead would be raised by God to glory.

Why are we allowed to affirm a miracle?

The original disciples believed in and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus’ resurrection. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar from Emory University, muses, “some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was . . . .” N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “that is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.”

In summary, there are four facts agreed upon by the majority of scholars who have written on these subjects which any adequate historical hypothesis must account for: Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection.

Now the question is: what is the best explanation of these four facts? Most sholars probably remain agnostic about this question. But the Christian can maintain that the hypothesis that best explains these facts is “God raised Jesus from the dead.”

In his book Justifying Historical Descriptions, historian C. B. McCullagh lists six tests which historians use in determining what is the best explanation for given historical facts. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” passes all these tests:

1. It has great explanatory scope: it explains why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian faith came into being.

2. It has great explanatory power: it explains why the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly saw Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution, and so forth.

3. It is plausible: given the historical context of Jesus’ own unparalleled life and claims, the resurrection serves as divine confirmation of those radical claims.

4. It is not ad hoc or contrived: it requires only one additional hypothesis: that God exists. And even that needn’t be an additional hypothesis if one already believes that God exists.

5. It is in accord with accepted beliefs. The hypothesis: “God raised Jesus from the dead” doesn’t in any way conflict with the accepted belief that people don’t rise naturally from the dead. The Christian accepts that belief as wholeheartedly as he accepts the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.

6. It far outstrips any of its rival hypotheses in meeting conditions (1)-(5). Down through history various alternative explanations of the facts have been offered, for example, the conspiracy hypothesis, the apparent death hypothesis, the hallucination hypothesis, and so forth. Such hypotheses have been almost universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. None of these naturalistic hypotheses succeeds in meeting the conditions as well as the resurrection hypothesis.

Yes, even that.


Beyond reason and unreasonable are not the same thing, and it is not unreasonable to re-point one's measure of faith when reason has proved insufficient.

Plato's Cave is reasonable.

Through a glass, darkly.

Nothing to lose but our chains - but then the Last Battle dwarfs.

For communication to happen, both parties must want to communicate. They must share a linguistic code and enough experiences to disambiguate.

Takes two to tango.